The CFO Track

You made 100,000 dollars profit last year, so where is it?

That's how Lakun Agrawal started his finance journey.

He is now the CFO of Hello Clever, an Australian fintech building real time payments across the world.

He joined when the business had about 40 people, as a fractional CFO 2 or 3 days a week, because the founder knew she needed his skillset before she could afford it full time.

Within about 4 months he was full time.

2 and a half years on, the team has grown to over 110, revenue is up 20x and there are offices in Australia, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan and New York.

But he got there the long way.

Lakun spent more than 20 years in big multinationals, through telco booms and busts and a company bankruptcy on his first day in Hong Kong.

Then working in a number of CFO roles with WPP, before making the jump to startup land.

Early on, when he was completing the accounts for his dad's business. His dad saw a $100,000 profit and asked, “So where is it?”

That confusion between profit and cash is still what he translates for founders today.

But it taught him the importance of communicating complexity in a simple way.

If you’re a finance leader wondering whether fractional can turn into something bigger, this episode is a great place to start!

Highlights:

• Hear how he helped Hello Clever grow revenue 20 times in two years, from 40 people to 110 across five countries

• Understand why he joined as a fractional CFO 2 days a week, and how that scaled to full-time in about 4 months

• Get the cash versus profit lesson his dad taught him with a single question, so where is it

• Learn why translating the numbers into plain English is the finance skill that matters most to founders

• Hear the Hong Kong story of walking into a new job the morning his company filed for bankruptcy

• Explore the real difference between an FD and a CFO, and why it comes down to your time

• Find out how he helps founders weigh debt against equity, and why it is ultimately their call

• See why even large companies get caught out ignoring cash flow

Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au

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.

That founding knowledge is hard to replicate.

The business is a different beast now.

Over 250 staff, circa 100 million dollars raised, a US expansion underway and 10 billion dollars in payments last financial year.

His route in was anything but planned.

He started off in investment banking and private equity, but a move to Melbourne a couple months before COVID changed his career trajectory.

He was contracting with a NDIS provider, which turned into a CFO role at an aged care business.

Earlier this year, Pay had a prospectus ready and were looking to list on the ASX.

They made the call to pull it when the market turned and raised private capital instead.

How he walked through that decision and managed the pivot with his team accordingly is worth a listen in itself.

If you love working in fast-paced environments, this episode is for you!

Highlights:

• Hear how he built pay.com.au’s finance function from scratch, joining at 100 million dollars in payments and scaling to 10 billion
• Understand why doing every number himself early gave him knowledge he says is hard to replicate
• Get the story of the ASX float that was ready to go, and why he pulled it and raised private capital instead
• Learn how he kept the team steady after the IPO came off the table
• Find out why he thinks Excel courses will be a thing of the past, and what replaces them
• See how a private equity placement at 22 shaped the way he reads a business
• Explore his early run of rejections, and why he now calls it lucky
• Hear how backing himself into new industries, from disability to aged care, set him up for pay

Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au

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 start in Australia. He grew up in Oman and East Africa, trained as a CA in India, then moved to Perth.

But when he arrived, no one would hire him. He volunteered for unpaid work, picked up a small audit gig and kept showing up.

A callback came from a hiring manager who’d already passed on him. Three local candidates hadn’t worked out, so Arjun got the call.

“Are you still looking?” and he started the next day.

From there he moved to Sydney, spent 5 years at Source Group working his way from FC to director of finance and helped exit the business to a US-listed buyer.

He then joined Eftsure as Group FC with the possibility of stepping into the CFO role. He put in the work and earned his place as CFO.

When the PE sponsors tried to exit earlier this year, the SaaS-pocalypse hit and the process didn’t get them where they needed.

Rather than wait, Eftsure pivoted and doubled down on acquisitions in the US and Europe, while expanding into Singapore and Hong Kong.

The failed exit turned into the next growth chapter.

It’s a reminder that the best finance careers aren’t always the ones with the cleanest start.

Sometimes the person who got the callback, is the best one after all!

Highlights:

• Moving to Australia from India with zero local experience and the months-long search for a first accounting role
• Getting rejected and then called back three months later when every local hire had failed
• Transitioning from Big 4 audit to industry and building a career pathway from controller to CFO
• Spending five years at Source Group and helping exit the business to a US-listed strategic buyer
• Joining Eftsure as group FC and earning the CFO seat through a 15x growth period
• Running a PE exit process during the SaaS-pocalypse and pivoting to an acquisition strategy when the sale didn’t land
• Expanding Eftsure globally through acquisitions in the US and Europe, with launches into Singapore and Hong Kong
• Using AI operationally within the finance function for reconciliations, data synthesis, and predictive analysis

Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au

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 one of the more unusual finance trajectories

She started in audit, moved through Caltex and Bain, then left corporate altogether to build a hospitality business with her family. That lasted more than a decade.

When she came back, she didn’t hold out for the perfect full-time role.

She took a 3 month contract and 4 or 5 months later she was running due diligence on an acquisition.

That set a pattern across her career. She has a knack for landing in the middle of a deal.

