A Lamborghini Huracán zooms through the Mojave Desert, spinning sand in its wake. The sportscar, with narrowed headlights like the eyes of a mean bull, is the fastest Lamborghini yet.
You’d expect to find a professional race car driver behind the wheel. You’d be wrong. It’s Gurdeep Bains, CPA, CA and Chief Financial Officer of OK Tire Stores Inc. And—fasten your seatbelts—the test drive is all part of Bains’s job.
Bains acknowledges that racing Lamborghinis is miles off the stereotype of typical CPA behaviour. Most people expect CPAs to spend their days hunched over columns of numbers. Nothing could be further from the truth, Bains says. Successful CPAs tackle jobs that are all about communication, meeting all different kinds of people, travelling and having adventures.
“You spend so little time in front of your computer. Most of the time you are out meeting with suppliers, potential new buyers, business developers,” Bains explains. “You have to be able to relate to people. It’s all teamwork and collaboration. None of it is the stereotypical accountant looking down at their shoes.”
Being skilled with numbers is a starting, not ending, point. There are many more strengths CPAs have that make them vital to their companies.
“A CPA brings a value-add to an organization. Sure, you could buy a computer program or hire a part-time bookkeeper to do your accounts. But a real person, a CPA, can interpret the data and figure out better ways to move the company, better ways to do things; efficiencies that I don’t think a straight bookkeeper would be thinking about,” Bains says. “Someone who’s been through the CPA program will always be thinking, ‘How can we do this better?’”
When CPAs are given CFO roles, their companies perform much better than non-CPA–run companies, says Bains—and his success at OK Tire would seem to be a case in point. Under the guidance of a new management team, OK Tire has added new stores and expanded its franchise chain across the country to a total of 325.
For example, “in the Halifax-Maritimes region we weren’t very strong. In the last couple of years, we have built up 30 stores there,” Bains explains.
"OK Tire Stores Inc. does not employ a traditional franchise business model," Bains states. "All OK dealers are also shareholders. A board of directors, elected from this group of dealers, works with the executive team to devise the strategic direction of the company.
"Tactical deployment of this strategy falls to the management team, which makes for a unique cooperative dynamic; we all rise or fall based on group efforts and collaboration, and everyone enjoys a share of those residuals at year-end."
The New Zealand–born Bains earned his Bachelor of Business Administration at Simon Fraser University, then had an important decision to make: become a CPA, or go into banking? The opportunity for a more dynamic career won him over. “Bankers are bankers their whole life. There’s much more mobility in being a CPA.”
He began working and articling at KPMG, a professional service company. Even at that early stage, he got to travel, accepting a transfer to Atlanta where he lived for a year and a half.
Bains then joined Canaccord Genuity. “We had 30 offices across the world. I went to Beijing and Melbourne, Australia and back home to New Zealand, and London and New York and Boston.” The reaction he got from friends and family reinforces how stereotypes around CPAs die hard: “My friends couldn’t believe it. They were like, ‘What? You get to do that? Oh, wow!’”
Now, with OK Tire continuing to add stores, Bains is meeting Canadians nation-wide. “People, especially in smaller towns, invite you to their house to come and meet their kids and spouses,” he says. With the new Halifax locations, he adds, he’s been invited to eat lots of lobster.
Becoming CFO at OK Tire two years ago was Bains’s biggest challenge, as well as his most satisfying one. “It was my first role as a CFO in a completely different industry than financial services. I had never before overseen a credit department, re-negotiated large banking deals, sourced land and overseen construction of a distribution facility. But I was able to draw from the large network of CPAs I had met through my career when I had questions.”
A company hiring a CPA for any business leadership role can expect a team member who’s trustworthy, has strong technical skills, sound judgement and always keeps an eye to the big picture—the possibilities beyond the status quo.
