‘I am not your typical grey accountant.’
Therese Cilliers lives by her own words of being adjustable and adaptable to remain relevant in the ever-changing finance profession, with an ability to multi-task with ease, Therese has gained a wealth of experience and skills in her career.
CIARAN RYAN: Today’s podcast is sponsored by Draftworx, which provides automated drafting and working paper financial software to more than 8000 accounting and auditing firms and corporations. CFO Talks is a brand of the South African Institute of Business Accountants. It’s my pleasure this morning to welcome Therese Cilliers, who is a high achiever, having been admitted as a partner of KPMG at the age of 31, and counted among her clients, Anglo American, Absa Financial Services, Zurich Financial Services and Momentum Life. She also worked as a management consultant as part of a team of 300 professionals and she won an award from Anglo American for work done in recognising excellence, both inside and outside the organisation. She was head of strategy management in 2013 and 2014 when she formulated KPMG’s five-year strategy together with a change programme called We Are KPMG, which required a complete strategy shift in the organisation. She then joined RMD Kwikform as finance director, where her responsibilities ranged from IT to HR. It was here that she applied the less is more approach to information sharing, the concept that users need less information of higher quality, and I’m sure we’ll get into that in a minute. Since 2018, Therese started NOTgrey Consulting, which is an odd name, we’ll find out how that name came about as well. The focus is really on effective strategy execution. She’s also part of the FD Centre, providing finance director services to clients in the Gauteng area, after which she took on the role of finance director, reporting to the Conco Group CFO, where she was responsible for the accounting arm and reporting of results of 30 legal entities, and this led up to the clean-up process in the organisation. The Conco Group is now in business rescue, we’ll find out why that happened too in a minute. Therese subsequently consulted to Adapt IT, specifically the Micros subsidiary, and was appointed as head of finance in Micros in December 2020. Wow, that’s quite a lead-up, we’ve got a lot of ground to cover there. Welcome, Therese, and where are we talking to you from?
THERESE CILLIERS: Hi Ciaran, thanks for having me. I’m currently working from home, I’m based in Midrand, our office is also based in Midrand, so it’s a quick trip across the highway if I need to get to the office.
CIARAN RYAN: Midrand, for people who are not in South Africa, is between Johannesburg and Pretoria. It’s north of Johannesburg. So that’s a very packed CV, there’s a lot in it, particularly the last part of your career, how did you find time for all of this? We talked about the Conco Group, Adapt IT, you set up NOTgrey Consulting, give us a bit of background on that.
THERESE CILLIERS: My husband always says that I don’t have a bee in my bonnet, I have several hives up there. But on a serious note, it always helps to love what you do and I’ve learnt that it’s imperative to know what your priorities are and to set very firm boundaries once you’ve established those priorities to make sure that you don’t get consumed by any one activity. I think the last couple of years, Ciaran, have been especially interesting, just what we’ve been through in this country, Covid has obviously thrown most of us a curve ball, it’s been a rough and an interesting ride, and I think a person has had to be quite adjustable and adaptable to make sure that you remain relevant in this kind of environment. So I really focused on a number of things and I’ve been very fortunate in that I’ve been involved with a number of really exciting clients over the period, and I’ve recently accepted a permanent position, which is with an exciting organisation with wonderful growth prospects. So I think I’ve been blessed in a very interesting time in our lives.
CIARAN RYAN: Explain then NOTgrey Consulting, this is the firm that you set up, your own firm, and the FD Centre and how these tie in together.
THERESE CILLIERS: I think you said that NOTgrey Consulting is an odd name and that is the response that I get wherever I go. It’s obviously not meant to refer to my lack of grey hair at this stage of my career, actually quite the opposite. It’s my freelance trading name and the name implies that I am not your typical grey accountant, I actually regard myself as quite a colourful individual and it’s also meant to reflect my conviction that, as professionals, we should have strong opinions, not grey ones. We should have the courage of our convictions to stand up for what we believe, and we should have the guts to swim against the stream of popular opinion when that’s required. So that really is where that name comes from. The FD Centre provide part-time finance director services to organisations that are not yet of a scale that can afford really a full-time financial director. So it provides experienced FDs with the opportunity to live that so-called portfolio lifestyle, while also giving smaller and medium sized businesses access to seasoned finance professionals, who’ve got some solid corporate experience.
