Daria Rudnik (00:01.909)
Welcome to Built by People Leaders. I'm your host, Daria Rudnik, and this show is for HR and L&D leaders in scale ups and fast growing companies, those building real impact from within and shaping AI ready organizations. Each episode, I sit down with people leaders to talk about how they build strong cultures and shape organizations around them. It's about HR being seen as a true business partner by leaders and by HR themselves. So let's dive in. Because today I have a very interesting guest, Tom Hunter.

He's the founder of Story Recruitment, a specialist accounting and finance search from helping founder-led high-growth tech, fintech, and deep tech companies make their first finance higher. And eventually the first CEO. He's built a network of 29,000 finance professionals across Australia and hosts the CE4 Track podcast interviewing Australia's top CFOs about leadership and scaling. Welcome, Tom.

Tom Hunter (00:57.368)
Thank you. Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Daria Rudnik (00:59.795)
Wow, I'm excited about our conversation. Have so many questions for you. And I'll start with the first one. Like HR and finance. We are kind of the back office, cost centers. How do you prove your value as a as a ch as a finance expert? How do you prove your value to business?

Tom Hunter (01:02.018)
Yeah.

Tom Hunter (01:18.382)
I think you do have to get away from that thinking of back office because I think that's holding you back for one. But I I think it just comes down to proving your value in it in what you do. So just because you're not making money doesn't mean you're not proving value. And say for for finance, it might be things about like creating efficiencies or saving money, or it might be adding additional value in other areas to help make them make better commercial decisions.

And so that applies again for HR, whereas people and the culture of a business is kind of the most important thing. Like if your culture sucks and the people don't want to be there, then like the the business is is cooked, right? So I think helping them make better people decisions to ensure the the teams are more resilient, to ensure you got high engagement and people are more bought into doing their job well. Because if people want to be there and are bought into what the business is creating.

then you've got a a much more efficient and much more productive environment.

Daria Rudnik (02:20.887)
Yeah, I loved it. Like helping business make better decisions. That's that's so true. I mean, in finance you help business make better finance decisions and people you help business make better people decision. And that's the those are critical elements. Well, tell us a little bit about yourself and your story. I mean, how did you actually like started doing what you're doing now?

Tom Hunter (02:30.881)
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.

Tom Hunter (02:39.413)
Yeah, so well I guess is a long story. so I I was originally a primary teacher, funnily enough. So I I was doing primary teaching in in Australia and then I moved to London. This was what, twenty sixteen? Yeah, twenty sixteen. And so I I didn't want to do teaching anymore when I got there. It's like I just didn't love it and it's ended up just yelling at six year olds at it like is 'cause

London's London's funny because like you'll have some really, really affluent areas and you'll have some areas where within the same junction you've got people that are on the other side of it. So to have some kids that come in that are really gifted and are reading like two or three years above, and then some other kids that might not have had breakfast that morning or might come in with bruises or all that. And it is I found it very, very difficult. It wasn't for me. And I think there's a

I don't know, I can't remember exactly what the stat is, but I think 50% of teachers quit in the first 12 months, something like that. Pretty crazy. But I I I was part of that stat. And so I I had no degree that was useful to me anymore. So I basically just Googled how to make money without a degree. And you know, and because I was in London and recruitment's so big in London, it it can't recruitment came up. And so I didn't really know much about it at the time, but kind of got into it.

Daria Rudnik (03:42.803)
It's it's a hard job, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Tom Hunter (04:03.425)
and then just spoke to a few different people and they're like, Yeah, this is it does this, you do this, you do this. And I'm like, okay, right. And so I went for a few interviews and still didn't really understand what I was doing at the time. but finally got offered a role, which was great. And so I got into it in London. so it was accounting and finance recruitment in the my previous business. I've been doing accounting finance recruitment for about 10 years now. And then I started my own business at the start of this year, so about seven months ago.

