Books To The Boardroom
Are you interested in how Australia’s best leaders grew into the professionals they are today? The journey from University (Books) to Leadership positions (Boardroom) can take many different forms. Listen in as we interview CEO’s, CFO’s, and Executives, on how they ascended to leadership positions, made critical career choices, and overcame adversity throughout their career. The Books To The Boardroom podcast is co-hosted by Sumith Dissanayake, a CFO turned Business Owner based in Brisbane, Australia, who is fascinated by all things leadership and career development.
Books To The Boardroom
Navigating Finance Transformation: Insights from Scott Walkinshaw, CFO of New North Feed
In this episode of the Books to the Boardroom Podcast, Season Three CFO Catalyst, I welcomed Scott Walkinshaw, CFO of New North Feed, Western Australia's largest vehicle equipment, transport, and crane company. Scott shared how businesses face tremendous pressure today - squeezed between clients demanding more for less and staff wanting flexible arrangements. Technology is the key to doing more without adding overhead.
Scott had a fascinating journey, including meeting the Queen at 19 as an apprentice mechanic, working as a bouncer, and eventually finding his way to finance after his grandmother's advice. "Numbers make sense to me," he explained.
We laughed about how our families still think CFOs are just tax accountants at shopping centers! Scott reflected on finance's evolution from number-crunching to strategic partnership, with automation handling transactions so people can focus on adding real value.
Scott is a big fan of cloud technology, enabling work from anywhere while eliminating infrastructure costs. Though automation helps with workloads, compliance requirements keep increasing, requiring specialized tools and proper planning.
Looking ahead, Scott believes humans will always be crucial in finance. His advice for upcoming CFOs emphasises emotional intelligence alongside technical skills - understanding people and staying curious are essential in our evolving profession
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Until next week, keep reading, keep listening!
Scott Walkinshaw
[00:00:00]
[00:00:00] Sumith Dissanayake: Welcome back to Book to the Boardroom podcast, season three CFO, catalyst. Today my guest is Scott Wilkins Show. Scott is the CFO at New North Feed, Western Australia's largest vehicle equipment, transport and crane company. Scott, it's great to have you on our podcast.
[00:00:21] Scott Walkinshaw: Thank you, Simmons. Great to be here.
[00:00:23] Sumith Dissanayake: Wonderful. I know you got a plenty of, finance experience. Before we deep dive, I want to explore your, early life and, you know, the career beginning, because I can see there is some good things, like a, really mindblowing experience that you had that as a youngster. So the first one, I, I, I, it can't come to my mind is like, you know, meeting Queen at 19.
Right. So, rare experience. Right. So what was the moment like for you and, how did you, how did that come about?
[00:00:52] Scott Walkinshaw: So when I was, a teenager and I was working as a, apprentice machinery mechanic in my hometown in New Zealand, [00:01:00] and, we heard that the, the queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were coming to visit. Our workplace. And so there was an awful lot of planning, as you can imagine. Before this event took place, we had to, you know, spit and polish all the floors and make everything shiny.
And, we were all told that, you know, there'd be no interactions with the Royal, the Royals. They would just walk around and do their thing. And,
[00:01:19] Sumith Dissanayake: Okay.
[00:01:20] Scott Walkinshaw: the queen came down to the floor where I was working and she was looking at some of the machinery and, one of the machines stopped working and my boss was like, you're gonna have to go over there and fix it.
So.
[00:01:31] Sumith Dissanayake: That's.
[00:01:34] Scott Walkinshaw: I, I kind of wandered over and I think, you know, if I think back, I probably had on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans, you know, which is what I normally wore in, in my job. And I was probably covered in grease. And so I walked over, I got the machine going again, and she was just standing there watching me the whole time.
And as I sort of. Finished. I, I turned and looked at her and I probably had the stupid grit on my face, and she said, I, I can't remember exact words, but it was something along the lines of, that's very impressive, isn't it? And I had no idea what to say, [00:02:00] so I just stood there and said nothing.