CIARAN RYAN: Yes, we have come across the FD Centre before. Is this part of a trend that you’re noticing of senior finance executives going freelance?
THERESE CILLIERS: Yes, I believe so. We’re increasingly seeing people taking retirement later and later in life or not retiring at all. In fact, I just need to look at my father-in-law, who was a CIMA graduate, he still consulted well into his late 70s, and now in his 80s he’s still doing pro bono work. I think that’s a win-win Ciaran, you augment your retirement savings while you’re still doing what you love and what you’re good at. You are perhaps not doing it at the same pace as you were at the peak of your career, but you’ve got the opportunity to still grow, keep your brain cells going and add value to the broader community and your profession.
Retirees return to add value to corporates
CIARAN RYAN: Yes, I do notice that there is demand from midsize and smaller sized corporations for the types of skills that you get from senior executives. It’s quite a healthy trend, particularly over this last year, you’ve had these companies that were struggling with the Covid lockdowns, and they needed some really high-level input and how can they tap into sources of finance, which, people with senior financial executive experience would be able to assist them with that. I think that’s a very encouraging development, what do you think?
THERESE CILLIERS: I agree, I think the more a person has the opportunity to gain broader experience and then to also share that experience beyond your original work life, I think it adds tremendous value. I think it was a trend that initially first started in Australia, they were referring to the grey brigade, the retirees who got back into the workforce and started adding real value in corporate life, and even beyond corporate life, just in terms of the social setup in a country. I think there’s a lot that we can still do in that space, and I find that personally very exciting, especially in a country like ours.
CIARAN RYAN: I see you’re also a board treasurer for the Direct Marketing Association of South Africa, as well as being a consultant at Adapt IT, which I think you said now has become a permanent position. Maybe just explain the Direct Marketing Association, are you still involved in that?
THERESE CILLIERS: While I was freelancing, I was really focusing on diversifying my skills base. So as an example, I did the SAICA IFRS certificate course, I joined the Institute of Directors and I started pursuing some non-executive director roles, and the Direct Marketing Association position was a fantastic opportunity to get my toes in the water as a non-executive director. I was the only board member with a financial background. So as you can imagine, we had some interesting conversations about budgets and audit processes and dealing with professional services firms. But then I also soon realised when I took up permanent employment again, that I couldn’t really do the role justice and I think that’s one of the risks of being a non-executive director is to make sure that you don’t take on too much. So I’ve had to resign from that when I took up permanent employment, but it stood me in good stead, it’s a very different position to be a non-executive in an organisation, as opposed to really getting your hands dirty on a day-to-day basis. It gives you that more independent perspective, while also allowing you to bring some of your solid experience to the table, and I think to take the conversation at that board to the next level.
IT solutions for the hospitality industry
CIARAN RYAN: You’ve now taken on the position at Micros, which is a subsidiary of Adapt IT, just explain what that company does.
THERESE CILLIERS: Micros focuses on providing IT, both software and hardware solutions, to the hospitality industry. So typically, the screens and the equipment you see when you go out to a local restaurant, where the waiter takes your order and sends through the order to the restaurant, that’s principally supported by Micros hardware and software. We also do booking systems for hotels and the like. We’re now also branching out into the retail space, which is rather exciting. Adapt IT, actually Micros, was my first client when I started freelancing, it had just been acquired by Adapt IT and had to fully comply with IFRS and, well, enter the person who had just attended some rigorous IFRS training. So from that perspective, it was a great introduction to the business, I had the opportunity of working with the original FD of the company and getting to know some of the key members of management, as well as the finance team. After the FD retired, I stayed in touch with both the Micros and the Adapt IT teams. Fast forward to June 2020, Micros again needed some assistance during the year-end audit, we were on Covid alert level three, most people were working from home, and I had the benefit of knowing both the businesses and most of the people in the finance team. So re-entering was quite easy from that perspective. I then continued to support Micros for a couple of months, and by November when the finance executive resigned, Adapt IT asked if I would be interested to apply for the position. So it really was quite a fortunate series of events, if you want to call it that.
CIARAN RYAN: Let’s just talk about the role of the CFO, and, you come with quite an interesting CV, how does one balance the CFO’s natural aversion to risk with value creation. This is the big debate that’s going on in the accounting sector, the accountant is always the guy who says no. How do you strike that balance between being the conservative one who’s looking after the funds and the one who’s not being a brake on the growth?