And so I when I when I started the business, because the n name of the business is called story recruitment. And so I've always had a really strong affinity to storytelling and telling stories myself, but also hearing stories. And founders are always the best storytellers in a business, the best salespeople. And so they'll tell about where the business has been, where they're going, what their vision is for it. And I always loved that. And so I wanted to lean into that as much as possible. And so that's where the name come from.

And then when I was deciding which verticals and what to focus on, I wanted to future proof the business as much as I could. So understanding where investment was going, but also understanding where the roles are going too. So in in Australia, 70 no eighty percent, eighty percent of VC capital goes towards tech, fintech, and deep tech. So deep tech being like space, robotics, science based, engineering, that kind of thing.

And so, okay, they're the verticals. And then with everything happening with AI, it's hard to know where finance is going to be in the next few years, but there will always be a human in the loop at the top. And so the first finance hire in a in a in a startup is so critical for ensuring that they do get the most out of the capital they've got available and that they do it in the right way. And so that first finance person is always going to be person. And then the first CFO

Is always going to be a person too. Anything below that is probably up for debate. And so that was that was kind of the strategy behind it. Really niche down to the markets that are going to be growing, but also focusing on the roles that hopefully will still be prevalent in 10 to 15 years' time when I'm hopefully still in this job.

Daria Rudnik (06:20.255)
Cool. Cool. So

But fine why finance?

Tom Hunter (06:26.273)
Why finance? well that was all I'd done, so I don't know any different to an extent. But I kinda like it. And finance gets this bad rap, right? Like ticket taker, back office, support function, and like accountants are boring or whatever. Like it was who is it Kevin from the from the office? Kevin is like the the guy with the chili and all that. So so finance gets a bad rap, but I think the very best finance people

Daria Rudnik (06:47.617)
Yeah.

Tom Hunter (06:55.723)
Are commercial enablers. They're next to the CFR CEO, next to the founder, and they're driving commercial business outcomes through efficiencies, through capital raising, for mergers, acquisitions. They're very, very strategic. And I love that. I think it can make such a difference and can be the difference between a good and a bad business. And so I am, yeah, that that's why finance, I guess.

Daria Rudnik (07:18.359)
I mean, I I I agree. again, it's kind of similar to HR. You can have like admin stuff, recruitment, someone people like doing the job and everyone's saying, okay, I mean just do the job. I don't care what you think. But if you have really strategic person helping you make better people decisions, again, the same comes with mergers' acquisitions, launching offices in new countries. I mean, you you can't do that without good HR person.

Tom Hunter (07:33.121)
Yeah.

Tom Hunter (07:38.102)
So

Daria Rudnik (07:46.613)
And obviously you cannot grow your business without a great finance person. That that's for sure. You know what I'm curious about? well, we're talking about startups, let's say. and then and when they're looking for their first or a potential CFO, the first finance hire, there's always this kind of tension, okay, w who is that I'm gonna hire? On one hand, I need someone who will be doing that with their hands, like someone

Tom Hunter (08:05.164)
Mm.

Tom Hunter (08:13.196)
Mm.

Daria Rudnik (08:14.145)
Who's hands-on, who's who's okay to make them dirty and and do some stuff. On the other hand, like you said, they need someone who's strategic, who is commercially oriented, who understands business, who can see into the future. And finding this balance between people who can do things and people who can think big, it's it's pretty hard. How do you help founders do that?

Tom Hunter (08:24.375)
Mm.

Tom Hunter (08:36.673)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so the first finance hire is rarely a CFO. you don't need a CFO early. Normally it's might be like a financial controller or a head of finance or a VP of finance. And your first first finance person isn't necessarily a specialist either. They're a generalist. And early days in a startup, you just need people to do things well and quickly rather than perfect. So you just need to keep moving forward.

