Martyn Cuff: ACMA: director and head of operations, Allianz Global Investors Europe

Financial Management (UK), April, 2008

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You have a degree and an MBA from London Business School as well as your CIMA, banking (ACIB) and stockbroking (FSII) qualifications, yet you're still in your thirties. How did you find the time to do them all?

I don't have the old classic City background of prep school, public school and university. My school in south Wales didn't have a culture where everyone went to university. I'd always been good at maths, so I went straight into a job at Barclays Trust Company in Cardiff at 18, dealing with wills, trusts and portfolio management for private clients. I took all my qualifications while working full time, so was doing exams until I was 34. I was at Barclays in Cardiff and London for over nine years of this and then moved to be a management consultant at Ernst & Young for the next three and a half years.

How do you manage to achieve any kind of work-life balance?

It can be rather elusive (I'm married with two children and a third due in April). Every time I think I've nailed it, it shifts again. But I was brought up in a family where everyone worked hard. We weren't particularly rich: my father was a car mechanic, my stepfather worked in quarries and my mother had a couple of jobs even when I was young. I always did holiday and weekend jobs when I was a kid. I get bored easily and I have something of a Protestant work ethic. I don't like the idea of wasting a day and I feel happy when I've done a good day's work.

So presumably you didn't take a long, well-earned holiday after quitting Ernst & Young.

No, I didn't. Led by two senior colleagues, I and three others set up our own consultancy company. We started in a tiny office off Trafalgar Square and, when we sold it in 2004, we had 70 people in offices in the Channel Islands, Scotland, France, Australia and South Africa.

If you'd got stockbroking and banking qualifications, why did you decide to become a management consultant?

I was influenced by Sir John Harvey-Jones when I watched his Troubleshooter television series in the nineties. I liked the challenge of going into a company and trying to solve its problems. I was impressed by the way that he could walk around with a pen and paper, ask a few key questions and then quickly deduce whether it was well run or not. He was a guy with practical experience who'd found a way to use it without getting bogged down in corporate minutiae. It wasn't that he'd read loads of business school papers but that he'd simply been there and done it. At about the same time I'd also been exposed to a project at Barclays where a professional services firm had been hired, which made me think: "I could do that and I'd get paid a lot more money."

Why did you decide to study for ClMA?

I didn't become an ACMA to be an accountant. I did it to obtain the skills that would equip me to do other things. The financial industry has so much mystery in it; so many terms that no one really understands. I often found myself thinking: "Oh, so that's what such and such means. That's really simple; that makes sense." Taking CIMA gave me the confidence to go into situations where I wasn't familiar with the detail. I knew that I could discuss the financials without feeling like a second-class citizen. I may not have been as knowledgeable as a CFO with 30 years' experience, but I had common ground with them and knew that I was a well-rounded business person.

The last qualification that you gained was the MBA. Didn't you know it all already by then?

The MBA was the icing on the cake. It was the ultimate step for me in revealing some of the remaining mysteries of business--at least from an academic perspective. Also, the other exams I'd done had been mainly technical. The MBA was more philosophical. It questioned business values and involved debating views and meeting people from diverse cultures. It was all about broadening the mind. I never thought I'd get into London Business School because it has such a strong reputation. I'd done my BA in financial services as a distance-learning course at Sheffield and now I was learning from the likes of Professor Sir Andrew Likierman FCMA.

I don't think you need to do all these exams to be good at business, but it worked for me. The academic jigsaw is complete and I've now got to use it. I haven't abandoned learning altogether, but I'm learning enough at the moment in my job.

What were the main things you learned from your part setting up a management consultancy firm?

We had no outside backing, having all put our own capital in, so there was nowhere for us to hide. Consultants get judged by the market every day because they charge a daily fee and clients want to know what they're getting for their money. In your own company you also see the realities of life, whereas in a large firm you can just be part of the ecosystem without any exposure to the commercial side.

I had just become an ACMA when I did this and it was great to see the basics of business up close and personal. Of the seven of us, four were qualified or part-qualified accountants. Although I didn't want to be an accountant, I did need to know how a business functioned. After all, a racing driver doesn't need to be a mechanic, but it really helps if he understands how the car works.