In this episode, Sophie Jackson talks to Nigel Glenday, Chief Financial Officer at art investment platform Masterworks. They explore Nigel's journey to the CFO role, the importance of learning by doing, and looked at how emerging technologies, in particular AI, are reshaping the finance function.

Hello, and welcome to Ask a CFO, the podcast series that shines a light on the different paths taken to become Chief Financial Officer.

We also delve into the personal journeys of those that have made it.

I'm Sophie Jackson, and in today's episode, I'm joined by Nigel Glenday, CFO at art investment platform, Masterworks.

Nigel's role sits at the intersection of finance, strategy and creativity, and his passion for what he does really shines through.

In our conversation, we explored his journey to the CFO role, the importance of learning by doing, and looked at how emerging technologies, in particular - no surprises here - AI, are reshaping the finance function.

How are you?

Hi, I'm good. How are you doing?

Good.

Well, first of all, do you want to just introduce yourself and tell me what you're up to at the moment? What your current role is.

Yeah, so I'm the CFO of Masterworks.

Masterworks is the only art investment platform that's made art specifically investable for a broad range of investors, from individual investors to fund managers and to wealth advisors.

It's a business that has been centred around the fact that art has been a very large, global, a strategic asset class, and that it is appreciated over extended periods of time.

But really, there hasn't been a good way for investors to add this asset to their portfolio.

So Masterworks has been a business that makes that possible.

Amazing. And then take us back to the beginning.

Tell me a little bit about your early life, where you grew up and so on, and how those experiences have shaped who you are today.

Yeah, I've called a number of different places home throughout my life. I was born in Zurich, Switzerland, in fact.

My father was working for what was an early iteration of UBS, so it was Union Bank of Switzerland back in those days.

But I was there only a few years. Someone asked me, do I have a Swiss passport?

And it doesn't quite work that way in Switzerland.

But I came to the States, I was still quite young.

I lived in Washington, DC for many years. Both my parents were in sort of diplomatic and diplomatic adjacent roles.

I moved to Paris when I was nine years old.

My mother worked for the National Science Foundation and was stationed in the American Embassy in Paris, really in what was the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

She was an extensive Russian language and cultural expert and had worked with what was then the post-Soviet scientific community and was stationed there for five years as really on the American side, and the West was understanding what was going on in the former Soviet Union from the scientific perspective during those years.

But for me, that was my middle school years, incredibly formative years. A number of relationships that are still very near and dear to me.

And then, came back to the States for high school and college, and it's really given me a broad perspective on relationships, on kind of learning across cultures, and just incredibly important in the way I've thought about my career since then.

Yeah, that was making me smile when you were talking about the Swiss passport, because I've got friends with Swiss citizenship, and I know it's a hard one to get and to hold on to.

So shifting to your professional journey now, can you walk me through a little bit the general journey you took to end up in your current role now as CFO at Masterworks?

It's a traditional and an unusual journey in some respects.

In school, I was really a history student, and that's what I love to do. I studied European history extensively.

I was fascinated by the history of the Atlantic world in the late 18th and 19th centuries.

And at the same time, I was fascinated by economics. I love econ.

Those were kind of the twin pillars of my studies in school.

But at a certain point, I knew I didn't want to be an academic. I think to the great chagrin of my history advisor in school, I decided to join UBS as an analyst in their investment banking division.

And this was at a time when these investment banks were hiring liberal arts majors and folks without, you know, hadn't been doing kind of DCFs all the way through college.

And that pendulum kind of shifts from a hiring perspective, but that was true at the time.

And I think at that point in my career, I really wanted to have some more practical and professional application for this overlap of both history and econ I'd done throughout my academic career.

And I joined UBS, that was 2005 in their STIG group, their financial students group, which at the time was just an incredible group of professionals, many of whom had come recently from DLJ and from Credit Suisse.

And they were really at the tail end of what had been just a super cycle in bank and finance M&A that had really made the careers of many folks who were my early, early bosses.

