The CFO Track

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 million.

Early in his career, he spent 6 years as a square peg in a round hole at Grant Thornton.

He felt like a non-accountant in an accounting firm who'd never studied accounting at university.

But he didn't wait to be assigned the interesting work. He agitated for it.

Forensic valuations, FP&A inside a higher-education scale-up, transaction services in corporate finance.

Then nights and weekends with a property tech startup.

That became the proof of concept for Hello CFO.

Bryn breaks down how a non-accountant built one of Australia's most established virtual CFO firms.

Including the housekeeping mistake that resulted in a lead investor pulling out and why the 18-month skills curve critical for any startup CFO.

For startup/high growth finance professionals, this is one you can't afford to miss!

Highlights:

• The 2006 Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast that set the career direction
• The square peg at Grant Thornton: a non-accountant in an accounting firm who agitated his way into valuations, FP&A, and transaction services
• The Cubbi weekends and nights for equity arrangement that became the Hello CFO blueprint
• Starting Hello CFO with 1.5 clients, 10 grand of revenue, a 6-month-old, a mortgage and a wife on maternity leave
• Why the GT partners said they personally didn't have the guts to make the leap
• Naivety as an asset, and the 18-month skill curve every startup CFO has to keep clearing
• The cap raises cautionary tale: ARR misrepresented, GST conflated, a lead VC investor pulled out mid raise

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 commercial team, and didn't consider himself a candidate.

He was, in his own words, a happy little worker bee.

Leading up to that point, Tim was one of the most travelled accounting/finance professionals in Australia.

Starting in Gilgandra, a country town of 2,000 people north of Dubbo.

Then roles in Brisbane and Perth, where he taught engineers how to count sand!

Including a stint at Tennis Australia, as a massive tennis fan, where he bumped into Lleyton Hewitt and Pat Rafter in the corridor talking about a budget.

He finally found his call as Commercial Manager at Carpet Call.

Then the owner walked into his office.

The three-sentence brief Tim got in the first couple of days has shaped how he's run the role ever since.

Make decisions. People are waiting for you to make decisions. I(the founder) don't want to make the decision.

In the years since, Tim has built on open-and-transparent philosophy he took into the role on day 1.

While building the change management playbook he runs on now.

Small wins first, get a chorus of voices to carry the work and never be the lone salesperson making the case alone.

This episode is about backing yourself and making changes. Make sure you tune in!

Highlights:

• The 2008 GFC landing in Gilgandra and the casual Grain Corp data entry job that became the career foundation
• The Bradken plant accountant fix worth a million dollars a year, by negotiating one Friday shift instead of standing down 100 people every two weeks
• The sand-counting story and the engineering-built dipstick that taught him to talk to operations
• The CPA-qualifying stretch at Tennis Australia and the Lleyton Hewitt corridor budget moment
• The "happy little worker bee" admission before the CFO offer
• The owner-founder's day-one brief: "Make decisions. I don't want to."
• The open-and-transparent philosophy Tim took into the chair on day one
• The change management playbook: small wins first, then a chorus of voices, never the lone salesperson
• The data evolution arc at Carpet Call: paper, PDF, CSV, Azure, lake house
• Why trade labour supply, not AI, is the biggest risk to his business

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 Services Australia.

17 years at Mercedes-Benz across 6 countries. A graduate program that moved him through 4 roles in a single year.

He also took on one of his favourite roles of his career.

A Chief of Staff role supporting the Global CFO with a portfolio of a €130 billion in 40 countries.

Including building a custom iOS reporting app in 2014 that even now would still be ahead of its time.

Then he moved to Singapore, where he stepped into a Regional CFO role and unexpectedly inherited APAC responsibility when his boss left soon after he started.

Weeks later, while recovering in ICU, he helped lead the carve-out of China from the regional structure.

And before any of it, he paid his way through university as a paramedic, performing CPR hundreds of times before he ever completed a board pack.

This led him to be a NED at the Emergency Services Foundation, looking after mental health for the people who do the job he used to do.

This conversation is really about perspective and how a lifetime of varied experiences shapes the way you lead when the stakes are high.

Episode Highlights:

• The Sunday-night paramedic years that paid for his economics degree in Stuttgart, and the couple of hundred CPR calls he did before he ever sat in a CFO meeting
• The Mercedes management trainee programme: four roles in 12 months across Sao Paulo, Poland, Stuttgart and the finance transformation office
• "You're acting with a lot of borrowed power" — the line every Chief of Staff needs before they take the seat
• Building a custom iOS financial-reporting app in 2014 that moved Mercedes' 40-country financials onto an iPhone
• The discipline of the last 5% and the loneliness of being the only one in the room who cares about it
• The Purple People framework: blue technical skills, red emotional skills, finance teams that need both
• The non-executive director role at the Emergency Services Foundation, looking after mental health for paramedics, fire and police

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 following semester!

