Voice of Experience: Anne Fergusson, Director, PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Business / Head of PwC Panel Network

by Elizabeth Harrin (London)

“I’ve had a back to front life,” says Anne Fergusson, a Director in PricewaterhouseCoopers Advisory Business and Head of the PwC Panel Network. She hands me a cup of tea. “Life is full of surprises.”

Anne talks as if she is surprised at the way her career has turned out, but listening to her it is clear that she made good choices, and has actively managed her route to the top at PwC.

She started salaried work at the age of 40, when she separated from her first husband. “I made a decision to earn my own living,” she says. It was a decision taken by necessity: living in the west of Scotland, outside Glasgow, she had three children to support. She had qualified as a chartered accountant when she was younger and took a full-time lectureship at the University of Strathclyde teaching financial and management accounting and tax practice.

She met and married her second husband, who was studying at the time. He read her professional journals, which she admits to ignoring, and pointed out a job he thought she should go for. “I didn’t think I had anywhere else to go, and I enjoyed academia,” she says. However, she rang the Director of Education at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland and he invited her to an interview.

“I ended up teaching to demanding audiences and made some great friends,” Anne says. Her work with the Institute saw her working in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Russia, Poland and Romania. “I was responsible for my own material, the hours were long and family life was very restricted.”

The opportunity to move on came from the son of one of her friends who was expanding his headhunting firm, Lomond Consulting, and offered her the position of Managing Director of the Scottish business. “I love being amongst people and being able to network and walk into a room – it was such a joy.”

However, she knew nothing about headhunting, but had confidence in her ability to get the best out of people through networking. “I was petrified of picking up the phone,” Anne says. “I got very friendly with the PAs of the people I was calling. I made a lot of female friends that way. It underpinned our business.”

One of her big breaks came when she sourced a tax partner for KPMG. The client had been searching for two years, but Anne knew she could find someone. After a hectic search, she found the perfect candidate but the client didn’t want to know. Anne persuaded them to meet her candidate – and he was a perfect fit for the company. It gave her a huge boost: “I had confidence in my own judgment, and that’s what I needed.”

Executive search took its toll. “I was working millions of hours and at the same time recognised that I had cut other things out of my life,” she explains. It was a difficult decision, but she left Lomond. On the day that she broke the news to her colleagues her husband Dixie was rushed into hospital. Sadly, he died ten months later.

Anne sips her tea. She describes the time as an emotional abyss. Dixie had left her a ticket to Australia and she spent some time travelling. “I couldn’t see a future in Edinburgh,” she says.

When she was back in Scotland, a former student rang her and told her about an opportunity at PwC in business recovery. “The opportunity to move to London swung it for me,” she says.

And so Anne had a new project into which to throw her boundless energy: the Panel Network started to take shape. “I’ve been allowed to just run with it,” she explains. “They brought me in and allowed me to run loose, which was very brave.”

The Network is a group of business professionals with decades of experience, who could restructure a struggling business by taking an interim role. It started with a small community of veterans but now numbers 2000 members. “The scale of the Network equals the scale of the business opportunity,” she explains.

The Network is not comprised of PwC employees: instead they are executives in their own right. When a PwC colleague comes across a business that is struggling, Anne can choose the right person from the Network to parachute in to help turn the business around. They can take an operational role, something that PwC could never do, but they can draw on the vast resources at PwC should that be required. There are currently around 50 clients benefiting from the community in a number of ways: from a couple of days of consultancy to using a Network member as an interim Chair.

The Panel Network is now embedded in every part of the business; so much so that it gives Anne’s colleagues confidence that they can go out and have the Network as a tool to use if they require it. It’s an additional extra that PwC can provide, over and above the work they do day-to-day.

The majority of her role now is facilitating the Network, and her previous experience gives her buckets of ability to make this happen. “Networks are all about friendships and the importance of friendships and trust,” she says. “As we go into tough times it’s imperative that we work with friends. It will be the more humane qualities that drive us.”

A lot of what she does now is very sociable. Anne is often asked to host dinners and she is out a lot: the opera, the cinema, London Fashion Week. “No two days are ever the same. I love the buzz – this isn’t a job,” she laughs, “it’s a party!” It’s just as well that she feels this way, because Anne doesn’t like the work/life balance dichotomy: for her, you have a whole life.

The time’s up, and Anne has the paperwork ready for her next meeting. Working at the pace she does, with the energy and enthusiasm she displays, it’s not surprising that the Panel Network is an asset for PwC.

“I feel I come into to work and flex my brain,” she says. “For the first time in my life thanks to PwC I feel I’ve been given the chance to move at my own pace rather than constantly being slowed down.”