[00:02:03] Sumith Dissanayake: I know it's a kind of a place where you don't know what to say or what not to say. Like it's hard. Is it because you're not dealing with royal all the day? Like it's a different way of dealing with them, I guess. I never had that encounter, so I, I can imagine the pressure.
[00:02:17] Scott Walkinshaw: It was a very surreal experience, but one of those things that I'll always remember. So, yeah, it was, it was, it was fun.
[00:02:23] Sumith Dissanayake: Wow. That's a, actually a really good experience, for a youngster. And, yeah, it's some kind of lifetime experience. Wonderful. And you
[00:02:31] Scott Walkinshaw: so passed on. Now they've both passed on. It's, one of those things I can kind of look back on, you know, talk to my kids about, tell my grandkid, you know.
[00:02:39] Sumith Dissanayake: Yeah. I know you're a hero, right? So, and you worked as a bouncer during your, university days, and what was
[00:02:45] Scott Walkinshaw: Yeah, so.
[00:02:46] Sumith Dissanayake: lessons you learned from that job mile?
Like, you know, it's a different job to finance. Like, I can't see any correlation between the two.
[00:02:55] Scott Walkinshaw: Well, it all came about because originally when I left school, finance [00:03:00] wasn't in my head. It wasn't ever something I wanted to do. my grandmother kept saying to me, you know, go to university, become a lawyer, become an accountant, do something like that. And I'd always laugh and say, no, that's not for me.
And so originally I wanted to join the Air Force as a pilot when I left school, and so I left school at 16. Applied to the Air Force and was very quickly rejected because my eyesight wasn't up scratch. So that kind of left me in a bit of a, a bit of despair, I suppose, for a while. And so, you know, I went to work at this place.
I was working out where I met the Queen and worked there for a few years. Did my, machinery, mechanics, apprenticeship. And sort of didn't really know what to do. So then I thought, okay, I'm gonna try for the police. So by this stage, I'd relocated to Auckland in New Zealand and I was living there and thought, okay, if I work in the security industry, that'll give me some experience.
So I was doing that, got to sort of 23, 24, and I was ready to do my [00:04:00] police application at this point and got rejected for the same thing. So.
[00:04:03] Sumith Dissanayake: Right.
[00:04:05] Scott Walkinshaw: Okay, clearly I need to rethink this. I had a bit of a midlife crisis at at 23 and I sat down and thought, okay, it's time to look at something new. And I decided to go to university.
So again, didn't start off doing finance, started off doing computer science. I thought a software engineer was where all the money was. So I'll do software engineering. So I was 24 I think, when I enrolled. And so I was old by everyone else's standards, you know, I remember sitting next to this young girl in my first class and first semester and she said, how old are you?
And I told her, and she goes, wow, that's really old, isn't it? Okay. That set the tone for me as a mature student. but yeah, I got through my first year of, my bachelor of science degree in computer science and it just got too hard. I just couldn't keep up with it.
[00:04:55] Sumith Dissanayake: Yeah,
[00:04:56] Scott Walkinshaw: And so that was when I changed to commerce [00:05:00] and I can still remember calling my nana and saying, Hey, Nana, just letting you know I've done what you suggested.
I'm now doing accounting. And she goes, I told you.
[00:05:07] Sumith Dissanayake: yeah, sometimes they're right and then, they must, she must be very happy. The, for fact that, you know, what she said was right.
[00:05:13] Scott Walkinshaw: And, and look, she was very happy to come and see me graduate. So, yeah, you know, that was, it was a really interesting path to get there. But, I just have a, I don't know, numbers make sense to me. Dollars and cents make a lot of sense to me. So,
[00:05:27] Sumith Dissanayake: But at early days, you were able to help, your grandfather with some bookkeeping, for his,
[00:05:32] Scott Walkinshaw: yeah. So my grandfather had a taxi business, so when I was probably. I guess 13, 14, I was, you know, doing his, it wasn't called a Baz in New Zealand, it was just a GST return, but I was doing GT returns and, you know, doing his books and all that sort of stuff from every weekend. and, you know, I just understood it, but I never really gave too much thought.
