Ambition

Check this out - the link takes you to a blog called Successwithu. It's written by Alex Chan, a Chinese guy working in Singapore. He's a financial controller (hence his appearance here), but he's dissatisfied with his lot:

Many accountant are working under my team. When they join my company, they are young and poor. After a few years, they are rich and Wealthy. Some are much richer than me........ Yes, there are so many opportunity there ! you can make money from share market, from property market, from trade, from joining a group of friend doing small business and make it big ..... But, I didn't do any ! What is the reason ? Why I didn't ride on it ? Why am I not set up a company there nor forming a team of people that we can work together ?

Good question, Alex. And that's one many more FCs could probably ask. And there are entrepreneurial opportunities out there, even for accountants, as he points out.

Is it too cheesy to suggest that getting into a growing business with a bit of excitement about it, an opportunity to make some decent money and a chance to experience life beyond the boundaries of the corporate finance function satisfy at least some of those frustrations? That is, after all, what the guys at EquityFC try to help FCs do. I'm not sure being FC at a high-growth PE-backed company would fulfil Alex's definition of success ("a person that can do the thing he love to do all the time"). But it's probably a lot closer than doing the faceless finance function thing in a faceless corporate...

By the board

We've written before on the need to think unconventionally about finance careers - get out into the operations side of the business, think laterally about job titles, look for positions in businesses where you'll get the right experiences to take your career forward and so on. But this story adds a new dimension into the mix: the FC as board member. I suspect it's far from being the only case.

It's a good news piece about a new management structure at "one of South Wales' longest-established companies," Andrew Scott, a subsidiary of the Rowecord Group which employs almost 250 staff has reported a turnover of more than £25m. Company secretary and financial controller David Hadley is part of this turnaround board. So why not an FD? Well, perhaps it's a seniority thing, and maybe the title will come in due course. But look at the rest of the board: a commercial director and an ops director? (There's also a BD director, so the commercial guy isn't solely responsible for sales and marketing.)

Which sort of implies the FC role is being treated on its own merits. If the FD role really does encompass a bunch more commerciality now (and it does), and if that side of the function is being handled elsewhere, why not have an FC on the board of directors?

OK, I realise that we may be about to turn full circle here: if he's a director, why no just call him "FD"? But that's my point. Maybe we will, indeed, see the emergence in UK company culture of a COO or an ops director or a business services director or even a support director to do the broader job that many FDs currently do - and the "FD" will become the FC who's senior enough to sit on the board. Which begs the question: would you hanker after the pure FD role? Or the wider "support" director's job?

Could you be a lifer?

It's unusual, these days, to come across someone who's worked their whole career in one organisation. (Even the notorious loyalist Lord Browne spent time as CFO of at Standard Oil... shortly before it merged with BP, admittedly.) So my eye was drawn by this story about the retirement of Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive director general Chris Mulligan. Why's he on this blog? Well, he joined GMPTE in 1977 as a management accountant, became financial controller in 1985, FD in 1987, and DG in 1991.

So he's another finance professional who's proved more than capable of operating at the highest levels of general management (and in Mulligan's case, politics, too). But I was also struck by the acceleration in his career. Eight years to get to FC, then just two to FD and only another four until he took the top job. The lesson? A smart FC will find a posting that's got plenty of meat to it, get stuck in, but then have a clear idea of how they plan to sling-shot out of that position into wherever it is they want to go. Mulligan managed that in one organisation; but for most of us today, that means picking the right jobs, stretching ourselves and having a clear exit strategy.

Ready to throw away the assumptions?

I was having lunch the other day with some people from a company that specialises in human resources (I'll leave it vague...). Great bunch, really smart guys, and had plenty of experience with FDs and FCs - but mainly in quite big companies.

I was talking about the financial controller post - and arguing that in the same way that the FD is now really the general manager of "the services that allow a business to function", so the FC is increasingly a person who, in order to put his skills to best use, or ought to have experiences outside the finance function. One of the guys demurred - in his experience, the controller is the numbers guy. End of. But I think he's just not looked at enough growing businesses where you can't afford anyone to have that narrow a view.

Evidence? Well, it's all around, but this news item caught my eye today: "Israel-based food importer G. Willi-Food International Ltd. on Tuesday named Albert Israeli as its chief financial officer, effective immediately. Israeli replaces Gil Hochboin, who served as CFO since August 2000. Israeli previously served as financial controller and sales and operations manager of Golf & Co. Group Ltd."