There have been some marquee transactions at the time, notably a number of, you know, mega bank M&A deals.

This was in time when Wachovia, now part of Wells Fargo and Bank of America had really just been on an M&A roll-up spree really through the 90s and early 2000s.

So it was really a great way to cut my teeth with just an excellent group of professionals.

And really UBS at the time had done a phenomenal job of pulling together just an amazing roster of folks.

So, you know, Michael Martin has had a big, big career since; Oliver Sharpozzi, who's been a close mentor to me throughout; John Kryan was co-head of that group he went on to be CFO of UBS and then CEO of Deutsche Bank.

But even across the whole investment bank at the time, so it was Blair Efron, there was Ken Mullis, Ben Lorello, other folks who've really risen to significant leadership across the investment banking industry.

So, it was really just a serendipitous time to have been there and started my career at what was, I would call it a toehold, in front of the, before the financial crisis, which really at that point, obviously got rolling, people really think about it as early as 2008 and 2009.

The financial crisis really started to emerge in 2007. At UBS of all places, and in fact, there was an internal hedge fund called Warburg Capital Management that actually shut down because of subprime exposure.

And it was a huge deal at the time. And the CEO was actually fired as a result. But incredibly, a formative and serendipitous time to begin my career at UBS.

And you mentioned not going down the path of academia, and you and I have talked before about that being a false friend in how I guess I always imagined academia as being this very cosy environment, which is very nurturing, and you're free to research your intellectual delights. And I know from friends in the space, that's not quite the case.

But I think having a grounding in history and having that kind of background must make you a bit different?

Is it something that you see echoing throughout your approach, particularly with the geopolitical and cultural waves that we're all riding at the moment?

I think that's right.

What I would say is, the study of history and liberal arts to a greater extent, just give you a grounding in knowing how to learn, and learning how to learn, which I think is incredibly important in this moment where we are in the age of AI.

So if you come out of schooling with an ability to think critically, to research, to follow the thread, and to help shape an argument over time, and whether you're doing that across any discipline.

History is wonderful about it because it's, really the study of people and places and events and shaping narrative and theory around. And economic history was a particular interest of mine at the time.

And I think many of those same disciplines really translate to the professional sphere, whether it's investment banking or otherwise.

So much of what my career has been about, it’s been about storytelling. It's been about research.

And those are the fundamental building blocks of I think of what makes a good historian, and on what makes a just a well-rounded liberal arts student.

I think it relates to hiring and finding good professionals. What matters and what is valued in the markets, I feel like you get that pendulum swings.

We went through a moment when hiring those liberal arts majors was incredibly important. It tends to happen, I feel like, when you're in a very competitive hiring market and you don't have enough maybe Wharton MBAs to hire.

But then that pendulum swung the other way where, and I think especially post-financial crisis, and there was a real retrenchment in hiring, many of the banks and consultants, you just want the people who have just, they were born out of the cradle and just wanted to be an investment banker.

And then I feel that is changing now and I know we're going to talk a little bit about AI.

And I think one of the real perspectives I have around AI is how much importance it puts back to first principles thinking, critical thinking, and human judgment that really help these language model tools be really just that, tools that provide cognitive leverage for humans.

Yeah, and one of the things that I think is imperative is that even if you are working within finance, that you are contextualising what the epic changes that are going on within the philosophical and human impact that they have. And so I feel like having a liberal arts background puts you at an advantage in being able to understand how things are impacting like greater, greater swathes of people.

So I really think it's an interesting background to have.

I agree. Just the only things I'd add to that is writing.

People have to know how to write. And it always shocks me how I've gone through my career, what struggles people have in just written communication, I think clarity of written communication.

And history is also a lot about pattern matching. And pattern matching is incredibly important really in any career, but as I think about it in bank and finance, where your ability to provide value, whether it's to investment banking clients, whether it's my operator role, whether it's the board at Masterworks, it's to my own employees, it's being able to effectively pattern match and draw the right lessons from either other companies or what else is happening in the industry.

