In this episode, Sophie Jackson speaks with Patrick Gilbride, CFO at Aura, a global technology platform redefining emergency response. They explore Patrick's journey from his early years in South Africa to his current role as CFO, look at the key decisions that shaped his career, and hear his insights on building and leading a finance team in a fast-growing startup environment.

Hello and welcome to Ask A CFO. In this podcast series, we shine a light on the different paths taken to become Chief Financial Officer and explore the personal stories of those that have made the journey.

I'm Sophie Jackson and in today's episode, I'm joined by Patrick Gilbride, CFO at Aura, a global technology platform redefining emergency response. Together, we explore his personal journey from his early years in South Africa to his current role as CFO. We look at the key decisions that shaped his career and hear his insights on building and leading a finance team in a fast-growing startup environment.

Thank you so much for joining me. I wanted to start us off by asking you to introduce yourself, your current role and what your day-to-day looks like.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm Patrick Gilbride, I’m the CFO of Aura. And my day-to-day looks, well, it starts off as a dad and a husband. I've got two small children, an unbelievable wife. So, it starts off early and chaotic, as all parents can sympathise with getting kids ready for school and feeding, et cetera, et cetera.

And then we move from that chaotic environment into the next one. Which is a post-series B scale-up business. My day-to-day is different every single day. It's very unique. I head up obviously finance as the CFO, but I also head up legal, revenue operations and marketing and the marketing function for Aura.

So, there's a lot of context switching required on my side, depending on the region, depending on the function that I'm trying to lead, depending on the stage of the business or depending on the accounting sort of reporting standards that we have to use.

So, every day is different, every day is unique, every day is a challenge, and every day I'm learning something new. I work with unbelievable people who teach me new things every single day, and I really wouldn't have it any other way.

I love that. So obviously I can tell from your accent, and from speaking to you before, that you're from South Africa. So, take me back to your origin story, if you like. Tell me a bit about your early life and how some of those experiences have shaped today.

Sure, I come from Pretoria, South Africa. I had a very, very happy childhood. I've got amazing parents. I have a brother who's also the CFO of a telecoms company in South Africa. So clearly there's an accounting bug in my family.

My mom was, actually ran and privatised our school tuck shop in South Africa. And my brother and I used to work in the break times and after school. There was a lot of counting of money. It was the real, real basics of a business. I think my uncle once commented, it was the only business he's ever seen where three times a day, your customers come running towards you. So, it was always good.

I learned a lot, learned a lot about the basics there and just very, very happy, happy memories from that side. My dad was an entrepreneur, he started his own engineering business, struggled for many, many, many years to make that a success.

Probably the hardest working person that I've ever met. He never really ever expected that from us, but just purely through leading by example, he really did instil that into myself and my brother of be the hardest workers in the room at all times. My mom always tells a story when my brother and I were young, my dad went to work on a Saturday and came home on a Tuesday just because it needed to be done, so he's still my role model.

I still look up to him in terms of how to get things done and how you approach problems, which is one bite at a time. That really shaped me sort of growing up, especially from a work perspective. My dad started us working in his factory from a very young age, from eleven or twelve.

And started us at the bottom, my brother and I, we would sweep the floors in the beginning. And the next year we came back, maybe we were packing something or maybe we were working on the machines and slowly escalated. Eventually, once I was in university, I was helping him do the books and those sort of things.

So, I was in a privileged position to help my dad, Rory, and his business partner, Tim, exit that business about five years ago and I helped him structure and exit the transaction with him. And then I both happily retired, which was obviously amazing for them.

And it just really was a up close viewpoint of if you put enough hard work in and you grind for long enough, there's no easy way to make money. Making money is a long and hard road. And if you stay the course and carry through, you will eventually be successful.

So that really, really shaped me and it shaped where I wanted to go. And it really instilled that I wanted to be involved in something, be involved in a company where I could make a decision or at least influence the decision and actually see the real world impact of what happens on a day-to-day basis.

I think that's amazing. I've never really kind of connected the dots there on how growing up seeing entrepreneurs, because they do work so hard and you're across everything. But that's very exciting and it makes you very curious as a kid, because you're seeing really all the elements going on.

