Are you our new Chief Financial Officer?

‍About Bardee

At Bardee, our ambition is to reshape the global food system. To do this, we breed billions of insects 🐛 to transform food waste 🥗  into insect protein for animal feed 🐶 and fertiliser 🌲  in our world-leading vertical farming system ~ learn more about what we do here.

In 2023, we aim to ramp up our production 30x and build our first mega-facility, to divert 300 tonnes of food waste from landfill per day, and scale our supply of insect protein and fertiliser going into sustainable animal feed and fertiliser products.

Bardee is now looking for a Chief Financial Officer to establish and lead our financial function and financial strategy as we unlock this new level of speed and growth.

Outcomes & projects you’ll work on:

Outcome 1: Establish strong financial systems for operations and reporting which will take us to the next level as we scale.  We’re currently a team of 25 in a 10-tonne/day facility, with financial reporting managed through external accountants and our leadership team.  As we scale our business to a 300-tonne/day facility, our customer operations, external spend, capital deployed, and team size will grow fast.  This means our accounting, payments, and financial reporting need to be prepped for scale, highly controlled, and work like clockwork.  Our hands-on CFO will:

• Establish, own and operate the traditional finance & accounting functions, including preparing board materials, conducting financial planning cycles with the leadership team, supporting audits, payroll, customer invoicing, payment of external suppliers, and accounting.
• Develop and implement measurement, reporting, and management processes on key metrics to ensure performance against our financial and strategic priorities: including cash runway, profitability, unit costs and gross margin, customer acquisition costs, and spend control.
• Ensure best practice is implemented across financial reporting, forecasting, and management accounts to generate maximum insight for our manufacturing and venture-backed start-up context.
• Architect real-time and automated tools and systems to provide critical financial and operational information to the CEO/Investors and make actionable recommendations on strategy.
• Update financial management processes, our internal financial control framework, as well as related infrastructure (e.g. software) to prepare us for scale and ensure appropriate controls and compliance.
• Ensure operational teams deliver our financial objectives.
• Over time, build our finance team by hiring and managing a qualified team to carry out all finance functions.

Outcome 2: Set a strategy for how we raise and deploy capital and manage our funds, positioning Bardee for growth and effective cash management.  We’re a venture-backed start-up in the manufacturing space.  We want our CFO to bring strong perspectives and lead our strategy on everything from how we bring in capital (equity, debt, securitization), how we make money (customer payment terms and pricing), how we spend money (spend control and governance), and ultimately how we manage our cashflow (incl. working capital, supplier payments, tax and incentives).  As part of this outcome, our CFO will:

• Lead financial decision-making, advising the leadership team and founders on strategies to foster growth and other objectives.
• Collaborate with the CEO and Leadership Team to evaluate new markets, channels, and partnership opportunities. Lead the company's corporate development efforts.
• Lead fundraising strategy, potential M&A/ equity/ debt/ joint venture structuring, diligence, valuation, and integration activities.
• Maximise the organisation’s financial strength through effective cash flow management and appropriate investment and capital raising strategies.

About you:

To succeed in this role, you’ll: 

• Have an appropriate tertiary qualification in Business, Accounting, Finance, business administration or related field and be CPA-qualified
• Have experience in a manufacturing/ FMCG/ agriculture context or venture-backed startup context (especially in the context of raising Series A to pre-IPO rounds), with aptitude to run a hands-on function across a small-but-quickly-scaling business
• Be a self-sufficient leader able to provide perspectives at a Board and C-level and lead a function autonomously
• Provide senior level financial management expertise, including taxation, compliance, asset management, insurance, reporting and legal issues
• Have practical experience building and maintaining financial systems and models & knowledge of relevant software (Xero or similar as well as ERP software for management; Excel, Tableau, Power BI for reporting)

Opportunities for growth at Bardee

In just 3 years since it started, Bardee has grown from a tent-sized experiment to Australia’s biggest producer of Black Soldier Fly Larvae-based protein and fertiliser products, commanding a facility able to process 10 tonnes of food waste daily and with plans for more. We now work with and supply some of Australia’s largest waste, logistics, pet food and grocery businesses and have no signs of slowing down.

This is the perfect opportunity for a senior-level financial executive to build a finance function with maximum autonomy as we take Bardee from a single facility to a major, multi-mega-facility company servicing the entire country.

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