SHERRI SWAIN

CPA, Professional Mediator /

Founder & CEO Masterpiece Mediation, LLC

Sherri Swain has a rare depth of business, finance, & life experience to help clients negotiate. Sherri brings 30 years of financial experience. She has learned a lot since starting her career as a CPA at Arthur Andersen running multi-faceted billion-dollar audits. Auditing pension plans, & SEC & FCC audits sent her all over the US before realizing her passion was presenting business efficiencies to clients. This was the first foreshadowing of her simplification & forensic skills.

Sherri’s career roles have always been in roles of collaboration across multiple disciplines to synchronize & simplify. Sherri’s next role was as a Senior financial analyst for Kraft Heinz, consolidating divisional long-range plans before being recruited to a national law firm to help win a large fraud case. Later, as a Senior Financial Analyst at Coca-Cola, Inc., & Time Warner, she honed her skills overseeing their long-range plans for large divisions. In these roles, she led the cross-functional synchronization of marketing, sales, accounting, finance, & legal.

Sherri set herself apart as an outlier throughout her career. In her 20’s she went out of her way to learn all she could & interact with various entrepreneurial thinkers to learn how their brains work. She also earned the trust & respect of a Harvard-educated one of the top litigators in the US-Joel Africk, Respiratory Health of Chicago, who wrote a letter of recommendation from her work - to help get her off the wait list at Emory School of Law.

While she raised her only child, she invested in & became intimately familiar with every type of investment from MUNIs, REITs, & MLPs, & international currencies to stocks & corporate bonds. Sherri was one of the top women international currency traders in the US at GAIN Capital for 2 years during her self-employment as a professional-level trader: 2009-2021.

Sherri is equally committed to being impactful in the community. Sherri passionately aligns her values with her ‘whys”. When her brother’s son was diagnosed with leukemia, Make-A-Wish Missouri granted him a wish that helped him gain the strength to fight leukemia. This led Sherri, as a volunteer, to be an inspirational force behind a team of women in Colorado that launched Make-A-Wish Colorado’s “Walk for Wishes”. This event has raised over $400k to grant kids wishes with life-changing illnesses. She also launched a “Wish Week” at her son’s high school which continues to be a legacy of community building.

Most recently, she helped lead the launch of Make-A-Wish Colorado’s “Wish Hero Campaign” to inspire others with the story of her nephew’s wish to live like a Navy Seal & triumph over leukemia. She also volunteered at Craig Hospital after her divorce to keep her grounded in a grateful, peaceful perspective.

A midwestern native, Sherri has fallen in love with Colorado where she had raised her son with her then CFO husband for 18 years & married for 22 years before divorcing. She credits her parents for modeling her habits of gratitude, relentless pursuit of knowledge, & being resourceful. Sherri enjoys hot yoga, reading voraciously, boxing, & walking with her dog Pepsi who is a favorite at Make-A-Wish Colorado events. She is committed to prioritizing time to travel to visit friends & family as she considers that a crucial part of health & wealth. Sherri graduated Cum Laude with a BS in Accountancy from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 1991 passing the CPA exam within that same year.

Favorite books: Head in the Game: The Mental Engineering of the World’s Greatest Athletes ; Becoming Bulletproof: Life Lessons from a Secret Service Agent

#1 - Effort is important - but knowing where & when to make the effort makes all the difference.

#2 - If you can’t SIMPLIFY something, you do not truly understand it well enough: Einstein.

Sherri’s Mantras - both will save you money, stress, & time.

Inaugural “Walk for Wishes” Channel 4 News Coverage

Make-A-Wish Co -Channel 7 -Patti Forsythe, longest tenured US Make-A-Wish Employee