So you don't really need the specialist CFO until a little bit further down the track. And it might be series B, Series C, it really depends on the type of the company that you're you're running. But how you ascertain pace and dealing with ambiguity and being able to work in an unstructured environment, because that's what startups are. They're messy, constantly growing. The data's not perfect. So you need to figure it out and just be a problem solver. So finding for that.

Obviously they need the the technical skill set of understanding accounting and FPNA and that's always important. But most good people will have that. And even if they don't know everything, they'll know to go find out. Because no matter what role you do, and in any business you go into, there's always going to be something you don't know. And so if you if you go in expecting you know everything and then when something goes wrong you don't know how to fix it, then that's a problem. But if you go in understanding, okay, I don't know everything, but

I'll go figure it out. I'll find out the answer through either someone else or ask for help or I'll go research it myself. I think those type of people are the ones that that thrive.

Daria Rudnik (10:15.762)
Mm-hmm. And I I do you agree that you need different kind of people for different stages of organization. And well, let's say you have a startup, you need someone who's ready to like live with ambiguity and make quick decisions. When you go to the scale up, you need to grow first, you need to move faster. When you go to the enterprise, you need structure, you need kind of certain procedures, you need to balance between long term and short term goals.

Tom Hunter (10:27.448)
Hmm. Yep.

Tom Hunter (10:42.766)
Sure.

Daria Rudnik (10:43.776)
How do you like in terms of building a team, how do you manage that? Do you I don't know hire people for each stage and then let them go? Do you do like how do you make sure that on on a like specific stage organization is right now you have the right people?

Tom Hunter (11:01.954)
Yeah. So it it that is hard. That is hard because very rarely does an individual scale with a business in the same role anyway, because people don't grow at the same rate as a business. Because a business can genuinely hockey stick, right? Whereas a individual doesn't do the same. So think structuring your hires in a way that okay, is this

Role going to be something that we need someone above in time, or are we going to give support around that person? So say you hire at a financial controller level, for example, because that's a really good level to hire at because for the first finance hire, because then you they can get the structure in place. And then you once the business grows to a level where they have the scale to require more strategic input, then you can hire that CFO because then you've got you've got a genuine gap there between

operations and strategic value. And so that person can come in and it's natural. The issue, what you can get sometimes if you hire two senior of a head of finance or a VP of finance, because then they're naturally thinking that next step for them is CFO. And so if you then go and hire a CFO above them in time, which you may do, that's a difficult conversation because they're probably thinking internally

That I'm that CFO. When we get to that point, I'm naturally going to get that CFO role. And for some it does, definitely. But it is rare for a business to for an individual to grow personally and their in their professional development as quickly as a business does, if they're really, really scaling. But I think that just ultimately comes down to how you manage your people. If you've got a really good development structure in place and your catch-ups are really clear and everyone's aware of where they stand in their own development.

Daria Rudnik (12:42.539)
Yeah.

Tom Hunter (12:52.354)
then hopefully those conversations aren't a surprise, but it's never never easy being told that okay, you're not the person you we thought you were, we're gonna hire someone above you. It's not fun.

Daria Rudnik (13:03.572)
That is that is so true. and again, not just in terms of CFO, you hire a marketing specialist, marketing expert who's expecting to be a CMO, you hiring an HR person who's expecting to be like a C CHRO of someone like CTO. I mean you hire someone who ex wants to be a CTO. And even you might want like you might invite someone to be your first CTO because you you do need that kind of person, but being a CTO in a

Tom Hunter (13:09.154)
Hmm. Yep. Yep.

Daria Rudnik (13:31.094)
three people startup and being a CTO in a one hundred scale up people ha one hundred people scale up, it's a different story.

Tom Hunter (13:33.294)
Very different.

Tom Hunter (13:38.329)
Sure. And that and that's the same in finance too, because say your first CFO is very, very different to an IPO CFO or an established listed CFO, and that's fine. They're different roles. But having clarity and having a really clear understanding of the differences between those people, then that's that's fine. it's just how you go about it.

