Shifting Gears

Building a Finance Function That Can Keep Up With the Pack

MAAP CFO Matthew Nott has scaled finance functions across AESOP, T2, and now at fast-growing global cycling apparel brand MAAP. Matthew shares with CFO Magazine A/NZ what other CFOs need to get right before growth outpaces them

I’ve spent most of my career inside some of Australia’s best retail growth stories: Aesop, T2, and now MAAP, and always during the periods when growth was steepest. Each brand is different. The lesson is the same: fast growth is exhilarating, and it is relentless.

What does fast growth actually look like?

20–50% revenue growth, year after year. One operating entity to eight countries in under 12 months. Six new stores, each in a different country, opened in less than four months. All with a fraction of the headcount you’d assume it should take. Global expansion can be the biggest opportunity available to unique premium Australian retailers. It also carries exponentially more complexity than the same growth at home.

My mindset through these periods of fast growth was always the same: our problems are good problems to have. Anyone would dream of the topline growth. But it always comes with a side order of challenges standing between where you are and where the business needs to be.

The CFO’s job is to anticipate and clear them before they slow you down. And in my experience, the biggest challenge is almost always the same: technology. It will either enable your growth or be the reins that are holding you back.

The MAAP growth story

MAAP was founded in Melbourne in 2014 by Oliver Cousins and Jarrad Smith, who brought their backgrounds in technical garments and design to cycling with one goal: build the best cycling brand on the planet. Twelve years on, and I’ll concede my bias, MAAP is a serious contender. But is it mission accomplished? Not even close.

From a garage in suburban Melbourne to a global brand across e-commerce, retail stores and wholesale partners worldwide, MAAP has always moved fast. COVID was a massive inflection point. Cycling boomed globally, and MAAP was ready to show up and show out.

I joined as CFO five years ago, just after that boom, with turnover having more than doubled and ambition running well ahead of it. We had a clear growth vision framed for execution, and one critical pillar of it was making sure our systems could meet the ambition.

Our stack at the time would look familiar to most mid-sized retailers: Xero for financials, Cin7 for inventory and purchasing, Shopify for e-commerce. Individually, great tools. But as a platform for global growth? No.

The moment you put pen to paper and list what’s actually required to swing the doors open in multiple countries, you discover the runway on your existing systems is far shorter than you thought.

We ran a thorough scoping process, made considerably easier by a growth vision so clearly articulated I could recite it in my sleep. That clarity matters more than people realise. When you know what you are going to need in 36 months time, you can scope your project properly.

For MAAPs growth requirements, we selected NetSuite as our ERP. The non-negotiables, multi-entity, multi-currency, multiple tax jurisdictions, automated consolidation, multi-location inventory, sit at the core of how it’s built, not bolted on. Just as important: ease of integration, so we could run best-of-breed tools across the rest of the business and swap them out as we evolve.

Five years on, the transformation has been absolutely mega. Retail stores across multiple countries. A wholesale network built with the right partners in the right markets. E-commerce scaled globally. We show up for our customers everywhere in a way that genuinely reflects what MAAP stands for. The ambition that existed on paper when I joined is now operational reality.

The technology underneath it means we operate efficiently and compliantly in every market. But it’s given us something harder to put on a slide: the confidence to move fast, back ourselves, and chase the next opportunity knowing our systems won’t be the thing that holds us back.

Now, the last thing I want to do is make all this sound easy because it wasn’t. Depending on whose research you read, 55–75% of ERP implementations fail in some dimension: functionality, budget, timeline, or abandoned outright. There’s no shortage of content out there on how to be one of the success stories.

Here are my 3 lessons that don’t get enough airtime:

1. Integrations. Done well, they are like magic. Done poorly, like a curse.  You will almost certainly underestimate the number, complexity and cost.  Not for nothing, but 3PL integrations are notorious: every provider runs a different WMS, every integration is bespoke, and there are no economies of scale if you run several.

2. Configuration yes. Customisation no. Coach your business to adapt its processes to the ERP, never the reverse. You’ve selected an ERP that should meet your needs – configuration is natural.  Customisation equals code debt, which is bad debt.

3. Testing. In my experience, never done well and never done comprehensively. Get into the weeds. Make sure it’s properly designed, fully scoped, actually performed, and repeated after every round of fixes. This is the dark horse of implementation risk.

And one more as a gift with purchase: pick a great implementation partner. We worked with Annexa, who met us where we were and operated as part of our team rather than an external adviser.  They understood the complexity of global retail from day one. That makes a massive difference to how the project runs.

When the data starts working for you

Get the foundation right and the entire business changes speed.

Decisions move faster when trust in the data is higher. Real-time transactions with a full audit trail mean insights surface consistently and can be acted on quickly.

Before we had that, we carried safety stock buffers across nearly everything because we didn’t trust our own inventory positions. Product sitting at a 3PL while the website showed zero. Lost sales, cash tied up, and an aged stock problem building down the track. Clean, connected data eliminates that entire class of problem.

AI is the buzz of all buzz words at the moment and to be fair it does seem to be the obvious next chapter for leveraging your resources.  But the benefits will remain theoretical without clean, structured, enriched data underneath. You must build the foundation first.

My own posture on AI keeps evolving with the technology. Governance and guardrails remain my biggest concern, particularly in a global business navigating data privacy laws that are also grappling with changing technology. 

That said, vendor-led AI inside the NetSuite ecosystem is showing real promise, as are approaches that contextualise AI to MAAP specifically while keeping NetSuite as the source of truth. I’m hearing some sharp examples from other CFOs of genuine efficiency gains across processes, reporting and analysis.

I’m actively challenging my team to experiment and bring new ideas forward. The future for finance teams has AI as a major part of it and anyone not learning how to leverage it will be quickly left in the dust.

In my opinion, global expansion is the most exciting part of a retail journey, and the most humbling. The opportunity is real. So is the complexity.

The brands that navigate it well aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the boldest strategy decks. They’re the ones that invest in the right infrastructure before they need it, and treat technology as a strategic asset rather than a back-office cost.

Get the foundation right and everything compounds: faster decisions, faster market entries, better customer experience, a more capable team. Get it wrong and growth itself becomes the problem, every new country, every new channel, every spike in volume widens the cracks.

Fast growth waits for no one. Don’t let your systems make it wait for you.