At Fathom she advocated her way into her first CFO seat and within about a year the business had exited to a FTSE 100 business.

The advice she passes on now is to be open to returning in a different way to the way you left.

A contract, a smaller remit, a side door, none of it closes off where you’re trying to get to.

On AI, she believes the tools let her move faster, but speed on a shaky base just gets you the wrong answer sooner.

Which is why she worries about the big 4 cutting graduate intakes, and who trains the next round of finance leaders if no one comes in as a junior.

If your career hasn’t run in a straight line, or if you’re working out what good finance looks like in an AI world, this one is for you!

Highlights:

• Hear how she ran a hospitality business for over a decade, then walked back into corporate finance on a 3 month contract
• Understand why she was in deep due diligence 4 or 5 months in, still working out where the files were kept
• Learn her advice for returning to work after a long break, and why coming back differently beats holding out
• Get her take on advocating for the CFO title, and the chair who sponsored her into it
• See why she keeps landing in the middle of acquisitions, including an exit to a FTSE 100 inside a year
• Hear the Bain lesson she still runs her team by, give me your message in 10 slides, not 50
• Find out why she thinks the real AI risk in finance is getting the wrong answer faster
• Explore her worry about the big four cutting graduate programs, and who trains the next cohort of seniors

Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au

“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 about 100 people to work out what he actually wanted next.

It landed him a first-time CFO seat at a startup that had just raised its series A.

Because he hadn't studied accounting formally, he learned bookkeeping and bank reconciliations from first principles, then hired a financial controller to take the systems to the next level.

If you apply Maslow’s hierarchy to finance. Transactions at the bottom, strategy and M&A at the top, you can only do the top once the bottom is sorted.

With AI and automation taking out a lot of that, Damon argues that this is the best time in history to be a CFO.

If you’re in finance and wondering whether the path you’re on, is what you thought it would be, this one is for you!

Highlights:

• Hear how a 12-year investment banker became a first-time startup CFO with no CA, no CPA and no experience in accounting systems
• Learn his Maslow’s hierarchy of finance, and why he thinks it’s the best time in history to be a CFO
• Understand how he found his next move by taking time off and speaking to around 100 people
• Get the GFC story of watching Citi cut 52,000 jobs from the other side of the world before he had even started
• See inside the Masters wind-down, 100 sites and half a billion in stock, run under live litigation
• Explore why a career in banking flips 180 degrees, from worker bee analyst to business originator
• Find out the real AI numbers inside Weel, from 2 to 5 times the output per engineer to automated receipts
• Hear how he built a company-wide AI culture with hackathons, lunch and learns and a habit of celebrating failures

Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au

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 actually like spreadsheets that much,”

Years ago that admission would have got her shunned. Instead, she leaned into it, and it became part of her whole motto.

Don’t let anybody box you into a finance identity.

She’s also become a genuine AI power-user and not in a hype way.

Her month-end process took five months to build and now closes the books in a day.

She talks about the “landline problem,” the idea that if you’re not hands-on with the tools, you don’t even realise you’ve fallen behind.

And she manages AI like a junior, consolidating feedback and watching the token spend, which is how every CFO should think about it.

What she said on careers is the one that stood out

Passive is leaving the fate of your own career to somebody else.”

After two rounds of maternity leave she rebuilt her presence from scratch, and a year and a half later she’s on the cover of a CFO magazine.

If you’re in finance and wondering what is next for you. This one is a must-watch/listen!

Highlights:

• Hear why our first ever returning guest built a career around not being a spreadsheet person
• Learn her “landline problem” analogy for why finance people fall behind on AI without realising
• See how she took month-end from a five-month build to closing the books in a day
• Understand her case for an active career, and why she says we make our own luck
• Get her honest take on managing AI like a junior, and why more context does not mean better output
• Find out how she runs a portfolio career across an edtech CFO seat and a day in venture capital
• Explore why she believes there are no real AI experts yet, and no room for ego
• Hear why she thinks a black-and-white finance mindset is a risk in an AI world

Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au

“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 faster than anyone expected.

At one point, they were number 1 on the Deloitte Fast 50.

When the first CFO hire did not work out, Luke stepped in for the interim and stayed for nearly 3 years.

What made him good was not technical, it was knowing his limits and working to his strengths.

So he hired a strong financial controller, leaned on external advisors and spent his time on what he could do that a career CFO couldn’t.

He was a co-founder, so he brought leads into the sales meeting instead of asking why the team missed their quota.

His biggest lesson is one every founder needs to know.

A healthy profit and loss statement hid the fact the business was nearly out of cash.

“You grow yourself into failure,”. Overdue debtors, contractors paid up front and milestones paid months later.

The company still scaled to 200 staff across 5 countries, before he decided it was his time to move on.

It means he brings a very unique perspective to his clients across startup finance.

“It’s the CFO’s job to say yes, but how.”

That's how finance should be run in a startup. Look for the opportunities, not the hand brake!

