Host

Philippa Lamb 

Guest

Alan Vallance, CEO, ICAEW 

Transcript

Philippa Lamb: Hello, this is the Insights In Focus podcast. I’m Philippa Lamb. If you’re a regular listener, you’ll know that last month we released an episode called So you want to be a leader?. What you might not know is that ICAEW has a new leader too, CEO Alan Vallance. So, this seemed like the perfect moment to get his take on life at the top…

Alan Vallance: [I sat on an executive team with an atmospheric chemist, a meteorologist, a hydrologist, and an oceanographer – and a chartered accountant.]

PL: …and some major challenges he’s already faced working overseas…

AV: [I was dealing with armed robberies at times in post offices, serious incidents, loss of life at one point, tragically.]

PL: Welcome to the podcast, Alan.

AV: Thank you, Philippa, it’s great to be here.

PL: You began your career at EY in London. Why accountancy?

AV: Well, it was actually EW at the time, so I guess that date stamps me a little bit. I did my degree at York University – it was economics, and I just loved economics. During that course, I thought to myself, should I become an economist? But the job opportunities were quite limited and there weren’t that many of them, and most of my graduate year ended up going to London to train to be chartered accountants. So, I started to look at that. I heard stories about, you know, if you want to be the CEO, be a chartered accountant, so I was quite attracted to that as a career opportunity.

PL: That was already in your mind?

AV: It was yeah, actually, although I never at the time thought how I would get there. But it was something that I was really interested in. But perhaps the clincher, which I was settled on, was the fact that in doing the chartered accountancy qualification, in the first year you had to do what at that time was called the graduate conversion course with four exams, one of which was economics. And I’d got a BA in that, I got exempted, so I thought, this sounds more and more attractive. So, I ended up applying to most of the Big Six, as they were at that time, through the milk round process. I was successful in getting an offer with Ernst & Whinney so I started in Beckett House back in the day, 1986. It had the sculpture outside the front door, which isn’t there any more. It was a great period, I really enjoyed it. I think that probably accountancy chose me, first off, rather than me choosing it, but then it developed from there.

PL: Having said that, you didn’t stay long, did you? You moved to Hertz. Was it just five years?

AV: I qualified and I moved up to a supervisor level. This was when the Berlin Wall had just fallen, and the firm had become EY by that stage, Ernst & Young. I was asked to move into the corporate finance team to go over to Eastern Europe to do merger and acquisition work because the western companies were looking at buying eastern state-owned companies. So, I went over to do due diligence M&A work. I spent several months in Budapest and this lovely town on the border with Austria called Györ, which is the home of the Hungarian state-owned biscuit company, which was being bought out by United Biscuits. I was involved in that, and it was a wonderful experience. I’d not really travelled outside of the UK before, and I got the travel bug. I came back and I then pursued a role which would allow me to really see the world, and I ended up moving into an internal audit role with Hertz Rent-a-car. That job got me round the world. I spent two years travelling constantly, living out of a suitcase, and I didn’t see a winter for literally two years. That was a brilliant experience.

PL: Tell me a bit more about the Eastern European experience, because that was a fascinating moment – there was a lot of tension, there was a lot of excitement, there was a huge influx of people like you going into Eastern Europe to do jobs like the one you’ve just described. What was it like? Because culturally, it must have been really different.

AV: It was fantastic. When I arrived at the weekend – and Hungarian is a very different language, I think Finnish the only related language to Hungarian – I felt a bit like a fish out of water. And my German, which is the second language, I did O-Level German, but it wasn’t terrific. The architecture is very different, and the Trabants motoring around the roads with smoke spilling out, it felt like a very different place. But the firm itself, Ernst & Young had an office at the time, and the team there were locals, but also people from the UK, from the US. It was a fantastic environment to be a team. Heading out to Györ, we had translators with us, but the team at the factory that we were at were great. They were very friendly, and they were very giving, and it really was an amazing experience. And that country was going through so much change at the time.

PL: It’s interesting you say they were welcoming. I would have imagined there might have been a bit of suspicion, maybe even a bit of hostility, but no?

AV: No, I never sensed any. There were times where I thought, have I done the wrong thing? I do remember travelling on the train from Budapest out to Györ, and I sat in a seat that was free. Little did I know that actually there was a booking system and there were seat numbers allocated, and that seat was allocated to a military official in uniform, an officer. And I think I was sleeping at the time when this person showed up. So, I made a couple of faux pas in a new place doing new things. But on the whole, it was a brilliant experience.