So, I love that story. Thank you for sharing. You mentioned that, I didn't know your brother's also a CFO, that's very funny. But tell me, what was it then that you think drew you towards as a career in finance. You mentioned those early experiences with your mum and her work with the tuck shop privatisation, tell me about that.

Yeah, look, I mean, I think I was kind of good with numbers. And as you mentioned, you're dealing with, in the tuck shop, hundreds of micro-transactions on a day-to-day basis, and you are strengthening that muscle in your brain of addition and subtraction constantly.

And while my dad worked very, very hard, he always made time for me to play maths games, you always thought it was so important for that. So, it just sort of, that muscle was sort of built in me and accounting then just came naturally.

And to be honest, I probably still don't, but when I started the journey, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. You're young, you're 18, your brain isn't even fully formed yet, you got to make this decision.

And I'd applied for both accounting and engineering at the University of Pretoria and I was accepted for both. When I was young and naive, and my logic at that point was, well, not every business has engineers, but every business has accountants. And I don't really know what I want to do. So, I'm going to go this journey, and I'm going to start this CA journey and that's why I decided to do it. I thought everyone needs this in their life, so why not do it?

I'm not sure what industry I want to be in, I'm not sure what I want to do, and I'm not sure what the world's going to look like in a decade, lets get something as general as possible that accounting on the CA journey is quite interesting because it's extremely generalist and specialised at the same time.

So, you should be able to step into every business and be able to perform that function, but it's highly specialised set of skills that you carry on or that you get, I suppose, after that. And I guess that's what drew it to me is I didn't really know what I wanted to do.

I think some of the most interesting people still don't know what they want to do. And I would recommend it to anyone or everyone to do this, especially if you don't really know what you want to do. It's the best place to be because you can kind of pick and choose any industry that you want to go into.

I think that's the same for most people I speak with. You always think when you hear this title of CFO, you think, oh, they're so focused on this goal and probably when they were fifteen, they wanted to gain that. And it's really most of the times, I think I've only had one case where they wanted to do from a young age. So, you’re in good company.

So, on that note, when it comes to aspiring to the C-suite and to being a CFO, when did that come to you? And how did you develop that from your accountancy background?

Again, I just, I would say that it wasn't so much the title that ever really inspired me, to be honest. It was more being in a position where you can make a decision, as I said, and you could actually see the real-world impact of it.

Once you get a little bit further on in your career, you realise that you have to be the CFO to be able to make those decisions. But the title was always not the most important thing to me. It was really more about looking forward, what can I do? How can I impact this business in a positive way? And that just naturally comes with the CFO title, I would say.

So, it wasn't so much that. I'm very happy and I'm very lucky to have the title. And I think it carries a lot of weight and responsibility, and I bear that on my shoulders and can be stressful, a lot of the financial decisions do stop with you.

But with that ultimate responsibility also comes a lot of reward, which is when it goes well, you can see your decisions have made a real-world impact, especially with Aura where I am now today, so I love that. And that was sort of the main thing, that was the main driving factor for me, to be honest.

Excellent. And your company you're working for is very fascinating. And I'm going to ask you a little bit about that in a few minutes. But first of all, tell me, how did you end up in Amsterdam? How did you end up at Aura?

Once I was finished studying at the University of Pretoria, like I said, you make this decision to go on the CA journey, which is four years of studying and three years of articles. So, you start a seven-year journey then. Finished studying, I was accepted at Deloitte Johannesburg.

So, I moved from Pretoria to the big city to do my articles with Deloitte. And it was three of the funniest years I've ever had in my life, to be honest. It was, for me, better than university, it was such an amazing environment, I've learned a huge amount. The colleagues and the people that worked with me and my mentors there were just unbelievable on every account. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

And after those three years of articles, I'd now finished my seven-year journey and the board exams that we had to pass. And surprise, surprise, I still didn't know what I wanted to do or what industry I wanted to go into. And I took the opportunity to do a six-month secondment in Deloitte, San Jose, Silicon Valley, and that was my real first taste of the tech world, that was 2014, 2015.

