It’s been a season of comings and goings and we delighted to welcome a new face onto the Hearts and Balls Board, bringing with him a wealth of financial management experience.
We sat down with incoming Director, Jimmy Gow, to find out more about the man behind the spreadsheet.
“Folk are usually surprised when they find out I’m an accountant, because I don’t lead with the numbers. I come in and ask what the problem is, and it’s hardly ever compliance. It’s where the business is going, what’s actually holding it back, what the owner wants out of it in the end. I’m looking at it strategically. The compliance matters, but it’s not the conversation.
“I set up on my own twenty years ago. I wanted to build something of my own and look after clients the way I thought they should be looked after, rather than the way somebody else had decided it should be done. Since then it’s been a real mix. Full-time CFO roles, board support, part-time and interim work, and project work including forensic accounting and restructuring and turnaround. Thirty-four businesses now, fourteen of them interim, four of those the best part of a year or more.
“A lot of it starts with a board that’s worried and doesn’t yet know how worried it should be. Something’s come to light, the funding position looks shaky, everybody’s braced for the worst. So the first job is just working out how big it actually is, and usually it isn’t as bad as everyone’s got it in their head. Then you calm everybody down, which is half of what I’m actually there for. Nobody remembers those jobs because nothing dramatic happened, but that’s the point of them.
“There’s a part of it people don’t talk about. You’re walking into a team who’ve just lost somebody, often nobody’s told them why, and that person isn’t there to speak for themselves. A lot of what looks wrong from the outside was a sensible enough decision at the time, made under pressure, with far less information than you’ve got sitting there afterwards. Nobody hands you their trust because of the job title either. You earn it, and the first thing everybody’s watching is how you handle the person who was there before you. So look after their reputation, keep their team steady, leave it set up for whoever comes next. Same whether it’s a small manufacturer or a football club.
“I spent seven or eight months as interim CFO at Rangers. It wasn’t a rescue mission at all obviously. They just needed a safe pair of hands to hold things steady while they recruited permanently, which is exactly the job I do. Somebody gave me one bit of advice early on: stay in your lane. I took it, and it stood me well. Plenty of people in that situation would be trying to make their mark, and that’s not what you’re there for. It was my team as well, which made it a strange one. My grandpa was a Rangers man, a lot of my friends are Rangers fans, and even the Celtic supporters among them wanted me to do well in it.
“The bit I remember is the quiet. An empty underground heading out of the city, up onto a deserted Copland Road, and there’s the corner of the stadium sitting in front of you with nobody about. Or up in the Govan Stand watching the groundsman and his team working away with the grow lights, using materials I’d been signing the invoices off for that week. Most of the job is invoices, payments and cash flow, and people, and every so often you see what it’s all for.
“These days I’m building a fractional practice, CFO Whitelabel. A handful of clients at any one time, some more regularly than others, rather than one engagement that swallows your whole world. It’s sector agnostic. Owner-managed businesses, private equity backed businesses, whoever needs it. What I like about it is being the glue. Sitting down with people, working out what the problem actually is, taking a decision together and then getting on with it. The key man in the middle making sure decisions get made on clarity and there are no misunderstandings. Most of the bad decisions I’ve seen weren’t reckless at all. It was just that everybody round the table had a slightly different version of the same thing in their head and nobody had spotted it.
“Donald Wilson brought me into Hearts and Balls. I’d been working with a colleague of his on a restructuring job, and Donald and I had played rugby around the same time, many moons ago. But the reason I said yes goes back further than that. I was on the committee at Hillhead when one of our players seriously injured his neck. You’re suddenly dealing with something the club just isn’t built for, and you realise pretty quickly how thin the ground is under a player and his family when the worst happens. Hearts and Balls is there for exactly that, and it does an enormous amount for the players who’ve been the unlucky ones.
“I’m a trustee and treasurer, so a fair bit of what I do is the same as the day job. Keep the numbers straight, make sure decisions get made on clarity. But it’s the nearest thing I’ve got to the role I’d have picked for myself. The work I’ve always liked is going in when something’s gone wrong for people and steadying it, and this is that, for folk who need it a lot more than any board does.”
