Terry Smith was on his way to becoming a Unilever lifer when he left the manufacturer to become FD at Canon UK nine months ago.

Some of us get anxious about leaving a job after two years let alone after 18 years (the amount of time Smith had put in), and he admits he was “quite apprehensive” to begin with.

“Everything is new – the people, the processes, the systems, even finding your way around the building. They’re all things you take for granted,” Smith says.

“But the environment at Canon is very welcoming. I remember going home in the first week and even saying then ‘it feels like I’ve already been here a while’.”

When he left Unilever, Smith was FD for the export business. He insists he didn’t leave the company because he was unhappy. Instead, he left in a bid for self-fulfillment.

After so many years and so many roles, Smith says he didn’t feel challenged anymore. “I wasn’t pushing my own boundaries the way that I wanted to. While I was enjoying the role, Unilever couldn’t really offer me the future development I wanted.”

Canon offered the chance to play in a bigger market. The export business within Unilever UK was turning over €100m (£69.7m), while Canon recorded sales of £541m in 2005.

Smith’s team is also much larger. “I have 85 people here in the finance team and I have a real leadership role. Previously, I only had three or four direct reports,” he says.

The chance to work on the Canon board was too good to pass up as well. “I want to drive the business forward, and my passion is therefore being one of the leadership team who is responsible for setting the direction, being very clear on the strategy, communicating that down through the business and then making that strategy a reality of the business performance.”

In fact, there very few similarities between his old gig and current position. Take, for instance, industry challenges: “The export business was simply about working with distributors across the world. Canon UK is an extremely complicated business, not least of all because it’s effectively two businesses within one.”

Strategy development is also viewed differently. “At Unilever, the strategy was very clear and defined. At Canon, there are much greater opportunities to develop that further.”

As he approaches his second year in the job, Smith has some big ideas on taking the business forward. Canon has to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and Smith is adamant the company must automate the monitoring and testing of internal controls. “From my perspective, wherever possible, we need to automate. As soon as there’s human intervention, there’s a greater possibility for a breakdown in that control,” he says.

(Incidentally, while Smith admits that complying with the act is a hassle, he says the reassurance of knowing that key controls within Canon are robust is worth the investment in time and money. “I’ve been through the process now for a number of years and what I’ve seen is that, after the initial bedding down of the process, you can actually start leveraging it. Unless your foundations are solid in the business, anything you do to build upon them is a risk,” he says.)

Smith is also pushing for the finance team to be more involved in the overall business. It’s a concept he calls “finance business partnering”. He explains: “For me, finance business partnering is being there at all those key decision points during the business and ensuring, on the information we have, that we’re making the right decision.

“It’s making sure that all the available information is being provided and understood – and, therefore, the decisions are made from a solid foundation. It’s also about building the relationships. Are your relationships with those decision-makers strong enough so that you can hold up a mirror and say, ‘Is this what we want to do?’.”

Smith wants to free the finance team from the “routine provision of information and data” and other transaction-based activities. Already, Canon has replaced its ERP system, and Smith says a lot of time has been spent “focusing on our processes”.

He adds: “It’s all in the quest to find the extra hour in the day in order that we can invest more time in partnering and in the business. I think there’s always been a willingness to do it but perhaps the infrastructure hasn’t supported it.”

There’s no doubt that Smith has found the challenge in an environment he enjoys. Could this be the start of another long-term relationship? “Unilever was a great company to be part of, but I’ve joined an equally good company to work for. I was expecting a lot and it’s delivered, and I know there’s so much more I can do going forward. I can see myself being here for quite a while.”

Related tags: export business, business performance, finance business partnering, canon, finance team, unilever, terry smith, finance director, leadership role,