She found a role with a mining company, where she reviewed historical port time, found the gap between what they were paying for and what they were using and renegotiated the shipping contracts.

Her CFO's reaction: "Why didn't I think of that?"

Not long after, she saw a startup with no finance function and a lot of structure that needed building from scratch.

She pestered the CEO on LinkedIn until he agreed to interview her.

She got the role, built the function and kept a secret from her own CEO the whole time.

He did not know she was teaching herself from YouTube videos and practising 3-way forecasts on her own home finances.

Today Kaycee is CFO at UrbanX, a Brisbane proptech scale up helping high performing real estate agents launch their own independent agencies.

Along the way, she has created a 4-stage framework for building any finance function from scratch.

Visibility, reporting, planning and compliance.

If you're a finance professional that loves to build and jump in with both feet, this episode is for you

Highlights:

• How Kaycee got her first CFO role from a LinkedIn message thread
• The blank-slate brief: external bookkeeping in place, and a finance function to build from scratch
• Practicing three-way forecasts on her own home finances at the kitchen table
• The four-stage framework she's built since for setting up a finance function from the ground up
• Why entrepreneurs trust obsession over credentials
• The "raving fan on your sideline” the bit of mentorship most senior leaders thinks about
• The two-altitude reality of high-growth finance: cross-functional partner and detail-level executor in the same week
• The IMX shipping renegotiation that taught her what strategic finance actually looks like
• Running finance across two businesses at UrbanX in Brisbane

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 gone.

Institutions that had been around for centuries were collapsing or being absorbed.

Governments were stepping in with sovereign guarantees just to keep the system moving.

And Akbar was front and centre, working through stress tests and contingency plans while the financial architecture of the modern world was being rewritten around him.

He stayed at NAB for 16 years.

Treasury, capital markets, and a secondment to New York, where he discovered what it means to represent an Australian bank that nobody in the world's biggest financial market had ever heard of.

When he came home, he found that international experience carries an unexpected penalty.

Out of sight, out of mind, even inside the same organisation.

Then COVID arrived at the same bank and demanded the same grit for a completely different kind of crisis.

He went from 30,000 colleagues at NAB, to a team of 200 with Hume Bank, from committees and governance layers to immediate cut-through and total accountability.

Only the scale changed, the things that actually mattered didn't.

Highlights:

-Living through the GFC from inside a major bank's treasury function

- Competing in New York's capital markets as an Australian bank nobody had heard of

- The "out of sight, out of mind" cost of building a career overseas

- Going from a 30,000-person institution to a mutual bank with under 200 staff

- Why the fundamentals of the CFO role are the same regardless of scale

- How AI is compressing the operational side of finance and shifting the value to storytelling

- The consolidation pressure reshaping Australia's mutual banking sector

- Why grit and ambition matter more than qualifications early in a career

If you have spent years inside a large institution and wondered whether that depth limits you or prepares you, Akbar gives the answers.

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 can't quite believe anyone trusted him with.

What followed was a career that moved through FX and interest rates in Brisbane and Sydney, a stint at Macquarie during the GFC and then corporate treasury at Aurizon through a government demerger and float.

What he didn't know when the Aurizon chapter closed was that a relationship built during that period would end up reshaping the next stage of his career.

A banker who remembered him from the Aurizon days rang a CFO and made the case for Cale to get a second interview at Tatts Group.

He got the job.

That same banker, nearly a decade later helped Cale save CTM during COVID when the business lost 90% of its revenue in a single month.

The team cut 1500 jobs to protect the remaining 2000.

Between those two moments he went from Group Treasurer at Tatts to building software from a coworking space in Kyoto.

Then deliberately taking a role with Bank of Queensland finance because he thought he had gotten lucky the first time around.

"If I fail here, then I was right," he says of the imposter syndrome that drove him into one of the most complex roles he could find.

Again, he didn't fail.

Today he is CFO at TechnologyOne, an ASX 100 software company with 1700 people across Australia, New Zealand and the UK.

His approach to his career and networking is "If I can help you, I'll certainly try. And if I can't, I'll connect you with someone who can."

Cale is a brilliant example of how networking can make an impact when you least expect it.

You don't want to miss this one!

What we cover:

• How finishing school at 16 shaped his early career and his impatience

• What happens when you leave a stable career to start a business and competitors physically turn up to try and intimidate you

• The phone call that got him a second interview at Tatts, and what it teaches you about how networks actually work

• How CTM lost 90% of its revenue in a single month and the decision to cut 1500 jobs to save 2000

• Why he took the Bank of Queensland role specifically to test his imposter syndrome

• The difference between leading a team you inherited and managing one you built

• Why he rented a house in Kyoto and went to the same co-working space every day for months

• How compounding generosity replaced the version of networking most finance professionals do

The CFO Track. Out now on Spotify, Apple and YouTube.

