There is a particular type of leader that companies call when things need to fundamentally change not when they need steady maintenance, but when the financial foundation needs rebuilding and the path forward is genuinely unclear. Amy O’Keefe has spent more than three decades being that leader.
As Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Sleep Number Corporation, the Nasdaq-listed smart sleep technology company, Amy O’Keefe arrived in December 2025 at what her new CEO described as a pivotal moment in the business’s turnaround. It was not the first pivotal moment she had been hired to navigate. It was, by any honest accounting, approximately the fifth.
Over a career spanning consumer products, home automation, medical equipment, wellness technology, and enterprise communications, Amy O’Keefe has built one of the most distinctive track records in American corporate finance a career defined not by stability and incremental growth, but by the specific and demanding art of transformation. She is the
A Foundation Built on Precision
Amy O’Keefe graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Business Administration in Accounting from Loyola College in Maryland a credential that spoke from the outset to the intellectual rigour she would bring to every role that followed. She began her career at Ernst & Young LLP, where she trained as a Certified Public Accountant. The Big Four experience gave her something invaluable: exposure to the full spectrum of how businesses are constructed, where they fail, and what financial discipline actually looks like when it is applied with rigour rather than aspiration.
From Ernst & Young, she moved into corporate finance at The Black & Decker Corporation, A move that would define nearly half of her career. Over 14 years at Black & Decker, which later became Stanley Black & Decker, O’Keefe rose through multiple corporate finance roles to serve as Divisional CFO for certain divisions of the company. This was not a supporting role. It was an operational one, requiring the ability to manage P&L responsibility, navigate the financial complexities of a global manufacturing business, and work within an industry power tools and consumer products that was, at the time, heavily male-dominated at the executive level.
O’Keefe has been candid about that environment. She was among a handful of female executives in the company during her tenure, a reality she neither dramatised nor ignored. Her response was characteristically direct: focus on the work, achieve the goals, build the relationships, and trust that consistent top-notch performance will earn its own recognition. It did.
The Turnaround Specialist Emerges
After nearly a decade and a half at Black & Decker, Amy O’Keefe stepped into a sequence of CFO roles across vastly different industries and it was in this period that her distinctive professional identity fully crystallised. She became, with increasing intentionality, a specialist in companies navigating major transformation.
She served as CFO of D&M Holdings from January 2011 to July 2014, A global designer and manufacturer of premium audio products operating across multiple international markets. From April 2015 to December 2016, she was CFO of Savant Systems, a global designer and developer of high-end home automation and control systems. Both roles required the ability to manage sophisticated financial operations in specialised technology markets, building the commercial and operational fluency that would prepare her for increasingly complex assignments.
What followed was a role that placed her at the centre of one of the most visible wellness brand stories of the early 2020s. In October 2020, Amy O’Keefe joined Weight Watchers International, Then rebranding itself as WW International, as Chief Financial Officer. She arrived during a period of significant digital transformation, as the company was shifting from its historic model of in-person workshops toward a subscription-based digital-first offering. Managing the financial architecture of that transition, rationalising costs, protecting margins, and ensuring the balance sheet could support an entirely new delivery model, demanded exactly the combination of operational precision and strategic agility that O’Keefe had been building across her career.
WW’s then-CEO Mindy Grossman described O’Keefe at the time of her appointment as uniquely qualified to accelerate the company’s digital transformation while delivering on the commercial mission. O’Keefe herself framed it simply: it was a unique opportunity to contribute her skill set to a company and team who so passionately shared a worthy mission.
Avaya: Finance Leadership Through Major Restructuring
From WW, Amy O’Keefe moved into the role that most recently preceded Sleep Number, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer of Avaya LLC, the global communications software company, from June 2023 to May 2025. The role added administrative leadership to the financial remit, reflecting both the breadth of her capabilities and the scale of the challenge she was being asked to take on.
Avaya is a company that had undergone significant financial and operational restructuring, and O’Keefe’s mandate was to play a key leadership role in its ongoing operational, strategic, and financial transformation. By the time she completed her tenure, the company had achieved significantly improved free cash flow a concrete, measurable outcome in a turnaround environment where the temptation to describe progress in softer terms is ever-present.
Her philosophy, which she has articulated in interviews, is worth dwelling on. Finance, in her view, is not the function of “no.” It is the function of “how about this, instead?” That distinction, Between a finance organisation that constrains and one that enables, shapes how she builds her teams, how she engages with CEOs and boards, and how she approaches the challenge of financial transformation in organisations that have drifted away from sustainable foundations.
