Spear Reit CFO and 2025 Young CFO of the Year Christiaan Barnard became the youngest financial director on the JSE at just 27 – and has spent the years since learning that knowing when to log off is just as important as knowing the numbers.
Christiaan Barnard puts his phone facedown at a certain time of night in a conscious effort to create boundaries. It is configured to not ring or vibrate with the exception of four people: his wife, mom, brother or CEO. It’s also why the Spear Reit finance chief lives in Cape Town’s leafy northern suburbs – a fair commute from the bustling CBD.
“I decided I would rather take a longer journey to work, but when I get home I have my peace and quiet. The city is busy enough and I spend enough hours in this office, so when I leave it I want to make sure I’ve left it,” he explains.
While he notes that he does struggle to sit still and prefers tasks with immediate results, he has had to learn to switch off. “But also, I think that’s what emails and WhatsApp has done to us. It’s given people instant access to you. There’s no shut off. You need to learn boundaries.”
And setting those boundaries as a young CFO trying to prove himself came with its own set of challenges for Christiaan, who at 27 became the youngest financial director on the JSE at the time.
He initially completed his articles at PKF (which eventually merged into Grant Thornton and then BDO) and received an early sign-off to work in the US on secondment in Tampa and Dallas. While on a break back in Mzansi, BDO and Grant Thornton contacted him regarding a client that intended to list on the JSE but required assistance preparing their accounts.
Steep learning curves
Christiaan had previous experience as an audit clerk helping a company set up financials for a listing, so he was hired as a contractor to assist Spear current CEO Quintin Rossi, MD at the time in 2016, and the founders in meeting the JSE listing requirements. Part of the listing process required the appointment of a financial director or CFO.
The actual appointment came as a shock. “I never thought I would qualify. I had zero experience post audit or article clerks. I was working as the financial manager at that point in time, contracted out. I saw people come in to interview, and then one day he [Quintin] asked me to come in for an interview,” he reflects. A day later, Christiaan received a payment to process, which turned out to be his letter of appointment. “I said I think you must have made a mistake because it read ‘Congratulations, you’ve been appointed as the financial director’,” he recalls.
Being the youngest FD in the JSE space brought significant pressure and scepticism – he faced questions about whether he was hired simply because he was “cheaper” and felt an inherent need to constantly prove himself. “It was a learning curve like you cannot believe,” he reflects.
He remembers waking up – and falling asleep at his desk. Six months in, he actually wrote his resignation letter and put it on his boss’s desk at 3am one morning. He then drove home, climbed into bed and fell into a fitful sleep. He woke up with a start about two hours later and raced back to the office to tear up the letter. “I said to myself: what the hell are you doing? You’re quitting. Why? I only told him [the CEO] about it eight years later,” he quips.
It was never Christiaan’s intention to be an auditor. “I don't like working in the confined regulations that auditors have. I want to be able to think and apply my mind. I always tell the guys who ask for advice post articles: it’s not to forget about what you’ve learnt, but that there is about 90 percent you still have to learn. And being in the real world, not having a fallback of an audit manager or partner, the lessons you learn are so much bigger because the mistakes you can make are so much bigger. As an audit clerk, you’re always protected.”
More than an income statement
And while he is profoundly proud of his journey, Christiaan is very self-aware that anyone is replaceable – and no one is above learning something new. “Don’t worry about asking questions. Everyone has to learn. No one goes into a job all-knowing. Every single day I will learn something new.”
One of those new areas is the technology space. While the property industry is not largely that dependent on technology, Spear has made a concerted effort to smoothline some of the processes. “We are looking at using apps and developing a program where our operations managers can utilise apps for communication with tenants. When there are damages or faults on properties, they can submit a picture via an app and the notification gets sent to the office to deal with.”
And he believes it should be as simple as possible. “You get an invoice, you load it, you pay it. There’s not a lot of technology in between that process. So that is what we’re currently working on, how to improve technology so it takes away the human element of having to go check an email, send for a quote, etc., all of that.”
He also firmly believes the CFO’s role has become more than just preparing a budget and income statement. “To be a good CFO, you need to know what’s going on throughout your business. You must understand every decision that’s made, from when the cleaner orders new hand sanitiser or sunlight liquid, to when the CEO does capital raises,” he adds.
“You don’t need to be in the grand detail, but you need to be in the high level of every single element in your business. It’s no longer just this accountant sitting in a dark room. It’s morphed into this person that is fully engaged.”
Calming a busy mind
Having grown up on a farm, Christiaan balances the demands of being a corporate executive with these roots by creating a strict physical and psychological divide between his work and personal life. “When I get home, my wife puts me to work in the garden. I do all the weeding because I can see instant results. If I do the weeding, they’re gone. I can see it’s gone.”
He loves playing golf, crayfish diving and being outdoors, but don’t take him hiking. “I don’t like hiking. I don’t see the point of it. You walk to nothing, to turn around, to walk back to where you came from. My mind is too busy to be that calm,” he laughs.
“The only thing that relaxes me, when I can lie still and do it, is I like to read statistics about sport. I would go into the history of Formula 1. I would go read the statistics about who won the most, who had multiple positions, tennis, golf, rugby. I like statistics about sports.”
And he’s become better at trying to switch off and maintain boundaries. His two-year-old daughter has certainly played a big role in this.
“It’s very important to try and learn as I grow into my journey with my wife and our baby girl that there are boundaries, there are family responsibilities, because, and I read this somewhere recently, ultimately when you look at your child today, remember this is the oldest they’ve ever been but also the smallest they will ever be.”