Daria Rudnik (14:04.03)
And and these are kind of people decisions like every founder and CEO need to make, but they might not have experience to understand that. They might not have time to think about all of this. And having an an an HR person who understands that kind of questions, you can think three steps ahead and say, Hey, well, let's not give this person a VP title yet, because we're not sure, because we might have consequences. Is it's a it's a good thing to have someone who can support

Tom Hunter (14:16.429)
Hmm.

Tom Hunter (14:28.984)
Yeah. Yeah yeah.

Daria Rudnik (14:34.058)
found us with that.

You mentioned a very interesting question to me, and that's like who owns hiring decisions inside Fast-growing Company? Is it HR? Is it like business, founder, both, I don't know, executive team? Who owns those decisions?

Tom Hunter (14:55.662)
I think it's a bit of both, isn't it? Because so the the founder of the CEO have so much on their plate, and eventually it's going to become too much for them to be focused just on people. And that's probably when you start to hire that HR person or that internal talent person. You're definitely going to need an internal talent person because recruitment fees are expensive. So if you can if you can hire that internally, then fantastic. And the

The outcomes of a successful business early is purely down to talent. If you're bringing in good people over and over and over, then you're pretty likely to have a pretty successful company. But if you're relying upon just an ad up there or referrals or just the odd thing here and there, that the density of talent is probably going to start incrementally dropping. So if you can bring in a really good talent person and HR person, or if it's the same person, fantastic. But

What what a metric that I normally give to founders, this is for finance, I imagine it probably the same for HR. If your day or your week is starting to become more than 20% of your time is being spent on finance, it's probably the same for recruitment. If more than a fifth of your week is being spent on recruitment, you need to hire a recruitment person or you need to hire a HR person. And as you start getting bigger and bigger and bigger, like more people generally equals more problems.

So you're gonna have these people problems that you need to manage. And you don't wanna because it'd be very rare for a founder to be coming from a HR background or a people background. So it's just not their specialty. So they shouldn't be spending time on it. So you bring in someone that knows what they're doing. They're probably a a people generalist, like the first finance hire, but they can just help out in as many areas that are people related as possible and just take that load and mental capacity off your plate.

Daria Rudnik (16:48.008)
Mm-hmm. I I like this metric, like measuring how much time you spend on what things. Like basically what you do as a founder, you develop your product and you develop and you grow your business. If you're doing that, if you're spending your time on finance and and and recruitment or people issues, that's not what you're supposed to be doing as a founder. So hire someone.

Tom Hunter (16:54.083)
Yeah.

Tom Hunter (17:06.646)
Sure. Yeah. Should be in like sales and growing the business and building the product or whatever their skill set is, they should be focused on that. 'Cause if they can get back twenty percent of their time to get twenty percent more sales, then it's untruly worth it.

Daria Rudnik (17:20.628)
Yeah. well on some of the previous episodes we talked about kind of having this balance. At some point you need the strategic person. You said like build structure first and then you find someone who can be more strategic and and and build the strategy. But again, those people are I mean, they are expensive. and you probably at the at this stage of your organization like you probably don't need the full time strategic person. So

Tom Hunter (17:35.341)
Yeah.

Daria Rudnik (17:50.378)
Do you see anything about like fractional CFO, fractional executives? How does it work and is it worth it?

Tom Hunter (17:53.432)
Thanks.

Yeah, definitely. I I think the fractional model's brilliant. because you get a a slice of the strategic value out of that person, but for like such a fraction of the price. Like it a really good model is you might have like an external bookkeeper or something that d deals with your debits and credits, and then you might have a a fractional advisor that might help when you're capital raising, that might help when you're trying to get some some structure and process in place or anything R and D tax related.

