Episode 38, James Burt, Finance Director at Oracle

James Burt is a Finance Director at Oracle and an experienced CFO who has implemented business transformation and technology solutions across four continents.

Commencing his career at Unilever is worth both large and small companies and has a track record of delivering profitable growth.

James is a people-focused senior finance leader with experience covering supply chain at audit outsourcing and large project transformations.

To contact Richard Holmes, please call 0403 513 720 or reach out to richardh@hprconsulting.com https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardholmesfinancerecruiter/

Transcript

Please note that this has been transcribed by AI/Bots so there may be typos and the occasional strange things happening.

Richard Holmes

0:00

Welcome to the numbers people Podcast, where each week we're going to be speaking with some highly regarded senior finance professionals and career experts looking into the ins and outs of what makes finance people on their teams tick. The podcast is proudly produced in partnership with ACCA, the Association of Chartered certified accountants, the global body of professional chartered accountant. In today's episode, I'm talking with James Burt James is a finance director for Oracle, and then an experienced CFO who has implemented business transformation and technology solutions across four continents. Commencing his career to Unilever is worth both large and small companies and has a track record of delivering profitable growth. James is a people focused senior finance leader with his experience covering supply chain at audit outsourcing a large project transformations. James, how

James Burt

1:01

are you? Very well, Richard, nice to be here with you.

Richard Holmes

1:04

Let's see again, if you've been keeping well. Yeah,

James Burt

1:06

very well. Thank you enjoying a sunny day here in Sydney.

Richard Holmes

1:10

I've known James for a number of years now. And I followed his career with with interest. And yeah, I think he's gonna be a great guest on the show. And James, would you like to tell us about your credit history and your journey so far?

James Burt

1:21

Yeah, thanks for sure. Where to start from, we're just chatting before you press the record button there. And probably a good place to start was actually, when I left university, not really having very much idea of what I wanted to be. And in fact, before University, I'm pretty much committed, I don't want to be a gray boying businessman, let alone an accountant, what a horrible thing to be at the age of 18. But as I said, you know, kind of graduated. And actually I did things like you know, painted and decorated and did these sort of odd jobs for a little bit of time after university. And that really taught me I think, the a the value of money, and perhaps my time as well. And then the need to do something that was intellectually challenging. And I was very fortunate, because I did end up getting a job at Unilever, I sort of identified I think, because I come for some creative job, perhaps in marketing a cartoon for exactly what it was, but it wasn't finance. And they said to me, I think with your STEM background, you should get finance or crack. And I was very, by then, I think, very keen to get my career progressing in an upward direction. So that's really where my career started back in the UK, started my Chartered Institute of Management, accountants exams and gotten that away pretty quickly. And I think the great thing of working for a company like Unilever was the provide a really first class training. And there were some fantastic managers that you learn from and colleagues that you work with, I really do think I was very fortunate to have had that opportunity early on in my career.

James Burt

2:42

I love that started story as well, where yeah, it started in Maxon. And they're like, Oh, we've got this, oh, give it a go.

James Burt

2:48

Do something, I feel a certain sympathy for you. And I've got teenagers, myself, and they will scratch their heads, and what are you gonna do? And it's really difficult because you don't, even as an adult, and even somebody, there's Middle East now, you don't really understand other people's jobs. What all these people in a bank do, or what all these people do in a power company, what have you and you don't really understand their jobs. It is difficult to say, that's a great career. Well, that isn't a great career. It is to some degree, there is an element of luck doing something that's your bent in love, always love problem solving. And so you're doing something where you are Kind of solving problems, that gives you that job satisfaction. When I used to wash up plates in a hotel, which I did for a few months that really didn't tick the box. You know, that was incredibly boring for me. It was often motivated me to work very hard at things I do enjoy

Richard Holmes

3:36

makes it easier as well. And I think you need to go get that exposure to move overseas as well. Because it Singapore,

