The CFO Track

He joined pay.com.au at 100 million dollars in payments and built the finance function as it scaled to 10 billion. Ed Trick is the CFO of pay.com.au, one of the fastest growing fintechs in Australia. He came in around the 100 million mark, when the business was about 2 years old with 20 to 30 people and no finance function. So he got on the tools and into the model, running every number himself. T...

When he first arrived in Australia, he got rejected for not having local experience. 3 months later, the same person called him back because every “safe” hire had failed. Arjun Adhia is now CFO at Eftsure, a fintech SaaS business fighting B2B payment fraud. He’s been there 4.5 years, joining when the business had around 600 customers. Since then, the business has grown roughly 15x. Arjun didn’t st...

It was a baptism by fire back into the corporate world, I’m not gonna lie. Francine Hackett ran cafes and restaurants for over a decade, then walked back into corporate finance and straight into a company takeover. She is now the CFO of Buildkite, the Australian tech company whose platform helps engineering teams build, test and ship software, with customers like Uber and Canva. Her path there is...

“I didn’t have a CA or a CPA, and I hadn’t used Xero before.” He spent 12 years in investment banking, then became a startup CFO who had to learn bookkeeping from scratch. Damon Hauenstein is now CFO and COO at Weel, but before that he was at Citi working on deals like the Masters wind-down, the biggest inventory liquidation in Australian history. He then left, took an extended break and spoke to...

Rachel Wong is back on The CFO Track, and she’s the first person we’ve ever had on twice! She’s CFO at EdSmart four days a week, spends one day in the VC world at a family office, and in her spare time she’s building The Finance Hybrid. A mission to break the finance and accounting stereotype. The thing I love about Rachel is how honest she is about it. “People who know me know that I don’t actual...

“I’m probably the first guest on your show who’s actually not an accountant.” Luke Rix is the co-founder and CEO of KC Ventures, which now runs finance for circa 70 startups. But the story starts well before that. Luke is not an accountant. He failed Accounting 101 at university and went into communications. He only ended up in finance because he co-founded a company, With You With Me, that scaled...

“You want to set up in a way where you’re almost irrelevant.” That’s how this CFO got the Chief Revenue Officer job. Mike Ammendolia told me that this week on The CFO Track. Mike is the CFO and Chief Revenue Officer at Prezzee, a global digital gift card company across seven markets. He's originally from Canada and moved to Australia 11 years ago. He loved it so much that he never left. At the sta...

Rebecca Lowde worked on one of the biggest deals in Australian corporate history. As one of Australia's best tech CFOs, Rebecca was CFO of Afterpay through the Block acquisition and she is now CFO at MYOB. Before that, she was with Oracle across Europe, SAP across multiple regions and a role as a CEO she never planned to take. Her accidental CEO story is the one that stood out At Salmat, the board...

Everything that made her great as a specialist didn't help her as a CFO. Gina McNamara told me that this week on the first episode of Season 3 of the CFO Track. Gina is the Regional CFO at SAP. She has been there 19 years, with 6 market units across Asia Pacific, Japan and China. Gina joined through an acquisition as a contractor. She wasn’t even permanent at the time, but took every role that wou...

This episode was brought to you by Tallystone. Use the promo code CFOTRACK for a 30 day free trial by visiting tallystone.com/cfotrack. He walked into the phone room at 21 and is now the Group CFO. Mihir Bhatt working on the phones, 20 hours a week, when he walked across the office and asked the finance team if there were any jobs going. There was, a 3 months of accounts payable cover for someone...

This episode was brought to you by Tallystone. Use the promo code CFOTRACK for a 30-day free trial by visiting tallystone.com/cfotrack. He walked away because the environment was too comfortable. Dr Tanvir Uddin walked away from a role at the Islamic Development Bank in Saudi Arabia because the room was too comfortable. It might seem like an odd time to quit. He was in the role and succeeding Inte...

This episode was brought to you by Tallystone. Use the promo code CFOTRACK for a 30-day free trial by visiting tallystone.com/cfotrack. The thread through Bryn Leggett's career is naivety as an asset. He started Hello CFO circa 9 years ago with a 6-month-old baby at home. His wife was on maternity leave, a recent mortgage, 1.5 clients and about 10k of revenue. His clients have now raised over $600...