For about a decade of her career, she worked with companies in some form of financial distress, Largely driven by overleveraged balance sheets. The adversity, she has reflected, did not diminish her. It became the engine of her growth as a finance leader. Accountability is the value she returns to most consistently: when things go wrong, she takes responsibility and supports her team. When successes are achieved, she attributes them to the team’s effort. This approach to credibility has made her, as she describes it, comfortable with calculated risk and has built the trust that effective finance leadership ultimately requires.
Sleep Number: The Newest Chapter
In December 2025, Amy O’Keefe joined Sleep Number Corporation as Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer her most recent and current appointment. Sleep Number, which operates more than 610 retail stores nationwide and sells its products direct-to-consumer through its website, is a brand with genuine differentiation: its science-based smart sleep technology, SleepIQ data platform, and highly customisable mattress systems occupy a distinct position in the wellness and consumer products space.
The company had been navigating a challenging period, and CEO Linda Findley, Who herself joined Sleep Number in 2025, was building a leadership team specifically oriented around stabilisation and sustainable growth. O’Keefe’s appointment was an explicit signal of that intent. Findley described her experience in driving profitability and operational excellence as exactly what the business needed to move forward.
O’Keefe’s own assessment was equally precise. She described Sleep Number as having exceptional assets, science-based technology, differentiated products, and strong brand recognition, upon which to build. The opportunity, in her framing, was not about survival but about unlocking the potential that the company’s core assets genuinely represent.
Beyond her executive role, O’Keefe also serves on the Board of Directors of TruBridge, Inc. A Nasdaq-listed healthcare organisational software company, Where she chairs the Compensation Committee and serves on the Audit Committee. The board role reflects the breadth of her governance experience and her ability to contribute strategic financial thinking across sectors as different from consumer products as healthcare IT.
What Makes a Transformation CFO
It is worth stepping back to consider what Amy O’Keefe’s career, taken as a whole, actually represents, Because it is a more unusual profile than it might initially appear.
The conventional narrative of senior finance leadership emphasises consistency: building deep expertise in a single sector, scaling within a company or sector over decades, and eventually achieving the CFO title as the culmination of institutional loyalty. O’Keefe’s career inverts this model. She has moved deliberately across sectors consumer products, audio hardware, home automation, medical equipment, wellness, enterprise communications, and now smart sleep technology and has done so specifically at moments when the financial challenge was greatest.
This pattern is not accidental. It reflects a deliberate orientation toward complexity, a belief that the most valuable contribution a finance leader can make is to an organisation that genuinely needs one not to maintain what already works, but to build what doesn’t yet exist and repair what has broken down. Her attraction to iconic brands with unrealised potential, to companies “on the cusp of unlocking even greater shareholder value,” as she has described it, is not sentiment. It is a strategic lens.
The skills this requires are specific. The ability to quickly understand a new industry’s economics. The confidence to set clear financial targets in uncertain environments and hold the organisation to them. The relationship capital to partner with a new CEO, board, and executive team without a long shared history. And the emotional steadiness to absorb the pressure of transformation environments without letting it compromise judgment.
O’Keefe has developed all of these. She is widely recognised in the executive community for partnering with CEOs, boards, and leadership teams to create shareholder value, accelerate operational performance, and build finance organisations that are high-impact and high-integrity simultaneously. The combination of those two qualities impact and integrity is rarer than it should be, and it is the distinguishing feature of a finance leader who can be trusted with a company’s most important numbers at its most critical moment.
The Road Ahead
At Sleep Number, the work is underway. The financial foundation is being strengthened. The strategy centred on a strong brand, differentiated products, and a simplified operating model, is clear. The question now is execution, and execution is where Amy O’Keefe has spent her career.
She has said she is excited to join the company at such a pivotal time. For anyone who has followed her career closely, that statement is not corporate boilerplate. Pivotal times are precisely where she chooses to be.
More than thirty years into a career defined by transformation, Amy O’Keefe remains exactly what she has always been: the finance leader you call when the stakes are highest, the foundation needs rebuilding, and sustainable profitable growth is the only acceptable destination.
She graduated Summa Cum Laude. She started in a Big Four accounting firm. She spent 14 years mastering the discipline inside a global manufacturing giant. Then she spent another 15 years taking on the hardest financial challenges available to her one company at a time, across one sector after another and delivering measurable results in every environment she entered. That is not a conventional CFO career. It is something harder to build and considerably more valuable: a record of judgment, adaptability, and performance that compounds with every challenge undertaken.
Sleep Number is the latest beneficiary of that record. It almost certainly will not be the last.
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