THERESE CILLIERS: I don’t agree with the notion that CFOs are naturally risk averse, Ciaran. I prefer to think of CFOs as being naturally risk aware, which is quite different. When you’re risk aware, you don’t embark on new initiatives wearing rose tinted glasses, naively expecting everything to go according to plan. I think my approach is rather to look at what could go wrong, plan to mitigate those risks and decide which risks you can afford to accept, because that’s the reality of doing business, it’s never going to be entirely risk-free because then you might as well just put your money under the mattress and not go into business at all. I think this is an area where diversity in an executive team is so important. You may have a more conservative CFO, if you want to refer to being risk aware as being conservative, but then you really need that dreamer, entrepreneurial MD to compliment that CFO. Then, of course, the other person I think who’s exceptionally important in that executive team is the strong, focused HR professional because let’s face it, most of the MDs and FDs who I’ve worked with really need that kind of HR person on their team, someone with a strong, strong people focus
CIARAN RYAN: That is interesting, it is the people focus and that does lead me into my next question. Are there some things, and I ask this to everybody who comes on to CFO Talks, there are some things you’re going to learn from experience only that you’re not going to learn in the accounting schools. You touched on one thing there, people management, that is really where it becomes more of an art form than a science, right? This is the trick in being a great finance executive, would you agree with it?
THERESE CILLIERS: Absolutely, Ciaran. Unfortunately, wisdom isn’t part of the curriculum in accounting school. When I told my friends in matric that I was going to become an accountant, one of them piped up and said, you’re going to sit in a corner forever looking at a laptop. She couldn’t have been more wrong because I find that 80% of my job is involved in dealing with people, either my team or my fellow executives, having to convince someone about something, having to sell an idea, having to convince someone to comply with a control. There’s a huge people focus in this role. You cannot be a successful finance person without having some level of people skills. Apart from people skills, I think one of the most important personal experiences for me has been to learn about the value of professional consultation. We all grow up thinking that I have to pass the board exam on my own and I’ve been doing the late-night studying on my own and so on. But once you enter the profession, you very quickly realise that this is not a game that you want to play alone, it’s not a job that you can do on your own. One of my first mentors used to say, if you fly alone, you die alone. I still live by those words to this very day. I would say another lesson that you only learn as you get to see more of the world and as you become a bit, I suppose, less naive about life, is that you must always be in a position to retrench yourself, as I call it. If you ever find yourself in an ethically uncomfortable corner, you need to have a few months of net pay in the bank so that you can never be beholden to an unprincipled principal, if you know what I mean.
CIARAN RYAN: We’ll come to that in a minute, that whole ethical debate around the accounting profession and how accountants often find themselves in this corner, where they are asked to do certain things, which are just very much on the edge, very dodgy. I want to just pick up on maybe a little bit about yourself and what led you to accounting in the first place, at what point did you decide this was going to be your career?
THERESE CILLIERS: It’s actually an interesting question, I think the first time that I realised that there was a profession like accounting was when I was in grade eight and we had a career day at school, and one of the professors from the University of Pretoria came to address us. He gave this whole long talk about how interesting it would be to be a chartered accountant and what the role could entail and so on. Right towards the end of the talk he quoted the monthly salary of a newly qualified CA – and now I am also giving away my age – at the time it was something like R35 000 a month and I sat there absolutely gobsmacked because that was a lot more than what my dad earned at the time, being an employee of the Municipality of Pretoria. Yeah. So I have to admit that the financial reward at the time was really attractive to me because I always said that I wanted to be a financially independent woman, if I ever married it needs to be for love and not for money. So that for me was a motivating factor, I’ll be entirely honest about that. I always knew that I wanted to be independent and I wanted to be able to maintain a certain reasonable lifestyle. I also really enjoyed maths and accounting at the time, so it was a natural fit. Then by the time I got to matric, I had a bit of an identity crisis and for a moment there I thought that maybe I should go into teaching and become a maths or science teacher. But my science teacher at the time actually talked me out of it within 24 hours, and I went to university, and the rest, as they say, is history.
