From stumbling into an attempted coup in her second job, to a baptism of fire at Vodacom, financial director Kayley Beattie has mastered a work-life balance, from wearing many hats in her job, to making time for family and personal growth.
It’s taken The Specialist Group financial director Kayley Beattie more than a decade and a half to reach the sweet spot between a demanding job and leading a fulfilling life.
From being able to read 100 books, consisting solely of Sci-fi and fantasy novels in 2025, while simultaneously freeing up time to walk a high-energy family dog and fulfill her personal roles as mother and wife, Kayley also manages an impressive portfolio at work.
“I like to joke that I have an extremely boring life and I really do. I live in an extremely beautiful area in Cape Town, so I spend a lot of time outdoors with my dog – I have a very high energy dog – and my children.”
Today, Kayley wears many hats, from chief financial officer to overseeing technological operations, ensuring legal compliance and managing human resources. She is a vital part of a small exco team while managing operations in over 73 locations on the African continent, including Namibia, Zambia, Mozambique, Eswatini, and Botswana.
The Centurion-based company specialises in environmentally safe pest control, and industrial cleaning and hygiene services. “A large part of our business is managing key accounts with big corporations such as Coca-Cola, Fidelity and most of the KFC’s across South Africa,” explains Kayley. But her scope doesn’t start and end at audits, or even statutory and legal compliance.
Her responsibilities extend to nearly all aspects of business operations making her a jack of all trades. “Because we’re a small exco team, I don’t stop at finance. Anything that touches legal, HR or anything like that falls within the scope of my responsibilities.”
Early career
Kayley’s career in finance began soon after matriculating. She studied a BCom in finance, majoring in investment banking, financial management and statistics at the Unisa. Two weeks after completing university, Kayley landed her first role with the Bank of China in Sandton as a personal banker.
“It was really different back then. There were no real electronic mechanisms for Chinese companies in South Africa to pay their staff. So it was all done manually,” Kayley recalls.
She worked with mainly steel manufacturing companies and dealt with sometimes 100s of millions of rand in cash, which needed a high level of human input to ensure that the amounts tallied and the right people got paid.
“Shortly thereafter,(2007) the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China acquired a 20 percent equity stake in Standard Bank and the paradigm shifted,” says Kayley.
Walking through flames
When Kayley turned 25, she began working as an accountant and, later, financial manager at a Pretoria-based national technology distribution company. She remembers the senior role being underpinned by several challenges, including a debtors book that ran into millions of rand. Add to that, the pressure to perform with an equity partner, young Kayley had her work cut out for her.
But then Kayley found herself, rather awkwardly, reporting to a financial director who was committing fraud and attempting to stage a coup-de-grâce.
Her voice trails off at this point as she paused to process the gravity of the conundrum her younger self had been exposed to so early in her career. “I knew the moment I exposed that to the equity partners my life was going to become extremely difficult….extremely uncomfortable,” she said.
Her sombre prediction came true. “I exposed it, I put my cards on the table with evidence and left the rest to the exco,” she recalls.
While the company immediately initiated an audit, Kayley found herself walking through flames in the months that followed. The financial director being probed had retained his position during the investigations, and was fully aware that it had been Kayley who reported his illicit activities.
The weight of this knowledge made the work environment and relations between manager and director remarkably strained at the time. “I used to get to the office at 6 am, and he was the only other person there, and it was deeply uncomfortable,” she laughs in a moment of gallows humour. “He was impossible to avoid. We did the financials and managed a bunch of structures within the business together, and it was month-to-month-to-month.”
A harrowing experience
The financial director didn’t take Kayley’s actions lightly. He retaliated by making everyday work tasks an uphill battle. From refusing to approve and release payments that were accurate, to not wanting to pay her at all. He had also removed her from meetings.
At 25, Kayley found herself at the epitome of an evergreen cliche of what it felt like to be a woman in a male-dominated field. “Here are five men who are 50+ and I am 25,” she says.
To add to that, Kayley felt that she had little to no support from the other directors. “While they were grateful for what I did because it saved the business, they were not willing to go toe-to-toe with this guy,” she recalls.
The whole saga, while marking a particularly harrowing work experience, taught the young accountant to stand her ground. She had also developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of the personal sacrifice it takes to be a whistleblower. “What I was doing was right and I still retain pride for doing the right thing. It shouldn’t have been a question, I understand that, but everything I knew that was going to happen, happened, in a big way.”
She says the two main reasons whistleblowers are reluctant to come forward is because of the retaliation that follows and the fear of being tarred with the same brush as the person being investigated, even when you are innocent. “I knew I was squeaky clean but I was the closest to him which is why I picked up what he was doing. For me, I saved a business that employed 200 people and the person who lost their job deserved it,” she reiterates firmly.
Kayley endured the consequences of speaking out despite being exonerated. She says her former financial director’s retaliation persisted even after she left the company, albeit unsuccessfully.
“I completely understand why people don’t do it, especially if their anonymity cannot be protected,” she declares firmly.
In hind sight, while the company directors had Kayley to thank for stopping the coup, and being able to retain their directorships, she found the lack of support difficult to reconcile.
A new chapter
In the aftermath of the whistleblowing saga that ultimately stopped an attempted coup, Kayley decided it was time for her next chapter. This time as a consultant at telecoms giant Vodacom’s leases and rentals department.
As if preventing a corporate knockout in her previous role wasn’t enough, Kayley had moved out of the frying pan and straight into a baptism of fire in what would become the most demanding period in her career.
Between her late 20s and early 30s Vodacom had handed her a R1 billion portfolio that included working with local municipalities and major public sector stakeholders like Eskom, as well as cross border operations in India. “I worked quite closely at that stage with the FD and MD of Vodacom which was gruelling- but fulfilling,” Kayley says in retrospect.
These years marked some of her most intense periods of growth. “Working 18/20-hour days for three years was not on my bingo card at the time,” she adds. “But that being said, it certainly taught me a lot of resilience.”
The fact that Kayley had landed up in exco meetings at one of South Africa’s top four companies at a relatively tender age, was not lost on her at the time either. “It taught me a lot about having an executive presence, articulating what I needed to say and it also taught me how to manage teams. At one stage I was managing a team of about 20 people spread across South Africa and India.”
Being handed a R1 billion portfolio with existing challenges taught Kayley how to speak for herself and stand out in a boardroom. “I gained a lot of faith in myself by being able to sort that out because people who had come before me had not been able to do it. I definitely destroyed my circadian rhythm to do it, but I am not sorry,” she said.
Motherhood, upskilling and work-life balance
Personal and professional growth always overlapped for Kayley. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Kaylay decided it was time to upskill and undertook to complete her CIMA degree over the next two years. While she was busy with the degree, Kayley welcomed her second child.
“My son was extremely unwell for the first six to 12 months of his life. He was in and out of hospital but I had an extremely supportive family and the company I worked for at the time was also extremely supportive,” she says.
Kayley also found it difficult to to take the standard four months maternity leave South African mothers usually get after giving birth. “Finance doesn’t really allow for that. I know that a lot of women may not want to hear that, but that has been my experience.” But she stands firm on the point that she would not have been able to do both without a solid support system at home helping with childcare and a supportive employer.
Kaylay has since made Cape Town her new home. She takes comfort and pride in being able to unwind in the peaceful natural surroundings of her home, when she’s not visiting the gym.
An avid reader, Kayley loses herself in alternate realities found in the pages of sci-fi and fantasy novels. Her Top three reads include the Red Rising Trilogy, Fourth Wing and Throne of Glass.