So, that was really exciting time in Silicon Valley, a lot of new companies, a lot of VC money throwing into it. And the offices, I remember going to some offices in Silicon Valley and for me being blown away that there were pinball machines and video games. And I was like, oh, my goodness, this seems like an unbelievable environment to be in.

But like I said, I still didn't know what I wanted to do, but I did feel like I didn't know enough yet to be able to effectively lead a finance team and I wanted to lead a finance team. So, I decided to stay on as Deloitte as an audit manager.

When I say I decided, I mean they decided that I was lucky enough to be accepted to be an audit manager. I stayed on there for a year and I was right, I didn't know enough. I learned more in that year than the three years of articles prior to that and I was approached, I was auditing a client, had a great relationship with a financial manager there, her name was Sam. And she came to me one day and said, look, there's a position for my neighbour’s company, he's got a property management company, he needs a financial director, would you be interested?

And I was immediately, still young and naive, to be honest. I was like, oh, financial director, I get to skip the financial manager part and go straight to the big leagues, and I took it. And it was the definition of being thrown in at the deep end. I did not know what I was doing. There was a lot of fake it till you make it there.

And I spent five years at the company was called Mafadi as in the financial director role. And really, really, really proud of what I did there. We took a company that was losing a lot of money every year, and we turned it over five years into a hugely profitable company. We grew over six, seven hundred percent in those five years.

We bought properties, we sold them, we converted them, we touched every element of property you can think of. Property management is a thankless game, it is high volume, a lot of work and low margin. And I'd say the main muscle I developed there is just hard work and churning out an incredible amount of sets of financials and books over those five years.

And after that time, I kind of felt, probably ignorantly, that I've learned everything that I could learn within the property game. And yearning still from when I was in Silicon Valley was there that I wanted to be back in tech, and I felt like I was getting left behind. I felt like the entire world was moving towards tech.

That's where everything was, that's where all the big opportunities were, that's where the world's going, and I really wanted to, steep back into that world, even though I'd only had a tiny taste of it at Deloitte in San Jose.

And one of my friends reached out to me and said, there’s this opportunity at a company called Aura, stick your hand up, you should go for an interview, and I did, and I fell in love with it immediately.

I got along with the CEO sort of within the first five minutes, we could tell we could hit it off and took a risk, went backwards in salary to take the job. Step into a world where I really had zero experience and jumped in with both sort of feet, eyes open, sometimes closed, and six years later, here I am out of South Africa in Amsterdam, and Aura is very happy to say it has expanded all over the world. So, it's been a great journey so far.

It's so funny when you describe your narrative, it sounds at moments, right, like there's a jump to something very different and then you're moving back to something else. And then later on in our careers, if we're lucky, all of the pieces kind of come together, right? And I noticed this a lot in people's trajectories and I think yours typifies it and not that long to be honest, right, in a decade.

So, tell me, because I was fascinated last time and it took me on a journey of research and I've been talking to people about it. So, tell me a little bit about Aura because it's a very interesting and quite unique company, tell us a bit about it.

Sure. Aura was born in South Africa in 2018, and as most people know, South Africa is quite a high risk country and only a small part of the population within South Africa actually have the economic means to afford private security.

This has resulted in a huge private security industry servicing a very small part of the population. And the founder Warren recognised that there was a huge amount of underutilised time available from the security responders who were sitting idle waiting for one of their clients to request help or to perhaps respond to a home alarm.

And the idea was that to actually go out and buy that underutilised time from the security companies and bring them onto one aggregated network that is connected with technology and offer the same private security to the average citizen in South Africa at a greatly reduced rate.

This would be particularly to service the personal security needs of the citizen when they're outside of their home, where the security companies at that stage currently only really respond to homes or businesses.

Just take a moment just to double click on how Aura works. We connected all of these responders onto one network with a connected device. Think about it like a phone in each vehicle. We've got over four thousand in South Africa.

We also replicated that same sort of technology for the private medical industry. We've connected over two thousand private ambulances in South Africa onto one massive aggregated network.