So, you know, I did economics at high school. I did accounting. I remember in my. Second to last year, a [00:06:00] friend of mine said, oh, he, I, I wouldn't mind doing accounting next year as well. And I was like, oh, well you're probably gonna need to do a bit of catch up. So I taught him, you know, sort of year 10 accounting over a weekend.
it just something that's always made sense to me. So, you know, even now, I just kinda look back on those days and think, you know, it, it, it made sense when you look back, but at the time I'm just like, oh, you know, didn't really, I never saw it as a career at that point, I suppose. To me, it sounded boring when I was younger
[00:06:27] Sumith Dissanayake: Yeah. You know, that's, that's the perception. Like it's hard for us. Like, you know, I thought like the cashiers were the accountants. When I was small, that was the only relatable person that I can see handling the cash,
[00:06:37] Scott Walkinshaw: yep.
[00:06:38] Sumith Dissanayake: right? And I thought that was the accountant that I, you know, and but later, so you, as you go, so when you get more exposure that you understand the how deep the, the, the, that function is.
Like, you know, it's not now, even now accounting is not accounting, right. It's not numbers anymore.
[00:06:54] Scott Walkinshaw: It's completely different. It's changed so much and you know, most of my family have no idea what I do
[00:06:59] Sumith Dissanayake: Same here. Same here, [00:07:00] right?
[00:07:02] Scott Walkinshaw: I try and explain it. They just tune out and they just move
[00:07:04] Sumith Dissanayake: Yeah. Yeah. The, the perception, even if you call, you know, even if you go to the market and say you are an account and they ask like, you know, you're busy at the tax time, so they can't see the, you know, the, the CFOs financial controllers in working in the companies. They only can see that, you know, the tax people who are probably you operating from the shop, shopping, shopping center, lobby.
So,
[00:07:24] Scott Walkinshaw: Yeah, exactly. Or it's, it's a, it's an audit function or a compliance function or something as opposed to a, you know, adding value to business function, which I think is what
[00:07:32] Sumith Dissanayake: Management
[00:07:33] Scott Walkinshaw: is, is it's certainly, a huge requirement of a, of A CFO these days. You've gotta be able to add value, otherwise there's no point in you being there.
[00:07:39] Sumith Dissanayake: Yeah. It has evolved to a, a totally different space from where I started sort of studying accounting to now's totally different ball game altogether. Because at that time it was still, this was number heavy. You know, the So because thing is like for you to do, to compile the annual report. So now that's not the [00:08:00] only task.
Like that's only one of the
[00:08:01] Scott Walkinshaw: No, and and to be fair, it's probably a very small part of my data now.
[00:08:06] Sumith Dissanayake: Exactly. So that's why we are even having these conversations to sort of explore how and the, the, the industry is evolving and how we can sort of fit in into the, the new world.
[00:08:19] Scott Walkinshaw: Yeah. Yeah,
[00:08:19] Sumith Dissanayake: Perfect. Right. And I know you're a big fan of, the automation and finance transformation, but what was the biggest, technological transformation that you have seen in the industry in the recent past?
[00:08:33] Scott Walkinshaw: Look. Yeah, I think, I, I dunno if it's from my early days trying to sort of do computer science or whatever, but I've always just. Understood and, and, and got involved in the finance and or the crossover between finance and technology. So I think for me, the, the, the biggest innovation is probably, you know, whatever you wanna call it these days.
It used to be called,RPA, you know, robotic Process Analysis or it was, you know, the early days of scanning documents and that sort of thing. Whereas [00:09:00] now, I suppose it's almost full blown ai. So I think that's certainly the most transformative. part of technology and finance, you know, where I've got roles now that are predominantly done by a, a machine or a process as opposed to being predominantly done by a person.
and I think back, you know, even 10 years ago, that wouldn't have been the case. Yes, machines were there to help you. Computers were there to help you. You had software applications to assist you. But you know, now there's certain functions, particularly around transactional stuff like a p, a and AR that can be predominantly done by the machine now, and you've only got a person either picking up the the rejections or just.
Touching base every now and again to make sure things are on track, but not actually sitting there all day, every day doing the same thing. See, that's the biggest change, which just allows the people to get back to doing things that people are good at, which is critically analyzing things and, and, and other ways of adding value as opposed to just that, real [00:10:00] transactional, button monkey stuff that doesn't really need to be done by a person.