CIARAN RYAN: It’s interesting, a lot of people have gone into accounting because they saw somebody who was an accountant, and they were like pillars of the community. They drove better cars, they dressed smartly, so they had all of the status, I guess, that one would aspire to as a young person, and oftentimes without really realising what’s behind that, what does an auditor or an accountant actually do. So it’s very interesting that you came to it that way. Tell us a little bit about your background, where did you grow up? You said your dad worked in Pretoria, so you obviously grew up there, tell us a little bit about your background.
THERESE CILLIERS: I grew up in Pretoria and I attended two schools in Pretoria, the last one being an all-girls school, Afrikaanse Hoër Meisieskool, which I’m to this day exceptionally proud of. That school really played a huge role in my life in terms of personal development and just allowing me to be the person who I was at that stage. So I found it amazing to be in a girls’ school and I always tell people that if you send your child to a single-sex school, you need to make sure that they actually want to go there. For me, it was a great fit, I loved my five years there. Then I went to the University of Pretoria, I concluded my studies there after four years and I was awarded a bursary by KPMG. I hated my first year of articles, it was absolutely dreadful, I despised every minute of making photocopies and making tea and coffee for the rest of the team.
CIARAN RYAN: Oh yes, you’re basically a slave in your first year, right?
THERESE CILLIERS: You are pretty much, yes, and then you still have to contend with writing board exams and going on out of town audits and all those kinds of fun things. Then from my second year of auditing, it really started improving quite a lot, the work was a lot more manageable, I had found my feet within the firm, but I always knew that I didn’t want to be an auditor long term. So I was very lucky that by the end of my third year, and after having gone on international secondment, I was given the opportunity to do something quite different. So I left auditing and I joined what at the time was called the national office and worked as the CEO’s personal assistant, which was really a tremendous experience for a newly qualified person to work with someone who was that experienced. It was looking at things like integrating the Arthur Andersen practice into KPMG at the time. I think from there on it just broadens your perspective because then you start seeing what all of the opportunities in the profession really look like, and it’s a broad range of corporate finance, consulting, accounting, going back into commerce, doing tax. There’s just so much that a person can do, that if you’ve got any kind of inkling about accounting or maths and numbers, and not being averse to working with people, I think finance is a great space to be in.
‘Your current assignment almost always is the most challenging one.’
CIARAN RYAN: Right and, of course, you’ve built up a lot of experience in different areas in your career, but what would you say were some of the most challenging professional assignments you’ve had to face?
THERESE CILLIERS: That’s really a difficult question because I think it’s probably your current assignment almost always is the most challenging one. I think that’s one of the benefits of the profession is that you never really reach a plateau. Maybe it’s also got something to do with the experience and the wisdom you accumulate over time, so you develop a deeper understanding of the complexity of each challenge you’re facing. At first you just dive in head first and you’re eager to solve the problem, and later on you start suspecting that there are things that you actually don’t know and so on. So I find that I look at problems from more angles nowadays. So for instance, we were speaking about the people issues and I’ve recently become far more attuned to change management with people issues and about how important it is to get that right. But I think to answer your question more directly, I think my most challenging professional assignment, and not with my current employer I might add, that being to pull a completely overstretched finance team through a very challenging financial year end, under cashflow constraints and trying to meet rather unrealistic deadlines, with a new audit firm onboard to boot. So that was really challenging from a number of perspectives. There were technical challenges, there were things that we had to sort out and clean up from prior years, but I think the biggest challenge there was to make sure that the team was on board and that we kept them motivated and we kept them going through an exceptionally challenging time.
CIARAN RYAN: Again, it comes back to team management, you’ve got to lead the team through a fire and get them safely on the other side.
THERESE CILLIERS: I think there’s a lot to be said for really being authentic in a situation like this. So I’ve had the opportunity of working with exceptionally gifted people and the ones that I admire most were the ones who were authentic and who were real in terms of dealing with their teams. To them it was also about how people were coping and not just about getting the task done. That’s something that I’ve tried to emulate in my own way is to really build a connection with the members of your team so that you know who they are and where they are as individuals, so that you also know what to expect from them.
CIARAN RYAN: Are there some things that you’re only going to learn from experience as an accountant?
THERESE CILLIERS: Oh yes, absolutely. Like I was saying, I think part of it is the people skills and I also think part of it goes with learning to deal with complexity, learning to deal with what’s really going to be important at the end of the day and not to sweat the small stuff. Very often when I am working with younger chartered accountants, they are focused on getting something technically 100% and they’ll spend hours and hours to ferret out the last couple of cents in a calculation. I think over time you realise that you can add more value by looking at an overall picture and by tackling the key performance indicators in an organisation. I think that comes with experience, that’s not something that a person can expect to know on day one.