And to help the listeners conceptualise this further is think about Uber but for emergency responses. So, in an emergency, you can use an app on your phone or a panic button, pretty much anything that can send a location in a panic situation and we'll get the correct private emergency response to your live location.

Because it's one big aggregated network and we utilise machine to machine dispatch, we're able to drive the response times down really, really low to actually unbelievably low levels. In South Africa, we average below seven minutes for security responses and under eleven minutes for medical responses, and that's anywhere in South Africa.

Our tech is really amazing because we track your live location and if you're moving, we follow you, we can see where you're going. And in a really bad situation, actually our responders on the ground have the ability to call additional assistance if needed from the other security responders or medical responders who already are on our network.

To date, we have categorically saved over eight thousand lives and two thousand of those lives have been saved in this calendar year, which really speaks to how quickly we're scaling.

And now that we've got funding and resources sort of post our series B last year, we can really, really offer our services to a lot more people. From there in South Africa, where that's obviously where we started, we expanded into Kenya and Ghana and Uganda to offer the same services that we do in South Africa.

And then we entered the first world market, initially the United Kingdom and recently we've launched in the US as well. We use the same technology as what we use in our African regions, but to solve a slightly different problem.

In first world countries, there's been a huge, huge rise in the amount of home alarm systems being installed or Google Nest, doesn't really matter what it is. And at the same time, police budgets were under pressure, and the police were no longer able to respond to unverified alarm calls, so Aura fills that verification layer.

So, if your home or your business alarm goes off and you're unable to verify that there is a situation that needs police or emergency response, Aura goes out and verifies if something's happening on site.

If there is something happening on site, our tech feeds that information back to the control centre and then the police are dispatched to that location and they are willing to respond because it is a verified emergency. I think in the US they use the phrase an imminent threat to property or life, so that's what we do. And we actually believe that we are massively helping the police by ensuring that they aren't wasting their time going to check sort of false alarms and they can spend their time wisely responding to actual real emergencies and help the capacity and budget constraints that they currently have.

Using the same tech and business model, again, we're able to drive the response times really, really down in first world markets and solve a big problem that these alarm receiving centres are currently experiencing.

All the OEMs, omnis, alarm or home DIY alarm systems are currently experiencing and enhance their service offering. So, when you can give that verification layer to the end customer when they aren't at home or when they aren't at their business. Our tech is constantly getting better we now have an ability to track your family, be able to send emergency responses not just to yourself but to other family members if you believe that they need help.

And our tech team is simply incredible, and the journey at Aura has been absolutely amazing. We are backed by some incredible investors who give us the space and allow us to execute on our vision and mission.

And our main metric that we display on every board back on management accounts, we lead every investment round with it is the number of lives we've saved and the number of safe spaces that we've created. We are extremely appreciative that our investors have given this and allowed us to really execute on the mission and we’re really hard at work to try and create a world where everyone is safe.

Amazing, well, thank you for explaining that for us. So, you mentioned coming into that role, taking a pay cut, believing in the mission, which you obviously do, you speak incredibly passionately about it. But what was it like stepping into this role where you were still building out the finance function and had quite a journey to get to where you are today? So, tell me a little bit about how you approached that journey.

Probably ignorantly, if I'm honest. I had the biggest sense of imposter syndrome I've ever had in my entire life. I did not know what I was doing at all.

And I took the title of CFO, which was an amazing, lofty title, but there was no one reporting to me, so it was just me, so I very quickly got some help, but just a bookkeeper to assist me. She's been with me right from the beginning and I love her to bits.

And I spent the first month trying to figure out what the guys had done. In any typical startup, it's all about growth and product and the actual delivering the lowest response time possible and finance and accounting came second.

I spent the first month trying to figure out what they'd done. There were three different companies and three different bank accounts, and I felt like they were flipping a coin to decide which bank account to pay for on which day. And I couldn't figure it out.

And I thought, okay, what's the ultimate source of truth? And that's the bank statement so I downloaded three years’ worth of bank statements across three companies, twenty to thirty thousand lines. And I individually mapped every transaction that had gone on to recreate something that I could understand that I could own, it was not a fun experience. It was a rather painful experience if I'm honest, but that took three or four months to get done.