James Burt

3:41

more recently, I did. But you I think that's one of the nice things working for big multinational, they give me that opportunity. And actually introduced me to Australia, back in 2000. I came for the first time in just before the Olympics. I mean, I've been working through ice cream division in the UK, they were looking for somebody with a similar background because we'd been investigated by the Competition Commission at the time. And they thought that the a triple C here was going to launch a similar investigation history to other similar market share, which I suppose at the time, they might have called dominance. And so they were just expecting either happening of a transplant but I got involved in looking at their supply chain where they had a few teething problems with a new factory. So it was very interesting work to sort of understanding that whole process of how that new factory being built and why it was some Wyvern business case wasn't being met. And then having landed in Australia and experience what we all remembers the weather before the last month. I landed in May and it was an Englishman. Pretty nice weather. I couldn't believe people calling it winter. I quickly realized that I really wanted to set my life up here. But I didn't go back to London to do a job in audit for a couple of years. Did that for about over three years. And that was a great job now before sort of family commitments, I was able to travel extensively with Unilever and actually I really enjoyed that job because Again, you know, the title sounds incredibly boring. It was like a global audit department. And because you know, people still have this old fashioned idea that audits, you know, you're kind of adding up numbers and ticking them bashing boxes was actually, the job was basically talking to fairly senior management all day long, understanding their job understanding the risks they face, and helping put in the action plan to mitigate those risks, which was actually a very enjoyable part of the job. So I've always enjoyed it and I your role, which is where you're talking to people all day long. And then the aspects of being in the finance bond, which you know, has been interactive, as a business partner, or you're talking to different colleagues is always been something that I, you know, when I look back at my career, what I'd like to have done more of or if I was to do it again, I'd be actually highlighting it, that sort of thing was really good. Apart from just that. I learned over those three and a half years, I learned so much you learn by talking to people and understanding their jobs and understanding the risks they're facing, really gave me a fantastic understanding of just how the company is because Unilever works.

James Burt

6:01

I can imagine in global audit as well, country, by country, it's different.

James Burt

6:05

Yes, they do all face different challenges. They've all got different local environments. But Unilever had a pretty well oiled machine, you know, every country was operating in a very similar way. But actually, internally, you weren't, I suppose 20% of my time was spent on finance. And but the rest of time, you know, you're doing actually auditing, supply chain, HR, marketing, all the different functions. You know, I think that was also something that perhaps isn't immediately apparent to people, when you think of all the always think it's a finance job. And you're just looking at the key financial controls, but actually is much broader. It was also quite an interesting time because Sarbanes Oxley was being rolled out around the world. So that was a new thing for the Unilever management to get their head around. And so made the job that much more interesting as well for me doing it.

Richard Holmes

6:52

When obviously, you left Unilever that was a big, big move for you. Because you with Unilever for a number of years and to leave the comfort of working for that company for a

James Burt

7:01

while. Yeah, I remember somebody saying, you know, it's like taking the big comfort blanket off when you when you leave, and I have been 16 years and the mind on my last role was in Singapore. And I was keen to move back to Australia and I have a couple of young kids ready to go to school and was just keen to get them into schools here. I think that's all I'm doing right now, I've got no regrets of the timing of that, because I felt the time was right, to sort of branch out. And you do realize there's a very big world outside of that, you know, that initial corporate company. I think the risk of working for these big corporates, perhaps for too long is that you it is possible to become quite insular or internal looking. It's actually one of things I love about my job at the moment is that pretty much every company in Australia I'm in I'm in I'm working in the our customers are more sort of the top tier larger businesses, the bit of Oracle I work for that is really interesting. Yeah, all sorts of different industries, all sorts of different challenges. Understanding how technology is helping solve their problems, is for me, one of the things I'm really enjoying at the moment, as you can imagine,

Richard Holmes

8:03

with with your current role in that space is enabling technology to evolve and roll evolving business.