Our first exclusive EquityFC.com feature is about making the move from FC to FD. In it, we argue that experience outside the finance function is getting increasingly important. A financial controller can do those jobs - and I'm not just talking in IT or HR, areas that are functionally close to finance. Sales and ops manager? That's what I call gaining non-financial experience...

Quick-start FD

Over at AccountancyAge, they've featured the story of 27 year old Charis Walsh who's stepped up to become finance director at Black Sun, "a small public company specialising in marketing and communications advice". BS didn't have an FD, so when she became finance manager and subsequently proved her worth in the business over the next 18 months, it was a relatively simple decision to move her up to board level. Great story - and a reminder that small, growing companies offer finance executives a fast-track to greater responsibilities and exposure to board-level experience. And as Walsh tells AccyAge, it's not about the beancounting: "I do a lot of human resources stuff, which is obviously not what you would think is within an FD’s remit, but actually it helps you understand a lot more about people and how they work. That does have an influence on things like utilisation capacity, staff turnover and what you’re paying." Good stuff.

Incidentally, Black Sun is an interesting company in its own right. It does a lot of work with companies on narrative reporting, and it's well worth poking around at its web site if you're trying to get to grips with this increasingly regulated area. But Walsh's appointment as FD might in part be related to the company's need to practice what it preaches: "As a partner to some of the UK's leading businesses we recognise the fundamental importance of good practice in Corporate Social Responsibility. We manage our own environmental and social impacts through communicating and reporting our progress simply and transparently. The intelligence, knowledge and experience of our people brings competitive advantage to our clients - as such we are committed to their continual growth and development." Having a finance manager running that all-important function perhaps shows a little less commitment to its people than having an FD do it...

If you've got a good FC, why have a "finance" director?

I've often wondered about how long the "finance director" tag can last. I'm not talking about the emergence of the "CFO" in the UK - it's more to do with the fact that outside the very biggest companies, most FDs do a lot more than finance (bits of IT, HR, facilities, procurement and so on). And when a company has a good financial controller to instil discipline, run the finance team and collate reports... well, maybe the board-level guy ought to be called something else.

This latest rumination on the subject was prompted by this story about a company called Andrews Sykes, where FD Anthony Bourne has been made redundant. "One of the non-executive directors, Jean Christophe Pillois, will assume overall responsibility for the group's finance function, assisted by the the group financial controller," it says.

Which makes a scary kind of sense, if you think about it. It's sort of an extension of the audit committee. Now, whether or not the rest of the board - which will take on Bourne's other duties (presumably all those IT, HR etc etc responsibilities) - will be able to hack it is another question. There's a reason FDs end up with that sort of stuff on their plates: they tend to be much better than most people at functions dictated by systems and processes. But it seems quite sensible for the FC to report directly to a non-exec on the pure finance side, no? And when he's ready to use the skills and cross-business expertise he's sure to pick up doing that role... well, maybe he'll call himself something like "Director of Business Services" rather than FD - just to make it clear he's not replaceable by his own FC!

(By the way, my first reaction was: there's a problem at the company, so they're slashing costs from the top - but the latest interims look pretty healthy. Or there's been a board-level falling out. But the release says the financial legwork will have reduced thanks to disposals - hence the "redundancy". So there you have it...)

Control is the new black

I was chairing a panel discussion with a couple of FDs this monring at the Loss Prevention 06 event in Kensington. (Stay awake at the back!) The subject was getting "LP" noticed at board level, and I was joined by Annie Guerard of Diesel and Peter Hartley, formerly FD of Blacks Leisure, Next and Texas Homecare. But it was something Annie said that really caught my attention.

She was stressing the importance of control in the modern business. Now that the systems have given us visibility within the organisation and the pace of change has accelerated (in a retail context, she pointed out, that also means the speed with which shoplifters, crooked staff and fraudsters evlove their tactics or exploit a weakness in huge numbers before you discover it), having a great controller in place to ensure that things are just as they seem is critical. In bigger organisations, of course, that might become the duty of an internal auditor or even (again, in retail) a dedicated loss prevention/security director. But for most businesses, the controller needs to be on the money all the time if the company isn't going to suffer a death by a thousand cuts. Her point was that everyone else needs to appreciate the importance of the FC role to their own function and pay it due respect.

And, actually, retailers are great places to see how the control role allows you to cross boundaries. It's no good having your finger on the pulse when it comes to the numbers and reporting them brilliantly. It's not even enough to be able to use them to spot where things are going wrong. In retail, all that stuff is bound up in marketing, customer service, supply chain management, stock control - only by being financial controller of all those things can you control any one of them. So here's to a silo-less world - and to the benefits of "connected" controllers as extoleld by one FD.