Introducing the next finalist for the Finance Director of the Year title, sponsored by iplicit, at the Accounting Excellence Awards.
Charlotte Crowley believes finance should be a full partner in a business – and that a dialogue between finance and the people that want to spend more money can be healthy.
Charlotte Crowley believes in a productive tension between lofty ideals and finance.
The FD of Xynteo, an organisation that helps global businesses find people- and planet-positive ways to commercially grow, says: “The group of people here – and in the industry in general – are idealists. They want to save the world.
“This idealism can be a challenge at work for someone like me, because it can appear you’re being pessimistic and saying ‘you have to allow for this to go wrong’. But I think that makes my job even more important, as the best thing my role can do to support the good work the industry is doing, is to be that voice.”
Having studied cause-related marketing for her master’s degree before going on to qualify with ACCA, she understands both sides of that tension.
“For a business to be able to help others, it needs to make a profit, it needs to have a focus on the numbers. In the near-term, I wouldn’t want decisions to be made only on numbers, but to say they weren’t important in the longer-term would be naïve,” she says.
At school, Charlotte was picked to do her business studies A-level early because of her flair for the subject. She studied economics and politics at the University of Birmingham before doing her MSc in marketing.
Recruiters told her she would suit both creative agencies and finance roles, so her first jobs were entry-level finance positions in advertising. Her time with the small PR company Salt Communications was “probably where I learned the most”, she says, and she progressed there from a junior role to finance controller.
“I was very lucky with my recruiters. I think they saw that to be good in finance, you need to be able to understand the business and understand the people that are working in the business,” she says.
“Because I had a background in marketing, I could probably do the finance part with the little bit of experience I had in entry level roles, but also I’d get to know the people I’d be working with outside the finance team. I believe that’s what has led to me being successful – because I’ve always operated in organisations where you’re supporting and enabling the business but going beyond the traditional scope of just doing finance.”
It was while at Salt Communications that she studied for her ACCA. When the business was acquired by MullenLowe, she was chosen to project manage Salt’s side of the integration.
A move to the consultancy Vivid Economics was supposed to involve professionalising that business’s finance function and processes, ready for growth. But when she was still fresh in the job, she learned the business was to be sold to the global consultancy McKinsey & Company. Charlotte found herself once again presiding over the sale accounts and the finance side of the TUPE process. After that, she spent around a year working on initiatives at McKinsey.
“I’ve been very fortunate that I seem to put myself into situations where I’ve never done things before and I get a really good learning opportunity,” she says.
“You wouldn’t ordinarily have a finance person that’s come up from being a finance assistant and finance controller to having a project-specific transformation role similar to a consultant at McKinsey. That was very interesting and again, it allowed me to get under the skin of business as opposed to just finance.
“McKinsey is a great place to learn. People that go there are very, very smart and they put a lot of effort into keeping those people very, very smart.”
Charlotte saw the opportunity with Xynteo as another chance to help gear up a business for growth.
“What appealed to me about Xynteo was that they’d been recently acquired by a private equity firm, which had bought a majority share. They were building up from being founder-led, which I’d worked in a couple of times before, and professionalising the business and the finance function. It felt like a very nice fit for me,” she says.
The company has a mission to help businesses tackle societal and environmental challenges “that are too big, too expensive and too complex to tackle alone”.
“For my master’s degree, my thesis was on cause-related marketing, so I’m quite interested in how businesses can support the economic problems of the world that impact everyone,” says Charlotte.
“What Xynteo is trying to do is help businesses connect opportunities for growth, with the desire to transition how, why, where, and when we do business to a better world for good – which fitted nicely with my ethos.”
The start of the role “was particularly challenging because the finance function was managed out of Norway and within my first month the office was closed down, and we had to rebuild the function from the UK, which included onboarding new team members and transitioning from founder-led based in Norway to a more systemised UK way of working. I got a little more than I bargained for. There’s still lots to do but we’re making headway.”
Xynteo is based on high ideals and on considering other metrics than those typically tracked or managed by finance – but financial sustainability is still crucial, says Charlotte.
“In the short term, you can’t just focus on the numbers. But in the longer term, you can’t not focus on them,” she says.
That means the idealists in the business need to hear from the finance function. “You must partner with them and find ways to ensure the business hears you, and fully understands the implications or decisions,” she says.
“I might say, ‘I know we want to give this work away for free because it’s a great client and a great cause. But, in our effort to create a positive people and planet impact, we need to be conscious of the impact to our bottom line – maintaining financial health is critical to basic things like payroll, supplier payments and investing in the business for its growth. It makes finance even more important in these types of organisations, because someone needs to be the guardian of the bottom line to enable other parts of the business to focus where they should.
“That’s the balance you need. You have to partner and listen to both sides. I might ask questions about something because it is a large spend and I also want,or need, to ensure that the implications of the spend have been considered but I also ensure that there is an open dialogue so I can better understand the objective of the spend. It’s important to understand the cost and gain both in the short but also in the long term. Something could have low short term gain and high short term cost but in five years it could have helped facilitate the company becoming the leading expert in a particular area because we took a risk now.”
All these judgements depend on having the best possible data, she says.
“It’s important to bring in multiple and consistent data points to allow you to truly make those decisions and have that assessment on the shorter and the longer term,” she adds.
Charlotte hopes her award shortlisting is a recognition of finance’s role in the wider business.
“One thing I say to my team is how important the finance function is to both support and enable the business,” she says.
“Being a true business partner, not just a finance partner, happens when every single person in the organisation sees value in the work that finance is doing, whether that’s because of the discipline and processes that are in place or because you’re able to offer a different perspective or you’ve got the commercial support.
“What I’d really like out of this is the recognition that I’ve enabled the business, I’m part of the reason for the business’s success. It’s not finance doing its job as a cog in the wheel.”
For all organisations, there’s a danger that the finance team is seen as the people who block things.
“My real desire would be that everyone learns and appreciates those blockages and why they’re there,” says Charlotte.
“I think challenge is good. In an organisation where you can create professional challenge to get the best results, I think it serves you well because not only internally, but externally, you’re going to deliver the best.”
Xynteo can be found here. The Accounting Excellence Awards are held on 8 October.