Public sector FD of the year: Stuart McCreadie

Stuart McCreadie beat a tough crowd to win the award for Finance Director of the Year in the public sector.

The FD of housing association group Moat Homes competed with Stephen Fitzgerald, FD of the London borough of Hounslow, and Peter Kane, finance chief at the Home Office.

McCreadie has had his work cut out for him over the past year when every member of the executive director team at Moat, including the CEO, left the company.

As the most experienced senior staff member remaining, McCreadie spearheaded a new fixed assets register for the 16,000 homes on the books operating across 50 local authorities.

The changes kept coming as he implemented a shift around of finance staff to operations. McCreadie said he felt the finance function needed to reach the next level of “financial empowerment”.

This entailed embedding the two departments together to create what the chair of the finance committee labelled

the best budget process he had seen in his ten-year tenure.

McCreadie joined the company in 2005 as director of finance and corporate services and is responsible for HR, IT, treasury, and finance at Moat Homes. He trained with Touche Ross, (now Deloitte & Touche) and is a fellow of the Association of Corporate Treasurers.

The criteria for the award included McCreadie showing the judging panel that he could achieve innovation, leadership and strategic development in the finance function.

His entry led one judge to say: “Stuart has achieved an enormous amount and positioned his organisation extremely well after addressing some very significant difficulties.”

The judges added: “For all of this he stood out as having terrific qualities as an FD.”

CURTAIN CALL

A not very well known fact about McCreadie is that he is very keen on amateur dramatics and made his directorial debut in May 2005 with a production in Westerham, Kent, of the comedy Look No Hands.