By Nelson Bennett
Business in Vancouver, in partnership with the Institute of Chartered Accountants, is pleased to announce the inaugural BC CFO of the Year Awards to be held in May.
As part of this focus on the contributions of CFOs in the business realm, BIV sat down with Peter Blake, CEO of Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers since 2004. Blake also served as CFO from 2002 to 2004.
I’m a big fan of recognizing excellence. It’s always a great thing to stop, once in a while, and look and see the kind of talent that really exists in the marketplace, and the CFO is an area that probably flies under the radar in lots of surveys and lots of other award-level entities.
The key is getting good people around you, and I was very lucky. I had some great people around me.
No one can do that job on your own. In my role, both as CFO and CEO, the one lesson I’ve learned is, “Surround yourself with a great team of people.” Because if you think you’re going to do it on your own, or if you think, by magically being bestowed a title, that you have to have all the answers, you’re on the wrong track.
It’s like going from Junior A hockey to the NHL. It’s just a big step up in everything you do. It was quite significantly different in terms of regulatory reporting. The Sarbanes-Oxley rules hadn’t yet come into play but they were just on the cusp of coming into play.
The internal reporting didn’t really change. You’re still a partner to the operating business, the revenue-generating side of the business, but there’s a whole other set of constituents that we never had to answer to.
The [foremost] is obviously the investing public, and the analysts and the investors who look at you with an interested eye to determine whether your style of business and your risk profile fits their level of interest for investment. So it’s a brand-new set of constituents.
In general, the U.S. tends to be a bit more litigious, so I think the risk levels in the U.S. are a little higher, so the board’s fiduciary duties are probably a little more heavy in the U.S.
But it doesn’t diminish the complexities in Canada, especially with Canada adopting the IFRS [international financial reporting standards] – the new regulations for financial reporting.
For some companies, especially in the resource sector, that has been extremely complicated and extremely significant in terms of switching their systems over. It’s a huge deal for many of the CFOs who are running financial groups within Canadian entities.
It’s the difference between survival and [not surviving] for some companies. There’s no course that you can take that teaches you how to navigate through these kinds of economic crises.
You have to be smart, and you have to be listening and thinking, and on your feet and nimble, and you have to make hard decisions sometimes. But if you have a good team of people around you, and if you have the right data, you can not only react, but anticipate and steer the organization. So the CFO becomes a very significant player when times are turbulent.