And once it was done, I had a real phenomenal understanding of what the main levers were that drive the business. I understood what worked and what didn't work. I could see all the mistakes that I've made, numbers don't lie.

And I did that and finished it and owned it and was something I could sign off on. And it really gave me, I always see the job as CFO, a large part of it is effective resource allocation. And being able to fully understand, as I said, what the main drivers are, what the main levers are in the business really made me a lot better at my job. It took me three months to think that I knew what I was doing. And it took me probably another three to four months to actually really believe in myself.

And I was like, OK, I really, really, really understand this now. And I really understood then what I needed and the team that I needed to build post that.

Amazing. And you touched there on the team side of this. So, tell me a bit about your journey with building out the team and attracting the right kind of talent and taking care of them.

First, I've got an amazing finance team that I've built in South Africa. And most of the credit needs to go to them, not to me. I always take the approach of hire someone smarter than you. You want the smartest people in the world working with you or working for you.

I always see it as working with me on a project, I always see it as collaborators, you do not report to me, we're doing this together. We're a team at all costs.

I will step in and do whatever's necessary and part of the journey of Aura was like, okay, I'll start, I'll do the books, I'll do the transactions, I'll do the bank reconciliations, I'll reconcile the cash flow, and we'll continue to do that going forward.

And then again, in finance and tech, it's again, there's a lot of resource allocation. So, what's the most important thing? And often it is more growth just to get a sustainable business to slow your burn rate down to ensure that we can deliver on the mission, save as many lives as possible.

So, finance often comes second. So, we took a lot on with a very small team, and we hustled as much as we could. And slowly over time, really built out a phenomenal team in South Africa who services our entire business from a finance point of view. I love chartered accountants.

So, I've got two chartered accountants working for me in South Africa and I can fundamentally say they are both a lot smarter than me and for a large part have made me, which was my original goal was make myself redundant.

Build a team and build a process, build a function that I don't need, they don't need me every single day, which allows me to free up my time to concentrate on other areas of the business, like I mentioned in the beginning, whether that's revenue or marketing or legal.

The biggest approach that I take with my team on an individual level is not to tell them always what to do but tell them why they're doing it. It's a big draw for me to give people context.

It was an extremely frustrating thing, and one frustrating thing about perhaps Deloitte and the auditing profession was that I felt like I was doing useless things. It was a box-ticking exercise, and I didn't understand why I was doing it. I was just being told, you must do this, end of story.

So, I really did not enjoy that. So, the one part I did not enjoy and it's something, it's a big lesson that I've learned is take the time to explain the why. And once you get the buy-in from the team as to why you ask them to do this, firstly, I think the output is better always.

And they also learn and grow with the business and that finance touches every part of the business, it's impossible for it not to. They can then connect dots, and they can surface information back up to me. It could be contrary to what I've asked them to do or they could notice areas.

Because they are at the coalface, they will see things before anyone else sees them. That's why I spend a lot of time explaining to my team why they're asking to do something. And when I'm building out a team, to be honest, a lot of it is more on attitude than on qualifications.

Obviously, like I said, I love CAs because they think in a certain way and they've got a unique set of skills but for everyone else in the finance team, it's more about the attitude. I want to see how they approach a problem. I'm not interested in whether the solution is correct or not, I’m more interested in how you thought about it.

I believe a lot of skills can be taught and humans are unbelievable and they're extremely adaptable to different environments. But having a good attitude is a prerequisite for me, having that can-do attitude and smiling, it's only work at the end of the day, don't take it too seriously.

You're doing very important things, but your family and your life are always more important than work as it always should be. But if you approach everything with a good attitude, you can laugh. If you can smile, then everything's good.

And just create that real environment where people don't not enjoy coming to work. There should be a joke, there should be something funny and getting to know my team on a personal level and getting to know what drives them and what motivates them?

South Africa is an unbelievably diverse country. Well, I mean, we've got eleven official languages and everyone's background, and everyone's origin story is different. And what drives them and what motivates them is very different.

