S4, EP1: From Go to CFO is back: What our [axr] 2026 Salary Guide Actually Tells You

Speaker A: Do you want to become a CFO

Speaker B: and take control of your career? Our AXR podcast series from Go to CFO will give you a unique insight into what it takes to become a successful cfo. Hosted by myself, Dave Goldbach, and my colleague, Kunal Gupta, from AXR Recruitment and Search, we speak to inspiring and successful CFOs from our network across Australia. They share their career journeys with us and with you. The closest thing you're going to get to delving into the mind of a cfo.

Speaker A: We hope you enjoy it. Love it. I just like the beginning of that. Not because of anything you did, just because I peaked the microphone. I just want to get that clear. So just that first. Like, I'll do it again.

Speaker B: Okay. Oh, the whole thing again or just the.

Speaker A: Just the beginning?

Speaker B: Okay.

Speaker A: Do you want to become a CFO

Speaker B: and take control of your career? Our AXR podcast series from Go to CFO will give you unique insight into what it takes to become a successful cfo. Hosted by myself, Dave Goldbach, and my colleague, Kunal Gupta, from AXR Recruitment and Search, we speak to inspiring and successful CFOs from our network across Australia. They share their career journeys with us and with you. The closest thing you're going to get to delving into the mind of a cfo.

Speaker A: We hope you enjoy it. All right, well, welcome, Kunal. I'm Dave Golbach. I am the Director of Accounting and Finance for AXR Recruitment and Search. This is Kunal. If you want to give a quick hello.

Speaker C: Yeah, hi. Hey, morning, Dave. Yes, great to see you in the room again. Uh, and it's good to kick this podcast series back on again.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. So, obviously it's been a while since Kunal and I have been here. We're working re engaging and kicking, um, off once again, the CFO podcast. The AXR Go to CFO podcast. We're very excited. This is our first one in over a year. But what we're going to do in this one is have a bit of a chat about the salary guides that we launched this year. So our 2026 salary guides give you a really good sense of what's in there and why it's different. And we're also just going to give you a bit of an update, I think, right now, about who we are and why we're re engaging and kicking off our Go to CFO podcast again.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, no, sounds good, Dave. I'm happy, um, to kick off on that. So, for our listeners from Go to CFO podcast series, what we're going to be doing as just reshaping it a little bit is we're going to be focusing on three main verticals during it. Right. So we're going to have one where we talk to senior finance leaders, so the likes of experienced CFOs. We'll also have a vertical where we're talking about future leaders and we're talking to future leaders about their career journey, the challenges they're facing around maybe making that next step, trying to manage things like work, life balance and what they're trying to do to navigate upskill, get to the position of being that leader in an organization. And we'll also run a series of how to guides, so talking about various aspects of navigating, maybe exiting a job, starting a new one, salary negotiations in your current employment, and also just sharing market intel and what we're seeing out there to help you be best prepared.

Speaker A: It's great. Yeah, I think we're, I think we're both really excited. We, uh, for those who don't know, at AXR Recruitment and Search, we've been running a CFO incubator program for about 15 years now where we gather future leaders who are looking to become cfo. And we, we interview a CFO as part of that, that series. There's three breakfasts and we do it in person with, with a really great group. And what we love about that is what we're going to love about this podcast, which is getting that opportunity to talk to those CFOs and really get under the hood of how do they make it once they were there, what did they do and what did they learn? You know, what did they learn along the way? All those really interesting tidbits that you just don't get unless you have a really solid conversation with the CFO and really learn a ton about their career. And as you talk through those things, there's so many insights that come out that we can all learn from.

Speaker C: Yeah. And I think there's a natural extension there because at this forum we're going to have CFOs share a level of insight that is open to a wider audience. M. At the CFO incubator program, which we do post out on LinkedIn. So if anyone is interested, please contact us on a company page or reach out to Dave and I separately and we'll look to get you in. But at the, uh, CFO incubator programs which are in person, CFOs often find it more comforting to maybe share even more and you get deeper insights There. So I think it's good to actually have exposure to both if and when you can.

Speaker A: Agreed.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: So to summarize, we're very excited to kick this back off again and get a chance to meet some very exciting CFOs. Be on the lookout for our first one which will be coming up shortly and we'll be trying to do them on a regular basis to give you insights all year. So to kick off this one, this is not really a how to guide, uh, but a similar one where we're going to talk through our salary guides and talk through how to use it, what it means, and maybe most importantly why it's different to some of the

Speaker B: other ones that are out there.