[00:10:04] Sumith Dissanayake: Yeah, it's true. And, but some of them come up, come up with this argument, Scott, to say that, you know, because you have to have something smaller to start with. You know, bookkeeping has to be there for someone to warm up. I think it's, more of, you know, because of the education's not, keeping, keeping up with the requirements.
So they always try to sort of see, you know, find a. You know, do up a story to say you have to have some space there for people to warm up. But instead what we could do is like, you know, now if that function's not going to be automated, it's not gonna be available, then you have to, to get people ready for the next steps in the the process.
[00:10:37] Scott Walkinshaw: Yeah, and that's, I think, you know, I, I always talk to, to my daughter about, you know, the, she might potentially have a job that doesn't yet exist because things are changing so rapidly. So, yeah, look, there, there's always gonna be a space for people and I. Just because you automate something doesn't mean that people cease to exist or, or become irrelevant.
It means you can put them to better [00:11:00] use than, than, than what they were before. But I think, yeah, look, it's, it's certainly, I. Challenging for people to, to learn a new process. Particularly, you know, I've been involved in a lot of transformations in business and trying to get people to buy into the fact that, hey, your job will still be there.
It may just look slightly different to what it did yesterday. and getting, you know, people on board with the fact that whether it's AI or any sort of machine learning, it's not the big evil thing, it's just, it's here to help us.
[00:11:30] Sumith Dissanayake: That's true and, and giving you the opportunity to, add value to what you do even in our business, like compared to what we started 10 years back to now. So at that time, people voted, people like data operators just pretty much, you know, punches the data into an accounting system. But what they want now is like a guardian.
So who is like a, someone who's, you know, sort of managing the process. Not just entering the data, the OCR and all the other, the advancements are taking care of that data entry function rather like what [00:12:00] you, elaborated before. So they have pretty much exceptions or, or, or add value to see, you know, how we can shorten the function and the process or make it more, visible, more transparent across the business.
[00:12:14] Scott Walkinshaw: E. Exactly. And I think, you know, OCR has obviously been around for a long time and you know. First using in its early days and it was a bit hit and miss, you know, the reaction wasn't always there and you know, it would always misread sixes and eights and fives, you know, you always had so many problems.
Whereas it's come so far now. But I think, you know, where we can really add value as people is to be able to do more with less or more with the same. I think, you know, I, I certainly see it now. We get, business gets crunched in the middle. We've got, our clients are demanding more and more of us. They wanna pay less for it.
And our staff are saying, well, you know, I wanna work from home. I wanna have flexible work. I'd like to get paid more. So the business gets the squeeze in the middle. But this is where [00:13:00] technology can help with those things. because you know the team I've got now, I think I could comfortably double the size of this business without having to add probably anything in this back office support function.
[00:13:12] Sumith Dissanayake: A tremendous achievement. Yeah, there's a tremendous
[00:13:15] Scott Walkinshaw: Yeah, so obviously we need more people operationally, but as my team sits today, we could comfortably handle the business to be twice the size. I don't know if we could do three times, we'd have to wait and see. But certainly the systems and processes we have set up now are very, very scalable.
So I think that's where, you know, that's, that's where technology really comes to the fore is being able to take a business that's, you know, say $20 million and make it a $40 million business without having to add multiple, multiple layers of overhead.
[00:13:43] Sumith Dissanayake: So this was one of the biggest challenges the finance departments were facing before. When the volume goes up, you to keep adding people to keep up with it. Otherwise, you are always going to be behind. Now the volume doesn't matter. It's only the complexity that you have to manage.
[00:13:58] Scott Walkinshaw: exactly. And you know, when I [00:14:00] first started at North Fleet, it had just done two acquisitions. They weren't even back to back. They were contemporaneous. They did one on the 21st and one on the 24th of the same month,
[00:14:09] Sumith Dissanayake: Right.
[00:14:09] Scott Walkinshaw: and. The business had already just doubled on the back of Covid, so then it doubled again.