And it all comes back to, again, that learning how to learn and that critical thinking that comes out of a liberal arts education.

You've also described whilst you've been working at Masterwork as an approach of learning by doing.

Tell me a little bit about that process, I guess, of trial and error and how you've stayed motivated along your journey there at Masterworks.

It's been fundamental to the time at Masterwork. Learning by doing was a concept I actually learned in my first economics histories class back in Virginia, and it was a concept that was really shaped around the industrial revolution as it related to agriculture.

Really took place as people were really experimenting with different ways to do things and to build technology at the time.

That's been true at Masterworks.

That is effectively an asset management and asset gathering business, tech enabled, that has a core competency around the art market.

There isn't another business like that.

And even within the broader asset management financial services space. So, it's meant a lot of the traditional service providers that you would contact if you were running a private equity fund, a specially finance fund, private credit fund, really cannot service out-of-the-box a business like that.

Because think about it, Masterworks is in the business of buying one, two, three, ten million dollar paintings, which in the context of the art market or the context of a painting is obviously like an enormous number.

I mean, someone paying two billion dollars for a painting, that's crazy.

But in the world of security sled, I mean, that's a rounding error, right?

So going to, say, a fund administrator and proposing, hey, I need a fund administration contract for a two million dollar fund that may have anywhere from 500 to 1000 LPs in it, their heads explode, right? There's no pricing grid that will do that.

So what it's meant is, and that goes for all of the different parts of the value chain that you would typically put together to put a business like that.

So you would go, if I were raising capital, maybe I'd go to a placement agent to help raise that capital. I'd go to a separate advisory business to help access the different sales, you know, asset gathering channels. I may have that middle and back office support. I may work either with the investment banks or broker dealers to provide certain brokerage and trading services.

So none of that existed for art as it would out-of-the-box.

So Masterworks has been a project in building all of those component pieces into what's become a vertically integrated end-to-end platform that goes everywhere from asset gathering, client education through an in-house advisory arm to an end-to-end asset management function, which does everything from researching the asset class.

So how do you even understand how art has appreciated over time? Has it even appreciated, right? Is this even something that's worth investing time and money?

I mean, so many people think, well, art, it's all just. Yeah, it's all super subjective and it's volatile and blah, blah, blah.

It's because people just don't have never had the data to really look at it.

Masterworks has changed that by compiling all of the private and public market data across the market to understand from just an index perspective, has this market appreciated, right? And that's actually not an insignificant exercise because that data is so heavily fragmented.

From all of that, then we're in the market combining art, right? We're in contact with all of the different intermediaries, galleries, dealers, direct to collectors.

And then everything from an operational perspective. These are physical objects.

We have to do all the fulfilment from storage, insurance, due diligence. Is the painting even real? Who are these people we're dealing with?

And then there’s securitising it.

What Masterworks does fundamentally is take a painting and take a painting public, right?

So you've got an SEC filing.

You're raising capital from individuals through an advisory relationship which is incredibly important in terms of suitability and understanding how they build portfolios.

So, all of that again, was a learning by doing exercise. There was just no blueprint to doing that. So for me, it was a lot of pattern matching in my career.

I was someone who started my career in investment banking through financial institutions.

I worked across all kinds of different niche specialty finance companies, both pre- and post-financial crisis.

And art finance is about as niche as it gets.

And then I so happened to have helped build another company around the art market, which was an art lending company just prior to Masterworks.

So by the time I started helping Scott build Masterworks, I had had these kind of twin pads in my career, both in corporate finance and capital markets and the art market and Masterworks had just been the confluence of those two where that learning by doing and pattern matching just really accrued to my benefit and I'd like to say accrued to the benefit of Masterworks as a business as well.

One of the things I love when you speak about your industry, because it is as you well say, incredibly niche, is that the intersection of so many different areas at once, it's quite fascinating, like parts of industries that would never really have been speaking to one another before.

But you are so passionate about this space and you're obviously obsessively fixated on the different areas and where that can add value and so on.

