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SHL’s group FD, Emma Lancaster, has seen it all – a delisting, an ousted founder and a management buyout. Now she can get down to business – online psychometric testing
The chances are that if you worked for one of the major firms over the past few years, you were probably tested for your worthiness by Emma Lancaster’s company.
Lancaster is the group FD of SHL, a psychometric testing business, where she has held the top finance post for the past five years. During her tenure at the company, which began ten years after starting her accountancy studies, Lancaster has led the business through a bitter boardroom battle for control that saw its founders ousted, the company delisted and subsequently bought out by management.
After so much drama, it’s perhaps not surprising that Lancaster says she’s at the company for ‘new and exciting challenges’. For now, these challenges are about meeting the company’s strategy of aggressive growth of its salesforce.
Driving forward the next technological and market-opening leap for SHL – to provide mass online testing – is a major step, especially with the ever-increasing battle for accounting talent among firms and businesses. Reaching this point with SHL has been turbulent, which belies her steady career path.
She classed her role as ‘back office’ at Andersen, the firm she joined in 1991 after a chance appointment in corporate recovery at Arthur Young inspired her. But her Andersen role was not the same as being a fee-earning partner in a big firm.
Lancaster went on to work alongside current M &S group FD Ian Dyson at Rank, where she served as financial controller and honed her skills for life in a public company. ‘The Rank Group was small from a corporate end, so I picked up enough plc experience to throw myself in at SHL, having had responsibility for statutory accounts, budgeting and forecasting. But while Ian was doing analyst meetings at Rank with 150 analysts, there would be five at SHL,’ says Lancaster.
Lancaster only has one real twinge of regret in her career – that she didn’t do proper research into the goings on at SHL when she joined in 2001. The company, formed in 1977, contained two of the founders on the board, Peter Saville and Roger Holdsworth, when she was appointed.
By the end of 2002, the company found itself in the acrimonious position of a power struggle between the founders, who were non-execs, and the chairman and chief executive.
A move to provide more internet-based products was reportedly the key argument – the founders were so unhappy with this strategic direction that they called for the chair and chief exec to step down, which led to what Lancaster describes as a ‘messy and public dispute’.
The management team won. While it had all got ‘very nasty’, Lancaster learned from the experience. ‘Before I joined, I should have done so knowing a bit more than I did.’ Then began the process of scaling down SHL’s operations and driving its new online strategy. Private equity, at that point, was far from the minds of the board. The priority was getting the company back on track following a failed expansion strategy and a lack of online products.
‘We went to the market and said we were committed to improve return on sales 3% a year for three years, by focusing the business on products. We achieved those goals and the share price went from 50p to 180p, where we exited.’
The business has begun to build close contacts with its customer base – so much so that it has, on occasion, pointed out to recruiters when they are failing to recommend the best candidates for jobs. ‘Where we have a deep relationship with a client, we test it with their recruits to look at the type of recruitments they’re getting. One client was getting good staff globally, but not in Germany. The Germans blamed the test, but we said it’s who you’re sourcing from,’ she says.
On the subject of the quality of recruits, chartered accountant Lancaster says it ‘never ceases to amaze me’ that so many qualified accountants do not have good numerical skills. ‘They’re not good at it,’ she says bluntly, ‘so I always test on this.’
As long as SHL passes this ‘challenging and exciting’ test, she will stay to push the company on through the next stage of its evolution.
If you want to practice your skills on a psychometric test, try SHL’s test at shldirect.com.
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