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Former Cadbury CFO offers guidance as a non-executive

David Kappler takes on new challenges after 40 years in accountancy. By Robert Bruce, accountancy columnist at the Financial Times.

David Kappler has just retired after nine years as global CFO at Cadbury Schweppes but he is as busy as ever. As well as being non-executive chairman of the newly listed Premier Foods, he is also a non-executive director and chief of the audit committee of HMV Group, Shire Pharmaceuticals and Intercontinental Hotels.

His role at Premier Foods is complex. "It's a new company, so I am working with the non-executive directors to represent the shareholders and to provide an interface between non-executive and executive directors. I will also be providing guidance for the executives, who have had limited public company experience," he says.

For Kappler, it is a role in which the non-executive chairman acts as mentor and experienced friend, as well as ensuring that the overall strategy works. As he puts it: "I do anything I can to test and challenge the strategy and act as advisor to the non-executives." Kappler sees progress in the share price and development of the business as his contribution to the organisation.

Premier Foods is at an interesting point in its development. Having been privately run by venture capitalists for four years it has now been floated on the stock market. Kappler commented on the challenge this presents: "We need to find a balance between the short term and the long term. For venture capitalists, strategy is generally how to increase cash flow." He describes the new strategy and how he can enable executives to carry it out as the added value he brings to the company.

Kappler started out as a trainee accountant immediately after leaving school. "I found at school that manufacturing businesses were rather more appealing than the auditing process," he said. He went straight into the company where he was to work for most of his career. "I was fortunate enough to go into Cadbury. I did my basic training in accounting at Bournville."

By the age of 30 he was named finance director at the Jeyes Group, part of Cadbury, which was expanding rapidly at the time. "It was my first experience of a finance director's responsibilities and I built my career from there," he said. In 1995 he advanced to finance director of Cadbury Schweppes itself. "It was very exciting. It was a time of change, with a redefinition of its business portfolio," he recalled.

"There were big deals for acquisitions and divestments, with several deals of $1 billion-plus. This led to a reorganisation of the business, then shareholder value creation initiatives and investor relations work, explaining the big deals to the market." On the professional side, he set up and chaired the investor relations committee of the 100 Group of UK Finance Directors, the main UK industry body for FDs.

This all brought change to Kappler's role. "You become less of a pure numbers man and more of a salesman, selling your ideas internally and externally, sometimes to a sceptical marketplace. I can barely remember when I last switched on my calculator, whereas at the beginning of my career number-crunching was at its heart," he recalls.

Conflicts on the ethical front between professional and business obligations were few and far between. "I always saw the finance director as the custodian of ethics and integrity in the financials and in the statements made to the financial markets. But systems were in place just in case. We had systems so that people had a direct line to me on a confidential basis. You need to be prepared to be aggressive, but know where the line is between right and wrong," he says. "If the financial people cannot stand up to aggressive managers, then you need to find different financial people."

Continuing professional development was also important to Kappler. "It is nearly 40 years since I started out and the world has changed," he says. "How formalised continuing professional development has been has never worried me. You just need to be up to date. Without that, your value diminishes significantly. But it is very much up to the individual."

Kappler has always seen the professional accountant in business as having a huge effect on the overall reputation of the accounting profession. "The problem is that it is the very few who make the headlines who tend to tarnish the rest of us. We need to ensure that the integrity of the finance functions and the audit committees is high and that, as a result, the Enrons slide into history. You can only stop future scandals by strong finance structures backed up with integrity."

Other articles in this series can be found on the IFAC website.