Gavin
Higgins

Chief Finance Officer

LinkedIn

Who I help

Internal and external stakeholders

How I help

Providing timely and accurate management information. Communicating with external stakeholders. Financial leadership. Driving improvements in profitability and cash flow.

“My goal is to transform finance and the way it’s viewed across the group.”

Gavin Higgins is the Chief Financial Officer at AAB. Based in our Edinburgh office Gavin leads our internal finance function.

As CFO Gavin is responsible for the financial stewardship of AAB. His role focuses on driving improvement in profitability and cash flow. Supporting the firm to achieve our ambitious growth plans from a finance perspective. Gavin ensures timely and accurate management information is shared with internal and external stakeholders. This management information helps our business unit heads to successfully deliver an amazing service to our clients while helping the financial delivery of their budgets every year.

A true partnership

In my role, I work closely with both internal and external stakeholders, with a strong emphasis on fostering collaborative relationships. I am eager to leverage my experience in transforming financial operations to build upon the already robust foundation of AAB’s internal finance team. Together with the wider team, I am enthusiastic about scaling our finance function to support our growth ambitions. We are dedicated to ensuring AAB’s operational excellence, and our internal finance function will play a pivotal role in this, by providing data-driven insights that underpin our decision-making processes.

My objective when supporting stakeholders, whether internal or external, remains consistent: to deliver timely and high-quality financial information. By keeping stakeholders informed of any changes and driving strong financial leadership, we can ensure that the management information at our disposal enables us to make decisions that will drive our growth and success.

Helping to add value

“I believe that through our internal finance function, we can add value for our internal stakeholders. This will then lead to the continued improvement and growth of the business. How do we do that? We transform the management information that we provide. We give the business unit heads the ability to see what is happening across the business so they can make informed decisions with up to date and relevant information. The key to the firm’s continued growth will be helped by good quality information which is exactly what we’re enhancing. Having a hand in this process is so satisfying for me.”

Changing industry perception

“AAB is a leading force in changing the perception of traditional accountancy firms. We are a different and disruptive firm – In addition to the M&A activity undertaken in the last year (and beyond) the businesses have grown organically, focused on enhancing the services we provide for clients and creating a culture where our people can thrive. I believe what sets us apart is that we place such an importance on bringing every single one of our people along with us on our journey.”

Improved tech enablement

With the advancements in technology, we have been able to streamline our processes across AAB as a whole and also across our internal finance team. By simplifying our systems and utilising these across our 13 locations we’re able to help shape our business as we continue on our inorganic growth journey/ following a period of accelerated growth here at AAB.

Making change more comfortable

“One of the greatest challenges I’ve come across is change and change management. The group is growing at a phenomenal rate, so things cannot stay the same- there will naturally be changes. Something amazing about AAB is the length of service we have across or locations. The challenge then becomes how do we lead all our people, those with long service and those who are new through the business change. Change isn’t always easy, but we must make these changes as comfortable as possible for our people across the board.”

Supporting the growth of AAB

“This is just the beginning of what looks set to be an exciting journey for me and AAB. Right now, we have over 1,000 colleagues. This time next year we might have increased this by another 1,000. Playing my part in supporting the continued growth of this amazing business and aiding in the continued betterment of our people, is what drives me forward.”