And understanding that and understanding what your team requires and what they want to do and giving them the opportunities to do that, you will get a huge amount out of your team in that way.

And I'm very happy to say that my original goal of make myself redundant has been for the most part achieved, one or two things that I still need to step into. But I love that and that is one of the proudest things. Everything else that we've done at Aura, whether it's restructuring or moving the companies, intellectual property offshore, raising money, all those things are kind of secondary to the team that I've built, to be honest. I'm extremely proud of them and I'm extremely proud of the finance department that we've built, which none of us knew what we were doing, we all learned on the fly.

I didn't have any Dutch experience before I arrived in the Netherlands. My US experience was minimal, I just had a little bit and now my team and me know all these things together and we've learned together and we've gone on this journey together. And yeah, as I mentioned, one of the things I'm most proud of.

Amazing. And I think you made a couple of points there that I just want to kind of loop back on. The first is around explaining the why, not the what, I think I said that right. And that to me is so important because I've done a lot of research on how to transform teams and so on, and when people are aligned with your vision and they know what the purpose is and they know why they're doing something, then it's proven that they are much more happy at work and more fulfilled.

And then on getting to know everybody as well and on the energy, I think you can train for anything apart from kind of attitude or just or whatever other intangible concepts that are about feeling. And especially as you mentioned there, with having a diverse team, you need a mixture of energy sometimes, you need a balancing act, and I think that that's great, so, thank you for that.

You've mentioned Warren is the CEO correct?

Correct.

Yeah, and you mentioned even from the first minute of being interviewed that there was a quite unique connection between you. What is your perspective on the CFO-CEO relationship and what makes that work and how can CFOs kind of adapt themselves to lead that?

I suppose it's, I mean, probably cliche, but there should be for every Ying, there should be a Yang. Especially in startups and especially in the tech world, founders are visionaries and eternal optimists, and they believe with everything in their being, I think it's a requirement probably to get in their business. It's like, it's like their child, their baby, and you don't ever see anything wrong with your own children, of course not.

And you have to be delusional about the chance of it working.

100%. I think without that, a lot of businesses will fail, and I see that CFO relationship as the opposite, often purposely introducing friction into the decision-making process to ensure that we've thought about all possible consequences.

Even if I agree with the overall viewpoint, I might take a position that is opposite to it to ensure that when we are discussing it and have, we really thought through this all the way to the nth degree? Have we thought about the second, third or fourth order consequences of the decisions? I spend a lot of time probably to Warren's frustration taking the opposite side on him on every new idea or everything that he wants to do.

I think he appreciates it in the long run, and he knows why I'm doing it, and sometimes I will be overridden and that is fine. As CFO, you've also got to know that a lot of us, especially accountants, are often risk-averse people, and if you've got to be successful, you've got to take a risk at some stage.

But it's about understanding what those risks are, planning and managing them to ensure that they do not become unsustainable. So, measure your appetite for risk and when you full stop, it's a lot of being honest, saying no, really sometimes digging your heels in if you really disagree with something. I don't think any CEO is served well by any CFO who's a yes man.

You want them to be driven; they want them to be aligned with what would be true and the vision and mission of the company. But do not be scared about saying no and pushing hard for additional research or additional work to be done on any sort of project that needs to be fulfilled.

Warren is also a unique CEO in terms of he gives you an unbelievable amount of responsibility and gives you the ability and the space to execute. Maybe a good example, I mean, when you were just started at Aura, he said to me, I'd like you to restructure the company and move the intellectual property into a different jurisdiction, and I said, okay, and that was the end of the discussion. That was the task. I said, like, where? He said, I don't know, that's why I got you, you must tell me.

So, he gave, which is again, you have to then take a lot of responsibility on yourself and do it and present the solutions to him and the pros and the cons of what we're going to do and why we're going to do it. And I think that the CEO relationship also needs to go in the other direction.

They need to give the ability to the CFOs to execute on what they're good at and trust them, trust them implicitly that they will execute to the best of their ability. And I think that's the biggest thing is you've got to trust each other. That's it, you've got to trust them. They're taking the right direction with the business, and he's got to trust you, the CFO, doing all the other things to make sure that the company can execute on its goals and missions.

