Meet the CA: Roses Only CFO Kelly Taggart
Kelly Taggart CA always knew that being an accountant in practice wasn’t for her, so she grew a business instead.
In Brief
- Kelly Taggart CA was a fresh-faced 23-year-old when she joined Roses Only in 2008.
- While cash-flow pressures during the global financial crisis initially made her fear for the company’s survival, Taggart has ended up playing a big part in its success.
- You can hear all about Taggart’s journey on her episode of podcast series “The Mentor with Mark Bouris”.
By Chantelle Herro
Kelly Taggart CA is the youngest member of the Roses Only Group’s management team, known as the “four amigos” inside the company. She joined the business in 2008 when she was only 23 and a freshly qualified chartered accountant. She was keen to build a business, and she hasn’t looked back.
Today she is the chief financial officer, chief operating officer and company secretary of Australia’s largest floral delivery service.
“I didn’t want to work in a firm, I wanted to work in a business where I could really make a difference,” she recently told high-profile businessman Mark Bouris on his podcast The Mentor with Mark Bouris.
“I didn’t want to work in a firm, I wanted to work in a business where I could really make a difference”
“And I knew that I would never be an accountant forever. I wanted to make a difference in a team and really grow something. But I was good at accounting; it was easy. It was a good place to start.”
Taggart tells Bouris that many of the basic skills she honed as an accountant she uses daily at Roses Only.
“What I like about accounting is more management accounting, so not so much the statutory side but pricing and producing models that actually help the executive team make decisions and get better.”
Taggart was thrown into the deep end from the beginning. In the early days she wasn’t sure how the business would overcome its cash-flow challenges. She says the company faced all the typical hurdles of an early-stage business – including a tricky period throughout the global financial crisis.
“We actually had a year where we went to our core team and negotiated lower salaries for a period,” she recalls.
In return, they looked at providing people with options in the company, as they wanted their team to “think like owners”.
Those sort of company values won Taggart over from the start and have kept her loyal to the ever-expanding Roses Only Group.
In the podcast, Taggart also talks about how the constant collection of data keeps the Roses Only Group executive team on track and why, above all else, the employees come first.
Listen to the podcast here.
