In five years, Andrew Warton CPA has 'owned' 40 company cars including an FPV Tornado ute, an FPV Typhoon and a Super Pursuit – all high-performance sports cars and significant perks for a trainee financial controller in his early 20s.
Now, at the age of 28, Warton has settled for a sturdy Ford Ranger 4x4 Turbo Diesel whose only foray into nature is the car park at the nearest beach.
Corporate Australia might not have the confidence to appoint a man of his years to the crucial position of financial controller in these trying economic times, but the automotive industry took him for a lengthy test drive first.
As part of the CPA Australia graduate program, Warton received a four-year handover from the incumbent finance manager and worked for three months in each area of the business before being appointed financial controller last year for the Bryan Byrt Automotive Group in Queensland.
The medium-sized dealership with a turnover of A$220 million employs 155 staff and operates four sites selling new cars, used cars, finance and insurance as well as offering vehicle servicing and spare parts.
Thorough training and mentoring alongside Russell Winks has already paid off, with Warton bringing impressive savings through more efficient practices, an important skill as the automotive industry struggles in the global financial crisis.
'Russell taught me the importance of benchmarking and best industry practice, to allow your facts to be the basis of your argument, and to use those benchmarks to relay information through to management on what they need to do and where they need to go,' he says.
So far this year, Warton's benchmarking is on track to save the company about A$100,000 a year.
'A big part of our servicing operations is looking at labour per technician. One location wasn't reaching the benchmark but was similar to another in terms of sales and gross. It could have been doing better, but that was hidden. They just needed the right mix of skills and the right person up front dealing with the customers.
They're reaching it now. And I applied the same benchmark to the other location that was already doing well, and now they're blowing it away, exceeding it by 30 to 40 per cent. To date, that's about A$60,000,' Warton says.
'When I took over the main financial controller position, we were benchmarked on a total dealership level for each of our areas of operation – new cars, used cars, service and parts.
What I did to make it clearer was to benchmark each department, to drill right down to give each department manager the opportunity to see where they were going really well, or where they were not quite where we wanted them to be.
It gives them the motivation to want to reach that goal, and that rolls into the overall benchmarks of where we want to be. It's worked really well at individual department levels,' Warton says.
Using the same rigorous process, Warton's multi-year business plan recently netted the company a new franchise that will add another 10 per cent to the sales turnover of the business or A$20 million.
'The feedback was that our presentation was the standout. I made sure everything was tried and tested against how the industry was going, especially for that franchise, and brought it back to benchmarking in those areas to get certain assumptions for each of those years going forward – that was how to build the model,' Warton says.
Since he is facing his first financial year in a global downturn, Warton has called in one of the company's semi-retired directors, a veteran of tough times, for advice.
As a result, he is now focusing on driving down the company's daily inventory to create a sleeker vehicle for the road ahead. He also has A$20 million of vehicle stock idling instead of augmenting it as he normally might after a good month or two of gross sales.
'So we're not stuck with inventory we can't sell or write off in the future. One potential consequence of that is that it might impact the service area if the balance is not struck (with spare parts, causing unnecessary delays for customers), so that's something we have to manage carefully,' he says.
He already understands the momentum a company can achieve by assessing the big picture every day - even if it's just for the time it takes to drain a coffee cup. It's about keeping the wheels of progress turning.
'Because day to day, you can get lost, I try to at least sit back for a few minutes and think about what's coming, such as the new franchise coming on board; preparing ourselves internally to take that franchise on and trying to do it in the best way without having to add too many extra resources; what do we have to do legally, for trade practice, for licensing for funding (and then) working on the banks, working on the reports,' Warton says.
Talking to department managers about new opportunities to fuel growth is also on his agenda, as is asking them to field his ideas about attracting new customers and providing feedback: 'What do you think?' 'Can we do it?' and 'How might we go about it?'
When not ensconced in a second reading of Stephen King's The Gunslinger series – 'There are seven in the series and each one is massive' – Warton might be found trawling through tax management on the net.
'What I've found on an accountant's level in a dealership is that there are so many transactions that go so quickly on a daily, weekly, monthly basis that you have to have the knowledge of technical allocation of where these should go in your financials and your balance sheet, and then there's the statutory end of financial year reporting requirements depending on your size, and some Australian International Financial Reporting Standards come into play.'
If he's not behind the desk he might be found cruising the car yard in search of his next company car, something big enough to carry his family – two dogs and a fiance – to the beach.