The Inbetweeners: life as an interim FD – part one

Ben Freeman ACA

Ben Freeman ACA qualified with KPMG before moving on to FD roles in an SME and later the Prudential. His interim experience includes posts in real estate, business services, consumer products and charities.

I was FD at Prudential Properties for about six years until 2007. My decision to become an interim was deliberate, which I think is unusual. I was coming to a cul-de-sac in my career, climbing the greasy pole and ending up in something that I just didn’t know I could stay at, so I decided to go into the interim world, originally just as a way of finding ‘change- focused’ work which is the sort of thing I enjoyed earlier in my career. I wanted to get back into something a little bit more commercial, having ended up in a role that didn’t offer that.

For me, it has to be a commercial, people-facing role, and when you are working with commercial and people, by definition it tends to be a ‘change-focused’ role. I don’t want to be just running a maternity leave situation or just holding the fort.

I think there’s a certain dynamic at play here that’s important: accountants, when they left school or university, chose to get a qualification to give them that security in life. They went out and made that decision a long time ago, based on their personality preference; whereas people who’d go off and become artists or start a business, they don’t think that way.

So for an accountant to take this route is against the grain – it’s still a journey and it’s more so for an accountant and/ or a lawyer than for others. That’s the first point.

The second point is that it’s definitely true that to be a good interim, you have a different set of skills than a good FD. In theory, an interim should be an all- rounder who can do anything that a permanent person can do, but I think that they are a slightly different breed and the role requires different skills. The things that come to the fore that are lost a little bit in the standard role and become very important to an interim are people skills, intuition and creativity. I think the project management part of your role becomes much more important because you tend to focus on outcomes rather than the status quo. And you need the ability to challenge the status quo; it’s a fine art, because if you go in trying to turn everything upside down, it won’t work either. Getting the balance right is important.

That said, and as much as I enjoy it, I do turn work down quite a lot because I have to keep reminding myself that I didn’t want to be a wage slave and just do what I needed to do to pay my mortgage, so to speak. It’s easy to forget, because it’s tough when you don’t know where your next job’s going to come from. I gave up a well-paid job to do this, and the reason was that I wanted to do work that I enjoyed doing. I wanted to be proud of what I’d done with my life and use my skills.

Nick Tiley FCA

Nick Tiley FCA studied engineering at Cambridge and started his career at Touche Ross (now Deloitte), before applying his expertise to the finance function of science and engineering firms around Cambridgeshire.

When I talk to potential clients, the context is nearly always around their specific objectives and needs. Typically it’s taken something to trigger doing this, so they do have a problem they want solved and there’s a conversation to be had teasing out what this is. For instance, one client said he wanted long-term business forecasts but once I was in, it turned out short-term cashflow planning was actually what he needed. In that case, he knew he needed something but he wasn’t absolutely sure what it was.

So having those meetings and trying to tease out what they want helps me write my engagement letter specifically around those objectives. Ultimately, they are spending money to solve the problem, so it’s very much part of a solution-focused approach. I know other interims might be looking for long-term, part-time roles – almost like an NED-style role – but so far I’ve sought out more project-based roles so I can see a clear link through the engagement to the solution.

There’s often a trigger point for approaching me. It could be the FD or FC leaving, or maybe the bank expressing a concern about lack of information or late information or a deterioration in the financial situation or something like that. At other times the board might be aware for some time that they lack this skill and want to do something about it but haven’t really got around to it, and they might be doing some sort of strategic HR work or an annual appraisal and decide they’ve got to do something about it this year. Sometimes they just want fresh, independent advice, someone to look at their business and tell them where the issues are. It’s almost like they’ve gone snow-blind – particularly if they’re running it on their own.

Generally, they haven’t got an FD. Maybe they had one who’s left, but the financial information tends to be backwards-looking, and what they generally want to know is where they’re going, not where they’ve been.

For those thinking about following the interim route, they need to ask themselves some tough questions: what sort of work/life balance do you need? How self-motivated are you? How much do you want to stay in a safe corporate environment that will look after you and how much have you got the drive to run your own business at the other end of the scale? What are the real skills you’ve got to sell? What are you going to say your expertise is compared with the next person down the line, and how good is your network of contacts to actually find a stream of work?

That’s the really important bit: your network. How connected are you in the world you’re living in? For example, if I wanted to get a lot of work in Norwich, I’d probably fall flat on my face, but getting work around Cambridge where I worked for 25 years and have university, bank, solicitor and business connections, is a different prospect.

Interim Management Group, October 2014

© ICAEW 2014
First published in Finance and Management September 2014