639: Thriving at the Deep End | Catherine Birkett, CFO, GoCardless

Back in the early 2000s, Catherine Birkett found herself being pulled into confidential meetings where her company’s senior management was discussing restructuring plans with the company’s largest investor.

The company—a fiber optics telecom firm known as Interoute—was not yet 6 years old, but its days appeared to be numbered as the company sought to weather the telecom industry’s historic collapse.  

As Interoute’s top FP&A executive, Birkett knew from the ongoing business plan’s numbers that massive changes were urgently needed, and she as well as others were not optimistic about the restructuring options available to the company.

In fact, Birkett recalls, she and many executives had to tamp down the feeling that “this was not going to end well.”

From a career perspective, Birkett arguably had less at risk than the other more senior executives sitting ringside during the restructuring discussions. Not yet 30 years of age, she joined the discussions knowing perhaps that other more gainful career opportunities were available to her outside Interoute’s four walls.

Nonetheless, she had been given a seat at the meetings out of recognition of not just her ability to recite numbers but also her grasp of the intellectual property that governed the numbers. 

“I owned the business plan,” Birkett explains.  

In the end, the company’s multiyear restructuring allowed Interoute to find a new path to growth while operating under a new management team—one that included the 32-year-old Birkett as CFO.

“I was thrown into the deep end as a finance leader—I basically had to learn on the job,” recalls Birkett, who entered Interoute’s CFO office in 2003 and went on to serve in the role for the next 15 years.  

“We managed to transform the company,” says Birkett. Along the way, Interoute marched in step with a new private equity firm owner and closed a string acquisitions. Ultimately, the company was sold to GTT Communications in 2018 for $2.3 billion.

“Being promoted so young, I definitely made mistakes,” admits Birkett, who credits her CEO and other members of senior management for standing behind her as she ran at breakneck speed to acquire the skills necessary to manage a quickly expanding finance team. –Jack Sweeney