Primary Teaching to Tech CFO & Building Finance from Zero - Kaycee Singh

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Kaycee Singh got her first A in Year 11 accounting and still enrolled in a Bachelor of Education.

She lasted until a tutorial on teaching maths to 7-year-olds.

Billy kicked a ball to Sally, who already had two balls. How many now?

Kaycee transferred to commerce the following semester!

She found a role with a mining company, where she reviewed historical port time, found the gap between what they were paying for and what they were using and renegotiated the shipping contracts.

Her CFO's reaction: "Why didn't I think of that?"

Not long after, she saw a startup with no finance function and a lot of structure that needed building from scratch.

She pestered the CEO on LinkedIn until he agreed to interview her.

She got the role, built the function and kept a secret from her own CEO the whole time.

He did not know she was teaching herself from YouTube videos and practising 3-way forecasts on her own home finances.

Today Kaycee is CFO at UrbanX, a Brisbane proptech scale up helping high performing real estate agents launch their own independent agencies.

Along the way, she has created a 4-stage framework for building any finance function from scratch.

Visibility, reporting, planning and compliance.

If you're a finance professional that loves to build and jump in with both feet, this episode is for you

Highlights:

• How Kaycee got her first CFO role from a LinkedIn message thread
• The blank-slate brief: external bookkeeping in place, and a finance function to build from scratch
• Practicing three-way forecasts on her own home finances at the kitchen table
• The four-stage framework she's built since for setting up a finance function from the ground up
• Why entrepreneurs trust obsession over credentials
• The "raving fan on your sideline” the bit of mentorship most senior leaders thinks about
• The two-altitude reality of high-growth finance: cross-functional partner and detail-level executor in the same week
• The IMX shipping renegotiation that taught her what strategic finance actually looks like
• Running finance across two businesses at UrbanX in Brisbane