PL: Well that’s working overseas, isn’t it? And you moved on, it was Australia after that.

AV: I think over my career I’ve worked in 20 countries. Most of them were during that two-year period travelling around Europe and Asia. I emigrated to Australia in 1991 and I spent 21 years over there. Again, initially I went into an internal audit role with what was then ICI Australia, so it felt familiar. It’s a good entree into that organisation. But pretty soon after that, I actually wanted to go into mainstream management roles, and I ended up going to work for the post office in Australia, which is a different beast to the post office here in some ways. There are some similarities, but a different kind of makeup of the way it did business.

PL: Huge, presumably?

AV: Yeah, $3bn, $4bn turnover, 35,000 employees, so a very, very large organisation. But the entree was the finance team, and I was employed by somebody who was a fellow of the ICAEW. That was terrific because he was somebody that recognised my qualification and experience. I worked with him for about two weeks before I was sent out to another part of the operation, and I then spent the next 15 years doing 13 completely different roles across the whole organisation.

PL: What sort of things?

AV: Everything from running the post office network in Victoria doing strategic planning, product development. I was what was called Group Manager, Philatelic, so I was responsible for stamp design and stamp production.

PL: This is a wide portfolio!

AV: There was warehousing logistics, electronic commerce. So, it really did give me a fantastically broad experience, which led to me then becoming a general manager and then moving into ultimately the COO role, and I left to join the weather bureau in Australia.

PL: That’s a fantastic crash course in everything you could conceivably need to know, isn’t it?

AV: I think I got to the point where I learned as much about what not to do as to do, but it was a fantastic experience. Some really difficult challenges too, in those sorts of environments. I was dealing with armed robberies at times in post offices, serious incidents, loss of life, at one point, tragically, but a whole host of big challenges, taking what was a very physical business, and it started to move into the digital and e-commerce space. So, there were a range of really challenging people-management issues, as well.

PL: What sort of things?

AV: Well, it’s very heavily unionised, so there were meetings with unions about particular issues affecting staff.

PL: And how were relations between union and management?

AV: They were generally pretty good. The managing director of that we had at the time had put a lot of effort into industrial relations, so it was quite a positive workplace in that sense. It wasn’t without its challenges, but on the whole I think it was a very positive experience. The union rep had a role to play, and the manager had a role to play, but it was done pretty much respectfully. But there were times when it was a bit of a challenge.

PL: And the management culture?

AV: It was generally very good. I did get the opportunity to work in so many different parts of the organisation. Nobody was pigeonholed into a certain functional string. So as an accountant originally, I could move to different parts of the organisation.

PL: That was quite advanced for the time. You didn’t really see that a lot then.

AV: I think you’re probably right, actually. But equally, towards the latter stages of my time there, I picked up a project to lead, something called Coach As Line Manager. We were getting into helping managers have difficult conversations with staff, but actually more about the positive side of it – how do I coach my team for a better outcome? That was great, I really enjoyed that, and I’ve taken quite a bit of that forwards into the other roles that I’ve done over the subsequent period. It was a great grounding, and there were some brilliant people I worked with who I’m still in touch with to this day. I learned a lot about it, but there were times when there were things I didn’t like, and I saw things that I wasn’t particularly happy with.

PL: What sort of things?

AV: I can remember one manager who went into a sales area who had been newly appointed, and he was somebody that you would expect to see in the 1970s, commanding control. He addressed this sales team by saying something along the lines of, ‘I’m the new manager, and you are koalas.’ People said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘You’re an endangered species.’ I was quite shocked to hear that.

PL: Leading with fear.

AV: Pretty much. And that as much as anything else was one of the things that taught us what not to do as much as to do. But there were many more positives, I have to say. The organisation was going through quite a lot of change.

PL: Downsizing?

AV: It has recently, but the impact of e-commerce on the letters business hadn’t really kicked in, it was just starting to as I left. The parcels business was becoming really quite successful, so that kind of balanced out. But I think since then it’s gone slightly the other way.

PL: I always think that your first encounter with those sort of moments in business, it’s hard isn’t it, when you’re actually sitting there thinking, these people are going to need to lose their jobs and I’m going to be in charge of that?