James Burt

8:09

Yeah, I mean, I feel fortunate to be working in this space at the moment. I mean, I've I've, I've always had an interest in in technology. Since I was quite young, I suppose, by zip extraction was probably my first taste. They count my scientific calculator. But you know, it was good fun to kind of learn to code in basic and what have you. And then when after I left Unilever, a couple of jobs that I did involve putting in new systems, where you were much more hands on the businesses, I work for much, much more than Unilever. Although I've been involved in big transformations at Unilever, in marble ultimate job, there was this global HR transformation involving PeopleSoft and new procurement systems and big restructuring, but the you will never go into the detail with processes, what I really learned was how technology can really help streamline and automate processes, I arrived in a situation where it took an incredible three weeks to prepare the month impact, you know, having arrived there are one of the things could go on. And what I've done in doing this, you know, my finance experience was the thing I liked about the job, as I was just saying earlier, was we have been business partner, working hand in glove with the CEO, and not being stuck in a world of spreadsheets, trying to reconcile what's going on, so that the lab did force me down around which was like, I've got all this out, you know, they've got all these disparate systems, all this stuff that needs to be reconciled all the time. It was kind of crazy to have that as an example for for different customer records for every customer in these different systems. And then the turnover costs was quite quite large actually. And so you ended up in Cafe land, as it was they do turn over quite often quickly. They're all these systems don't know console. So bringing that back to a single source of truth and for me, pretty satisfying, and actually seeing how software as a service which has Sir, I suppose relatively new kind of technology, I mean, it's still new for a lot of customers haven't yet made this move to the cloud. But once you've tasted and seen it and seeing the opportunity, it gives you to get rid of a lot of manual work gives you back all so much time, that kind of experience segue for me to join Oracle kind of vO tech is, to me that when I look at all as one of the biggest business to business software companies in the world, they are, I think, in a very nice basis, this isn't a nice space where your technology is needed, you can see the business benefits, and you need to see that you're making finance people's life better. There's always not a problem. It's funny, because I'm talking to people about this, but you look at all the problems CFOs and the teams have, and there's always a new one coming down the track. You just think, Oh, I've got everything sorted. And then IFRS come out with a new set of standards easy to wrap your head around. I mean, the ones I've always sticking at the moment are these new ESG standards, which are mostly non financial metrics that need to be reported. The responsibility for these is landing on the CFOs table, this technology is really the solution. So you don't have to employ another small army of people operating manual spreadsheets, and if you can get that automated and streamlined and reconciling itself with as little intervention as possible. So so much the better

Richard Holmes

11:20

couple of weeks ago was how much of this company in a month and is three weeks, and he's just still to this day. It's like 2022, he's like, when is that going to change? But I guess it's just started by investment companies get into technology.

James Burt

11:33

And it's not easy, you know, otherwise, nobody would be suffering like that. And I think those are companies that perhaps report quicker, but how long are they working till, you know, that was one of the downsides of our career and finances that you often did spend those mountains, working very late at night, in order to hit whatever deadlines have been set by the global or regional teams has pretty miserable existence, sometimes in watching colleagues in marketing and sales, go out the door, five o'clock, and you go, okay, maybe I joined the wrong department here.

Richard Holmes

12:02

What do you got another five hours? That's right,

James Burt

12:05

the technology is there, it does need to be applied, you've got to have the right kind of change mindset. And obviously, there's a lot of, there's a lot of know how in being successful in that space. But it's by no means impossible. And actually, for any company that is taking three weeks now I'd actually encourage them to reach out to me to have a chat with you all I can do to help.

Richard Holmes

12:25

And looking back, what advice would you give to someone wanting to pursue a career like yours, James, because I actually do like the way you kind of fell into it. It's good. But I guess with hindsight, what advice would you give,

James Burt

12:36

you definitely want to be passionate. While you're doing you're doing this for a very long time. You know, as I say, I kind of fell into it. But then, you know, having discovered what it was in there, they did get me rather well in terms of what I was interested in, and what have you. So I haven't looked back. But you know, having said that, you know, I'm sure if it was doing something that wasn't enjoying, you know, yeah, I would have looked for the next thing and made it made a move. But from our point of view, I was fortunate. So I think advice wise, I'd say, look, give it a crack, make sure you are you've got a genuinely curious mind and you're enjoying it. Definitely, you know, ask a lot of questions. One of the things I do remember, I think was on my very first day at Unilever, being shown around the office and a guy that was probably three or four years, my senior said to me, while you're here, just make sure you understand everybody else's job. You know, ask them, What do you do? How do they fit into this thing? Because it is there, though a lot of people you know, in that I can't remember, but let's call it two 300 people on that floor. And you kind of you noticed this person that's never worked in business before you turn up and you kind of go well, what, what all these people do, but he encouraged me not to be too shy to ask, but you know, just get out there and ask and I have to say that when I was good advice that I did take, I think having that organizational awareness is important for you to add the most value in job

James Burt

13:56

search and before James like me all our friends who what do they do for a job, friends in it have gone on to doing something in to find, you know, these big companies with tons of people on the floor? A lot of people.

