Advisory Director — Capital and Performance (Business Services)

Neither a second finance chief nor a commentator

This appointment sits in an unusual space. It is not an executive role: the Group Chief Financial Officer and the finance team keep every decision. It is not a board seat, with a director's formal duties of oversight. And it is not a consultancy engagement that delivers a report and leaves. The Advisory Director is counsel to the finance chief over 18 months, someone with enough experience of hard years to say which commitments will survive a bad one, and to say so early enough to matter.

Affordability under the bad case

Most organisations plan on a base case and stress-test reluctantly. Affordability looks different under a downside. A commitment that is comfortable at forecast revenue may be ruinous if utilisation slips, a large client leaves or the cost of people rises faster than prices. For a cooperative or mutual, which cannot usually turn to outside equity the way a listed or investor-owned firm might, the question carries extra weight.

Your counsel will cover the whole chain. You will help the Group Chief Financial Officer agree how decisions are allocated and the thresholds kept by local leaders. You will advise on what evidence should govern capital, staffing and controls, and recommend, commitment by commitment, whether each continues, is deferred or ends under the downside case. You will challenge proposals that relocate cost or risk without naming who carries it, along with investment cases that skip adoption, dependencies or the downside. And your counsel will extend to who leads, how issues climb and how often progress, exceptions and unsettled questions are reported. The value of the role lies in the quality of the recommendation and the readiness of the person giving it to be held to it.

The adviser the finance chief needs

Your understanding of professional services comes from decisions that were yours to make, among them a poorly supported commitment you halted before it did damage. Baselines you set have held when a finance chief and the people doing the work questioned them, in organisations with revenue of $330 million or more, 1,300 people or more and three countries. Regulatory remediation, succession and turnaround all count in your favour, as do capital allocation at level 4 and, at level 3, risk judgement, controls and reporting, and FP&A forecasting. You can say where a market's own judgement should stand and where it should give way, and you write that boundary down. An unresolved gap, in your counsel, comes with a recommendation attached rather than a request for more time. You would recommend ending a commitment without first gathering agreement from each market, and you expect to stay answerable for your counsel across the full term.

Eighteen months of counsel, and the first three weeks

By day ninety, you and the Group Chief Financial Officer should have settled a downside case and tested every major commitment for affordability against it. By month nine, your recommendations on continuing, deferring or ending commitments should have been reviewed and acted on by finance leadership. By month 18, downside testing should be part of every capital and performance review, with the finance team making affordability judgements in its own right.

The selection conversations are brief. Week one is a confidential conversation by video with the Group Chief Financial Officer. In week two the Regional President hands you a case built around a commitment under pressure. Week three is an in-person discussion with the directors. You can expect our reply in writing inside four working days of each conversation.