We’re interviewing the finalists for the Finance Director of the Year title, sponsored by iplicit, at the Accounting Excellence Awards.
Today, meet Ciaran O’Donnell, founder of Virtual FD, who uses his corporate experience to advise startups and early-stage businesses.
Ciaran O’Donnell remains grateful to the man who told him not to go and work in the City at the age of 23.
Ciaran had boarded a plane to London the day after graduating from his ACCA course in Dublin in 1998.
“I moved to London and I was going to go into the City. But I was counselled by a recruitment consultant, who said: ‘If I put you into the City at 23, you’re going to come back to me in five years asking to get out’.”
Instead, he was pointed towards the corporate career that he now draws on to advise ambitious early-stage businesses.
His first job in that corporate world was with the Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, which owned Orange Telecom. He was part of a team of three doing internal audit of the company’s operations from the Americas to Sri Lanka.
The company sold Orange and invested in Three Mobile, where Ciaran shifted to business planning and forecasting and “just became quite good at it”.
“I was the go-to person in Three when we were buying 3G licences in Sweden, Denmark, Austria. When a business case was needed, it was ‘Ciaran, do your model’.”
The corporate career took him to senior roles with Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk before he changed direction.
“I thought, do I want to stay here forever and try to get a long-term incentive programme or share option scheme? Or do I jump ship and work with people who are setting out from scratch to win the Superbowl?” he says.
“Up to that point, I was a typical risk-averse accountant and it was only by surrounding myself with founders who were chasing something big that I realised I could help them.
“I left the corporate world at the end of 2009 – just as my wife was expecting our first child. I packed in the corporate space and for 15 years I’ve been surrounding myself with founders, CEOs, early-stage companies – all talented in different ways but, through no fault of their own, just missing that finance structure.”
“I call myself a virtual finance director. Effectively I’m a freelance FD for early stage companies and startups,” says Ciaran.
“The window I’m looking to have fun with is typically the seed to series A funding space. Typically, when a company makes it that far or gets that big, it will then raise a significant round and will need a full time FD. I’m trying to bring the finance discipline, structure and governance sooner than you would traditionally bring in a full-time FD.”
“If I’m not the right fit for a business, it’s fine. We’re all adults. I say at the start of every new client relationship, if this doesn’t work out, that’s OK. There’s no six months’ notice. If we set ourselves up for success, it’s going to be great fun, and it’ll be a bit stressful and we have to get through all these things. But if it’s not going the way you want, please put your hand up.
“For example, they might be nervous about saying they’re ready to bring in a full-time FD. I’ll say, when we first spoke two years ago, that was the relationship – that I’ll work with you as long as this fractional role works, but at the point we need to bring in a full time FD, please raise it.
“If you leave a great client relationship behind, they’re walking advocates for what you do.”
Ciaran is based on the Isle of Wight but works with clients anywhere. “Location doesn’t really matter because when we jump online and I share my screen, we’re in the same place, looking at the same thing. Covid has been a huge game changer in getting everyone comfortable about Zoom, Teams, Google, but also sharing screens,” he says.
Building a freelance business involved becoming more comfortable with speaking in public and on social media.
“I’m not a natural. At school, I would never want to put myself on stage,” says Ciaran.
“Four years ago – and this was the classic Covid opportunity – I put a video on LinkedIn around the time of the first lockdown. I look back at it with a tinge of embarrassment but I realised this was something I enjoyed and wanted to become much better at.”
He has since taken part in workshops on presentation and storytelling skills. “I think I’ve just raised my game by practising, testing, trialling in front of a trusted audience, taking on criticism and trying to make little improvements,” he says.
He has also created a series of 50 videos, posted on LinkedIn over 50 weeks, which he says “got more of a reaction than I was expecting” and gave him an outlet to talk about serious and important matters in a non-technical way. For example, a video referencing cold showers and Wim Hof, showed “how to talk about CEOs and founders about cashflow forecasting without talking about cashflow forecasting”.
As well as helping promote the business, these soft skills can be useful to clients whose CEOs need the figures communicated to non-finance people.
As well as helping promote the business, these soft skills can be useful to clients whose CEOs need the figures communicated to non-finance people.
“People won’t remember technical detail because we’re not really programmed to remember detail ahead of a good story. If you want to start a movement or spread an idea, it’s so much easier if you can stick it around a story,” Ciaran says.
He now recognises these story skills might have played a part in his corporate success.
“When I got my first job in London when I was 23 and all the other applicants were 30-35 and far more experienced, my boss said: ‘I gave you this job because in the interview, you had this way of asking me “What’s the story with Orange?” or “What’s the story with the Port of Felixstowe?”’
“He said I was encouraging him to share a lot in those interviews and he felt this would help us do our job by building relationships with the businesses we were auditing.”
Stories, he says, are key to getting people to “know, like and trust” you – the all-important elements for a business relationship.
“As you get to your mature years and you’re telling stories, people can ask you a question off the cuff and you think ‘I’ve never thought about this’.
“For example, I didn’t really know why I ever chose accountancy, but I got a flashback to sitting at the family dinner table in 1987. The Irish economy was in the toilet. My dad was a chemist working for a government semi-state body and it was being shut down. He would have been 42 and I was 12 and I remember thinking, what’s the big deal here? Can you not just get another job?
“Then I remember thinking: I don’t want to be sitting at a table when I’m 40-whatever, having lost my job and thinking whatever my dad must have been thinking with four kids.
“It was only a couple of months ago, when somebody asked me the question ‘Why did you choose accountancy?’, that set me thinking about how difficult the moment must have been for my dad.
“‘Have you ever met an unemployed accountant?’ That was the classic line in Dublin. There was no economy and as a 12-year-old, when you hear people saying accountants are never out of work, it does influence you to choose a career where you’re not going to be one of those families.”
Ciaran says he’s less risk-averse as a freelancer than he was in a corporate job.
“I love the fractional space and because I’m diversified, I’m actually calmer working with risky businesses with short cash runways, because if one goes down, as some do, it doesn’t take me down,” he says.
“It also means that when we’re up against it, I’m not a full-time member of the team who’s really nervous about my position. I’m the calm head, objectively saying we can steer our way through this, so it diffuses that tension.”
Now enjoying work-life balance while working with exciting clients, he remains grateful to that recruitment consultant who steered him away from the City.
“I don’t have his details, sadly. It was the type of relationship where I would go to an interview and call him from a phone box for the ‘How did it go?’ conversation. I’d love to be able to catch up,” he says.
“Sometimes people just plant this very long-term view of how they want to help you. He knew he would get a commission but I think he felt better placing me in a role that was the right fit and remarkably, it opened up different routes and channels.
“I probably know a lot of people in the City who need to get out of it. I’m 49 and a lot of people in their late 40s and 50s are still on the platform in Surrey, getting the train in, but they’ve missed out on many things. Maybe they needed somebody to plant the seed and show that you can engineer what you want to engineer.”
The Accounting Excellence Awards are held on 8 October. Ciaran O’Donnell’s business Virtual FD can be found here.