And so it pretty much grew four times in the space of 18 months. And unfortunately, the only solution was to just throw people at it because we had different systems from different businesses and there were just, we'd inherited people from both of those businesses. So it was just a case of just putting more people to it.
So I kind of. Had to look at that when I came in and go, well, it doesn't make sense. We had people stepping on top of each other. We had gaps because things weren't being covered and we were okay, we need to get some processes worked out, first of all. And you know, I think I've shared probably a net four people out of my team and made things more efficient and again, continue to grow the business so.
people are not the answer. Unfortunately. You've gotta the right people in the right place. Absolutely. But more people does not [00:15:00] equal more efficiency. It just doesn't make any
[00:15:02] Sumith Dissanayake: Well said. Yeah, true. True. I mean, end of the day, we can't rely on people. I mean, we need to work with them, but end of the day, you know, there should be a system for us to have that sustainability. and especially I know some of the problems that we solved in the past is like, you know, when people are moving on, it's really hard on the CFOs to go back and restart.
Restart. So how many times you're gonna restart. So rather you need to have a concrete, or automated function or outsource function. And then of course, you can work on the more strategic, work rather than restarting all the time.
[00:15:35] Scott Walkinshaw: Yeah, exactly. You know, and I've been in roles where I've been very hands on and I've been in roles where I'm incredibly st strategic and are very hands off and everything in the middle of that spectrum. But I think, you are right, it's very time consuming to, to change people and to have to, you know, backfill roles and retrain and all that sort of thing.
The more you can systemize and the more you can have consistency and transparency across the process, [00:16:00] the easier it is to, you know, I, I've got, a couple of people down at the moment and the business just kind of continued on because we've got the processes in place to just deal with it. It's not putting a huge amount more pressure on anyone.
And that's not to say those people don't do anything. It just means that we knew they were weren't gonna be here. We made a plan, we put a process in place and you know, you, they'll have a bit of backlog to catch up on when they get, get back, but it won't be like it was years ago when you went away for three weeks and nothing got done in your absence.
So, you know, I think having more automation and, and better systems in place, it allows you to have more cross-functionality. You know, so you don't have one person on the team that knows it. You have three or four people on the. So if one person gets sick or goes away, someone else can step in and you know.
[00:16:46] Sumith Dissanayake: True. And, and, and I have seen, the staff turnover is very, less when there's challenging jobs. So when the job is more repetitive, so the staff turnover is high in the finance department as well. So if he can automate or do [00:17:00] something to sort of make sure that the routine functions are handled differently and then hand over the more challenging jobs, so then we, they will stay longer and our retention would be higher, and then valuation, the compounding is going to be better for the company.
[00:17:13] Scott Walkinshaw: Yeah, absolutely. And that's where, technology does really come to the fore is in those repetitive routine processing functions. you know, and accounts payable, classic example of that. And, you know, when I first started here, we have three accounts payable people. I've now got one, and now she's at the point where she sits there and goes, I need more to do.
Can you please find me other things to do because I'm so on top of it. It's not like we've decreased the volume, the volume's increased and the complexity's increased, but the systems are there and you know, she's got a bit of handle on it. And yeah, so I think that's where you can really make some significant change and see some real value.
But you're always gonna have those people that are quite happy just doing that. Ongoing processing and that sort of thing. So you've gotta be able to find things for them to do too. But, I, I'm lucky in that all [00:18:00] my team are hungry to learn new things. They all want, you know, new challenges and, and, and a diverse role.
So it makes it a lot easier.
[00:18:07] Sumith Dissanayake: Yeah, and you're a big fan of the cloud technology or the, you know, having the data or the systems on the cloud and what benefit, that you have received or what you have seen, what you have seen, in having the finance systems or the other systems are in the cloud these days.
[00:18:23] Scott Walkinshaw: if I think back to, you know, my first role in commerce after I left practice and I was financial controller for a, a drilling company, and we were headquartered in France and my ERP was on a server in France, which I had to remotely access. Day, and it worked relatively well. It wasn't too bad. I had a very good data connection where I was, so it was okay, but when it went down, it was just, it was a nightmare, you know?