AV: Yes, I think so. You’ve just reminded me of an experience when we closed a post office. We had to have a community meeting, it was in an outer suburb of Melbourne where I was living. There were a number of us from the management team who went to attend the community meeting, and I was actually on crutches at the time, because I had torn my calf muscles. So, I hobbled into this meeting to be confronted by some very angry local residents who were very passionate – quite rightly so – about their post office. There were in fact two post offices in the town, and we were consolidating everything into the one post office. I remember one really passionate gent standing up, and he said to us, ‘You’re worse than the Japs were in the war’, some really confronting, personal affronts. I remember thinking that I can understand that that person was very passionate, and I learned a lesson, not just with that but with some other things, where what I’ve respected is cool, calm, collected leadership, people who can behave respectfully but actually understand that on the other side of the table, some people can get very angry and passionate. Passion is a wonderful thing, and I’m really keen to tap into the passion of people in the workplace, but it can sometimes be negative just as much as positive.

PL: Yeah, it’s that understanding, isn’t it, about how change is experienced in a very personal way when you’re not the person in charge of it, when it’s being done to you?

AV: Exactly. There’s an expression I’ve used, which is you do it with people, not to people. An important part of that is actually sitting down to understand who you’re working with, to understand them and what drives them. And particularly when you need to change an organisation, have you explained very clearly why we need to change? In the main most people will understand there’ll be an impact on them and their situation potentially – or not. But if you don’t understand where they’re coming from, you’re not necessarily going to get a good outcome.

PL: Good communication.

AV: Very much so, yeah.

PL: Talking of change, you moved on to the Bureau of Meteorology after that?

AV: I did yeah. It’s been a bit of a journeyman of a career in some senses, hasn’t it? I went to the Bureau of Meteorology, it’s the Met Office equivalent in Australia. It was run by the director who was at the time an atmospheric chemist. I was brought in as the COO to run the back office operations.

PL: And that was your first COO role?

AV: It was my first COO role, yeah. I sat on an executive team with an atmospheric chemist, a meteorologist, a hydrologist, and an oceanographer – and a chartered accountant.

PL: Quite a change from the usual management team.

AV: But again, they were really welcoming, and we all played to our strengths. I remember many times when Greg, the director, a guy called Dr. Greg Ayers, we would have a conversation at the executive meeting, which might lead into a scientific conversation with four scientists in the room, and he always made sure that if it got too technical, he would look at me and explain what they were talking about. I really appreciated it. He was a wonderfully thoughtful leader who took the time to think about his team and whether they engaged in the conversation. How could they be engaged? He was brilliant at levelling the playing field. And it was a really good team, actually, we worked really well together. But it was an organisation – and still is – where there’s a really noble purpose in what you do. Your job is to protect lives and property. It’s really interesting when the organisation is running and the weather’s fine, as it were, the organisation operates like many others, it has its silos, the finance team are doing their thing. They’re having a discussion with the HR team, somebody hasn’t given them a report, there’s a bit of tension. But as soon as you have an extreme weather event, all those silos disappear and there’s a common purpose. It’s incredible to see those sorts of organisations have that a single objective, that noble purpose, and everybody’s on the same team. And you do that for two, three, four days – however long that event lasts – and at the end of it, when the adrenaline stops running, you sort of reflect and say, ‘That was brilliant, how can we keep that up?’ But you can’t, that level of intensity, of focus, because it’s essentially kind of an emergency service operation.

PL: It’s interesting, because we hear a lot about common purpose. You know, it’s the aspiration of all leadership to bring everyone along with a clear understanding of what you’re all there for. But as you say, that’s a great organisation, you know exactly what you’re there for. It’s really transparent and you can see it in real time. That’s harder to do in organisations where there isn’t that sort of clarity.

AV: That is true. Not always, but yes, I think that generally can be true. You have to sit down and understand where we are heading. I had a really interesting conversation with Peter Moore, who used to be the CEO of Liverpool Football Club. I met him a few years ago, we were at a conference together. Peter had been born and raised in Liverpool, he’d emigrated to California, worked in Silicon Valley, did very well, and then came back to the UK to run Liverpool for a period as the CEO. I’d been working in Australia for a long period of time, so we were comparing the culture of the workplace in those two countries with the UK. There are some real differences, so we were talking about that, and then I asked him about the big challenge when he went back to be the CEO at Liverpool. He said, ‘Well, actually, the problem was, we didn’t have a common purpose.’ And I said, ‘Really? I would have thought as a sporting club that the purpose is for the club to be successful.’ But actually, he made the point, ‘We’ve got a lot of different parts of the organisation, it’s a very big organisation behind the scenes, and the most important thing was to get us all on the same page.’ So even in organisations where you might expect the goal is clear, it might not always be. The more complex the organisation, the less clear the goal is likely to be. So that kind of leadership role of setting the direction is really important, but even more important is communicating it in a way that people can understand, and then you’re role modelling what you want people to be able to do as well.

