Peter Weatherston is Corality Financial Group’s very own Cadel Evans and starts every day with a death defying bike ride to work. This is how Peter gets his adrenalin pumping whilst preparing for a day that includes juggling an extensive range of projects across multiple continents. As Head of Consulting, Peter manages projects ranging from financial structuring of multi-billion dollar investments and capital raising to complex financial model builds and financial model audits within sectors such as infrastructure, transport and resources.
Peter started working for Corality in 2008 and was promoted Head of Consulting at Corality Financial Group after the merger between Corality and Navigator Project Finance. He is a chartered public finance accountant with 10+ years experience from the Bouygues Group and and PKF in London.
Following the merger between Corality and Navigator your role has changed – how?
Corality Financial Group now has 30 employees and the consulting team that I manage has more than doubled since the merger. My role has moved away from the day-to-day delivery of client projects to working closely with our Associates and Project Managers in making sure we deliver value for our clients. I now focus on client engagement, project planning, staff recruitment and team coaching.
Corality Financial Group is growing extensively – what are your biggest challenges managing this growth?
Our biggest challenge is managing our resources to ensure we always have the right people on every project. This requires careful project planning and staff rostering as well as team coaching. Corality is growing extensively and it is my job to make sure everyone we recruit gets the support they need. I spend a lot of time coaching team members – this is how we make sure we develop the skills needed to service our clients and how I see us growing our future leaders!
Corality had four new joiners in October – what skills /expertise have you been looking for?
We generally have a lot of strong candidates applying for positions with us which allows us to focus on hiring people that tick all of the boxes! We look for people with numerical excellence, passion for solving analytical problems and logical thinking. With a global client base and a diverse range of projects we need people who enjoy travelling and the challenges that come with working with senior management. We also make sure that each person we recruit fits in with the rest of the team - you need to be creative, show initiative and be willing to work hard to get things done to work here!
We look for people that can offer something extra that compliments the team, either in their previous experience or their skill-set. It’s always good to have a champion of a particular product or service that other members of the team can lean on for support when things get complicated.
With offices in London, Singapore and Sydney you juggle projects across several different time zones – what are some of the challenges involved?
Well, the time zones can be challenging and there have been occasions when we have WebEx conferences or meetings over Skype at strange times like 3am. It’s all part of the job though and us making sure we give our clients the best service possible.
Working across different time zones offers many opportunities. With offices in London, Singapore and Sydney we are able to offer our clients 24 hour service. For example, an analyst in Sydney may work on a project during the day, have a hand-over Skype call at the end of the working day with an analyst from the London team who picks it up and works on it overnight (Sydney time). The London team will hand the project back to the Sydney analyst as this person gets into work the next morning. This 24-hour work-time is invaluable where the deadlines are tight and our clients really appreciate the speed and efficiency that we can achieve this way. One recent example was an African resources project where we shared the financial modelling work between the Sydney and London office. Because of this we were able to deliver a complicated financial model to meet a client’s extremely challenging timeline.
Describe a typical day?
It’s difficult to describe a typical day so to give you an idea I’ll describe a few things I’ve been up to this week. I start each day with a 10k cycle to work and have recently been stopping in at the pool en-route as I train towards a 2k ocean swim early next year.
We have two new joiners this week, so I have been over-seeing the induction process which has included a “boot-camp” intensive training. This week they are building a vanilla renewable model as part of a case study assignment – we are pushing them hard!
I’ve been working closely with one of our project managers on a project to raise debt for a copper project which is nearing financial close as well as kicking-off an urgent project with an oil company for an initial debt sizing phase. This week included the delivery of a final audit opinion letters on two financial models - one for a corporate financial model with a view to a company refinancing and the other for a PPP project in New Zealand.
On the financial modelling development side, I’ve been scoping out several new projects including the rebuild of a project financing model into an operational model for a large infrastructure deal, the build of a financial model for a large PPP in India as well as the model audit of several project models for a large fund management company. I’ve also been working closely with one of our project managers from our London office (a few late nights) to scope and resource the progression of a large financial modelling improvement programme for a major oil and gas company in Scandinavia.
On the lighter side, I have been on the test panel for some giant inflatable remote-controlled sharks that our marketing team has sourced for our stand at the Gold Symposium in Sydney. Yes, I realize that it sounds weird but is has been great fun having them in the office!
Post merger Corality Financial Group has a larger service offering – what would you say are the key benefits to clients?
I think that the merger has improved the two brands and our clients are reaping the benefits of the broader service offering. Whereas before we would perhaps look at each project as a discrete piece of work, we now step back from the project and ask “how can we deliver more value to the client?”. With a team of experts in a range of areas, it means that we can heavily consult internally within scoping and progress discussions so that the client gets the benefit of hearing ideas they perhaps wouldn’t have considered before.
This has meant that a lot of our projects, which have started out seemingly small, develop into long-term relationships where we function as advisors for our clients and they call on us again and again so we can help them overcome challenges.
Looking forward to 2012 – what will you focus on next year?
We have got a very strong pipeline of projects already for the first half of 2012 which is fantastic. This allows us to plan our team resources now in preparation for what is coming.
One continuing challenge is the evolution in our service offering from discrete financial modelling and model auditing projects to more encompassing consultative and advisory projects, as well as managing our clients’ expectations upwards in terms of our overall capabilities. Running with the same theme, I believe the biggest challenge will be managing the team as we grow. We have ambitious growth targets both in Australia and abroad and it is therefore likely that my focus will be turning towards increasing the team size in our London and Singapore offices and then in the coming years also in Hong Kong.
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