Ian is the charismatic Group Financial Controller at PIB Group in Retford – a private equity backed insurance intermediary on a run rate to hit £500m revenue by 2024. One of the fastest growing and most acquisitive companies based in our region.

He joined the business in 2018, bringing almost 30 years of experience that includes:

• Asda – Senior Manager Internal Audit
• HMRC – Director of Internal Audit
• Findel plc – Director of Finance Operations & Change
• University of Hull – Interim Transformation Director

Ian had very strong relationships with Nik Pratap and with Charlotte Morgan-Smith. When Charlotte joined Pratap Partnership in 2021, it brought the relationship between Ian and our business closer than ever. He is one of our most important clients and has a wealth of personal experiences, finance team leadership insights and people strategy perspectives to share.

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You have been hugely successful in growing and developing your finance team over the past four years – growing from 28 heads to 45, promoting 14 and with high rates of retention that any Finance Leader would be proud of. What has been the secret formula for achieving this?

I wouldn’t say secret, I always view my job as simple - create an environment where my team can just be amazing.  From my personal perspective, it stems from working in a company whose moral compass lines up with mine and my CFO trusts me to build a team the way I’ve always wanted to.  A key thing that underpins all of our work when buying as many businesses as we do, is creating a safe environment for the team to try and succeed/fail. I try and operate as flat a structure as I can; our communication and collaboration is constant and we definitely don’t have any time for politics or egos.

I always try to be fair and recognise good performance before people look for the recognition themselves, so they know I value them.  I’m a huge fan of good performance management. It’s often viewed as a negative i.e. exiting folks, rather putting in really good support plans to bring people up to where you need them to be and it be sustainable.

The other side of this is that our business is not for everyone - I always believe in being honest and having the integrity to have those tough conversations with people.  That’s how I would want to be treated and I have seen it in my past when that hasn’t been the case.  Team performance and relationships deteriorate resulting in an impact not just for the individual, but the business as a whole.  

The result, I hope, is that is we have an environment where people can be themselves and take control of their own development.

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PIB Group has an M&A strategy that can beat almost every other corporate in the Yorkshire and East Midlands region – 26 acquisitions in 2022 and 14 already in 2023. With new businesses acquired in the UK and across Europe and all integrated into your group finance department, how do you cope?

A lot of caffeine and not a lot of hair to lose! There are probably two areas I focus on. Firstly, we are really passionate about work/life balance as it could easily overwhelm you and frankly my team are no use to me burnt out or “crocked”.  The team will come in for 8:30 to 9:00 and they want to bring their A-game because everyone is bringing the A-game to help them.  They then go home between 5:00 and 6:00 and spend time doing the things that matter. There are always the odd, and I do mean odd, occasion that we need to do extra, but people are happy to help as we don’t take advantage and I only ask when we genuinely need it.

The other side of this is constant innovation and improvisation.  In our world, we don’t ever get the time to get to perfect as 6 months on, the need will have changed. You cannot scale at the speed we do by trying to over-engineer - keep it simple, everything.  The critical part of all of this is that I don’t need to come up with all the answers, I have 45 other brains who come up with some brilliant solutions.  We kick the tyres, and when it goes well, they get the recognition.  If it goes wrong, that’s on me, and we rip it out and work out how to improve it.

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One of the characteristics of your team is the very rich diversity that you have and how well it all works together. How have you achieved this and what are the key lessons for other finance leaders?

My team has school leaver apprentices through to grandparents, return to work mums and dads, part time to full time, and so it goes on.  The diversity gives us our strength and avoids group think, but it does make it more challenging and rewarding managing a team with a whole spectrum of personalities.  We all sit, including myself, in one room and people just get up and go talk to people rather than e-mail.

Ultimately, everyone can learn, especially me, from everyone else and I can comfortably say I have learnt more in the last 4 years in PIB than I have in the previous decade. I think the key is giving express permission as well as backing up by your actions that it’s OK for people to not know something.  With all our acquisitions, we encounter something new and outside our knowledge set on a daily basis. As such, we are very comfortable going “don’t know, let’s go find someone who does and learn from them”. Again, it’s not the manager that has to find this out, they may not have the time and someone else might be really interested, so that individual can head off with a brief and updates the team when they return. This also builds resilience as we encounter so many single points of pressure and this gives people multiple opportunities to develop soft skills as well as technical elements.

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Your career has been very rich and varied. How did the foundations of an early role in Internal Audit help you build your career?

It absolutely gave me a bedrock in so many transferrable skills as well as a degree of ‘rhino’ skin.  To do Internal Audit (IA) well, you have to really hone your communication, influencing and process analysis skills.  You also have to develop your commercial appreciation and risk skills so that you can balance the theory with what the business is willing to consciously accept about its control environment.  IA has a very varied reputation and is often viewed as a blocker.  Again, it comes down to developing the team, the products and reputation.  For me, whilst IA often has the authority, it needs to earn the right to be listened to as that will end up moving behaviours way more effectively than just requiring compliance.

I also discovered how to apply learning from sector to sector - in a lot of aspects, IA is all about people as well as processes. IA in retail can be applied to the public sector or financial services, it’s working with the business to make it relevant.  You know when you are starting to do it well as you move from tolerated to being invited in early to prevent rather than pick through an aftermath.

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You have other big responsibilities outside of PIB Group, including a NED role at Lincolnshire Co-op. How is it possible to fit this in and what benefits does it bring to take on these additional roles?

I am grateful that the activities mainly fit around my PIB role without too much conflict.  I have been lucky to have a chance to take up a number of roles that involve my community including the Co-op, as well as the Lincolnshire Police/Crime Commissioner and Lincolnshire County Council.  They provide a unique chance for me to learn about and provide positive challenge into services that make a huge impact on my world at home.  It is really rewarding to bring even more social purpose into my work and to be able to coach new people from different backgrounds on skills they have not had a chance to develop yet is something that just makes me smile.

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(As we are talking to Ian, he is freshly back from a very active holiday in Lanzarote and he is one of the most active Finance Leaders on Strava!) How important is it to look after yourself physically and look after your mind outside of work to be successful in the modern age?

Without question! It allows me to completely decompress from so many issues.  Although I do need to temper myself sometimes and remember 50 year-old me doesn’t recover or bounce back as well as 25 year-old me.  I’ve always believed that throwing yourself down a mountain on skis means you really can’t be focussing on accruals and prepayments.  On the other hand, going for a run also gives me plenty of time to think through problems that just need a bit of brain space to mull over.  

As much as anything, I like to keep learning, I like to keep challenging myself to find my limits. I have an amazing run club that I help with coaching in, and it’s a complete leveller. No one cares what you do as a day job, you just chat and run.