PL: I read somewhere that you had first-hand experience of what you were at the Bureau for when you saw a plague of locusts.

AV: Well, I didn’t see them, but it was in 2011. At the time, there were some really very serious floods in Queensland and in New South Wales, two states of Australia. It was a terrible situation in a place called the Lockyer Valley, which is just outside of Brisbane, where there was severe inundation. Tragically 26 people or so lost their lives in the flooding. The centre of Brisbane was flooded, the river had broken its banks, and literally the actual centre of Brisbane itself was flooded. There were also bushfires in three states at the same time.

PL: And you had a response to all this as an organisation?

AV: Yeah. There was also the Fukushima tsunami and then the subsequent nuclear, radioactive cloud, and a plague of locusts in Victoria. It literally was a biblical event. The way the organisation was working at the time, you have weather forecasters who are based in each state of Australia. In the summertime, you have American forecasters who come over to help with the firefighting activities, and in Australia, they go over to the US in their summertime. Normally, you can deal with a severe weather event because it’s one event in one location. But when you see so many simultaneous events happening, actually, you can see literally the infrastructure of the organisation starting to creak. It was at the height of climate scepticism, I guess I would say, to me, it felt like this stuff is actually real. Working with the scientists who were saying, ‘Here’s the data, this stuff is real.’ So, at that time, it really felt like the organisation was really, really struggling to respond to that series of events. But the team are amazing, they pulled together, we dealt with it. There were some really resourceful people. The Brisbane office, where our state-based team were actually in a high-rise building, they were literally trapped in the building because they couldn’t get out with the flooding. They had to improvise, do all sorts of wonderful things like head to different floors and try and get toilet roll because they’d run out, all these sorts of things. Food delivered in boats, those sorts of things.

PL: Really firefighting.

AV: Literally, but we got through and it’s amazing. It’s a rare thing for people to have – I’m not sure that opportunity is the right word – but to go through that experience as an organisation.

PL: Well, yeah, it’s a real learning opportunity, isn’t it? Without wishing to sound remotely callous about the events themselves, there’s lots to learn when you’ve finished firefighting.

AV: Very much so.

PL: And did they do that?

AV: They did actually. In fact, there was a Royal Commission around the flooding, so there were lots of investigations and understanding of why it had happened and what could be done. There are things you can’t prevent – it was more about adaptation to those events. So, there were lots of things that came out of that piece of work, some of which the bureau adopted and other organisations, too. But that point about learning, I think it’s really important. One of the roles of leadership is to provide an environment not just for people to succeed, but to provide an environment where they can learn, and learn from mistakes sometimes. I’m a big fan of encouraging people, that it’s OK to fail, but that they need to learn from that experience. And certainly, I lived the dream with that and with the weather bureau during that time.

PL: When you came back to the UK, you went into something totally different, didn’t you?

AV: I did, I became the Chief Operating Officer at The Law Society, which is the professional body for solicitors.

PL: Was that a choice, or was it just the job that popped up and you thought, yeah, I could do that?

AV: It was a job that popped up, but I fitted the role because I’d been a COO. I kind of worked it out during the process of applying that my skill set, my USP, was effectively taking the best of the past into a brave new world. The organisations I’ve worked for over my career collectively have a history which is just short of 1,000 years, it’s something like 962 and counting. And they’ve all been challenged by regulatory change, technological substitution. But they’ve all got fantastic assets, people, histories, and it’s about taking the very best of those things and transforming them into that future state. And that’s effectively what I’ve been doing since I’ve been running those organisations for last 12 years.

PL: That was your first CEO Role, is that right?

AV: That was my second COO role, and then after I left The Law Society I went to The Royal Institute of British Architects, the RIBA, where I became CEO, and then spent six years or so as CEO of that organisation.

PL: Obviously very different organisations, but thinking about the roles, how different was that?

AV: Lots of similarities. They’re both Royal Charter bodies, they’re both professional bodies, they sit atop their profession, they represent them, and in some cases, regulate them. And when you look at these organisations, they regard themselves often as unique, but actually, when you look across, there’s lots of similarities. We do have a CEO forum, a number of us who get together and talk about being lonely at the top. But actually, there are a number of CEOs of professional bodies who all have things in common, so we get together regularly, we share ideas and problems, and it’s a really fantastic experience, actually.