Amazing. And then the perennial question, I guess, for everyone in every industry is, how are you approaching AI and upskilling the team? And are there any challenges or exciting moments on that journey that you think would be relevant for our audience?

Yes, I think you have to embrace AI. You have to embrace it as anyone in finance, to be honest, it would be silly not to. It would be the same as when excel was introduced and you insist that you carry on going to use your calculator and it's just, you have to embrace it.

There's two sort of two or three sort of levels to AI, I suppose, which is what it can or what it can't do. The average day-to-day person sort of thinks of AI as ChatGPT or Gemini or, you know, we're asking maybe to do market research or to clean up a document for you, the formatting or to help you make a presentation.

I encourage my team to use it all, but I encourage them at no point to outsource their thinking to AI. I mean, it's the kind of definition of AI, it's always going to give you the most average answer, because that was how it was trained, how it was built.

So, it's an unbelievable tool, but just don't outsource your thinking to it. So, I want efficiencies from AI and if a task would take a normal person, a normal team member an hour, I want you to use AI and spend forty five minutes still back and forth with it, argue, discuss it, make sure that your idea is there, and then you ask it to critique your idea.

Do not ask it for the ideas. So, there is that element and my team do use it on a daily basis, and our books and our accuracy levels through the rooftop provisions are more accurate, our calls are more accurate, so we are using it.

We're getting management accounts and billing out a lot earlier in the month, so, we need to embrace it. The second part of where we've used AI, we've one of good friends of mine started a company called Masasa.

And it's a very interesting tool where I had this vision and mission for the finance department within order to stop being a reporting department and start becoming an insight department where you can really, really give the teams on the ground. We have teams all over the world. We have a shared service function in South Africa and everyone operates in different time zones. So use the tools and make sure that the finance department becomes an inside department.

And the way we did that is we introduced an AI system that pulls data from a number of different systems into one sort of dashboard or place. So, it will pull information from our ERP, from a data management tool, from our tech tools, from our CRM, all into one place.

And it has all the information there and has our books effectively, just in a very nice digestible format where you can see what the revenue is and see what the gross profit is and see what the operating expenses.

Obviously, we need to keep some information confidential, but the amazing part of this tool is that you can then ask it questions. So, okay, this is the client and I can see how much money we made from a client, and you would be able, what is the gross profit percentage on this client and what has it done for the past six months?

And that AI will actually be able to tell you, okay, this is how much you're paying the security companies for responses, this is how many times the guys are responding on a monthly basis, this is your gross profit percentage, and this is how it's trending down.

So we have really within Aura tried to embrace AI as much as possible to really give the team members on the ground, the people who are actually growing our business, the tools that they need and the information that they need to be able to make effective decisions without having to constantly ask me or ask them.

So, that's been a big goal for us. Where it's limitations on where it's going, sure, I don't know. I think it's an old saying and I'm definitely not unique, but we will overestimate what it will do in the short term and underestimate what it will do in the long term.

I think in the long term, I think that's a problem for we're all going to have to figure out as humanity. It's very hard for us humans to think about the ultimate positive outcomes and the ultimate negative outcomes at the same time. I do think that the valuations of the AI companies currently only make sense if you're displacing the labour market.

So, I do think there's some big pain coming and it's a complex problem that we're going to have to solve together, sort of not only company to company, but country to country to try and figure this out because a lot of people, including me, derive a lot of purpose from their work and feeling productive and doing difficult things and feeling that sense of achievement when you do it, AI is going to disrupt that.

And I think it will be slightly different to the industrial revolution where industrial revolution kind of did one part of the economy where I think AI is going to disrupt every single part of our economy at the same time.

I'm a little bit nervous, but control the controllables, embrace it as much as you can, try and get as efficient as possible, and hopefully we will figure it out as a species or as humanity to make sure that it's not too disruptive for everyone.

I love what you've said because you've contextualised it. And one of the issues that I'm having at the moment is I don't often speak about this in a finance space, because when we speak about AI, we're talking about specific tools, like what your agent's doing, like how is this working out, like what's the team doing?