Anything really, really specific and that is of high value or high risk, then I would be using a fractional person. And that doesn't have to be an external party too, because you'll have lots of boutique or larger fractional VCFO advisory firms or yeah, it might be called virtual. Or you can actually get someone in on a part-time basis internally. If you wanted a touch more control and it's probably gonna be cheaper, maybe, than getting someone in that

hopefully will scale with the business in time. I see that pretty regularly where a business, particularly in particularly in deep tech, where there's a little bit more complexity. Cause if they're if they've got a hardware component or they're building something and there's like a massive R&D part to the business, it's a much more complex company than just a pure play SaaS company. So there's much more complexity. So they probably need some input from someone quite strategic.

And particularly in deep tech where commercialization and revenue might be five, seven years down the track, it's very hard it's harder to scale up. So they need to be really, really capital efficient. And so getting someone in on a day a week or five hours a month or whatever the amount is is hugely lucrative because you can get really, really good decisions made with a really good strategic head on their shoulders, but for far less than you'd have to price it for something else.

Tom Hunter (19:53.229)
And it's often better than getting in a finance manager or financial controller if the volume isn't there. Cause a lot of these early stage businesses, the volume of transactions isn't high enough to require a full time person, but the strategic stuff is there in a small volume. So it's good to have have something like that available. So it it there's heaps of heaps of it out there. So much appetite, but there's also lots of providers too. So

Daria Rudnik (20:02.23)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Hunter (20:21.9)
I think I I speak to at least one CFO a week talking about how they are thinking about going and starting their own fractional CFO thing. That's super regularly.

Daria Rudnik (20:32.042)
Well, I know a lot of people who who do wanna be fractional executives, fractional CMOs, C C CHROs, CFOs. but it it feels tell me what you see. It feels like company CEOs are not fully ready for that 'cause they feel they wanna own their people. I'm either hire

Tom Hunter (20:39.587)
Mm.

Tom Hunter (20:51.454)
Well yeah, there's Th there is. There is a little bit like that. I think it really depends on the philosophy of the company. Like I'm I'm recruiting for a role at the minute that's like a first finance hire, but it's doing no accounting. They've outsourced all of the accounting, FPNA tax to a VCFO firm and they've just got this person coming in that's pure strategy. And like it's a super attractive role because

Daria Rudnik (21:17.525)
Mm.

Tom Hunter (21:20.29)
The accounting part is often not the exciting part. As much as I love accountants, it's it's not super exciting. Whereas the strategic work is. And so lots of people want to do that. So there's some companies that are taking full advantage of these businesses or the individuals that come in, but it can be yeah, they they lose a little bit of control, but I guess that's how the the individual CEO or founder or MD or whatever associates with.

Daria Rudnik (21:47.029)
Yeah, I didn't I agree. I I w I once was a CHRO in a startup and I I wasn't doing recruitment. I wasn't I was interviewing p final candidates but we had a company doing recruitment for us. We had ⁓ outsourced admin, HR admin and it was just pure strategic. Okay, how do how do we build business in other regions and and stuff? That's that's exciting. Yeah, that's really good.

Tom Hunter (22:02.893)
Mm.

Tom Hunter (22:08.042)
Awesome. Yeah, yeah. Hey, good. That's the dream, right? That's the dream. Take away the melody.

Daria Rudnik (22:16.138)
Well, you mentioned storytelling and and and that found us a great storytellers. How does those stories help having right people on the road?

Tom Hunter (22:30.35)
So for for a business, for an early stage company, you don't have many runs on the board. You don't have much proof of work. You've got a concept and you might start to get a little bit of traction, sales and growth and all that kind of thing. But people are buying into the vision. And most really high caliber people, like when when markets aren't fantastic, this is slightly less true. But mo majority of the time, great people have options.

And so they have choice. And so they're not going to leave just for the sake leave their current role for the sake of an extra 5k, an extra 20k. They're joining for the story because they're going to be investing then hopefully the next five to ten years of their career in something that they're going to be all in on. And so that's that's a lot. That's a lot to commit to. That's a a sacrifice to an extent. So they need to know.

