‘My wife said, have you realised yet that you have ADHD?’: Meet FD of the Year finalist Bradley Channer

He says: “I ended up getting a gig on this kids’ TV show called Bounce House. We did a pilot which was picked up and we made a series of it. I was straight out of acting school, I’d moved to Sydney, I’d quit my job in hospitality and I thought ‘This is it, the career’s taken off’.

“About three weeks before the show was due to go live, it was shelved. It was bought by another network and it never saw the light of day. I was gutted. I had to go back to work in hospitality.”

‘I was doing eight shows a week and taking home £500’

After the disappointment of the TV series, Brad decided to buy a one-way ticket to the UK. “That was 16 years ago. I knew nobody, I had £60 in my back pocket and a maxed-out credit card, and I ended up staying on the couch of a guy in Whitechapel whom I’d barely met through a mutual contact,” he says.

“The next day, I got a job and the next day I got an agent.”

He made ends meet through street marketing gigs that included tempting people into nightclubs for pay of £1 per person and urging smokers to quit on behalf of the NHS.

He auditioned for a lot of West End shows and got into the Royal Academy of Music. He sang for Sondheim, but even as a working entertainer, life was a struggle.

He says: “I was doing eight shows a week and after agents’ fees and tax I was taking home about £500 a week. My rent was £350, my transport was £120 and there was barely money for food and booze – and I was thinking, this is supposed to be the peak of my career.

“So I started my first business. I’d worked in sales and marketing for a lot of pub companies and I started an app called Free Beer, back when apps were taking off. It was an app that gave you a free beer around London every day. I knew nothing about business. My only accounting knowledge would have been from high school, where they taught me to do a P&L balance sheet and a cash flow – and I’ve always been good at Excel.”

The business was a “disaster”, he says. “Everything went wrong and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I learned so much from getting the scars.”

He created a beer magazine, which he sold for “a bit of money”, and agreed with his business partner to take Free Beer to Florida before selling it.

Along the way, he turned to advising startups. “I kept meeting all these great startups that had really good ideas but couldn’t get their stuff together,” he says.

“Their forecasts would say they were going to triple their sales in month five but they didn’t spend any money on marketing. They weren’t telling any stories and they weren’t getting investment. So I found myself spending a lot of time with startups and getting really embedded in the startup community.”

He turned this line of work into a consultancy practice through which he helped firms make business plans and forecasts, then raise the money.

“Over my career, I've raised probably just shy of 60 million US dollars for companies of different shapes and sizes – quite a lot of money for this early stage sort of business,” he adds.

When someone pointed out that he was working as a management accountant, he resisted the label -- but he realised he’d need a qualification to pursue full-time jobs. However, he couldn’t face reading the textbooks that ACCA sent him in the post.

At around the same time, he says his wife, a psychiatrist, asked him: “Have you realised yet that you have ADHD?”

He says: “I got diagnosed with ADHD and started taking medication – and my life completely changed. I went from entrepreneur/actor and having lots of different companies as a consultant to suddenly just focusing.”

He was accepted onto a CIMA CFO Gateway programme which acknowledged his documented experience as the groundwork for a qualification. The programme ended with an interview exam with a passing score of 85%. He qualified alongside the CFO of BMW, who remains a friend.

‘Tech people are artists in their own right’

Advising tech companies is a specialised form of finance work, Brad says.

“Tech companies are creative companies. Developers are incredibly creative people. They’re usually on the spectrum like me. They’re artists in their own right and they think creatively, they don’t think about the money necessarily,” he adds.

Often, founders don’t understand the cost of sales, he says, and a senior accountant needs to know enough about tech and cloud infrastructure to properly control costs. He tells how he helped one company reduce database hosting costs from £10,000 a month to £2,500 by changing “some things in the tech that didn’t need to be there”.

“These are startups that have to scale and multiply their number of clients by 100 in a short period of time – so are their costs going to multiply by 100 too? And if so, how are they ever going to be profitable? By asking key little questions, you’re able to make the tech more fit and streamlined so when you do scale, it’s going to become profitable much faster,” he says.

‘I was able to get costs down dramatically’

Since 2022, Brad has been CFO of UBIO – a bot automation company whose clients include Google and trivago.

UBIO connects websites without using an API. The upshot is that someone looking for a hotel on Google or a flight on Skyscanner can see live data that’s been fetched from the website of that hotel or airline.

“You’re getting the same service but you’re not getting redirected,” says Brad.

“It's a great company to work for. It's a tech scaleup, so it's a loss-making tech company. I specialise in coming into companies when they’re turning over up to £1m and I take them to around £10m ARR and exit and then I go onto the next one.

“When I came on board, as with most tech companies, I was the first proper CFO they’d had. Turnover was about £1.2m and within a year I had them up to £3.6m.

“When I joined, their margin was only 65% on average and it would fluctuate hugely month on month. I did the first analysis the company had done on that area and was able to get their cost of sales down dramatically, keeping a steady gross profit of 80-85%, but was also able to change the commercial offering to focus on certain sectors instead of being Jack of all trades.”

The sexy thing about accountancy

The FD of the Year shortlisting recognises not only Brad’s work for businesses but his drive to contribute to the profession.

He sits on the global CIMA Council, is vice-chair of CIMA’s lifelong learning committee, the CPD review committee and Members in Practice committee. He delivers workshops on communicating, presents webinars on things accountants are expected to know and runs a WhatsApp support group where around 150 FDs and CFOs can ask each other questions without judgement.

He also does advocacy work, speaking up for accountancy apprenticeships at Westminster. He believes apprenticeships are key to addressing the skills shortage in the profession.

“We’re going to be in trouble as accountants soon. Management accounts should be fine but with practice accountants and auditors, there's a massive gap,” he says.

“CIMA has more members coming from apprenticeships now than ever before. Working with my counterparts at CIMA, we’ve got accounting officially recognised as a STEM subject, which is great news,” he adds.

He says more people would be interested in accountancy if they just knew it existed and how interesting it can be.

“When everyone thinks of accountants, they think auditors, they think tax returns. While those are very vital roles and really good for certain people who love that stuff, it all looks at the past,” he adds.

“Gen Z don’t want to look at the past, they want to look at the future. That's what management accountancy is and what all accountancy should be. It's not just focusing on what we did last month, but focusing on what we're going to do because of that: how are we going to change the future? That's the thing that makes accounting sexy. It's the fun part.

“What I like about apprenticeships and making accountancy a STEM subject is that we're able to attract people from different socio-economic places. The guy who grew up in a council house in central London and has had free school meals, he’s going to have a very different view of the world from me as an Australian immigrant who has come through my route – and different from you.

“To have those diverse views, to be able to give the ability to a range of different opinions, I think is going to do nothing but strengthen us as an industry.”

Find out more

The Accounting Excellence Awards are held on 8 October. Brad Channer can be found on LinkedIn here.