And because we had a seven hour time difference or something went wrong in their nighttime, it would impact my daytime and. I was the first one. So I [00:19:00] think we had seven different territories around the world, and I was the first one to actually get approval to house it locally, which made a huge difference.
But again, it was still on-prem. You know, we had massive server infrastructure. We had to have a server room, and there was cooling and there was power, and there was an IT team and all those things. So I think. Cloud hosted technology allows us to get away from all those infrastructure costs because infrastructure, you know, we were a small business then we were a $20 million business.
So to actually have a server rack and, you know, a dedicated server room and that, it was a huge chunk of our, our revenue. Whereas, you know, now with the cloud, you can do away with all that. You can have, you know, more secure data storage. You can have. More data storage. and it allows you to access from anywhere, which I'm a huge fan of.
Like, I like the work from anywhere thing. I like to know that if I'm okay, God forbid I'm on holiday and I have to do work, but if I am, I can open up my laptop, log in and quickly do [00:20:00] something, not have to worry about VPNs, you know, a secure connection, those sorts of things. you know, my, my executive travel all the time.
You know, so I've got an owner plus three other executive members. They're always on planes, whereas, you know, now with having everything in the cloud, they can just access things anywhere. And you know, mobile enabled technology is a big thing too.
[00:20:22] Sumith Dissanayake: Yeah,
[00:20:22] Scott Walkinshaw: you know, we've only just in the last 12 months gone away from paper expense claims to having it on their phones.
[00:20:28] Sumith Dissanayake: that's
[00:20:28] Scott Walkinshaw: So, you know, no more excuses. We lost receipts. Take a photo of it when you get it, guys, and then you can throw the receipt away instead of sticking it in your drawer three weeks later, you're looking for it, you know? So, yeah, huge fan of the cloud. It was incredibly expensive when cloud technology first sort of came to the fore, but now it's generally, it's more efficient.
You know, I, I, I can't think of many cases where it's not, we only have, I think. One piece of software that's left hosted, by us. [00:21:00] And we are looking to move away from that this year, and then we won't have anything. And so, you know, our server room is virtually redundant now. and the it guys love it.
They're really happy because it means there's less infrastructure for them to monitor and, you know, they can focus on other things like security that are far more pressing. So,
[00:21:17] Sumith Dissanayake: true because they're, they, the function has evolved even faster than the accounting function. So they don't need to maintain the hardware. Rather they spend time on the data security, cybersecurity, you know, all these kind of more trending topics. And I think with the, the cloud technology, from my experience, it gave a different kind of perception for the account as like when we were at the back office, it's like, you know, we can't leave the company, you know, premise before we have to be in the bus, the company or the location to do the accounting.
I remember saying overnight to finish the reporting pack early days or come on a weekend just to do that. Yeah. And now it has given us that kind of [00:22:00] mobility that we can do it from anywhere and we can be, you know, doing it on the go and we can meet people, we can be outside and be social with the socialized, with the, you know, rest of the business community.
But still, you can get your work done.
[00:22:12] Scott Walkinshaw: Exactly A a and it also adds for greater transparency and visibility for other members of the business too. So, you know, we've just put new ERP in, which is cloud hosted, and now for better or worse, my MD can sit there and start looking at the financials on, on a, on a live basis. And it can sit there and go, I can see revenues doing this, or I can see that cost is doing that, and I'm like, yep.
Let's talk at the end of the month once the numbers are finally in. But he can go in there and look, which is both good and bad. But you know, it allows the sales team to go in there and follow up on customers who are delinquent with payments. It doesn't have to be the finance team anymore. It can be guys, go and check your customers.
Chase, the ones that owe us money. You've got it now. It's right in front of you. If they call up and they want something else, you can say, Hey, you haven't paid your last bill. Why should we give you something else? So it it, it makes [00:23:00] some of that finance function a bit more distributed too. But puts a lot more power into the hands of each user instead of it all being really tightly held.
Obviously we've got, you know, security protocols around it, but, it's, it's, it's a lot more functional now having, you know, cloud hosted technology and with the right permissions, then you can, you know, give a lot more usability back to each member of the team.