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 direction at once.

Sean O'Donoghue was the CFO carrying that and what he took from it shaped 40 years of financial leadership.

Before Wembley, he was at KPMG in 1983, closing ledger books with a ruler the year Excel launched.

After he helped build a digital bank called 86400 that NAB eventually bought to replatform UBank.

Then 12 years as CFO of Cuscal, Australia's fifth end-to-end payments company.

Culminating in a November 2024 ASX listing that won IPO of the Year and saw the share price move from $2.50 to $4.

When the analysts asked him to describe the company, he said: "Boring and predictable, like me." They loved it.

In this episode, Sean breaks down what 4 decades in the chair actually teaches you, from the red journal book to real time payments

Sean retired from full-time corporate life just before Christmas. The lessons do not retire with him.

He's also one of the funniest people you'll ever meet. This is one you don't want to miss out on!

Episode Highlights:

• The Wembley Stadium domino effect and how to respond without reacting
• Why getting kicked out of an acquisition led directly to the IPO
• What 86 400 was really built to prove, and why NAB bought it
• How to genuinely cut 40% of fixed costs (it requires a three year process redesign, not a headline number)
• The "spare walls" business case and what it teaches about return on capital employed
• Why "boring and predictable" is the highest compliment in public markets
• His advice on AI: stay close, be a fast follower, but never let artificial intelligence replace actual intelligence

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 listed giant.

She was leading acquisitions, investor presentations and all over a Southeast Asia expansion.

Then her confidence went, her sleep was impacted and her energy fell through the floor.

She took nine months off. The scariest thing she'd ever done.

She came back and put her dream companies on a Trello board.

Nura headphones was in her top 3 and they were looking for a CFO.

"You put something out into the universe and it sort of can manifest itself."

She built their finance function from zero. Following that, she moved to Tribe to lead an IPO that was pulled within weeks of her joining and pivoted the business through a market collapse.

Today she's COO at XY Sense, scaling a global privacy-first sensor business.

Episode Highlights:

• Why burnout felt like losing confidence in things she’d done a thousand times before
• How nine months off became the most empowering period of her career
• The IPO that was pulled within weeks of her joining as CFO
• Why she started too high level for engineers and had to go to product unit
• How REA Group grew from 200 people to thousands while she was inside the finance function
• What happens when you pull the lever too quickly on a team that isn’t ready
• The difference between a business that wants a CFO and one that’s told to hire one
• How she went from CFO to COO and what that transition means

This is the episode for anyone who has ever pushed past the point they should have stopped.

But also, how time out can be the best thing you ever do for your career.

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 Zoo. The company behind Boost Juice, Betty's Burgers and a few others.

They went through 3 IPO attempts and fell short, before a trade sale finally landed.

Along the way, he did close to 200 investor relations meetings and watched the sun come up from the Chadstone office more than once.

He learned that the moment you gloss up the numbers, “those investors will cut you up and eat you for breakfast.”

But he credits his team for getting the deal over the line - "If anything, they picked me up." He described it.

Episode Highlights:

• How Woolworths consolidated 25 distribution centres down to 8 and what that meant for finance
• Why Paul calls the Woolworths-to-Coles move fair game for any finance professional
• The reality of running a simultaneous IPO and trade sale with vendor due diligence
• What close to 200 investor relations meetings taught him about knowing your numbers
• How Betty’s Burgers grew from 8 restaurants to nearly 60 under Retail Zoo
• Why going from a big business to a smaller one can accelerate your career
• The fuel crisis facing logistics right now and how a CFO manages it in real time
• Why routine is the only thing that makes Melbourne-to-Sydney weekly commuting survivable

This week on The CFO Track, Paul Stevenage breaks down what 25 years across listed companies, private equity and family-owned businesses actually teaches you about finance leadership.

You don't want to miss it!

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 first trip overseas. Her second was to move.

She landed in the UAE in January 2009, to work with a property business during the GFC.

Her new employer was so quiet in those first two weeks they nearly sent her home.

They didn't.

What followed was 8 years of incredible learning experiences:

- Managing shopping centre development finance during a listed property trust era.

- Running commercial operations from a site shed 20 feet from the water on an Abu Dhabi beach.

- Leading regional finance for an education company funding solar lamps for girls in rural Kenya.

- Dealing with runaway camels from a neighbouring Sheikh's palace.

When Karma moved back to Australia, she had no house and no job. But 1 recruiter in Canberra took the call.

Today she's CFO at the University of New England, reporting directly to the Vice Chancellor, running what she calls "five businesses in one."

She was never meant to be an accountant.

Karma was going to be a pharmacist, a double degree fell through, but a three-day intro course at Coopers and Lybrand changed her mind.

This episode is about what happens when you stop planning your career and start taking the calls you almost didn't answer.

This week on The CFO Track. Karma Auden is a CFO and financial storyteller.