CIARAN RYAN: There’s a lot of research being done internationally on this, what are the competencies of a CFO, and it does come down to the softer things. The people management, the team management, strategy, communication, what is a CFO doing that they are communicating these numbers in a way that can be digested by people. This is one of the reasons why the South African Institute of Business Accountants developed the CFO (SA) designation, certified financial officer, was basically in recognition of those competencies, both technical and softer. A lot of what we’ve been talking about here is the softer stuff, how do you lead a team, they get despondent, how do you pull them through?
THERESE CILLIERS: And also, how do you explain technically complex matters to other people so that they understand because I think as accountants, we do run the risk of getting so fired up and excited about IFRS and technically sound reporting that we forget about the actual users of the information and what it is that they need to make sensible decisions about their finances. To me, that’s quite a passion, to make sure that we explain things in a way that’s understandable and sensible, and that we implement controls and reporting requirements, not just for the sake of complying with corporate governance or IFRS but to really add value, to really make a difference and to make sure that what we’re doing is sensible at the end of the day.
‘It’s not about how you endure but rather in how you recharge.’
CIARAN RYAN: Tell us a little bit about yourself, do you have a family, what do you do in your downtime? What are your interests in life outside of work?
THERESE CILLIERS: That’s why I say I am a colourful person; I do have various interests. I recently read a Harvard Business Review article that gave me such an a-ha moment and I had to share it with my team. It was all about building resilience and what they were saying is building resilience is not about how you endure but rather in how you recharge. I’m really fortunate in the fact that I’ve got so many things that recharge me in life. I can really rattle down a whole list of things but one of the things I really enjoy doing is spending time with three of the most talented individuals I know, being my husband and my two daughters. We’ve got two gorgeous Standard Poodles in the house, so as you can imagine, it’s never quiet. The youngest of which is nearly six months old and I must tell you, I have never seen a pet with a greater zest for life, so if you spend ten minutes in her company it’s like having just had a tonic. I enjoy photography, I do pilates once a week, I love all kinds of creative pursuits, so I cook, I bake, I decorate cakes, it’s fun. To get back to the whole point around recharging, you only really recharge when you keep both your brain and your hands so busy that you really can’t think about work, you can’t focus on anything but the thing that you are working on at that point in time. That for me is perfect recharge time.
CIARAN RYAN: How old are your daughters?
THERESE CILLIERS: They are 12 and nine, so not yet teenagers but moving in that direction.
CIARAN RYAN: It’s going to become more hectic. A lot of schools have closed, for those listening, we are in the middle of the third wave of Covid at the moment, and quite a few schools in the Johannesburg and Pretoria area have closed. Is it the same with your kids’ schools?
THERESE CILLIERS: My kids are actually in an online school this year. We have two high-risk individuals in our household, so we decided to take them out of school at the end of last year. It was a very tough decision to make but we have enrolled them with a fully online school, where they have live classes, they write exams, it’s a very structured environment. So far it’s gone well, what’s been nice is the fact that Covid has not disrupted their academic year this year, they’ve been carrying on business as usual. They miss their friends at school and I think there’s a lot to be said for a real school environment, as opposed to an online school, but it is what it is and we’re trying to make the best of it.
CIARAN RYAN: Yes, a lot of people are doing that these days, online schooling, remote schooling.
THERESE CILLIERS: I think it’s becoming increasingly popular and if you think about the benefits that one could potentially generate out of online schooling, if you do it right, it could be a very cheap form of very high-quality education, if you have WiFi access that is.
CIARAN RYAN: My last two kids, I homeschooled them using pretty much this model that we’re doing now at the moment, where you could pick up a curriculum from a very, very good overseas college and take them through that. It actually can work but you’ve got to be able to balance that with the social activities and the sports and that kind of thing.
THERESE CILLIERS: And they need to be quite self-disciplined to make it work.
CIARAN RYAN: Yes, it’s got to be a disciplined environment. One of the reasons we did that, just to wrap up on that point, was because the viewpoint I got was that we spend far too much time in school, you spend the first 18 years of your life being a student, and I thought you should start living your life by the time you’re 15 or 16 and know what career you want to do and get busy with that phase of your life, rather than being a schoolchild, so to speak.
