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This article was first published in the February 2016 UK edition of Accounting and Business magazine.

Poggenpohl kitchens are renowned for their simplicity and minimalist design. With their soft-closing doors and drawers, handles seem to be treated by the designers as an unbearable visual intrusion. If you can afford a Poggenpohl kitchen, you can have one in almost any colour combination you like, although classic white and grey are the best-selling liveries. You get the idea. 

Poggenpohl is rather like a perfectly structured set of accounts, a balance sheet that whispers its symmetry. But a kitchen serves no purpose without food, and Poggenpohl UK’s FD Sharon Wallis knows that the accounts serve no purpose unless they are useful to the business. 

‘A lot of people just focus on the numbers,’ she says. ‘But you need to be able to understand the business and the operation because the numbers alone don’t always give you the right answer.’

Poggenpohl sells through three channels: its own studio outlets, independent dealers, and projects with property developers keen to promote Poggenpohl kitchens as part of an upmarket offering. 

If a particular studio is underperforming, Wallis is clear that she needs to understand exactly what’s been going on – personnel changes, for example, or, as in the recent case of the London Waterloo branch, a two-month closure for the total refit of a new ‘concept’ kitchen display. 

‘You need to understand in moving forward how that is going to affect your results, and not just make a decision based on what the numbers say at this point in time,’ she points out.

Like a good cook who loves to welcome dinner guests, Wallis also ensures » that financial information is shared and understood across the business. ‘We’ve tried to be a lot more open with results and key performance indicators to try to encourage [studio managers] to be more responsible for them,’ she explains. ‘If everybody is working towards the same goal and they understand it, you’re much more likely to achieve it than if it’s just the management team leading, with everybody else coming in behind.’

Part of the family

Poggenpohl UK is part of the 123-year-old German parent, Poggenpohl Möbelwerke in Herford, Westphalia, which in turn is owned by Nobia, Sweden’s SEK12.4bn (£975m) revenue multibrand kitchen retail group. But Poggenpohl in the UK has the look, feel and finance function of an SME – apart from the fact that the core of its financial reporting system is SAP. The UK head office is literally ‘above the shop’, upstairs from the high-street studio in St Albans, Hertfordshire. 

There’s a very small finance team, and very little interaction with the other brands in Nobia’s portfolio (the rather larger but cheaper Magnet is one of them). Just a few things such as insurance are dealt with by group head office.

But Nobia has cash and is eager to spend it, so Wallis is on the lookout for more business growth opportunities. ‘There are many parts of the UK where it would be good for us to have a studio, so it’s just finding the right individuals and the right property,’ she says. 

Budgeting is another top-of-agenda item for Wallis. In Poggenpohl’s market, the retail business is ‘reasonably stable and straightforward’, though the period before the May general election last year was ‘a challenge’. 

Trickier to predict is contract work. It’s keeping the kitchen-maker busy, but it’s not entirely within Poggenpohl’s control, so timings can slip and a project may not complete till the subsequent reporting period. ‘That’s the name of the game, but it can be difficult to manage,’ Wallis says. Head office understands that, she adds, so from a targets perspective, the important thing is to be ‘demonstrating that we’re doing everything we need to be doing’.

The endless reporting deadlines are, Wallis says, the worst part of the job, although they’re to be expected. ‘Probably the best part of the job is seeing the business grow, and seeing our efforts and the efforts of the people I work with being successful, and achieving our targets.’

Sharing in success

She draws a distinction between her time at Poggenpohl and her previous role with a small local accountancy firm, Holmes Peat Thorpe, where Poggenpohl was a client. ‘As a practitioner you work for the client, but you’re not part of their success,’ she says. ‘You’ve helped them in terms of making decisions and giving them information, but you can’t influence. Here I’m able to influence situations and help people to make decisions, and then see them work and improve our business.’

But her time at the firm was ‘amazing’, she says. ‘They supported me throughout all my studies, exposed me to a lot of different areas – management accounts, auditing, VAT, tax, cashflow, budgeting, all sorts of forecasting and client interaction. They effectively set me up for life.’ 

Her ACCA Qualification, she says, generates opportunities. ‘It opens doors for you. I wouldn’t have any worries that I wouldn’t have a lot of opportunities if I ever moved on from Poggenpohl. I think it also gives you confidence in your decisions because you know that you’ve got the knowledge, and ACCA provides all the training.’

The Qualification’s strong ethical thread also helps, she says, when there are commercial pressures ‘to make the decision that’s right, not the decision that somebody may want’.

Just like the kitchens, then: clean, simple and true.

Andy Sawers, journalist