With a father who worked in accounting and a mother who worked in banking, it’s fair to say that for Jeanette Wong CA, Chief Financial Officer at London Marathon Group (LMG), finance was a family affair. “Early on in my life,” she laughs, “I made a pledge that I would never work in the industry!”

She kept that pledge – at first. After studying classics, Latin and Greek at University College London, Wong pursued a career in advertising. However, she soon “realised it wasn’t for me”, accepting instead her career destiny. And so, looking for interesting grad schemes, she decided on CA training at EY.

“I really enjoyed my time there but I don’t mind admitting I found it hard at first,” she says. “Quite a chunk of the grad intake I was studying alongside had done accountancy or business at university, and I was sitting there going, ‘Why are there debits and credits? A number is surely a number….’” And around the same time, she was offered a very attractive role at a leading celebrity magazine. “I was in the midst of my exams and thought, ‘Oh, maybe I should just take this job.’ But I can honestly say I am so glad I stuck with it, because of what I have been able to do with the qualification.”

For at a fairly early stage of her training, Wong accepted she wasn’t interested in staying in practice. “You get parachuted into all these different businesses as part of your training, and I just thought, I want to become part of that.” And so she did, becoming Marketing, Innovation and Supply Chain Finance Manager at Innocent drinks after qualifying. “This was a brand I really wanted to work for because they were miles ahead in terms of sustainability and the importance of people and culture,” Wong says.

From there, she moved into the luxury fashion industry, working at Burberry and later Jimmy Choo. “But by the time I’d had kids, my focus had evolved and I really wanted to work somewhere that focused on the planet and doing good.” As a result, she joined organic food company Abel & Cole in 2020, taking twin directorial roles in finance and sustainability.

“The CA qualification opened all those doors. Alongside the solid foundation of financial principles, there’s the strategic thinking, the problem-solving and the discipline that comes with the training too,” she says. “And that is what has really helped my career, as it’s given me the confidence to go for what I’m genuinely interested in.”

“I’ve been to sustainability leadership conferences where I’m the only CFO in the room. That’s crazy – finance has a huge role in balancing profit with protecting our planet”

Which is why, when she was headhunted for her current role at LMG, she initially hesitated. “It seemed like an exciting opportunity, but I wasn’t sure it was the right fit since I don’t come from a traditional sporty background.” In another life, that may have been where this road ended, but while she may not be a “sporty” person, Wong had run the London Marathon several years previously.

“After a health scare a few years ago, I made a commitment to myself – if everything turned out OK, I would do something meaningful to give back. That led me to run the London Marathon, something completely outside my comfort zone. My family and friends thought I was crazy, but it ended up being one of the best days of my life, running alongside thousands of people, each one with their own story about why they’re doing it, with strangers cheering you on while experiencing London at its best. It’s something that has really stayed with me.”

These days, Wong is not just behind the scenes at LMG – she’s on the ground, too. Like all staff, she takes part in event day duties, last year stepping up as a tailwalker to support the final runners across the finish line. “It’s a real privilege to be out there, experiencing the event alongside participants and seeing first hand the impact it has,” she says. This year, she’s entering the New York Marathon herself.

Juggling act

Friends joked that she’d have to find something to fill her time “the other 364 days of the year”, she says, ”but the reality is I’ve never had to juggle as much as I do now”. Wong’s role is incredibly varied, encompassing not just standard finance elements, but the ambitious growth plans too – plans that have been so successful that LMG today “is almost a completely different business to the one I interviewed for”.

In 2024 alone the group acquired the Bath Half Marathon and Caledonian Concepts – organisers of the Loch Ness Marathon – and formed Athletic Ventures, alongside UK Athletics and the Great Run Company, to stage events such as the 2026 European Athletics Championship in Birmingham.

But it’s the sustainability piece that Wong discusses with the most vigour, describing how she has been working hard to ensure LMG can “demonstrate our leadership in this space across mass participation. An example of which is, just before the 2024 London Marathon, we hosted a sustainability conference where we called on our peers to really consider our environmental impact and innovative ways of thinking to protect the planet.”