James Burt

14:10

And it's funny, because I definitely had that impression of it myself, in the old days is sort of this big black box. And I'd always sort of chuckled to myself. Do you think that there are members of the magic circle that come along? And in the old days, of course, you'd have an IT person that come physically to your computer, and you often get a coffee or something on the property first then reboot button. And then we have our fixed et

Richard Holmes

14:35

Cie session, whether it was your first boss at Unilever or not, if you over the years, if you have like a mentor or someone in particular influenced you the most.

James Burt

14:44

Yeah, look, I mean, I have I'm trying to think I'm I'll be quite fortunate. I've had lots of really good bosses that I've certainly learnt a lot from, I wouldn't say that I had a, you know, a senior mentor that overlooked my career and made sure that it was on the right path and or what have you. Having said that, you're asking about advice, you know, later. And perhaps I got another question is, you know, what would you do differently? And that's actually, you know, that is something that when I was younger, I didn't pay much attention to finding a mentor, and then doing that, you know, seriously, and I think you can do that early in your career, and listen to them, potentially be very, very helpful. Again, just because, you know, they've got the wisdom of being around so much longer than yourself. And they can see career pathways that are, you know, paid to yourself. But as I say, I've got no particularly with Greg, because I feel I've had a good ride. But yeah, there's advice for younger people on starting off in their career, I think. Definitely. Talk to everybody to find out what their jobs are, too. I mean, talk to your friends, find out what their jobs are. Yeah, if you can identify, you know, a friendly face that's relatively senior that's been around a while, like you touched on

James Burt

15:55

James, it's about trying something that suits you, like, you've touched on before about being passionate about what you do. There's a there's a lot of people who, who unfortunately, hate what they do, but they're just stuck there. And it's just like, wow, life, life is too short to be doing something where you get out of bed in the morning, the same from the, from the day, you wake kind of thing. So nothing is about giving it a go and planning anyway. Fortunately, with Unilever as well, companies like Unilever, and those people to Nationals can give you different career paths in different ways. And good people, good leaders. early on. Did you have any, when you reflect back, like what what's the worst advice you've received? Yeah, I

James Burt

16:30

think I'm just sort of pondering it. And I'm not somebody that I don't think I've got any regrets. And I honestly don't think I've can think of any bad advice. That being that would mean, I followed it, and I've got to regret. And if there was any bad advice, I think I spotted it as bad and ignored it.

James Burt

16:46

When you talking about Unilever with the global audit as well, when the opportunity came around? Did you go for that? Or was it we tapped on the shoulder?

James Burt

16:53

That was a that was a job back in London that? You know, I mean, I did go for it. And I'll tell you why. So he's a you know, he was pretty structured back in a and I don't know if it's still the case. But I remember they had a matrix of jobs that ideally you needed to do before you could kind of progress to the next level. And one of those jobs if you wanted to get have a senior sort of leadership role in finance, and Unilever was really a prerequisite to have worked in global audit. And I think, you know, they, they recognize the value of that. And I've certainly I look back. And I think that was an incredibly valuable job for those many reasons. But it really does instill that risk, and management and control culture in your brain, when you just think about things, having done it fundamentally differently. And certainly as I think it then did well, for me, and as a CFO, you don't want to be the CFO that's in charge of the Big Four wasn't the wheel when somebody walks off with you know, a million dollars or more, there's some reputation or danger. That's happened that's shredded the company's reputation. That was oh, would actually even now i'd really get people inviting a look, if you can get if you can do some time in order or this management, or whatever they call it nowadays, that is a very valuable thing to do. And, and certainly, you know, just just understanding it was really helpful as a CFO, I was able to set up the systems who required to mitigate the risk. And and it's interesting, because I do, you know, I sort of get a little window into a lot of businesses now and Australia throughout the world I'm doing and, you know, quite often, you're saying, Well, it's interesting, you know, they've left the door open a little bit, they haven't actually got the right systems in place. And as a system, not just technology, but you know, the right processes in place as well, to mitigate those risks. You know, not everybody actually does have the understanding that, that I think that they would benefit from Cisco, because I mean, through deal with a lot of people, myself, James ID, here, what commercially focused finance people and they've got to be a group controller free, and you can trade it a bit, but they do. And at the end of the day to get ahead, I