[00:23:22] Sumith Dissanayake: Completely agree. And, the, when we get, you know, we get some kind of lightness from the workload from this side of, you know, the advancement, but from the other side, the compliance is sort of, you know, is coming in and then trying to sort of, it's getting better, you know, not better. I would say it's getting more and more compliance that you have deal with as a CFO.
So how, how was your experience dealing with, the compliance that, I mean. Increase in compliance requirements and how, what strategies do you use to keep up with the, the compliance that you need to cover in your
[00:23:54] Scott Walkinshaw: Well, exactly as you just said, it's about taking that small stuff away, getting rid of the transactional stuff and being [00:24:00] able to focus. but, but also there are technology platforms out there to help with compliance, which, you know, I really liked to use when I can. So, in my role previous to this, we were a, you know, several hundred million dollars business.
So I had a lot of compliance payment times reporting modern slavery and, and you know, IRS 16 and we had a number of properties that we had leases for. So there was a huge amount of, compliance that we had to, to manage, but. Going out and finding technology tools to help with that, and also making sure that we had our data structure in the right way so that, you know, when it comes to lease reporting, you weren't running around looking for copies of the leases.
You know, we had them all stored in one place. We had them nicely laid out. We put summaries across there so we knew, you know, which leases, which, which properties, which ones were. Caught by the standard and which ones were outside the standard. You know, so it, you really unfortunately do need to understand what it's you're complying with and making sure that you, I suppose you structure your [00:25:00] processes that way.
So for us, again, coming back to the lease thing, we had a lease management tool to manage. I think at one point I had 187 leases to manage. So each time the lease would come in, it would get loaded straight onto the tool and the tool had a summary and then we could download those reports. And that made it really easy at the end of the year when we had to do our compliance reporting, it also made it really easy for my parent company to go, okay, what properties do you own?
What properties are you leasing? What properties are you lease or less or of, and you know, we could, we could easily deal with things that way. And it was the same with the modern slavery reporting, you know, finding tools to help. Track our spend, where the risk factors were, you know, those sorts of things.
So it's only going to become more and more burdensome, I think, because obviously, you know, corporates should be accountable. We should be able to justify that we're paying the right amount of tax and that we're paying out suppliers as and when they're due and, and all those sorts of things. [00:26:00] But, yeah, I think it's, if, if you're not.
If you've got a company that perhaps doesn't understand it, so you've got a board that doesn't understand it or just kind of sees it as a, you know, a nice to have, it can be quite challenging to get the buy-in. And if you can't get the buy-in, then the rest of the business won't be on board with it.
You'll never get the information you need, and you may not get funding for. I was lucky I managed to get funding for these systems, but not every company is willing or able to pay for that. So then it becomes manual function, and that's where the nights and weekends creep back in because you're sitting there pouring through reams and reams of paper going, how much have we spent with this company?
You know, do we do our due diligence when going into business with these people? What's our exposure, you know, from a, say a modern slavery point of view? You know? So, yeah, look, the only way to do it is to try and keep some. Free time there so that when these things come up, you've got time to address them.
[00:26:56] Sumith Dissanayake: That's, that's so true. Yeah. Of course, as a CFOs we have to [00:27:00] not to work at a hundred percent capacity. Then you can't sort of, you know, get into these things You.
[00:27:04] Scott Walkinshaw: exactly. And, and unfortunately when someone doesn't know who should do it, guess where it goes.
[00:27:12] Sumith Dissanayake: No doubt it sounded. Yeah, so this is what I always say, like when you go to board meetings. So who comes out with the most of the work? It's A CFO, so most of the
[00:27:21] Scott Walkinshaw: Yeah, it's either gonna be your CFO or your cosec or general counsel because anything that looks like compliance comes to me and I'll sit there and go, that's health and safety compliance guys. Send out the HSE guys. Or that's, you know, say transport compliance. Go and send the transport manager. Just 'cause it's got compliant with the title doesn't mean it sits with me.