For while air pollution in London falls by 90% on the day of the marathon, she says, “the biggest contributor to mass-participation events’ carbon footprint is the travel”. To try to mitigate this, LMG has collaborated with travel demand management platform You Smart Thing – which curates a travel plan for every visitor to its events, demonstrating the lowest carbon option – and Cur8, an initiative that lets participants purchase carbon removal credits.

Any large company will have a sustainability element to the accounts, says Wong. “And yet I’ve often gone to sustainability conferences where I’m the only CFO in the room. That’s crazy – finance has a huge role in balancing profit with protecting our planet. I’d like to think there is a movement towards the two working closer together.” But while this is the second role of Wong’s that does just that (Abel & Cole being the other), she had to work to make it happen.

“I was recruited to Abel & Cole as the Finance Director, but I wanted to work for them because they had high sustainability credentials,” she says. “So once I was there, I made it quite clear that I wanted to step out of the day-to-day finance piece and really get involved in sustainability.” Fortunately, they were more than receptive and her role quickly progressed to include both.

While her CA qualification certainly opened doors, once she’s in the room Wong takes the reins, and she’s keen for fellow CAs to recognise there are openings to do this: “You don’t have to pigeonhole yourself in one department. Use your opportunity to get involved with the aspects of the place that most speak to you.”

Doing so not only helps you build up the skills you need to move your career in the direction you want, but creates a self-fulfilling cycle. “When you wake up thinking ‘I can’t believe I actually work here’, that passion will ignite what you go on to achieve in that role,” she says. “Without that, it’s harder to succeed.”

Action plan

This sense of gratitude is precisely what Wong feels for London Marathon Group, not least because of its track record. The marathon itself has raised £1.3bn for charities since 1981, while the parent charity, London Marathon Foundation, has donated more than £110m to projects across the UK that inspire activity.

“We know how transformative the power of sport can be, whether on mental health, physical health or addressing the obesity crisis,” says Wong. “There are so just many benefits and we are absolutely committed to doing everything we can to get more people involved.”

Which is why, despite the orchestrated pushback against equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) in the past couple of years, Wong insists that LMG will not be deflected. “If anything, it’s become more important than ever, and we signed off our EDI action plan up to 2030, for which I was part of the working group.”

After all, she explains, the route to inspiring people to become more active is to understand why it isn’t happening naturally. And for that, you need a strong grasp of the relationships different people have with sport, and why. 

“Ultimately, inspiring people to be more active starts with understanding why they aren’t engaging in the first place," she says. “That means recognising the diverse relationships people have with physical activity and the barriers they face.

"We know there are communities with limited access to sport and exercise. A key part of our work is identifying those barriers—whether social, financial or cultural—and finding ways to break them down."

"The CA qualification opened all those doors – it’s given me the confidence to go for what I’m genuinely interested in”

What holds people back is of interest to Wong in other contexts too, including careers. For International Women’s Day 2023 she was invited to 10 Downing Street to discuss social mobility. “It was a very proud moment for me to have an opportunity to contribute to a discussion like that,” she says. “A lot of it was stuff we already know – I think it’s important to just keep putting it on the table, whether it’s having a youth board member, for example, or how we think about internships.”

For Wong, blind recruiting could work as a key driver in improving social mobility in accountancy. “One of the best accountants I’ve ever had in my team wasn’t qualified,” she says. “So while I would absolutely encourage anyone to do an accountancy qualification for all the reasons I’ve given, I think it’s really important that recruiters are not blinded by that. Rather than making qualifications a rigid requirement, employers can work with their teams to identify when pursuing one would be beneficial and provide the right support when needed.”

This, she says would create opportunities; perhaps even to the extent that they could enjoy a career path as successful, varied and purpose-driven as Wong’s, for which she has only one regret. “If I could go back and change one thing, it would have been to learn to be unapologetically myself in the workplace sooner.” Whereas a decade ago, she would not have admitted to struggling with certain tasks, she says, “now I have no problem telling you the things I don’t excel at – because acknowledging that makes me a better leader.”

tcslondonmarathon.com

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