RM

Richard McIntosh

19:01

really enjoyed it. And it's benefited the career substantially by just knowing governance and risk and what that means, right. So she's probably got advice for someone to experience and not just where we have seen a lot in the recruitment space where a lot of accountants coming through just want to be business partners just will be unless and there's nothing wrong with that. Obviously, that's the future of finance. To a certain extent, I sense for your background. Jones is about understanding process.

James Burt

19:25

But although ultimately, you know, when you when you are the CFO, these things become your responsibility. So certainly being a business partners important is really important skill. And I did spend a lot of time as a business partner and his partner role. But now ultimately, finance is responsible for reporting the results correctly. They're responsible for the money and all going missing, and then a whole host of other things besides and then you're just better equipped if you've actually done those hands on roles. You can see where there's gaps that need to be closed.

Richard Holmes

19:56

So the nature of your role, James, I can imagine you're the future of finance into is what your company can enable? How do you continue to learn to stay on top of your role so that you are the kind of go to guy and go to Company? I'm lucky.

James Burt

20:07

And I think this is one of the things that if big companies are able to offer is the time and the resources to stay on top of learning, certainly at our core, the most incredible amount of training and time I've invested in law, understanding the technology landscape, not not just about applications, but about the technology that actually underpins those applications, whether they be autonomous databases, around cybersecurity, and there are a few other sort of areas that aren't immediately apparent. But as I say, I mean, I, through the course of my day, really learning something new every day. And certainly, you know, here at Oracle, we were encouraged to spend a Friday afternoon. They don't want anybody to really have meetings now that time is set aside to concentrate on, again, more self development, so that there's a very, very strong learning culture here at Oracle made easy for me, to some extent, because of that,

Richard Holmes

21:01

again, working at Oracle, what is the future of finance from from your point of view, obviously, it's technology, it's automation. But what else is