THERESE CILLIERS: Fifteen may be a bit young though, I don’t know that I would have been a very responsible student at the age of 15.
CIARAN RYAN: My viewpoint on that is probably that’s the way we’ve been brought up, that you are going to be in school that long. Back in the day, when schooling wasn’t a guaranteed thing and our grandparents were doing it, they were often working by the time they were 15 or 16…
THERESE CILLIERS: That’s very true.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg autobiography
CIARAN RYAN: And they were taking on responsibilities, so that was my viewpoint and I thought that’s an interesting one, and I tried to pursue that with my kids. What I’d like to hear from you as my final question is what books inspired you or books that you would recommend?
THERESE CILLIERS: I’m currently reading Ruth Bader Ginsburg – A Life in American History by Nancy Hendricks, and wow, what an inspiring lady.
CIARAN RYAN: I’ve seen the book advertised, tell me your impressions of that.
THERESE CILLIERS: I am about a third of the way through, so I have still got lots of reading to do. But what I appreciate about the book is how it goes into who she was as an individual, so it does not only focus on her career achievements and the like. I think what I appreciate about her is the fact that she lived such an integrated life, she wasn’t shy to live by the tenets of her faith, she was openly Jewish. She was professionally, of course, hugely successful in a time when women weren’t really all that welcome in the legal profession, not in the States at least. By all accounts, she was also a very good wife and mother. In fact, there’s one point in the book where she says that her fellow students used to be able to go home and just focus on their studies, whereas she had I think it was a 12-month-old child at the time when she was at Cornell University. She said that that really brought home to her the fact that she had a richer life at that stage, so having the child gave her the richness of family life when she went home but it also focused her to a greater extent when she was at university having to study. She said the one part of her life actually augmented the other, which I found quite interesting, and she had such a wicked sense of humour, which I always enjoy. She has always been a person who I have admired at a distance, and now that I am getting to know more about her as an individual, how she was brought up and how her mother always inspired her to, first of all, be a lady, which in her mother’s eyes meant, apart from having good manners and carrying yourself well in society, it also meant not to get overly emotional about things, which I thing stood her in very good stead once she entered the legal profession. So even though she had very strong views about things, she managed to bring those across in a very calm, collected and professional way. She managed to bring people across to her point of view without getting all worked up and emotional, which I admire. So yes, it’s a hugely inspiring book and I can’t wait to finish it.
CIARAN RYAN: She passed away, I think it was last year, wasn’t it?
THERESE CILLIERS: Yes, it was still during the Trump administration.
CIARAN RYAN: Interesting, okay, was there another book that you wanted to recommend?
THERESE CILLIERS: There are a couple that I am still going to get to, I am a huge fan of Brené Brown, so I have recently bought a copy of Daring Greatly. I’m looking at reading A Promised Land by Barack Obama, another book I enjoyed was Becoming by Michelle Obama, she too is just such an inspiring individual. If you look at her life story, where she came from and ending up as the first lady in the White House, she’s a really influential person to me. It was very, very inspiring.
CIARAN RYAN: It seems that you like non-fiction and you like stories of powerful people, powerful women.
THERESE CILLIERS: I do, I really enjoy that, I find it inspiring. But I must tell you that I also enjoy fiction, especially reading that with my nine-year-old, so we’re very much into Harry Potter at this stage. We’ve done the whole C.S. Lewis range of books. It’s fun, it’s nice to have a bit of balance, a little bit of fantasy coupled with reality and inspiration.
CIARAN RYAN: And what better way to wrap up the day than a little bit of reading from Harry Potter as the children go to sleep.
THERESE CILLIERS: Indeed.
CIARAN RYAN: Okay, Therese, I think we’re going to leave it there. What a great story, great experiences and insights. Thank you so much for coming on and wishing you the very best of luck in your multiple positions because it’s not just one, you have such a varied life. I think you’ve got so many things going on there, it seems like it’s very full, it’s exciting and you’re not afraid to take on big challenges. I do hope we stay in touch and get you back on, by then there will be a lot more chapters to your life.
THERESE CILLIERS: Thank you Ciaran, it was lovely talking to you and I would love to stay in touch.
CIARAN RYAN: Thanks so much, Therese.