Highlights:

• Hear why a non-accountant ended up running finance for nearly three years
• Learn his reframe that a startup CFO’s job is not to say no, but to say yes, but how
• Understand the cash versus profit lesson that nearly sank the business, and how you grow yourself into failure
• Find out how a side project to help an unemployed veteran friend became a company in five countries with 200 staff
• Get the 6am hack he used to hold down a bank job, an MBA and a startup at the same time
• See how an Anzac Day PR campaign took the business from ten signups a week to two hundred
• Hear why he brought leads into the sales meeting instead of asking why the team missed quota
• Explore his read on the startup market, why it is easier to start a business now but much harder to scale one

Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au

“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 start of his career, he got rejected from every Big 4 internship.

But instead, he hustled his way into Deloitte by DJing at a university entrepreneurship conference.

His professors gave him one piece of advice: just be useful.

He took that literally and built a fintech audit portfolio and helped IPO companies like Zip.

Then got sent halfway across the world on empty Qantas flights during COVID to check on businesses they’d acquired entirely over Zoom.

When he got to Prezzee, month end was 3-4 months behind.

He was told to fix it, offshore what he could and get them ready to list someday.

He took the company to profitability in his first year and with 54% percent growth.

Then he did something most CFOs would never consider. He made himself unnecessary.

“If I didn’t think in that mindset, I wouldn’t be given the opportunity to now do revenue work or go to the US and be the acting president.”

He rebuilt the sales governance the same way he’d rebuilt finance.

Processes, controls and confidence levels.

He’s not a salesperson, but a CFO who understands where the growth was already sitting.

Reinvention from the inside.

Highlights:

• How he got rejected from every Big Four internship and DJed his way into Deloitte
• Why lateral moves through fintech audit built the foundation for his CFO career
• What it was like flying on empty Qantas 737s during COVID to check on acquisitions done over Zoom
• How he took Prezzee to profitability in his first year with fifty-four percent growth
• The philosophy of making yourself “almost irrelevant” as a CFO and why it opens doors
• Why he reframed the CFO role from “no” to “what would need to be true for me to say yes”
• How he transitioned from CFO to Chief Revenue Officer without being a salesperson
• His advice on using AI to differentiate as a finance leader rather than just cutting costs

Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au

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 offered her the top job and her instinct was to say no.

She had always assumed CEOs were the extroverts who “walk and talk and go on a stage and kiss babies” and that is not her!

But driven to push herself, she took the role, stood up at her first town hall and admitted to the business that she would make mistakes and wanted their help.

The response from the rest of the business was incredible.

3 years on, after selling off each part of the business, she worked out what she actually wanted to be.

The answer was CFO. “I’ve proven I can do the CEO role and I’m not doing it again!”

Her philosophy on finance is something that every ambitious finance professional needs to hear.

"What you never want to be is business prevention. You always want to be an enabler of growth."

That theme runs through her whole career, from making her finance team sit in on sales calls to an Accountant at MYOB, who built an AI agent that cut a 5 hour process to 5 minutes.

If you have ever felt like you were the wrong fit for the job in front of you, this one's for you!

Highlights:

• Why she almost turned down the CEO role, and the small moment in a lift that changed her mind
• Her rule for finance teams, that you never want to be business prevention, only an enabler of growth
• How she worked on the Block acquisition of Afterpay, the largest transaction in Australian corporate history, almost entirely over Zoom
• Why she made all her finance directors sit in on sales calls every quarter
• Ego and imposter syndrome, and why she Googled banking covenants in her first ASX role
• She learned change management the hard way, centralising European finance into a shared service centre in Dublin
• How one of her MYOB accountants built an AI agent that cut a five hour journal down to five minutes
• Her view that finance is moving from transactional work into the value added advisor space, and why graduates should stay curious

Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au

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 would help her learn.

Revenue recognition and commercial business partnering. Each one built her skillset, helped to earn trust and Gina made it to CFO, still in her 30s!

Then the job changed her career.

Male dominated and difficult conditions at times. The skills she’d spent years building were the wrong ones for the role she was now in.

Gina began working with an executive coach that gave her a different perspective.

“What if you just left those 20 emails at 5pm? What would happen?”.

Gina’s team had to tell her to stop doing their jobs and she started stepping into the role she knew she could do all along.

19 years with SAP, because she kept choosing to learn.

Not settling for comfortable, but 19 years of progression and growth.

A massive Season 3 is here for The CFO Track. Welcome back!

Highlights:

• Her first year as CFO nearly broke her and an executive coach turned it around

• Why lateral career moves matter more than promotions for building a path to CFO

• How she survived an acquisition as a contractor and turned it into an 19 year career

• The moment her team told her to stop doing their jobs and why it was the best feedback she got

• What happens when you say no and someone tells the CEO you don’t understand

• How SAP is running vibe coding sessions inside its own finance function

• What it takes to manage six markets across Asia Pacific as a working parent

• Why 19 years at one company is not stagnation when the business never stops changing

Tom Hunter, Story Recruitment - first-CFO and first-finance-hire search for Australian tech, fintech and deeptech startups. Host of the CFO Track Podcast. Storyrecruitment.com.au