Your story

Sure. I'm currently CFO of a listed logistics group here in London, about £1.2 billion of revenue, warehousing and road freight across the UK and Benelux, and I've been in the role for four years. Before that I spent six years at a private equity backed distribution business, first as Finance Director and then running the finance side of the sale process, which is where I learned to think like an owner rather than someone who just reports the numbers. Before that it was audit and then corporate finance, so I'm comfortable on both the control side and the deal side.

In the current role the big pieces of work have been refinancing our debt, which we did in 2024 and which took our interest cost down by about 80 basis points, and putting in a proper capital allocation process. When I arrived, every depot manager effectively had their own capex budget. We now run it centrally, and our return on capital employed has gone from 9 to just over 13 per cent.

What I'm looking for next is a business at an earlier point in that journey, where the finance function needs building rather than maintaining, and where there's a transaction or two on the horizon. That's why this role caught my attention.

The one I'd point to is turning round our key accounts business. I'm Commercial Director at a consumer goods distributor based in Johannesburg, and two years ago our top five retail customers made up about 60 per cent of revenue and almost none of our margin. We were giving away rebates that nobody had looked at properly in years.

So the first thing I did was get a proper customer profitability view, account by account, including the logistics cost to serve, which we'd never allocated. That alone was eye-opening: two of the five were loss-making once you put delivery costs in. Then I renegotiated the trading terms with each of them personally, over about nine months. We moved from flat rebates to growth-linked ones and brought in minimum drop sizes.

We lost one of the five, which was a deliberate choice, and replaced most of that volume through independent retail within a year. Gross margin on the key account book went from 11 to 17 per cent, and operating profit was up about R140 million.

What I'd bring from that into this role is the discipline of looking at cost to serve before chasing volume. I suspect you've got a similar conversation coming with some of your larger accounts.

Happy to. I'll go back about fifteen years, because that's where the thread starts. I was at a global bank in Singapore doing infrastructure lending, and in 2011 I moved to a regional private equity firm because I wanted to be on the equity side, making the investment call rather than lending against someone else's.

I stayed there seven years and became a partner. By 2018 the firm was raising its fourth fund, and I was spending most of my time fundraising rather than investing, so I left. My first move out is the one I'd do differently: eight months as CFO of a fintech. It was the wrong fit. I'm an investor, not an operator, and I recognised that quickly rather than staying two years to make the CV look tidy.

In early 2019 I joined a family office here as Head of Investments. It was about SGD 3 billion at the time, and they wanted to build a direct private markets book from scratch. We now have 14 direct investments and a team of eight.

This role makes sense now because you're institutionalising a much larger pool of capital, with a proper governance framework around it, and that's the step I haven't done yet.

I'm HR Director for the Canadian business of an international insurance group, based in Toronto. Canada is about 3,200 people and roughly CAD 2.4 billion of premium. I report to the Canadian CEO day to day, with a dotted line into the Group Chief People Officer in London.

My team is 38 people: business partners, reward, talent acquisition and a small HR operations hub. I own the people budget for Canada, which is about CAD 9 million excluding salaries, and I sit on the Canadian executive committee, so I'm in the room for the commercial decisions, not just told about them afterwards.

It's worth being clear about where the line sits. Pay ranges and grading are set by group, so I can't redesign those on my own, but I make the case for exceptions and I've won most of them. Organisation design, succession for the top 60 roles and our union relationships in the claims operation all sit with me.

In practice, the CEO uses me as a second opinion on most senior hires and on every restructuring. Last year that meant leading the merger of two claims centres, which took out 140 roles with no grievances upheld.

Broadly, yes. I've had more responsibility earlier than I expected, and I've worked on transactions I'd have been very happy just to be near at the start of my career. But I'll be honest, there was a stretch of about three years where it stalled.

I was Deputy General Counsel at an infrastructure group here in Mumbai from 2017. The General Counsel was ten years from retirement and going nowhere, and I was doing a lot of the work of the role, the board papers, the disputes strategy, without the title or the seat at the table. For a while I was frustrated and probably let it show more than I should have.

What I did about it was have a direct conversation with the CEO about what I needed, and then take on the things nobody else wanted. The big one was a ₹2,800 crore arbitration over a toll road concession that had been drifting for years. I took it over, changed the counsel team, and we settled at about 40 per cent of the claim value.

That got me noticed by our parent company's board, and when the group set up its renewables business in 2021, I was made General Counsel there. So yes, I'm happy, partly because I learned how to get unstuck.