So tell me a little bit how much your personal interests have guided your career development, how important you think that is when we want to reach the upper echelons of our careers and how that niche specialisation can help our career progression.

You know, what's interesting is as niche as Masterworks is what has propelled me in my interests or my career is really being a hyper-generalist in many ways.

And what I've loved about Masterworks in particular is its intersection of so many disciplines and domains.

I mean, in many ways, the art market element of what we do is, of course, deeply interesting.

But it's really been the intersection, again, of the art market, of capital markets, of entrepreneurship, and of building, and infusing that with also just really strong relationships along the way.

I mean, it all comes down to the people you work with.

I mean, Scott and I have had a great relationship having built a business.

We've come from different perspectives in our career. Mine on a, again, with this corporate finance career path that in some ways by accident intersected with the art market.

And on his side, he's really come from a deep serial entrepreneurship background around ad and fintech in the early days. which has been incredibly instructive for me, because in many ways, it's a totally different motion and skillset.

And I have had to unlearn a lot of patterns that have been instilled in me through my banking career to be successful in an operating role.

So just back to your thought, it's to a great extent, there is a niche element to it.

But I would say it's the intersection of these disciplines that have been really what is most interesting to me, rather than the art market alone pursuing.

I love what you were saying there as well earlier, you were talking about unlearning certain things as well.

And one of the things I think is really important in our personal development as well as in our professional development is in checking in at certain chapters and being like, okay, what's serving me still?

What's something new I need to learn? And what are some of the things I now need to let go of?

Because I find particularly within the finance function, I spent a lot of time working with treasurers and then we're working with people who've gone up from treasury.

And some of the things that serve you well at certain moments of your career are not coming with you on the next part of the journey.

And I think that can be quite a painful journey sometimes to delegate large swathes of things that you used to be all over all the time.

And that's definitely something I see as potentially holding people back. So I love that you said that.

When you look back over your career to date, what do you see as having been some of your standout challenges and successes? And what can we all learn from those, do you think?

I think it's exactly what you said.

And I've thought about exactly some of these career development transition moments, you know, recently ascended in finance and corporate leadership.

It's certainly early career and you're a banker. You are sort of trained to be a hyper individual contributor.

You are trained to be someone who is kind of be the...

And I remember one of my early kind of MDs I worked with, it's kind of the, you're trying to be the perfect soldier. And that's doing things end to end, that's having sort of extreme competency across like a large swathe of domains.

And it's also part of banking it’s a real kind of rainmaker culture, right?

It's a rainmaker culture. So, you know, people are aspiring to be like, you know, I'm going to be the guy, you know, the guy who brings in these deals, that executes all these deals.

And there are just incredibly talented people who do that.

But it's a different skillset and different motion in an operating business where I had a boss along with me sort of put it to me, he said, like, Nigel, you can be a great soloist, right? But at a certain point, you need to learn sort of how to conduct the orchestra.

I'm probably botching his analogy, but that was the gist of it.

And Masterworks, has been a real lesson in doing just that, where early on, we had a storefront office in Soho, we were in the basement, it's a ten-person team, and I just did a lot of stuff on my own and just figuring it out along the way.

And part of it, again, goes back to my time as a history student, because one of the things you don't really learn is not a lot of team projects, right?

Maybe in academia.

And so I was very comfortable doing a lot of solo projects and that served me incredibly well at the early days of the company.

When you're just figuring everything out for the first time, you're going to be moving very quickly.

As the business begins to grow, you realise you become much more strategic about where you are spending your time and you have to start separating your identity from all of these other things you do, right?

Because it all comes back to identity and saying, am I identifying myself with the ability to just be like supremely competent at this wide variety of tasks from the 100,000 foot level down to the ground level.

And you can sort of get a lot of personal validation from something like that.

And you realise over time, that's going to begin to hold you back. And it certainly did me.

And again, what I think I'd learned as a history student at the same time is I love, I love mentorship. I love to teach.

I love training. And that's actually been something that's been true across my whole career.