That what they're investing, that time, effort, resource, mental capacity, is something they believe in. And that comes down to the story. So if the founder has a great growth story or where they've been story or what they're hoping to create or or make a change to s a significant problem in the market, because a commercial story is great, but if it's actually leading with a purpose of helping people or helping fix a particular societal issue, then that's even better.

Because people want to feel good about what they're doing as well. And it helps so much with engagement. So I I think this story is so, so important because not not everyone can do it well. and recruitment can be so corporate and so old school and just full of cliches. whereas I think it makes a massive difference where you really do give a promotional element to the the role and really tell the story properly.

Daria Rudnik (24:24.596)
Yeah. you're right, like you're hiring people for the same for the mission, for the vision, how let's let's create something meaningful and great together. But then when company grows, you have more and more people, the founder, like they're not they cannot tell this story to every newcomer. You need to somehow scale this story. And again, you need to have people who'll be able to scale this story to keep this culture. Things change, people change, processes change, but this

Tom Hunter (24:47.822)
That's right.

Daria Rudnik (24:50.826)
this mission and this this vision that was shared through those stories, they need to stay and definitely like again, nature are the people who can make it happen, who can keep this story alive.

Tom Hunter (25:01.55)
For sure. Because culture is it's not easy to build at the start, but it's easier because you've got less people, you've got more control to an extent, and you've got the ability to influence more. But as you do start to scale, you've got more layers of management, you've got more people. Sometimes they're even dispersed across multiple locations. And I I think that 100, 150 ish mark is probably the point of not of no return.

But if you haven't nailed your culture at that size, it's very difficult to rein it back in. And I think that's why you do you're starting to see more and more startups being five days in office. ⁓ I'm starting to see that a lot, lot more, particularly really high performing ones. And that's what they tie it down to. Well, we've got a really collaborative culture, we've built a really high performing culture and they're five days in and they're not changing from it. And that works great for some and it doesn't work great for others. But I think their belief in their mission and staying true to that

is a massive part to it and that's what people buy into.

Daria Rudnik (26:03.903)
Amazing. Well, Tom, thank you so much. It it was it was a great conversation. Thanks for sharing your stories. Is there anything I haven't asked you but you think it's important for HR leaders and scale ups companies to to learn?

Tom Hunter (26:06.754)
That's the game.

Tom Hunter (26:17.612)
And this kind of t goes back into my whole philosophy around storytelling. I think if you know internal talent leaders invested in copywriting for their teams for writing good ads or writing good posts about their team and the business and the the roles they're recruited for, I think they'd be they'd be saving tens of thousands of dollars or whatever currency you want to go with for on recruitment fees. Because if you can tell a really good story.

And you can promote that business and the role and the everything else that's going on there, you can make a massive difference to your application, right? Because I I use I use applications lots and I get a lot of traction from it because I think the way that I write things make a massive difference to how people perceive it and read it and engage with it.

Daria Rudnik (27:08.233)
Yeah, yeah, it's true. it's not just what people is gonna do, what ki what environment are you joining? What is the mission? ⁓ what kind of culture? Yeah, what's yeah, how d how how am I gonna feel in this in this company when I join? So that these are important things and these are important stories to tell. Well, thanks so much, Tom. It it was a great conversation. How people can find you w how they can reach out to you?

Tom Hunter (27:14.358)
What's it for them?

Tom Hunter (27:24.182)
You great?

Tom Hunter (27:30.764)
Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn, so I think it's Tom Hunter Story. That's like an orange background, so it's hard to meet miss me in the in that picture. Or storyrecruitment.com.au. And if they are interested in finance podcasts, I also run a podcast called the CFI track.

Daria Rudnik (27:46.773)
Cool. We have all the links to the in the notes to this episode. And thanks for being with us today. Thanks for listening till the end. If you like this episode, please give us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribe to our YouTube channel and stay tuned for the next episodes. Bye.