[00:27:40] Sumith Dissanayake: is. Exactly. Yeah, that's right. That's, that's again, that perception that, you know, because we have that role, you know, in a more broader way. So people, you know, it's trying to come under it, then we have to sort of put it into the right box, and as the kind of moderator in the, in the game. So, now looking ahead, how do you see the role of finance professionally evolving in the world?
[00:28:00] That's becoming more and more automated. What are your thoughts of the future finance?
[00:28:09] Scott Walkinshaw: look, the first thing is I, I, I don't think there'll ever be a time where humans aren't involved in the process. Yes, I think our roles will become different. we'll obviously spend less time doing the routine transactional stuff, but even once the data's processed, someone still needs to analyze it.
And yes, machines can certainly do some of that data analysis, but it's still gotta be interpreted and it still needs to have a, a humanistic view put across it, you know, because at the end of the day, every business has still got people involved in it either. At the frontline in operations or in the back office, there's still people somewhere.
So people still need to work with people. We can't just completely depersonalize everything. but I think, you know, the compliance burden will still ramp up. I'm sure. So there's still gonna need to be advice and [00:29:00] guidance there. You've still got operational people that yes, they can look at a screen and see what the, what it says, but they dunno what it means.
Or what they need to do. So the business partnering and the coaching and the mentoring piece, it, it will always still be there. yeah. I mean you can run all the accounting for non-accountants courses in the world you want, but people will still go, it's too hard. I don't understand it, I don't wanna deal with it.
So there'll always be scope there. But yeah, I honestly don't know what it'll mean for say some of the junior transactional. Processing people. We may find that those roles become far fewer. they'll probably be in companies that either can't afford data processing or, you know, can't put in a process to do it.
But in, in large companies you might find that there's yeah, fewer people at the junior level and, and more sort of that middle to senior level people.
[00:29:55] Sumith Dissanayake: Yeah, that's true.
[00:29:56] Scott Walkinshaw: But I mean, even with all the technology we have in place, we still need people [00:30:00] to co train people on how to do it. We still need champions and SMEs to help onboard new users, reconfigure reports, do the minor changes, do the maintenance, and the, you know, so it'll just look different.
I think we'll still be here.
[00:30:14] Sumith Dissanayake: Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more. And what are your advice, for, I mean, advices for the young and upcoming CFOs? How should they get ready or what should be in their toolbox to, face the challenges in the future?
[00:30:29] Scott Walkinshaw: Look, I think understanding people and, you know, making sure a a as CFOs, and I, sure I'm not alone in this, our EQ is not always the highest, particularly if we're, you know, junior moving into that more middle management, senior management role. So we do need to focus on EQ because. You know, we, we are still dealing with people every day.
You know, I've got a, a reasonable sized team now, and I've had very large teams in the past and everybody's different. So you've still gotta make sure you know how to deal with [00:31:00] people. That'll never change. And even if it's not people reporting to, you've still gotta know how to talk to a board, how to talk to a bank, how to talk to an insurance.
There's always people in the equation somewhere. So I think, you know, keeping those social skills up is important because, you know, some of us can tend to be very. Data driven and data focused and all that sort of thing. But, keeping abreast of the changes in technology are, it's really, really important.
you know, knowing what's happening, what are the, the latest tools out there and, you know, talking to people like you and going to road shows and going to seminars and just talking to colleagues. And I think, I know it's a cliche, but you can't stop learning, I, I'm, I'm still curious and I think that's a really important thing, is to still be curious about the other parts of the business or other businesses or, you know, I like to be out there seeing what's going on at the coalface, not just sort of stuck in the office, because that's how it can really add value to know what's going on in your [00:32:00] business or maybe your client's business or your suppliers, businesses, you know, those sorts of things.
So. Yeah, that'd be probably the two key things for me is, you know, keep curious, keep current and yeah, make sure you understand people or you understand how to relate to people because I don't think anyone truly understands people. But, yeah.
[00:32:20] Sumith Dissanayake: Great advice and thank you very much for joining me today, Scott, and, you know, thank you very much again and all the very best for your future, David.
[00:32:29] Scott Walkinshaw: No, thank you Sumit. It was really nice to be here and, yeah, I hope your listeners enjoy.