And I think that is what I've tried to instil in my team is a culture of learning, a culture of intellectual curiosity, which has helped Masterworks, specifically across the finance team build a swathe of different competencies that I think have allowed us to do more with less.

But again, just coming back to the challenge, because I'm going off on a tangent here, it's really been transitioning from that pure IC role to one where you can effectively delegate.

You can effectively just be more thoughtful about what is the highest marginal utility of my sort of next unit of time that I'm using.

And frankly, just letting go of some things, right? And it's unlearning a perfectionist tendency.

And you can say, listen, I'm going to delegate some of this stuff and if we get to 80% of the answer and it's good enough, that's great.

It doesn't have to be the last I is dotted and the last T is crossed.

Certain parts of the finance business, absolutely you need that for sure and then there are a lot of other parts you don't.

And it's really learning that.

I'm just nodding very vociferously to so much of what you said and it made me feel very seen as well.

And I think a lot of what you're saying ties to a journey up in any career, right?

And I think I'm a literature major and I like to be in the weeds of everything. And as we're growing, I've had to let go of things.

And then at first it's not done exactly the way you would like. And then you have to accept that that's better than you having done it and not having been able to do all these other things.

So I think what you're saying about how we identify with things, how we get validated by certain parts of our jobs, it's quite confronting when you're really going on that journey of letting go of them and realising, okay, I need to become something else now because you have to sort of say goodbye with a lot of the other ways that you saw proven past.

Completely.

I encourage you, if anyone hasn't read Atomic Habits, that's a lot of what James Clear talks about and I think what resonated with me when I read that some years ago was just how your habits and your actions are a reflection of identity, at the end of the day.

So highly recommend the read.

One of the things that we talk about a lot within Ask a CFO is whether the CFO role itself has evolved.

How do you see it from your perspective on whether the CFO role has evolved?

And if so, what you think is essential now for modern leading CFOs to be cognisant of?

Yeah, of course, I'm coming from the perspective of our niche business at Masterworks, but there's a lot that's changing, of course, in the age of AI.

Many of the kind of tasks and routine tasks that really characterise much of kind of operational finance are being automated, which has obviously been something that's gone on for some time.

But it speaks in the moment, and this is the way I've characterised it to my team is everyone needs to be focused on human-centric tasks.

And anything that is machine-centric needs to be automated, it needs to be given to an agent, or it needs to be offshored, it needs to be a combination of all three.

And that is what is happening.

And when you go back to this concept of identity, if you are identifying yourself and identifying your professional worth through these machine-centric tasks, that is the moment where you need to step back and say like, what are the things that only I uniquely as a human being can be doing and adding to this company.

And one of the essential skills that I've had to build, and I think has been the thread through my career is storytelling.

In many ways, I'm a corporate storyteller for the business that has, I've been able to take that liberal arts background, history, pattern matching, research, to help craft a story at the end of the day about Masterworks, which is a niche business.

And what I love about it is anytime you talk to people about Masterworks, it elicits just a variety of reactions, almost overwhelmingly just total fascination, some head scratching, right?

And the head scratching usually comes from people's preconceived notions about what the art market is.

As long as the art market kind of, all these super shady characters, and how do we take this market that people have all these preconceived notions about?

There's this real tension at the core of it between kind of aesthetics and money, and there's this kind of snobbery and pearl clutching, right, that exists in the art market, which I've just come to conclude that that's actually just, it's not a bug, it's a feature.

That's just like the drama. It's at the core of what makes the art market and what it is.

I've sort of stopped complaining about it once I've realised that drama is what makes the whole thing tick.

But just to come full circle to your point. All of this comes back to how do you become an effective storyteller around the business?

Now, the CFO has to do that with data. You're doing that also from a financial perspective, understanding, okay, how do we think about organising the Masterworks business?

I mean, at first what it was is, can I take a painting and just take it public? Can we put a painting on the blockchain?

There was sort of a blockchain crypto element to it very early on. If you look at the early Masterworks S1s, there was a whole crypto element to it.

