The newly appointed CFO of CFAO Equipment SA is looking forward to the learnings the new role brings.
Tammy Rosse believes her recent appointment as CFO of CFAO Equipment South Africa is recognition of the effort she has put into developing herself and building her career over the past decade.
She joined CFAO Equipment South Africa in 2015, when it was still called EIE Group, as a financial manager. A year later, she was appointed group financial manager.
“While managing the finance team remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic and overseeing our recent acquisition by CFAO Holdings SA, the last three years have been the toughest years of my career, but they have also resulted in immense personal and professional growth for me,” Tammy says.
She explains that she has learned that “today’s turmoil is tomorrow’s opportunity and that even when the situation seems insurmountable, it is possible to overcome challenges, learn from them, and move forward”.
Tammy’s journey to becoming a CFO started in 2009, after she received her honours degree in accounting sciences from the University of Pretoria. She joined Deloitte in Johannesburg to start her articles, and in 2012 she was seconded to Deloitte’s Miami offices, where she spent six months before returning to South Africa to take up the position of audit manager.
“There was high supply and low demand for audit managers and I was one of the lucky few to stay on as an audit manager at Deloitte. For the next three and a half years, I gained excellent audit experience, juggling various clients, deadlines and teams,” she says.
Tammy believes that her new role will allow her to continue her learning journey and get to know even more about the industry and business, as she is tasked with driving the conversion of CFAO Equipment’s enterprise resource planning software over the next two years. “We have never been through a conversion before, so this will be a monumental challenge for us as an organisation,” she says.
From an overall strategy perspective, Tammy intends to interact with all divisions within the business to determine how to continuously add value for investors and stakeholders.
On a more personal note, she intends to maintain an open-door policy as the new finance leader in the organisation. “Communication and accessibility are important focus areas for me. In the past, employees have not always felt comfortable approaching executives in the business. This needs to change. I believe it is critical to always have the greater good of the people and the business at heart and this is where I hope to bring a different perspective.”
Looking ahead, Tammy says the future looks bright for CFAO Equipment SA. “This is an exhilarating time for our business. Having recently become part of a really big group of companies, being CFAO Group based in France, a wholly owned subsidiary of Toyota Tsusho Corporation in Japan, we now have direct access to our primary OEM as well as new potential markets across Africa, leaving many exciting opportunities ahead of us.”
