From Bean Counters to Business Partners to Business Avengers!

How Lachie Cornwell is Bringing Sexy Back to Finance

Films and TV shows love to portray finance professionals as grey-suit-wearing, sensible-haircut-sporting killjoys.

It’s a tired, old trope – and one that has really begun to irk me as I’ve racked up more and more interviews with CFOs whose earthy sense of humour, emotional intelligence and strategic thinking is so at odds with how they’re presented in popular culture.

But after speaking with Lachie Cornwell, Chief Financial and Operations Officer at True Protein, I’m now thinking that risk-averse and slightly robotic rep has less to do with the individual personalities of finance professionals and more to do with the day-to-day reality of their workload.

Reconciliations, journals, data entry, month-end close – it’s important, sure. But it’s also repetitive and uninspiring.

Cornwell knows it. And he wants more for his team. So, over the past seven years, he has worked hard to unlock their potential through automation, AI, and a strategic partnership with Business Avengers.

As he puts it: “Embedding finance teams in operations – that’s where the real sexy stuff is. And it’s where the really amazing value can be delivered.”

Turning scorekeepers into strategic navigators

When Cornwell joined True Protein, the finance function was what he describes as “very reactive”.

“We were just paying bills, chasing the odd debtor, compiling basic financial reports and looking after compliance to a bare minimum,” he recalls. “It was very transactional.”

But as the business grew, that approach became unsustainable. Multi-million-dollar capital investments, increasingly complex supply chains, and forecasting expansion – including, most recently, into petrol, convenience and supermarket channels – demanded more than historical reporting.

In other words: “The role of finance had to change so that it was looking into the future, not just at what happened in the past,” Cornwell says.

Of course, being able to accurately weigh in on the future requires a deep operational understanding of how things are being done in the here and now.

“All of the data within a business ends up in a balance sheet or a profit and loss statement,” Cornwell says, “and a really strategic finance function understands the source origin of every single one of those lines.”

It’s all about “moving from that classic role – where you’re just reconciling and churning out a month-end pack – and repositioning finance inside the business,” he adds. From his perspective, that means “really collaborating with each department, connecting them and being the conduit between them, and finding ways of improving or altering how we tackle a high-paced, scaling, high-growth business.”

It’s this proximity to real decisions that Cornwell believes turns finance from a dull grind into a genuinely engaging – and developmental – place to work.

Calling in the Business Avengers

There was a practical constraint to this evolution, however: that everyday grunt work still needed doing.

“The hardest part of being a really high-growth business is trying to jostle the capacity of people with their capability,” Cornwell says. “And with the organic growth journey that we’ve been on, 80% of our local, highly skilled finance team was dedicating their time to repetitive, scalable tasks. That just drains their energy, mental capacity and time, and stops them from tackling the more complex, non-repeatable stuff, which is where all the fun actually is.”

To solve this problem, the team started outsourcing its heavy lifting to Business Avengers, whom Cornwell describes as “the domain experts in the plumbing of finance”.

When it comes to distributing work across the two finance functions, he’s found a “20–80/80–20 hybrid model” works best. This means the in-house team spends roughly 20% on transactional tasks and 80% of its time on strategic, insight-driven work, and vice versa for the Business Avengers.

The aim is to ensure the internal team doesn’t lose its grip on the fundamentals, while the outsource team still gets an opportunity to contribute their own valuable insights – increasing buy-in, camaraderie and morale across the board.

“The Business Avengers’ hyper attention to accuracy has unlocked our local team so they can focus on the value-adding stuff,” Cornwell says. “That’s the magic of what this hybrid model has delivered.”

He adds that its success is due in no small way to True Protein’s Head of Finance, Amy Knoll.

With ASX experience and a strong grounding in process discipline, Cornwell says Knoll has been instrumental in lifting capability across both the local team and the offshore function – treating Business Avengers not as a third party, but as an extension of the finance team itself.

That involves:

• Shared communication channels
• Regular face-to-face time
• Clear expectations and accountability
• Small gestures that build trust and belonging

“Amy has the process discipline and the knowledge of automation that I think are going to be critical for the future,” Cornwell says. “But really the thing that we’re leaning on her for most is the team dynamic and elevating the skillset of the finance team that we’ve got, both locally and abroad.”

Tech an extra load off to really kick it up a notch

The implementation of an ERP system and the adoption of AI and automation tools have also helped free up True Protein’s finance team for more challenging work.

“The use of integrated automation and AI tools has become a bit of a secret weapon of late, in that it’s really allowed us to interrogate our data in a very detailed manner,” Cornwell says. “This has allowed the finance team to spot issues before month-end and come to leadership with solutions, rather than waiting for questions after the board pack is presented.”

For Cornwell, this isn’t just about improving efficiency – it’s about protecting meaningful career pathways in finance at a time when automation threatens to hollow them out.

“You never want a situation where you see finance teams shrinking because machines are doing the basics for them. You still need to master the fundamentals in order to then unlock the strategic side of what finance can offer a business,” he says.

“So then it becomes about how else can we grow graduates – and assistant managers, managers, right the way through to CFOs – in their roles by engaging them more in the business?”

A chance for finance to prove its worth

True Protein’s redesigned finance function really got a chance to prove its mettle recently, in the form of a brand-new, state-of-the-art, 3,500-square-metre production and distribution facility in Brookvale.

For Cornwell, the site represents far more than increased floor space. He sees it as the physical manifestation of True Protein’s garage-to-global growth ambitions – and a defining moment for the finance department, which has now moved decisively from support act to central player.

“As we get bigger and our public profile continues to grow – and especially for all the people that work here and for our customers – we need to make sure that our steps are in the right direction, and that we’re not going off course with wild ideas that aren’t financially feasible,” he says.

His efforts to turn finance from a functional necessity into a place of influence, growth, and intellectual challenge appear to be working out well for True Protein. The company is still growing at pace, with cumulative growth north of 30% year on year – a result that few other consumer brands in their twelfth year can claim.

But Cornwell believes the headline numbers are only part of the story. The bigger challenge for him is ensuring the business has the infrastructure, discipline, and leadership depth to sustain that momentum, particularly as it expands into new markets and operates at far greater scale.

“We’ve got huge ambitions and lots of ambitious people,” he says. “There’s so much dry powder here to light – it’s just a question of which horses to back. And it’s finance that helps us make those decisions.”

Three ways CFOs get outsourcing wrong – and how to get it right

1. Outsourcing is a capacity unlock, not a savings hack.
“If you treat outsourcing as a pure cost play, you won’t get the outcome you want. The real ROI is the time your internal team gets back to think, analyse, and partner with the business.”

2. Don’t outsource chaos.
“You can’t outsource a finance function that’s out of control. You actually need to do the work beforehand to make sure that you’re handing over something that is in a relatively decent state.”

3. Transactional relationships cap performance.
“You have to treat external teams as an extension of your own team. You’re always going to get a better outcome when you connect on that level.”