Speaker A: Because we know there are a lot of salary guides out there, but we like to think that ours is a bit different and we'll tell you why.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, well, it is different in the modern age we're in. I haven't tested this with AI, put our salary guide out there compared to others and got it to critique it. And it, you know, so AI never lies or it definitely does, but we'll take it as truth is it said, look, ours is distinctly different and I'll uh, A uh, market level above. And this is what we suspected going into the process when we were developing our salary guide because we wanted to be really conscious about not just putting down a role and salary range. And you often see that you see a lot of salary guides from a lot of the big players in the market where they would have a role. And then there's a salary range which might be like $100,000 in the range. Like you might have a finance manager paying, you know, 110 to 190,000. And that doesn't really tell you too much. And it's just a job title. So what we've really tried to do and we've been conscious about this is to go beyond that and get into the role scope. So really spending a lot of time defining what the job involves because at the end of the day different organizations have different views on titles and we could maybe talk about that also. We'll get into that. But then also what the skills and demand for that sort of position are because ultimately that's what defines it. And we have noticed some key trends in the market which we'll probably get into around what these skills in demand are, uh, which define the role. So for each position across different tiers, we really look. Define that. Dave.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. And I agree that is one of the key differentiators and what makes it really important, I think what we also do is we, we really, we break it down across a number of different levels. So what we've, what we did and what we learned from past salary guys is there is a massive, and not just salary guys, but obviously we're talking to candidates and clients all day, every day. That's what we do. And there is a big difference in salary in sti, lti, in role definitions, skills, all that when you look at the large, large business. So ASX 300 and above, you know, your mid tier business and then your small business and salaries can range significantly as well as the role scope. So as, as one example, you know, if you take CFO of an ASX 300 business, you know you're earning somewhere in the range of 600k to 1.3 million, potentially more. You know, could be infinite almost. And, and with a huge uh, lti, STI and all that. But that's because obviously your, your role scope and your skills required for that are very different to where you're a CFO of a small business where you're obviously going to be earning less. And that's also to just economics of the size of the business and what they can pay. Yeah, but the uh, but that when you're in that CFO role in uh, a small business, you're doing everything, you know, you're probably paying the bills yourself, you're doing AR or you're doing ab, you're doing the commercials, you're doing everything. And it's way more hands on than you would be as a CFO of an ASX50 where you're obviously spending probably more time.

Speaker D: Yeah.

Speaker A: Talking to institutional investors, talking to the market. So all those things are quite different and it would be silly. And what we see in other salary guides is just one row for cfo and that just doesn't make sense to us.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. I think that bifurcation by segments to really split it by your large ASX 300, your medium sized businesses, your small size and professional services allows, has allowed us to go that one layer deeper. So we're providing meaningful bandings as well across the different role titles.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. I think the other thing that we do which we've sort of just spoken about quickly, which I think adds a lot of value, is the fact that we also talk about we've got obviously a band for salary and our bands I think are smaller than other salary guides we've looked at. And again that's because of we are being more specific about the role whether it's large, small or medium. But the other thing is we do is we also provide guidance on bonus. So we do a pretty detailed review of the market around sti, lti, whether it's cash or not and percentages. And that, that's a real. I think that's a real.

Speaker C: Yeah. Bonus. Well, that's something we've added into our side, uh, we got this year.

Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I think that makes a big difference because when, I mean again we talk to candidates all the time and once you're, you know, once you're past maybe accountant level and you start getting to that manager level and above, STI starts mattering, LTI starts mattering and matters. And it's something that is really important now in the market, especially when you get into the scale up world or the SaaS world where LTI is really important, PE really important. So that's why we thought critical to put in expectations around bonus in our new salary guides.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. And I, I mean look, the idea is it's twofold here. You know, it's important to develop a salary guide which is even just for the average reader. Without too much engagement, they can get something out of it and it's valuable to them. But M, where the real value lies both from someone who might be looking to hire or someone who's looking for their next career move is the engagement with us in discussing it M and getting into the minutia and the detail because it's at the end of the day, it's a starting point for a conversation and the interesting stuff is all in the detail to discuss. Well, what might you actually be looking for? So for example, for a candidate it's really important for them to think about their career journey in terms of skills that they're developing to get to where they want to get to. As opposed to taking a more binary view. Go from one job title to another and go, okay, I've now got to manager. I need that senior manager role. Get me a senior and then to go to a head off and director or whatever that may be as opposed to that journey on skills. So I think our salary guide helps enable that and same for someone from a hiring perspective, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, totally. Ah, agree. We had a great meeting with the talent team and the sort of head of finance and the CEO at a large fmcg, uh, where you know, Kal and I would be very well aware of this, both having come from finance and in our past and mostly commercial Finance, where you're sitting down just before budget time to work out, you know, budgets for next year and what's reasonable and what are the salaries. And if, you know, once, as we all know, once you put that in the budget, that's the budget, and you really want to get that right. So we had a, uh, you know, we spent an hour with them and really went through all the different roles that they're looking to. To hire for and budget for. And, And I think this really helped. And I think going back to what we started talking about earlier, what really helped was the fact that we defined the roles in the guide and not just titles. Now, uh, I think another conversation we have every day is around titles. So, yeah, there's. Every company has a different title and they're all different and, and you can't tell. So, you know, uh, there are, there are financial controller roles that are put out there as financial controller. And then you dig into it and actually they're doing FP and A, and they're doing commercial. And so you can't just look at title. You really have to understand what does that role actually do. And then that is what defines salary and sti, lti, et cetera. So that's a big thing that we're trying to solve for in this guide,

Speaker C: and we'll get to that. Because I think that's a really interesting conversation on its own in terms of where the market's going and the trends we're seeing on different roles, which we'll save to our next episode. And there's a bit of a spoiler alert for what might be coming. But what I would say in terms of looking at salary guides is the one bit of advice I might give to the candidates or people looking is to try to start to dispel some of the preconceived notions one might have from maybe a few years ago what that job title might involve. To your point, if it's a financial controller role, often people think technocrat, technocrat and just compliance, risk management. It's really not like that anymore. There's. There's a whole myriad of different financial controller roles we've worked on just in the last few months, which have been so different. And they could have been called five different titles. They could have been called, uh, you know, head of finance. They could have been called head of controllership and FPA or, you know, commercials. And, you know, there's elements where there's tax and treasury involved, which typically controllers don't always get exposure to. But these roles do have. So I think that's just one something, something to be mindful of for any, you know, listener review of what's happening is that, that these roles are evolving and they have evolved quite significantly over the last year or two as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's good. And just to give a bit of a plug for, for Graham who works in our business, part of the salary guide at the end as well is that mid tier accounting firm. So we actually do quite a bit of recruitment at AXR in the, in that mid tier accounting world. And so there's a pretty comprehensive guide in there at the end of the salary guide around all the different types of roles that are out there in that, you know, mid, not, not the big four, but anything you know, below. And we've gone into quite some pretty big detail there around, you know that the sort of corporate finance roles or transaction services roles, you know, your typical audit accounting business services roles. So that's, that's a, that's a big help too if you're, if that's you out there. And you know, we know we do speak to quite a few people in, in the mid tiers who are looking to make their first move into commercial as well. So you know it's a, it's an interesting part of the market.

Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. The other thing I'd also mention is, you know we have covered the transformation piece, we've always covered the transformation piece in our guides. We continue to do so. The, the way transformation has evolved is also quite interesting. There are certain areas which continue to stay consistent. There's still demand for you know, ERP system implementations, continuous improvement, process improvement optimization, those type of roles. But there's a big trend and a lean as expected into skills uh, that relate to AI implementation and AI and finance.

Speaker A: That is very true. I think transformation is transformation. It's changed and it's evolving constantly. Well, um, I think that hopefully gives everyone a really good sense of what our salary guides are about. If you go to AXR recruitment and search website, there's a link that you can, you can download. I think when we share this podcast we'll provide a link as well. So you can, you can download those salary guides, keep them next to your desk, use them as you need. We, we use them all the time ourselves. I've got one that sits next to me every day so hope you hopefully you got a good sense of, of what they're about and hopefully you, you use them soon. So thank, thanks everyone for listening to our, our, our first of, of hopefully many go to CFO podcasts for this year and next year. Um, and we will see you soon at the next one.

Speaker C: Yeah, thanks Dave. Thanks guys. Thanks for listening.

Speaker D: Thanks for tuning in, and we hope you enjoy the insights from our network of inspiring finance leaders as they share their journey from Go to cfo. If you're looking to make the next move in your finance career or build your team, get in contact with the team at AXR Recruitment and Search today. We are passionate about building careers, not jobs. Teams, not just hires. If you enjoyed the episode, hit the like button and subscribe today. See you next time.