Ross Brand – PHL Group

Speaker: Ross Brand, Chief Executive Officer, PHL Group

Ross Brand: Thank you, Roger. I’ve had a phenomenal year working with you down here at PHL Group. You’re a huge support to us and the team and we learned a great deal. Thanks ever so much.

Ross Brand: The two main issues that we had here at PHL Group were that we had experienced phenomenal growth over a number of years. However, we’d never really truly planned for for how to achieve that. And we knew that we wanted to achieve more, but we knew that we also needed to plan. So we had something to follow. The second kind of main issue we had was that we recognized that in order to fulfill our opportunities and our success, we needed to change our investors. And we wanted to attract a private equity investor and really, we didn’t have the gravitas or skill set to be able to do that. We need to professionalize our financial team. And you were able to help us with both of these things. I’m incredibly grateful.

Ross Brand: There’s been a number of benefits to our organization as a result of having worked with you Roger and with the CFO Centre and to name a few key ones, I just take a few seconds. The first one being that we now have much greater understanding, scrutiny, challenge and discussion around financials, better information to make decisions. And this extends from a board level throughout other parts of the organization. So we have better decisions being made which are more balanced as a result. Other benefits include the fact that we achieved what we set out to achieve in that we attracted and on boarded a private equity investment partner and a debt fund to help complete our management buyout. And the business is now majority owned by the leadership team who were here when you joined us and you’ve helped us immensely. The last one really is that we now have a more rigorous plan, a more rigorous planning cycle and a greater understanding of the things we have to do the needs. We levers we have to pull in order to achieve our expectations and ambitions. So it’s been a been a great experience. Thank you.

Ross Brand: The benefit to me personally is I learned a huge amount from you, which has helped me to be able to ask better questions, make better decisions and ultimately sleep better. As a result of knowing more, got a long way to go, still got lots to learn. But I’m a much better person in terms of understanding our business, our business finances than I was when we started. So, thank you

Ross Brand: The number that really matters to me is three, three is the number of people in my family who I now get to spend the evening with or the weekend with being truly present in the moment as I no longer spend time worrying about what I don’t know or what I have to do. Thank you, Roger.