And then I go into other spaces, you know, like I'm in a female founder’s network, I've been asked to join other things, and then we talk about, I don't know, the sectors in the prevalent, but what's not happening is someone connecting all of the dots, and that's what needs to happen.

And I'm worried that a lot of the AI is being developed almost in silos, and there's not like an overarching sense of what are we disrupting, what do we replace it with? The universal basic income talk seems to have sort of dissipated out to sea.

And the idea of what other roles we could develop in society, because I think there's a chance to reset a lot of jobs that are admin based that do not involve, you know, critical thinking and cognitive reflection. We can move to other roles, but someone needs to have a plan.

And so I'm a bit worried that everyone's speaking about this topic, that everyone's speaking about their bit of this topic and nobody is bringing it all together.

It's 100%, it's scary, and I hope that we as everyone together can actually figure this out because there is some big disruption coming.

Yeah, I just think what I'd like to encourage everyone to do is to be honest as well, because I've been invited into some spaces to speak about it where I felt like I was going beyond my remit to say some other things around, you know, who's developing it, who is it for, what kind of differences and lack of opportunity will be exacerbated by it.

You've got like digital exclusion and financial exclusion, I think could be massively exacerbated by AI, we really need to think about that. So, I would just encourage everyone to follow their guts with this. And if you think something seems this might be a problem, it probably is a problem, and everyone thinks that someone cleverer than them is thinking about this. But the truth is, I don't really know if anybody seems to really be doing so.

But it kind of seems like two terrible outcomes. So, one is that it is everything that everyone imagines that all the founders of AI companies tell us what it is and it really is going to disrupt the labour market is going to cause huge pain.

The other option is it's not as good as what everyone think it is and it's actually not that great and you could crash the sort of world economy because there's been so much money invested into this.

Something to look forward to either way.

But any time there's volatility in any market, there's opportunities. So, control the controllables, don't stress about things you can't control, do as much as what we can and be prepared. I would say like, it's exactly what I said to my team, just don't outsource your thinking, don't be lazy and I think you'll be okay.

100%, and I think you made such a good point there. I'm also conscious of specifically when people are using it to help with research and so on. It can reinforce your own bias, but so reverse prompting, like learn these things properly, like get it to tear apart what you're thinking rather than tell you how great it is anyway.

I put them against each other; I will sometimes I will use ChatGPT and then I'll ask Gemini and I'll tell Gemini this is from ChatGPT. So, I try to put them against each other sometimes and see what it is because you're 100% right.

That is just, I think a lot of it has been, especially what we use on a day-to-day basis, that has been designed much like social media to keep you engaged. So, it will reinforce your ideas no matter how bad they are.

And to make you feel good about using it, let's be honest.

Exactly. Everyone wants to tell everyone wants to hear that is a phenomenal idea. Not everyone wants to hear this is terrible and you're opening yourself up for a huge amount of risk. So exactly, just be careful with it and use them against each other.

Exactly. And then finally, for our listeners, many of whom are at different stages of their finance career, what's one piece of advice that you'd like to leave with our audience?

There's no substitute for hard work. I think if you put in the time, you put in the effort, the cream will rise to the top, it might take longer than what you hoped it for, it would, but it really, really, really will.

As I mentioned, have a good attitude and it will serve you extremely well. But probably the biggest one is never be the smartest person in the room. If you are the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room.

Embrace the imposter syndrome, embrace that uncomfortable feeling, embrace that nervousness in the pit of your stomach where you're like, oh my goodness, I do not know what these guys are talking about, that is where you learn, that is where you grow.

It is uncomfortable for a reason, but you'll look back two, three, four months or years down the line and really, really appreciate that you put yourself through that. And I think anyone who does that with the correct attitude will be successful.

Amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you so much for your time, it was fun.

A very big thank you to Patrick for joining us and sharing his story. It has truly been a pleasure to get to know him. If you enjoyed this episode, please do subscribe and share and stay tuned for the next Ask A CFO episode as we continue to explore the journeys of current and former CFOs across the world.