That eventually all by, went by the wayside.

So what began as a way of saying, Hey, can we just turn a painting into a single stock?

Morphed as we got feedback from the market that said, Well, no, this is a strategic asset class that people want to have an allocation to.

And that has grown and certainly as we went through a massive run-up in asset prices during Covid and post-Covid, and even now as that is moderated, I think what's starting to come out is not only is art is an investment, something that our investors want in their portfolio.

They want it not only for financial returns, but there is a real aesthetic and lifestyle benefit to it.

That is much a part of what we do as the financial returns.

And we, at Masterworks, have started to build a real mission around the art collection. Because I haven't really talked that much about the business, the Masterworks business is over 500 paintings.

It's 1.2 billion dollars of capital deployed.

I mean, it's a real collection now that we are releasing out into the wild. There is, you know, 50 to 60 paintings that are on display around the world.

We just had things at Southgate in London, at the Bilbao, at the Guggenheim Bilbao across regional museums.

And that has been what has really resonated with people. It's not only returns, it's knowing that there's shared ownership with these objects that are getting shared with the public.

So again, back to your question, it's all about storytelling at the end of the day.

Maybe one other skill I would add to that is it is being able to mix accounting, tax and finance competencies, not only with these sort of liberal arts skillsets, but also technical skillsets.

I actually feel very strongly that finance professionals today need to have tool mastery.

And I did that very early on in my career. I realised the difference between going home in a reasonable hour or staying at the office all night was going to be my ability to be a total spreadsheet jockey and just understand these tools through and through and to become highly proficient at them.

Spreadsheets are still the core universal tool at the centre of finance.

It was the original killer app of the PC back in the late 70s or really what drove PC sales in the 80s.

But that today needs to be paired with other technical skillsets.

I feel very strongly that if you are a spreadsheet guru and a spreadsheet power user, you are only one to two steps away from being a proficient Python user.

And AI today, if you attend, it's all comes back to sort of history and liberal arts.

You need to teach yourself how to learn. AI is incredibly good at being able to teach you new areas and new skillsets based on what it is you already know.

So one of my first use cases for AI, to get to be whatever, this back in 2022 was like, okay, I know everything about this domain. I know everything about spreadsheets. I want to do this, boom, boom, boom, boom. I'll translate that. I need to build this out in Python, right?

Because there just was certain tasks we were doing where there was like cash management, FP&A forecasting.

They were just becoming a pain in the neck of a spreadsheet.

I said, I want to be able to do this in a more programmatic way.

Masterworks has its own unique challenges around like the fact you've got these 500 paintings. By the way, all these paintings are in separate corporate vehicles. They have separate audits with their own books and records.

So there's like 500 different public companies. So just from a finance and accounting standpoint, it's just like a really amazing systems problem.

And spreadsheets just start to break, at some point. So AI became a really great way to accelerate learning, just for myself and then within the finance team.

So, you know, our Head of Tax became complete Python, Pandas, and Polar's expert and built an entire K-1 generation system so we can do all of our tax reporting in-house across all of our SPVs.

Masterworks does all of its in-house fund administration. So that 1.2 billion dollars in capital, we have, we gather all those funds. So when investors send funds to us, which we accept across payment rails and across different domains and currencies, we've got to build all the operational pipes to be able to do that.

So, again, this all comes back to, it's learning by doing, it's being a generalist, it's being able to translate those sort of accounting skillsets into other technical skillsets that I think make people really, really powerful.

So, I just want to move back on a couple of things there, because I think they touch on big, broader thematics that we see playing out in most of our conversations at the moment.

So you mentioned at the beginning the importance of intellectual curiosity, that's come up a lot.

And you spoke there around separating out the human-centric tasks from machine-centric ones.

One of the things that came up, I'm just off the back of hosting a finance leaders forum in New York, and one of the things we spoke about there was this need for a sense of psychological safety in order to be curious as we're all experimenting with how AI is going to revolutionise all of our jobs.

