OK Tires’ Gurdeep Bains Helps Company Pull Ahead

A Lamborghini Huracán zooms through the Mojave Desert, spinning sand in its wake, and though you might expect to find a professional racecar driver behind the wheel of this, the fastest Lamborghini yet, you’d be wrong. It’s New Zealand-born Gurdeep Bains, CPA, CA and chief financial officer of OK Tire Canada.

And – fasten your seatbelts – the test drive is all part of Bains’ job. Bains acknowledges that racing Lamborghinis is miles off the stereotype of typical CPA behaviour.

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 organisation. 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?’”

Bains earned his Bachelor of Business Administration at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada 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.”

Original article by Business in Vancouver, October 10, 2016.