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Route to the top: Tele2 CEO

Allison Kirkby, chief executive of Swedish telecoms group Tele2, reveals how she overcame obstacles to develop her career.

As an ambitious child of parents who were both factory workers, I had always wanted a professional career that enabled me to see the world and had secured university places to study Business and Languages when my father became terminally ill. I decided to take a gap year but then joined Distillers, the spirits company.

Distillers was acquired by rival Guinness within 18 months of me joining so I then transitioned into the Guinness management training scheme. I very quickly realised I wanted real responsibility, so I took up an Assistant Management Accountant position at the United Distillers HQ in Edinburgh. After almost 5 years, I joined FMCG giant Procter & Gamble (P&G).

P&G encouraged and expected talent to be internationally mobile, in order for them to be able to take on ever-increasing roles of responsibility across the company. I started as UK Financial Analyst for Household Cleaners (Flash & Vortex). In my first 5 years I gained experience as an Analyst, a Cost Accountant, Profit Forecaster and Group Finance Manager working on some of the UK’s best known brands – Pampers, Ariel, Daz, Fairy and Lenor – before becoming Treasury Manager for the whole UK.

I was then offered an international opportunity as Associate Director of Finance for P&G’s Balkan Markets, based in Bucharest, Romania, responsible for the whole region – Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Slovenia, Croatia, Moldova, Albania and Macedonia.

There was economic crises in almost all our markets, with rapidly devaluing local currencies. It was also the period between the Bosnian and Kosovan wars, and we were waiting for US sanctions to be lifted, preparing ourselves for a fast launch of our products into Serbia, as soon as the sanctions were removed.

My P&G colleague had a gun fired at him outside our hotel. It happened during my last ever trip to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, after we uncovered the fact that our distributor was avoiding import duties, possibly by working with local Mafia. P&G had zero tolerance towards corruption, and so we had to immediately shut down our operations there. The morning after the shots were fired we were driven to the Romanian border quickly, and I’ve never been back to Bulgaria since.

My dream was to become CFO of one of P&G’s larger business units, so after my Balkan experience I returned to the UK, initially working alongside the Customer Business Development team at a time when P&G was putting finance business partners to work directly with their largest global customers and distributors on joint value creation opportunities.

After a stint working in Global Beauty Care and leading the divestiture of several non-core brands, I became CFO of P&G UK/Ireland, the biggest operation outside of the US at that time. That was followed by one of my biggest developmental roles when I became Head of Investor Relations and Corporate M&A for EMEA, where I learned the importance of the ‘equity story’ – especially as part of the team preparing P&G’s equity story to support the acquisition of Gillette for $50 billion-plus.

I joined Virgin Media as an Executive Director in Finance, as their newly appointed CFO was keen to develop his potential successor, which felt like the perfect career building opportunity for me. I was given a very broad role at Virgin Media, so that I could learn the industry and the business quickly.

I was soon headhunted to be CFO of TV company Shine, that had been acquired by the Rupert Murdoch-run News Corporation, working for Elisabeth Murdoch, founder and CEO. The firm is a global TV content producer, owner of hits such as MasterChef, The Biggest Loser, Spooks, Broadchurch, and The Bridge. NewsCorp wanted someone who could help integrate a UK privately held company into a US-listed company.

Every new role brings new challenges. Shine was small, but complex, and as a result of its related party connections with the leadership of NewsCorp, we had to get our finance systems, processes and controls fit for purpose for an SEC-listed Company fairly urgently. SEC regulations, revenue recognition policies and Sarbanes–Oxley was a foreign language to the many creative entrepreneurs in the company, so there was a lot of heavy lifting to be done.

I left Shine after 2 years, when it had fully integrated into News Corp and subsequently 21st Century Fox. The role became less challenging and was evolving towards a divisional FD position. I had recently been appointed Non-Executive Director and Audit Chair of baker Greggs and was itching to become a publicly listed company CFO myself, so ended up becoming CFO of Swedish TMT operator Tele2, and then CEO just over a year later.

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