PL: They are very particular organisations, aren’t they?

AV: They are, and while they’re all the same construct under a Royal Charter, they’re all effectively groups of companies. Some of them are charities, some of them are not, but the fundamental DNA of the organisation is the same. They are a Royal Charter professional body holding members to the highest standards in the public interest.

PL: And accountable to the members as well. The members hold power, don’t they?

AV: They do. Some of these organisations have a council as the overarching body, some of them don’t. Some of them have a different construct. But essentially, they were all born in Victorian England, in the main, through from about 1830, to 1880, 1890, that sort of period. It was a learned society, all male as well – nowadays not, which is great. But they came from the desire for a group of learned people to help themselves to be more learned to educate each other. And they had some other philanthropic objectives, so there’s a lot of work around the education of young people, perhaps in disadvantaged areas.

PL: And promoting the profession as well.

AV: Promoting the profession, yes. That period of time is the time when the organisations that they are today became, if you like, professional, because they became organisations that were given the Royal Charter, they were organisations where the professions themselves were really sort of evolving at that stage.

PL: So, for you, how is it different being a CEO as opposed to a COO? Is it radically different?

AV: It is different. The span of what you’re responsible for is the whole organisation, not just a part of it.

PL: But COO roles can be very, very broad and as well.

AV: They can be. There is a sort of step up. It is the case that there’s only one CEO and there are more C-suite officers. So ultimately, you’re responsible for the organisation, for what it’s doing. You’re accountable to the board or the council, whatever the governance structure is.

PL: Did you like it straight away?

AV: Oh, definitely. I did, because I can sort of go back to what I said early on in the conversation – it was through my qualification and then my experience that led me to be where I am.

PL: You were ready, weren’t you? You had a lot of private-sector experience or quasi-public-sector experience to bring. I presume you did bring that in, in perhaps a way they hadn’t had before?

AV: Well, I believe it is probably for others to judge, but I think I did. I think I had the overall goal – I do want to be a CEO. But looking back, if you’d said to me, what’s the route, I would never have picked and told you about the journey I’ve taken because it’s taken me all the way around the world and back to 20 different countries, numerous organisations, and a whole host of different situations. It’s been a rich and rewarding experience because of that, but I could never have plotted the path.

PL: But you must have a phenomenal network.

AV: It’s pretty good. I’ve made some friends over the years and been connected to people, and that’s been great. I’m still in touch with lots of people right the way back from university, through to my early days in accountancy and beyond.

PL: It’s interesting thinking about the network you must have acquired, and people you can draw now when you come up against stuff that’s maybe new to you, because we talked about this in the last leadership podcast we did. All the guests had interesting stuff to bring around that. But Sarah Walker-Smith, the CEO of Ampa, the legal services network, she mentioned for aspirant leaders that really the key thing is get that network going early, and as broad as you can get it. She also brought the point about how it’s really important to understand the organisation as a whole, not just your bit, even if you’re quite junior. Would that chime with you?

AV: It would, absolutely. I think one of the great things about doing the chartered accountancy qualification and doing auditing is you got to see a range across a large part of an organisation, and I think that was brilliant. It was a great grounding in starting to unpick things: hold on a minute, what’s this all about? How does this work? So, you start to ask questions. Who are you? What do you do and why? And that starts you enquiring about, is that the right way we can do it? Is there a better way of doing it? That was great, coupled with the opportunity – and I think luck perhaps does play a part – where you’re in an organisation where you are allowed to do pretty much anything you want to do. Being given a huge range of opportunities, building up that experience. But one of the things I have said to people is, I remember the things that I learned way back when I did my chartered accountancy training, and I still use those skills.

PL: She said exactly the same thing.

AV: To this day, I still use them, and they’ve been really helpful. So, my skills have been transferable as a chartered accountant, which is great. But I’ve added to that with experience in a whole series of different operations, organisations, countries, and that rich breadth of experience, that diverse experience is so important. People go up through a kind of functional hierarchy and can get to the top, but I’m a firm believer in the fact that the broader the experience in that organisation, the richer your contribution to that organisation in the end.

PL: Yeah. One of the other panellists, Joe Dubbin – he’s MD at Cripps Leadership Advisors – he raised a point I hadn’t thought about before, which was that if you wanted to equip yourself for really senior roles, you might like to dig into the practicalities of creating functional SMEs from the ground up, because the chances are, you’re going to have to do it at some stage.

