7 minute read
Tom Seymour
The problem solver
TOM SEYMOUR AND PWC THRIVE IN AN INCREASINGLY COMPLEX WORLD
by Ken Robinson
It is a good time to be in the business of answering difficult questions. Can a mass vaccination centre be set up in four weeks? Will taxes increase to cover ballooning government debt? How do we end homelessness? As CEO of PwC Australia, Mr Tom Seymour (Class of 1992) is prognosticator-in-chief, selling solutions in an uncertain world. “Clients don’t come to us for easy things they can do themselves,” Mr Seymour says. “When the world is sailing along in a stable environment we’re probably not as busy. But when the world has lots of complexity we’re really busy - and the world is as complex as ever at the moment.” The early 1990s must have seemed like simpler times when Mr Seymour was living in an old unit on the beach with a couple of fellow Bondies. “I loved it there (at Bond),” he says. “It was still pretty new as a uni. I think I saw the quality, the smaller class sizes, quite practical legal teaching, and a real sense of community.” With a Bachelor of Laws (Hons) from Bond, as well as a Bachelor of Commerce from QUT under his belt, Mr Seymour joined the Gold Coast office of PwC in 1994 as a graduate. Twenty-six years later in March 2020, following stints running the firm’s tax and legal operations, he ascended to the top role. His elevation came just as Covid began to wreak havoc. In the time since then the ‘big four’ audit and advisory firm has been grappling with some of the most pressing issues facing government, public and private clients. “Government finances and budgets are more complex than they’ve ever been,” Mr Seymour says. “You’ve got geopolitical complexity probably like we haven’t had since World War II. You’ve clearly got Covid. Interest rates are effectively zero which means anyone with money is looking to get it into a home that earns money, and that means the deals market is the hardest it’s been.”
Business is booming at PwC which has 700 partners and 8000 employees – but so is competition for the next generation of young problem-solvers. Mr Seymour says it is “probably the hottest market for professionals I’ve ever seen in my career.” That is a critical challenge at PwC which recruits 800-900 university graduates every year.
“The number one issue for us is attracting and retaining really smart, great people,” Mr Seymour says. “We don’t dig stuff up and sell it, we don’t make things - we sell professional services. So the quality of our professionals is everything to us. It defines our success, our brand and our sustainability.”
The firm recently launched a Total Reward strategy to attract, retain and motivate the best talent. Under the program, about 80 per cent of PwC employees can expect to receive bonuses, up from around 40 per cent. The firm is investing $15 million in a PwC Academy to upskill employees, while workers can swap out public holidays for other days off during the year, among other perks.
Most graduates still need good university marks to nab a job but Mr Seymour puts a premium on well-rounded candidates. Have they had good part-time jobs? Contributed to community groups? Do they play sport? Are they into the arts? “We’re a pretty diverse organisation so we try to look for people that have had different experiences,” he says. “If you’re a cookie cutter, you’ll keep some clients happy but you won’t keep all your clients happy because they come in different shapes and sizes too.”
Once in the PwC ecosystem, graduates can expect to rise rapidly through the ranks. “We’re a fast-paced, agile organisation that propels careers,” Mr Seymour says. “I’ll often get a bunch of our grads in a virtual room and
say, ‘Put your hand up if the job you’ve got now is the job you want 18 months from now’, and not one hand goes up. And you could do that across our entire business, because a first-year partner wants to be a senior partner. Our whole organisation is predicated on the ability to advance your career.”
While some, like the boss, remain longterm PwC employees and partners, others stay for a few years before going on to other endeavours. “Our alumni network is critically important to us,” Mr Seymour says. “There’s a huge number of CEOs, government ministers, heads of government departments and chairs of boards who can say, ‘I started my career at PwC’. That’s a big part of what we offer as well.”
Currently, Mr Seymour is putting some of the best minds in Australia to work on problems that will shape the nation during the pandemic and beyond. “If you’re in a situation where you’ve left uni and you’re not exactly sure what you want to do but you want experience and to learn, you couldn’t come to a better organisation because we’re so diverse in what we do,” he says. “We’ve got teams who have designed and stood up vaccination stadiums in four weeks from scratch - all the technology behind it, the process management control, the reporting - end to end. We have teams working on the biggest transactions Australia’s ever seen, on complex tax matters, legal issues, some of the most complex audits and cyber risk issues.”
TOM SEYMOUR ON…
Working from home
“If anyone doubted you could work flexibly from anywhere, Covid has absolutely proven you can. But it has also shown that people don’t want to work from home five days a week because humans want human interaction. Younger team members are missing out on experiences like jumping in a cab with a partner and going across the city to a client meeting. You don’t get the dinner on Friday night after you’re finished a big transaction or a big audit. You don’t get to travel. And those sorts of experiences are part of what we offer. I think in a perfect world post-Covid, staff will get the flexibility of working from home a day or two a week. But I’ve got to be honest, I think the negatives (of working from home) outweigh the positives.”
Tax reform
“Tax reform will be inevitable as a result of (the pandemic) but in Australia it will require federation reform to go with it at a time when the states are getting further apart rather than more integrated. If you go back over history, whenever there’s been a major shock to government finances - the Great Depression is a good example - the only way governments got out of it was fundamental reform. My own view is you’re going to see taxes going up because governments are going to need to raise more money. The second point I would make is pandemics increase inequality. We are going to enter a high inflation environment - look at car and house prices - everything’s expensive at the moment. And as inflation increases, if you’re asset rich you get richer. But if you haven’t got assets it’s even harder to get assets and inequality becomes entrenched. I think in Australia you’ll see a reform and increase to indirect taxes like GST. But it’s going to take a brave Australian government to do what they need to do.”
Environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors
“ESG is beginning to really embed itself into the cost of capital and if you’re raising capital in a sector which is non-ESG friendly, you are paying a significant premium. If you look at big transactions that have played out recently, like the BHP transaction, ESG is littered through that. The critical issue with ESG in Australia, from both the government perspective and how companies react to it, is around what I’d refer to as the just transition. It’s a lot easier to be environmentally friendly if you’re well-to-do. It’s a lot harder if you haven’t got a lot of money. A lot of the people who are the most vocal for change are living in the cities. Are they prepared to pay an extra two per cent in their tax bills every year to fund the transfer of wealth? That’s where that conversation will ultimately get to because the transition is not free.”
