Andrew Fred Russ
CPA/Senior Finance and Analytics Executive in San Antonio, TX
Andy Fred Russ started his career on the front lines of store operations, taking hourly roles as a student, and spent the next 25 years at a $50B+ consumer-facing company, eventually becoming its Vice President of Planning & Analysis. Formerly named Andrew Fred Russ, the Texas-based CPA now works as a finance executive and business advisor. He is a Partner at Ellacap, where he leads quality of earnings and financial diligence for founder-led and family-owned businesses, and Principal of his own Texas CPA firm, Russ CPA.
Those front-line store operations jobs spanned high school and college, from 1996 to 2002. In 2001, while still a student, Russ interned with Deloitte in Assurance, IT, and Risk Consulting. After he graduated, he pursued finance, and from 2002 to 2008 he moved through a series of increasingly senior analyst and finance manager roles across multiple business divisions.
From 2008 to 2015, Andrew Fred Russ worked in Planning & Analysis for Store Operations, holding Director and Senior Director titles. He oversaw finance and strategy for a major new-market expansion. His scope eventually broadened to cover the financial infrastructure, annual planning, reporting, and multi-year roadmaps of Texas operating divisions.
From 2016 to 2023, he worked as Head of Merchant Planning & Analytics, a post that carried Senior Director and Managing Director titles. Russ was the merchandising organization's senior partner on financial and analytical matters and routinely advised the senior executive committee on financial performance, trends, and strategic planning.
He stepped into the role of Vice President of Planning & Analysis in 2024. Through 2026, Andy Fred Russ led a team of more than 100 people in finance, analytics, data science, and pricing, and directed the enterprise planning process for U.S. and international operations. That process included the annual plan, the five-year plan, and the weekly forecast for a business with 60 officers and more than 400 locations.
Along the way, Russ repeatedly built what the company did not yet have. Two company-wide teams, one for cost of goods and one for decision science and data, began with him and became permanent fixtures of the company's operations. He created the company's first item-level merchant profit and loss statement (P&L), giving buyers and store leaders a shared, consistent view of performance and replacing the offline spreadsheets used by 100 buyers and 400 store leaders.
He also served as the principal strategist on a division turnaround, taking that business from losses to strong profitability. Over two years, he delivered the analytics behind five company-wide price investments, each funded by cost savings.
Andrew Fred Russ puts developing people at the center of his leadership. The department-wide leadership development program he built and ran led to five director promotions, one senior director promotion, and seven manager promotions in two years. His teams' retention also improved. His approach rests on three commitments: developing people and building teams, bringing order to chaos, and democratizing intelligence. By that last phrase, he means getting the right insight to decision-makers when it matters most.
Today, that experience shapes his advisory work. Ellacap provides advisory, accounting, and investing services to founder-led and family-owned businesses with enterprise values up to $100 million. Its offerings include quality-of-earnings (QoE) reviews, fractional CFO support, accounting cleanup, and buy-side and sell-side advisory. Russ leads the firm's quality-of-earnings and financial diligence efforts. He helps owners buy and sell companies, relying on more than two decades of planning, forecasting, and performance analysis at a large, complex business.
At Russ CPA, Andy Fred Russ works with clients directly on quality of earnings and transaction diligence. His expertise covers readying a business for sale, clean books and credible numbers that stand up to diligence, fractional CFO support,t and item-level profitability, which comes down to knowing which products actually make money.
His education includes an MBA in Finance and Economics from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, along with a BBA in Accounting and a BBA in Computer Information Systems, with Honors, from Texas State University. At Texas State, he received the LBJ Outstanding Senior Award. Russ has held his Texas CPA license since 2003.
Board service at nonprofit and university organizations has been a constant throughout his career. Andrew Fred Russ served 20 years on the advisory board of the Texas State University McCoy College of Business, including a term as Chair from 2021 to 2025.