AV: I think that’s very true. I would certainly agree with that comment.

PL: Not sexy, but useful.

AV: Yes, exactly.

PL: Because that’s not something you ever hear about, is it? But as you said, when you get there, if you’re the one who knows how to do that stuff, that’s going to be really helpful.

AV: Very true. Or if you don’t know, your network will contain somebody that does.

PL: They all talked about constant ambiguity, particularly since the pandemic. Did you find that in the roles that you’ve had since then?

AV: Oh, very much so.

PL: How did it manifest itself?

AV: In various different ways. I can think of examples going way back. When I was at the post office in Australia, even, we were acquiring a company, and we needed the government to say yes or no. But we never thought they’d give us a third option, which was to not respond, which then forced the organisation to think about what it was going to do or not. Ambiguity is something you just have to live and deal with.

PL: More of it since the pandemic?

AV: I think so. If you look at the workplace of the future, I don’t think since the pandemic the world has really settled into, you know, what is the future of the workplace? How many days a week are people going to be in work? Do we allow teams to set their own timetables? All those sorts of things are not locked in yet. So, whether you call it ambiguity or flexibility, I think as a leader, you’ve got to look at a whole range of different options. Maybe it’s those different options and an analysis of those, but ultimately you may not have all of the information, things may still be ambiguous. But ultimately as the CEO you’re going to have to make a call. You have to learn to be less than perfectionistic at times, if I can say that, because you’re never going to have all the information and if you wait, it’ll be too late. You need to have made some decisions before that.

PL: Decide, trial stuff, and then think again.

AV: I think so yeah.

PL: I’d like to wrap this up by asking you your thoughts about who the future leaders are going to be in the next five, 10, 15 years. We asked the guests that question. We asked them about things like management styles and all the old tropes about men and women perhaps being expected to manage differently, rather than manage differently in reality. Sarah says she’s still often the only woman, the only CEO in the room – which I’ve got to say I was a bit surprised – when she goes to high-level meetings. What do you think it’s going to take to get a broader talent pool stepping up to those leadership roles? To feel that they can, and they should, and it is for them?

AV: How long have we got? There’s a number of things I would say. Firstly, that there’s a leader at the top of the organisation that is in a position to make that happen and wants to. I think you’ve got to role model what you want the organisation to be. So as a leader, if you want it to be diverse, then you’ve got to do something about it. If you’re looking as an organization at bringing new people into the organisation, the net has to be a lot wider. I think it has changed. I was recruited through the university milk round approach and there were no school-leavers appointed to my organisation in 1986. Although we did actually have the last two article clerks at the time. But it’s really fascinating to see that the world has turned almost full circle.

PL: Degree apprenticeships, that sort of thing.

AV: So many different pathways towards starting an accountancy qualification. So, I see that things have improved, but I think the worst thing I or anybody else could do is to say, that’s great job done, because it’s only just begun. I think it’s also about an ongoing commitment. Change doesn’t happen overnight, you’ve got to keep at it. And you need to listen, as well, as one of my bosses used to say way back when. Listen with big ears, because you can often, as a leader, start to talk and everybody else just listens. But I think you’ve actually got to listen first and understand the situation, and then do something about it.

PL: You’ve had a busy career.

AV: I have, yeah, but a really rewarding one. I wouldn’t have changed it.

PL: How’s the new job feeling? You’ve only just got your feet under the table.

AV: People tell me it’s week four, I’d stopped counting. But people keep reminding me and hopefully next week, maybe they won’t say five. So, it’s four weeks now as we’re recording this, but I was with the organisation for a couple of months beforehand. Michael Izza and I had a lot of time to do a really good handover. It’s a bit of a unique time, I’ve never had that luxury and it’s been great, so I’ve been able to hit the ground running. But there’s so much more to do. It’s a brilliant organisation, and I’m not saying that just because it’s my own professional body. I think Michael has left it in really good shape, and it’s a solid foundation to build on. But I think there’s so much more to do: AI, sustainability, the future ACA qualification being revamped, there’s so much, and there’s some really exciting things to look forward to. I can’t wait.

PL: Well, thanks for sparing the time.

AV: You’re welcome.

PL: Head to the show notes or, of course, the website for more information on leadership. Join us early in May for the next podcast. In the meantime, if you’ve enjoyed this discussion, please rate, review and share the episode. And of course, you can subscribe to the whole series on whichever podcast app you like best. Thanks for being with us.