In June, three women will row 2,800 miles across the mid-Pacific, from California to Hawaii, in an open rowing boat. The team, called Row for Life, will power their way continuously – four hours on, two hours off – for 24 hours a day, on a journey expected to take at least 40 days. There will be no support or back-up on hand.

One of the women is Victoria Peddie Bell CA, an experienced financial professional, founder and Managing Director of financial consultancy Peddie Bell and mother of two. Despite her wealth of experience, in one respect at least Victoria is a complete novice – she had never set foot on a rowing boat until January this year. How has someone without voyage-hardened sea legs ended up on such an epic challenge?

“Last November, I was out for dinner with friends I’ve known for 25 years,” says Victoria, “one of whom was Felicity, who was talking about her latest challenge of rowing the Pacific.” This is Felicity Ashley, who in 2021 took part in a 3,000-mile row across the Atlantic – part of the World’s Toughest Row competition – and had signed up for another in 2026. She explained to her friends that evening that one of the women in her team might have to pull out, having just had a baby. “I half-jokingly said, ‘Well, maybe I could do it,’” says Victoria, "and we are extremely happy to be working in partnership with EY as our lead sponsor and a strong supporter of the CA qualification."

There wasn’t any one thing in particular that led Victoria to make this impulsive decision, she says – rather it was a “perfect convergence of circumstances at a moment in time, and it just seemed to fit”. One, she had just turned 50; another, she had just stopped working full-time as an executive. “So I had the time available,” she says, “plus I’ve always liked a challenge.”

What was different about this challenge however – apart from it being seaborne – was that it wasn’t “a challenging job that’s going to help somebody make lots of money or fix something for somebody else, but it was a challenge just for me”, she says. “There is definitely something in this whole thing about being midlife and thriving.”

Holding the purse strings

One beneficiary from Row for Life will be Cancer Research, the team’s chosen charity due to Felicity and third crew member Janette Potgieter both having overcome the disease themselves, while Victoria’s father Donald died from neuroendocrine cancer in 2022.

“My father was an engineer by trade, but used to get annoyed as he said the accountants controlled the purse strings,” says Victoria. “As an engineer working in business, he felt that if he wanted to challenge them, he had to understand them. So he went to night school and got an accountancy qualification.”

Victoria’s own path into the profession wasn’t entirely linear either, heading to university to study law for reasons she’s unsure of. “I think I watched a law programme on television one summer, and thought, ‘Well, that looks like fun’.” She didn’t love the course, she says, but as part of it she had to do some accounting: “I just found the numbers were interesting, and fortuitously the sister of one of my friends worked in insolvency and restructuring and suggested I consider it as a career, because while it’s legalistic, it’s more numerical.”

A placement with Arthur Andersen followed, and ICAS training that “didn’t just teach you how to pass exams, or even how to be a good accountant, but how to be a good finance and business professional”, she says. “And I think one of the amazing things about this qualification is that it gives you a standard, it gives you knowledge, and you can take it to other places, outside of the finance function.”

Victoria’s CA took her to investment banking, a sector she worked in for many years before taking a “slightly crazy intermediate step” of working for the NHS. On realising it was not the best fit for her, she left and found herself “a little bit at a loss for what to do next”.

“One of the amazing things about this qualification is that it gives you a standard, it gives you knowledge, but you can take it to other places”

Her years in investment banking had given her some “phenomenal experiences”, she says. “But also there comes a point where you work with these companies doing amazing deals – but once the deal is done, they go off and the future of the company happens without you.” Victoria wanted to be “part of an organisation’s story”, which led to her setting up her eponymous consultancy, Peddie Bell, with her first client being a small risk management firm which wanted someone who could help them connect with private equity.

“These guys were technical gurus around foreign exchange, interest rates, commodities, inflation, risk management, hedging and accounting,” she says. “But they weren’t strong at talking to a private equity investment professional and making their services relevant across the private equity deal cycle.” That was something Victoria was good at, and, during her two years there, “they went from being under £100m in revenue globally to hitting ambitious goals and growing the business in Europe quite substantially”.

Crucially, Victoria “went on the journey with them as an organisation”. From there, she got her first opportunity to work on an interim basis for a portfolio company of Bain Capital. The job was billed as being “straightforward”, says Victoria: “‘The CFO is leaving,’ they said. ‘We’ve got the new guy who can’t join for five months, so just hold the tiller. It can’t be that hard.’”

But after joining it transpired there were challenges with certain tenders. “Nobody understood their profitability and we’d already bid, we had some challenges which required a turnaround plan and nothing was quite as smooth as it was meant to be,” says Victoria. “[Despite this] I absolutely loved it, and I seemed to thrive in that environment.” And things progressed from there.

The environment is, however, still so male-dominated that Victoria says every time she joins an organisation as CFO she replaces a man, and every time she leaves she is replaced by one: “I’ve met many CFOs over the years, and only once have I met another woman CFO in a PE portfolio company.”

Game face

While there’s no shortage of women coming into accountancy, they’re not making it into those leadership roles. “I’d like to mentor more women coming through,” Victoria says, adding that there is some truth in the narrative around loneliness in leadership. “The further up you go, the fewer people there are you can be truly open and honest with. You’ve got to carry the team and put your game face on when things are tough.”

“While you’re climbing and you’re trying to get to the peak, don’t forget to look at the path along the way. People who find that balance have a more comfortable life”

Victoria has been lucky to develop a support network during her career, but all her role models and bosses were male, and she was left to proactively seek out women across the private equity industry and in advisory firms, and build those relationships herself. “That doesn’t take anything away from the support [the male role models] gave,” she says, “Many were very helpful – but I do think it would have helped for me to have seen some female role models around.”

Role models that might have maybe given her the kind of advice she wished she’d had at an earlier stage in her career – don’t forget to enjoy the journey. “Something that I’ve been guilty of is always striving to get to the next level, always looking for the next thing,” she says. “Even during the last few years I’ve still found myself struggling with the feeling that I’ve got to prove myself all the time.”

Take on the challenges, by all means, she says, but “while you’re climbing and you’re trying to get to the peak, don’t forget to look at the path along the way. People who can find that balance have an easier and more comfortable life.”

So is she confident she will enjoy her next journey, across the Pacific? “I’ve had some very bad wobbles,” she says. This was not helped by her feeling incredibly seasick for 36 of a 42-hour rowing journey on her first attempt at finding her sea legs.

“I honestly thought, how am I going to be able to do this? I can’t pull out because we’re so close to the cut-off date that the whole thing won’t go ahead.” But being this far outside of her comfort zone has meant finding “new ways to look at resilience”.

“There are a lot of lessons in that,” she concludes, “that I wish I had back when I was working as a CFO.”

peddiebell.com
rowforlifepacific.org.uk

ICAS has recently launched the CA Women’s Network. Learn more here