James Burt

21:09

interesting thing is I spent a fair amount of time about luxury of pondering that, and I think a lot of it's probably known, you know, then is the reality here for a lot of people yet, not necessarily, we're talking about the fact that finance people are still spending three weeks a month reconciling and trying to report numbers, etc. But I do think that the future for the technology available now, and I won't go down the rabbit hole of why that is, necessarily enables it, but it is a situation where things are going to be far more automated, and now frees up the time for the more interesting business partnering work within finance teams. There's some pretty interesting technology that's actually here today. But I think we're gonna see a lot more than they often say that if you're a futurist, you don't need to necessarily imagine some new technology that hasn't been invented yet. Rather than looking at the technologies that are working in small pockets now, and work out which of those is actually going to grow and be very significant in the future. We want one area that I was a little bit skeptical when I first heard about it, which was digital assistants. And then some of us have those at home, whether it's your Google your Apple or your your Amazon, Alexa. And certainly, I've got one of those at home, I use it all the time every day often is the arbiter of a family argument. But if you think about it for a second, just pause, the ability to just ask the system. So what's the gross profit on that product? In that country, that region, that channel? And it just tells you? What was it in the month before the prior? Or tells you again? Have you got a predictive analysis of where that's going to be in the next quarter, according to the forecast, and he tells you, suddenly, you're now we got a conversation happening? That's answering all the questions without you even having to go in and search it'll find that report. And I think that to me is going to grow and grow and grow as a way of working. I think it is a little bit new now, you know, only see the generation of people that have been brought up, you know, with these tools. And if other generations report on that literally babies holding the iPad or iPhone, which is kind of my kids kind of grew up with Marcus Cole, imagine a world without that technology. So I think that's one area that will really see a change in thinking out a bit further, but possibly, is actually how whether it's going to transpire so more often more difficult to understand or see it but you know, the metaverse is an interesting use case, I think we'll see exactly how that might impact finance teams. Not too sure we know you're going to be collaborating this space longer. And we're going to be wearing goggles all day, you can't really see that happening. There are some interesting use cases that finance people joining today, you're still going to need to understand counting and neither understand the whole other stuff that we we would have had to have understood the border data in becoming a data scientist and understanding analytics becomes really critical. And one of the interesting things I've seen actually is that almost due to lack of finance, ambition or leadership is that somehow the role of the data scientists or though the analyst is often sitting in the IT department, which I find slightly surprising, because I often think well, the finance people here suddenly those with that business background should be very well equipped to be looking at not just financial datasets, but you have all the non financial data sets and mashing it all together and then trying to get those insights that are going to help the business make the best decisions for me, they know that that is something that's only going to grow in importance, and was already important now. Um, so I think, you know, part of that future vision, definitely an area that I've been paying a lot of attention to files firing off all my career. Yeah, I think it's all change if you're coming out of university, just the options available to you. But yeah, I was just learning the basics. The basic accounting, you got to read a balance sheet and a p&l and understand that and understand cost management, understand how costs are allocated and use, there's a whole lot of stuff that's just bread and butter. In some ways, the job becomes ever richer, as a result in any other technology driven thing that will, if I, if I was to wind the clock forward 10 years, certainly 10 years, 20 years, all these systems, all these old legacy systems would have been replaced, I mean, companies that won't or don't replace them will probably have been disappeared or take over. And certainly, you're not gonna see so much of them with nothing. The advent of true Software as a Service, continuous innovation, that enables is pretty important. Because you know, where we've had this sort of stop start approach to technology and new implementations or, you know, every five or 10 years, whatever the appetite is, for business in terms of how much energy they've got to put in another system, which it can be a disruptive that actually is an equation disappears, because by the app on your phone, it's going to update seamlessly, every time you update your LinkedIn, you know, they're getting I was talking to my data, how do I use the product, you know, you can do all of that. But it's gotten some cool new features that enables you to do your job as a recruiter. And that's the same in finance, where you've got new emerging technologies with machine learning, digital systems, or AI, whatever it is, it's kind of a lot of ideas going into Now, if you've got a software as a service platform, that becomes very easy to adopt and take advantage of, without having to set up the expensive set where IT projects and get it off the ground and working now you're just sort of switching a button going, person are using this on. So I think that's another interesting aspect as we go forward.

Richard Holmes

26:40

I mentioned in in previous episodes, and it's an exciting time for finance, how much it's evolved in such short period of time. Yeah, like I mean, that's the thing when you reflect at the start your career, what it was like to what is now known you for a while James, you come across as a pretty calm, collected, chill out kind of guy. When you do get overwhelmed. What do you do? Like when you're feeling the pressure? Like, what Scotty thing,

James Burt

27:01

one of my hobbies is surfing, I haven't actually been out very much involved late, but I totally enjoy that. Because when you're out in the water, you're not thinking much else other than when's the next wave coming? And how am I going to what do I need to position myself for it be now I just love walking the dogs and going for a walk in countryside, I find that it relaxes you. So in a exercise is great as well, Poppy, my exercise routine. So I had a big birthday quite not long ago. And I thought

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Richard McIntosh

27:27

to finish off, James, what makes you happy

James Burt

27:31

England winning a cricket more seriously, I, you know, having kids that are happy. And you know, having a happy family is really important to me. That's kind of I mean, ultimately, I'm a

Richard Holmes

27:42

Family Guy said someone said to me the other day, James that you're only as happy as your unhappiest child. That's actually quite quite an interesting thing, isn't it? But if you've got a kid who isn't that, obviously that brings you down a bit. So basically, you've just got to make all your kids really happy all the time, which is not the way it works, is it?

James Burt

28:02

I do remember going to a prenatal class with my first child back in the UK. With a she was a bit wife, whatever. But I remember her saying, brilliant. We're always stuck with me, which was your carefree life is basically over you knew we now have something to worry about until the day you die. True. I mean, obviously it's not to put you off having kids. But of course they're so rewarding. But you are the I think to your point. You're right. There's always you know, worry. And of course you want the best for the kids and you want him to be happy.

Richard Holmes

28:32

Well, hey, James, really appreciate your time. You've been a great guest and really happy to have you on the show and looks thanks for your time and hopefully we'll have you on again soon.

James Burt

28:40

Yeah, thanks, Richard. It's been a pleasure talking to you