There is a common assumption that the best CFO in the room is simply the one who knows the numbers better than anyone else, the sharpest technician, the safest pair of hands with a spreadsheet. I believed that too, once. What changed my mind didn’t take decades to sink in. It happened quickly, once I found myself working hands-on with entrepreneurial clients moving through every different phase of their business lifecycle, from early growth to hard-won maturity to eventual sale. The numbers, I learned early, are only ever the starting point. The real work, the work that actually changes the trajectory of a business, happens in the conversation that follows.
Not long after qualifying as a Chartered Accountant in South Africa, I co-founded a boutique auditing and consulting practice, Lucro Auditing & Consulting, alongside my business partner. We built it into a firm of around thirty people, serving privately held, entrepreneurial clients across an unusually wide spread of industries, from property, construction and education, through mineral resources, manufacturing and engineering, to financial services, franchising, consulting, professional services, investment and logistics, among many others.
Audit was a significant part of what we did, but it was never the whole practice. Alongside it we ran a genuinely multidisciplinary consulting offering: business valuations, due diligence, growth and exit planning, corporate structuring, support and advisory around raising finance, dispute resolution, and board reporting and advisory work. Clients came to us for the audit and stayed for everything else.
What makes the audit environment unique, looking back, is the sheer breadth of access it gives you. Within a relatively short space of time I found myself inside dozens of different businesses, across different industries, different stages of maturity, different accounting systems, different management styles, each of them actively working toward a different business and financial strategy. I would have needed to hold far more jobs in commerce than any one career could realistically fit to gain that same depth of insight.
On paper, that’s an audit career. In practice, it was something closer to an apprenticeship in how businesses actually work, and it reshaped how I think about the role of a CFO today.
Why the audit chair was never really about the audit
Here is what nobody tells you when you start out in audit: the technical work, testing controls, verifying balances, forming an opinion, is the entry ticket, not the destination. Clients don’t remember you for a clean audit report. They remember you for what you tell them once the audit is done.
That’s where my role actually started to matter. Once the numbers were signed off, the real conversation began: what did this year’s results actually mean, what should the business be doing differently next year, and what financial decisions were coming that needed to be thought through now rather than in a crisis. I found myself preparing information for banks when clients needed financing, sitting with owners as they negotiated the sale or purchase of a division, working through what outside shareholders needed to hear and how, and, more often than I expected, simply being the person a client called when something didn’t feel right in the numbers and they couldn’t quite put their finger on why.
I also trained as an expert valuator, which turned out to matter more than I anticipated. Understanding what a business is genuinely worth, and watching that number move year on year, gives you a completely different lens on strategy. It stops being about this year’s result and starts being about the trajectory the owner is actually on.
Growing up alongside my clients
The relationships that shaped me most weren’t the biggest clients or the most technically complex ones. They were the ones I kept for ten, fifteen, sometimes close to twenty years, clients who started out small and, through a combination of their own hard work and the advice we built together, grew into genuinely successful businesses. As they grew, my firm grew with them.
A large part of my job, in those years, was simply sitting across the table and explaining. Explaining what the financial position actually meant in plain terms. Explaining where the opportunities for growth were hiding inside numbers that, to an owner buried in the day-to-day, looked like nothing more than a set of totals. Somewhere along the way I stopped being “the auditor” to those clients and became something closer to a business partner they trusted with decisions that had nothing to do with compliance at all.
That is, I think, the actual skill. Not the technical accreditation. The ability to sit with an owner, understand the business behind the numbers, and help them see further ahead than they can see on their own.
The efficiency thread
There was a second thread running through those years that I didn’t fully appreciate until later: I was, almost without noticing, always looking for inefficiency. Where a client’s business was bleeding time or money it didn’t need to. Where a process could be tightened, a structure simplified, a cost avoided. That instinct, sharpened over more than 25 years of sitting inside dozens of different businesses across dozens of different industries, turned out to be its own specialism.
Years later, after moving to Australia, I led divisional operational efficiency transformation work in a mid-sized Australasian financial services firm, introducing digital workflows and automation that measurably improved how the business ran. It was the same muscle I’d built at Lucro, just exercised at a different scale: find where the friction is, build the case for fixing it, and bring the people who have to live with the change along with you.
That same instinct is what has pulled me toward artificial intelligence over the past two years. I’ve spent a considerable amount of that time deliberately upskilling myself, not as a trend to watch from the sidelines, but as a tool to actually put to work, and I now spend a good part of every client engagement finding practical, efficient ways to implement it in their businesses. I genuinely cannot imagine working without it anymore. It has become as fundamental to how I operate as the technical training I started with, and I make a point of staying close to how quickly it keeps evolving, learning something new most days, because the moment you stop is the moment you fall behind the businesses you’re meant to be helping.
What it adds up to
If I trace a straight line through all of it, audit training, over 25 years running my own firm and advising owners across almost every industry you can name, valuing businesses, leading efficiency transformation at enterprise scale, and more recently building real fluency in how AI can be put to work inside a business, the thing that actually made me effective was never the technical qualification. It was learning to be trusted. Trusted enough that a client would call me before a decision, not just after. Trusted enough to sit on their side of the table and tell them something they didn’t necessarily want to hear, because it was true and it mattered.
That is what I set out to bring to every client at Impact CFO Advisory. Not just the numbers, and not just the audit-trained rigour behind them, but the years of sitting with business owners as they grew, an instinct for finding efficiency wherever it’s hiding, now sharpened further by AI, and genuinely caring whether they got where they were trying to go.