About this episode
When Adrian Talbot tells us that he parachuted into Thames Television in the early 1990s, the image of the London skyline—once used to brand the popular British broadcasting company —quickly comes to mind. Suddenly, in our mind’s eye, just to the right of St. Paul’s dome, we spy a 20-something-year-old Talbot floating confidently downward. Along with a boatload of first-class metaphors, this is the type of instant imaging that every conversation renders—at least for those of us on the lookout for them. But Talbot’s successful first jump—not unlike those of many future finance leaders—came about with a degree of serendipity. “The lead auditor became sick—I was parachuted in for 2 years, and this gave me an early taste of media,” explains Talbot, who at the time was an auditor for BDO. Several internal auditing roles followed, including one with Hilton International that required a good deal of travel in order to complete audits in different parts of the world. “When you have chased the financial controller for the Caracas Hilton around the airport with a sheet of accruals or when the general manager of the Nairobi Hilton is yelling at you for telling him that he made a mess of a capex project, it is rather character-building,” comments Talbot, who soon jumped back into the media realm with United Business Media, where he would serve as a finance director for the company’s television broadcasting properties before entering the global communications sphere as a finance director for Burson Marsteller. Talbot reports that years later, when he was recruited to be CFO of Hotwire, a fast-growing global communications firm, he found a unique match—not because of his years inside media and communications but because of Hotwire’s global CEO, Barbara Bates. Bates had sold a communications company that she had spent 25 years building to Hotwire in 2016 and gone on to be named Hotwire’s Global CEO. “I was able to help her with my experience around the globe, and she was able to help me with her experience inside the USA,” says Talbot, who today credits Bates with helping him to safely land inside a finance leadership opportunity. - Jack Sweeney