Andy Penn

I dropped out of school when I was 15 in the UK or in London.

And I can remember my first job in London was basically as a shipping clerk, which was a very junior administration person.

But I remember it vividly because my starting salary at the time was £2,424 a month.

a year.

And the first problem I confronted was that my daily train ticket was 10 pounds a day, which if you do the math, you can work out was more than I was actually earning.

So I had to get a second job to supplement my income to be able to do that.

But I think the thing that I learned and it taught me was that ultimately you can't teach motivation.

You can't teach people what to be passionate about.

And for whatever reason, I wasn't motivated

during my schooling time.

But then when I commenced work, albeit in a very, very junior role, I actually found motivation and I enjoyed it.

And then as a consequence, I did take myself back to evening classes and weekends where I studied my final schooling and I did a first degree.

Then I qualified as the accountant and I did a master's degree.

And so I sort of did do all of that, but rather unconventionally.

the one thing I've had some natural ability for is finance.

But I was always, I guess, in a sense, a little more inquisitive than just doing purely finance.

And so over my career, whilst I've done a lot of finance roles, I've always then sort of tried to push myself to move more into management and strategic roles as well.

But finding that finance and accounting has always been a very, very

great and solid foundation for me and then of course to your question did i find that helpful in terms of doing other roles absolutely when you're the chief financial officer as an example you get to have an opportunity to view the whole of the business there's not many other roles other than the ceo where you have the privilege to be able to do that and then of course you also see it through the lens of the economics of the company which aren't necessarily the only thing that's important but they're a pretty important part of a business obviously

Well, I think moving into the CEO role, which I've done twice in a major publicly limited company, is always a bigger step than you anticipate, even when I did it second time around.