When Darren Cooper was named CFO of Reveal Group of Melbourne, Australia, in 2019, there was no friendly board member or executive recruiter seeking kudos for having completed a successful a CFO search.
Instead, Cooper says, his twist of fate was due to a personal relationship that he had established with Reveal management after his prior company, Adcorp Holdings, had hired Reveal to provide it with services inside the intelligent automation realm.
Read MoreOriginally from South Africa, Cooper had been counted among the finance rank-and-file of a Johannesburg staffing company only 5 years earlier. Turn back the clock to those times, and you would find Cooper spearheading a number of the staffing company’s strategic IT projects when Adcorp entered talks to acquire the company.
The resulting deal swung open a number of new doors for Cooper, who became a key player in the restructuring of the staffing company’s South African operations. Adcorp, in turn, promoted Cooper into a group financial manager role before asking him to relocate to Australia to serve as the region’s finance leader.
It wasn’t long before Cooper’s purview spanned all of Adcorp’s Asia-Pacific operations, a charge that eventually led to him developing relationships with a variety of technology services providers—one of which was Reveal Group. –Jack Sweeney
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CFOTL: Tell us about the Reveal Group … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Cooper: Reveal Group is a specialized intelligent automation solutions company that uses robotic process automation (RPA) and associated technologies to effectively digitize a process. What we do is effectively to program little software robots to go in and do volume processing, the monotonous work. This is any process that is based on, If you get this, then do that, then push it through the system. We have technology that recognizes handwriting on forms so that they can interact between systems. At the end of the day—particularly in larger companies where you have high volumes—by using Reveal you can remove significant costs from the business as well as increase the process efficiencies in the cycle of implementation.
Read MoreWhen I joined the group, we were on a number of different accounting systems. We never had had that sort of hierarchy of holding company subsidiary relationships. It was a typical entrepreneurial start-up type of environment. We ended up putting in NetSuite, did a system migration, and got everybody onto the same platform. The ultimate goal was then to try to build up the kinds of data that would enable us to actually start tracking basically everything and especially seasonality trends between individual regions, which have very different cycles.
Unfortunately for us, COVID hit and kind of stuffed up everything in the process. We certainly have data that we’ve never been able to have a look at before to analyze. I personally have a number of questions as to the accuracy of some of it in a steady-state environment, so—COVID aside—it still will be good to do a good dive into some of the different kinds of trends. Hopefully, as we’re coming out of COVID now, we’ll start being able to benefit a lot more from our data.
jb
Reveal Group | www.revealgroup.com | Melbourne, Australia