This episode was brought to you by Tallystone. Use the promo code CFOTRACK for a 30-day free trial by visiting tallystone.com/cfotrack. Tim Bensley took the Group CFO job at Carpet Call when the owner walked into his office and asked if he wanted it. Tim thought about it for about a second and said yes. He hadn't been planning on the role. He had been at the company five years, running a commercia...

This episode was brought to you by Tallystone. Use the promo code CFOTRACK for a 30-day free trial by visiting tallystone.com/cfotrack Rafael Pasquet sold a pair of single boxing gloves at 7 years old, at a flea market in Germany. He'd bought them as a pair. He sold each one for the price he paid for both. His mother still tells the story. Most recently, he's the CFO of Mercedes-Benz Financial Ser...

This episode was brought to you by Tallystone. Use the promo code CFOTRACK for a 30-day free trial by visiting tallystone.com/cfotrack Kaycee Singh got her first A in Year 11 accounting and still enrolled in a Bachelor of Education. She lasted until a tutorial on teaching maths to 7-year-olds. Billy kicked a ball to Sally, who already had two balls. How many now? Kaycee transferred to commerce the...

This episode was brought to you by Tallystone. Use the promo code CFOTRACK for a 30-day free trial by visiting tallystone.com/cfotrack He was a few years into his career at NAB when the world's capital markets froze overnight. Akbar Shah was in treasury, the part of the bank that manages funding, liquidity and access to capital, when the GFC hit. One day, that access was a given. The next, it was...

This episode was brought to you by Tallystone. Use the promo code CFOTRACK for a 30 day free trial by visiting tallystone.com/cfotrack CTM lost 90% of its revenue in a single month. Cale Bennett was part of the team that cut 1500 jobs to save the remaining 2000. At 17, Cale Bennett started university, studied international finance and landed on an FX trading desk managing sums of money he still ca...

This episode was brought to you by Tallystone. Use the promo code CFOTRACK for a 30 day free trial by visiting tallystone.com/cfotrack This CFO watched north of half a billion dollars disappear on the Wembley Stadium construction project. While they were working on Wembley, the steel contractor went broke partway through construction. What followed was a domino effect that hit Multiplex from every...

This episode was brought to you by Tallystone. Use the promo code CFOTRACK for a 30 day free trial by visiting tallystone.com/cfotrack Burnout didn't look like falling apart. It looked like losing confidence in things she'd done a thousand times before. Jacqueline Hasler spent a decade at PwC, 2 years in London and 6 years inside REA Group as it scaled from a $12 share price and 200 people to a li...

Three IPO attempts. Each one fell short. Paul Stevenage has been CFO/Head of Finance across some of Australia’s biggest names. Woolworths. Australia Post - Star Track and Coles. He ran finance for Woolworths’ multi-billion dollar supply chain transformation and oversaw a $500 million-plus StarTrack acquisition at Australia Post. But the period that tested him the most was the 7 years with Retail Z...

A private number from the UAE rang at 8:30pm on a Thursday night. Karma Auden almost didn't answer, but it changed her career. The person on the other end was a recruiter calling from Dubai. They asked one question: had Karma ever thought about working in the Middle East? She had not. Three months later she was on a plane to Abu Dhabi. Business class, for a three-day job interview. It was her firs...

Sammy Michaels hitchhiked to work in -40 degrees for six months. He was in Mongolia, helping PwC set up their local office. Negotiating ride fares with local drivers who didn't speak English, then trying to expense a trip that came with no receipt. That kind of problem-solving has defined his career since PwC in the UK. Then Anglo-American in Singapore where he learned the hard way that not everyo...

Rachel Wong’s finance role disappeared overnight. So she went and ran the retail stores instead Rachel picked accounting because she ran out of other options at university. Her dad taught her debits and credits at the kitchen table because she had never done the subject at school. That accidental start has led to one of the most varied careers in Australian finance. Six months into her first start...

Jorrick Chivers was a school business manager in Tasmania when a once-in-a-career opportunity came to him A brand new NBL franchise (Tasmania JackJumpers) needed someone to build the entire operation from scratch. With no office, computers, or staff. He said yes. Day one was his kitchen table. Jorrick became the first employee. Within three seasons, they had sold out arenas from their first game,...

There aren't many people who have built a finance function inside hypergrowth from scratch three times. Alexey Mitko is one of them. He built it at Canva, then Koala, then Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus just sold for $1.6 billion. The same instinct ran through all three. At some point, Alexey stopped thinking of himself as just the finance person and started going upstream into HR, legal and operations. B...