And I think once people are a bit frightened or reluctant to let go of certain things, that is not the right mindset for them to be open to trying these new opportunities.

So how are you working with your team to help them build confidence?

Because I know that you're self-described all in on AI. So how do you foster that feeling of intellectual curiosity and the expansive possibilities rather than feeling, oh, I'm going to be usurped or oh, I like doing that task and so on.

Number one, it just comes from leadership, the top down.

I mean, I'm using these tools all the time. I am constantly talking to our team saying, hey, have you tried this? Have you looked about doing this way? Hey, see what I played with last night.

Part of it comes from sort of like a, there's kind of a laziness, frankly, like I hate doing things this super manual way all the time.

I love, I have this real satisfaction when I build something and it just works.

And I just know, oh man, if I had just done this the old way, I would have, this sort of taken me ten hours and now I do this with a push of a button.

There's something just like drives a deep satisfaction from that.

But you know, in terms of fostering that, again, it comes from the top down.

I'm deeply passionate about these things.

I love new technical frameworks. I love new tools. I love to tinker and experiment with all of them.

I encourage that across the team. And I want them to share wins.

We do lunch and learns, internal showcases. Hey, look what I built. I discovered this new framework.

And part of that is I'm fortunate to be working at a growth company where we have the surface area to be able to do that.

And we can take a little more risk to some of these tools.

I'm not in an enterprise where I have to jump through ten different internal hoops to, you know, get a new tool used.

We have our processes, no question, but we're much flatter in that way so we can move more quickly.

You know, we're in the middle of an ERP transition into one of these next-gen ERPs, you know, AI native. And part of it is we've got a business where, there's a limited number of stakeholders that are, involved in that type of decision. So we can move quite quickly.

And the team is really, they've actually never been more excited to do an ERP transition because they know the potential to automate just fast across what they're doing in the back end.

Amazing. And then is there any final piece of advice you'd like to share with anyone who aspires to become a CFO at some stage, from a young student to someone in a senior finance function?

I mean, listen, all the perfectionism that may have served you early in your career, it can be a painful transition, but you want to dispense with that as quickly as possible, especially you go from if you're transitioning from these banking or consulting careers where it's all about what is the polish of the work product that you're providing to your clients, which makes perfect sense in those domains.

When you are in an operational domain, you realise that speed and iteration, and making mistakes is actually essential to learning.

You have to make mistakes. And if you're not making mistakes and you get on yourself for making those mistakes, then you're not going to be learning.

And I think a fear of making mistakes is actually what really holds people back.

And it can be really rooted in perfectionism, which in my view is, again, going back to education is actually, I think, can be very rooted in the way that we teach many students, and many students have to, again, unlearn that.

But it's fundamental to learning by doing. Learning by doing requires making mistakes.

I love so much that you've said that because I spoke with someone else a long time ago and they said that they'd learnt more from their big mistakes.

But it takes a big person to be able to learn that lesson, to take it on the chin and then to apply learnings from it.

I think sometimes it can set you back so much.

And certainly I think in myself, I've always tried to avoid making mistakes at any cost because you see it as a failure. And the ability as a growth moment is very powerful.

Yes, totally right.

And it's hard because the finance career and probably a treasury career, I mean, there are certain times you can't make big mistakes. When you're sending a wire out, you're sending a wire, it's got to be some money.

I mean, you can't be like, oh, I’m learning by doing.

It's going to be one million dollars and it's going to that bank and you got to do it.

But there are ways to still embrace learning and learning culture in the midst of that.

There are lots of techniques where you can deal with learning and the mistakes and the development that comes along with that, but also still deliver great product, making sure the wires get to the right place in the right amount.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much. I've loved speaking with you.

You've had a very unique journey.

I think your passion and your enthusiasm for your space you're in really shines through.

And I love how you've taken your journey and applied it to many others to give them some actionable advice. So thank you for being part of it.

Thanks, Sophie. Always happy to chat.

A big thank you to Nigel for taking part in our Ask a CFO series.

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