Q&A: Autostore's Paul Harrison on why CFOs are creative too

In a parallel universe, Paul Harrison would be designing buildings.

“It must be the most amazing thing in the world to be able to look at a newly created structure and think ‘that came out of my creative mind’,” says AutoStore’s CFO, explaining his alternative career choice as an architect.

It’s a revealing insight into a leader who believes creativity is an undervalued trait in financial leadership.

“One underestimates the need for creativity in a CFO,” Harrison reflects. “We associate it with other disciplines more readily.” This creative mindset has proved valuable in his role at AutoStore, where he’s helping architect the future of warehouse automation since joining the Norwegian robotics company a year after its IPO.

Coming from previous roles at Sage and Just Eat, Harrison saw familiar patterns in AutoStore’s rapid growth trajectory. “What each of those businesses had in common was a sense of an even brighter future than exceeding past successes,” he explains. At AutoStore, that future lies in the vast untapped potential of warehouse automation – less than 20% of warehouses worldwide are currently automated, presenting a significant growth opportunity for the company’s innovative storage and retrieval systems.

But what drew Harrison to make the leap from software and food delivery to warehouse robotics?

His answer reveals the architectural mindset at work again – he saw an opportunity to build something significant. The appeal wasn’t just in the technology, but in the company’s culture. “What I found was not only a business that had been incredibly pioneering and successful, but also a management team that was humble and constantly driving to be a Better Business in future,” he says. “I liked that combination of success but humility and hunger for more success.”

Transforming the traditional role

The CFO role has evolved dramatically over Harrison’s 25-year career, expanding far beyond its traditional boundaries. “The regulatory burden of businesses has changed profoundly,” he notes. “At the same time, increasingly, CFOs play a reasonably significant role in defining the strategy of the business.”

This evolution demands a delicate balancing act. When discussing his role with AutoStore’s CEO, Harrison reveals a telling insight: “About 30% of my time is spent with the CEO running the business generally.” Success, he explains, means “being available to go to customer meetings, to go to partner meetings.” It’s this intangible aspect of the role that has significantly broadened the CFO’s remit.

The expanding scope of responsibility has led Harrison to adopt a distinctive approach to team building. “If anything, because CFOs are spread thinly, I almost over recruit in seniority and experience in my team,” he explains. This strategy enables him to focus on higher-level strategic initiatives while ensuring operational excellence.

One of Harrison’s key principles is the ability to anticipate future needs. “The art of doing the job well is to be able to look ahead and plan ahead and put new people, new processes, new systems in place almost ahead of when the business thinks it needs it,” he says. “Just because something’s right and serves the business well today, it cannot be assumed that that’s going to be right and serve the business well in two years.”

This forward-thinking approach has proved particularly valuable at AutoStore, where rapid growth requires robust financial infrastructure. The company maintains impressive financial metrics – 73.5% gross margins and 46.8% adjusted EBITDA margins in Q3 – while expanding its global footprint across 57 countries.

Autostore success formula

At the heart of AutoStore’s robust financial performance lies a deceptively simple strategy: standardisation at scale. “We’ve resisted – and this is not typical of our industry – bespoke product for different customers for different end markets,” Harrison explains. This approach has been crucial in maintaining the company’s impressive gross margins

The business model’s strength is further reinforced by AutoStore’s strategic go-to-market approach. “The implementation of our solutions, along with other technologies and warehouses, is done by one of our 23 business partners,” Harrison says. This partner-led strategy has enabled rapid global expansion without the overhead of establishing direct operations in each market. “One reason today we’ve been able to sell AutoStore in 57 countries is not because AutoStore has had to establish 57 different sales operations in 57 countries, but our partners have that presence.”

The market opportunity remains vast. Harrison points out that “less than 20% of warehouses in the world today are automated presenting a significant growth runway. This opportunity is driven by several compelling market forces.

“Businesses are all facing rising labour costs, scarcity of labour, increasing demands from consumers for same day, not next day but same day delivery,” he explains. These pressures are pushing distribution centers closer to consumers, “which compounds the cost challenges, meaning that a highly dense high throughput storage system resonates strongly.”

Innovation continues to drive growth. Harrison highlights recent developments such as their multi-temperature grid system, allowing grocers to store both frozen and chilled products in an AutoStore cube, with retrieval by workers in ambient temperatures. This kind of innovation exemplifies how the company maintains its competitive edge while staying true to its standardisation philosophy.

The broad applicability of AutoStore’s solution is another key strength. “Broadly speaking, 70% of everything that is stored in warehouses will fit in an AutoStore bin,” Harrison notes, highlighting the system’s versatility across different market sectors.

Modern CFO skillset

The evolving nature of the CFO role demands a diverse skillset that extends far beyond traditional financial acumen. “We’re actually storytellers,” Harrison emphasizes. “What we do is we preside over a ton of often numeric information. But our job for the benefit of our broader range of colleagues in the business is to bring that to life.” He stresses that finance’s role isn’t to “deliver a report with 300 numbers on it on a page,” but rather to extract meaningful insights and actionable recommendations from the data.

Harrison identifies several core attributes that he considers essential for modern finance leaders. “Innate curiosity” tops the list. “You have to be curious as to how the business works in order to suggest ways in which the business could work better,” he explains. Equally important is what he calls a partnership mindset. “You’re not brought in to establish some sort of confrontational role. You’re partnering with the business, you’re working with colleagues in the business to evaluate opportunities to solve challenges.”

When it comes to building finance teams, Harrison increasingly looks for what he calls a “digitally native, digitally comfortable mindset.” This is particularly crucial as finance functions embrace new technologies. “The required skillset has evolved, and undoubtedly an ability to think about the potential for technology to enhance the role further, and of course the most recent obvious example is AI,” he notes.

Reflecting on his own career journey, Harrison identifies one area he wishes he’d gained more hands-on experience in earlier: IT transformation. “One of the projects that we’re contemplating is to put a new ERP system in place,” he shares. “I’ve done a couple of these in the past as a CFO, but on each occasion I found myself wishing that at an earlier stage in my career, I’d been perhaps at a more junior and more dedicated level on those projects.”

The art of looking ahead

As AutoStore looks toward 2025, Harrison’s focus is firmly on laying the groundwork for future innovation, particularly in emerging technologies like AI. However, his approach is methodical. “My focus is actually on some of the foundational layers for AI at the moment,” he explains. “What AI is doing is scouring your own ecosystem and analyzing data and providing fresh insights. What that requires is that your data governance is in a perfect place.”

This foundation-first mindset extends to the company’s geographic expansion. With AutoStore recently opening a new factory in Thailand alongside its existing Polish facility, Harrison sees their planned ERP system as crucial for maximizing these opportunities, enabling them to “manufacture in an agile way in both locations according to demand patterns.”

However, navigating this growth trajectory comes with its challenges. “We could try to do 20 projects, 20 new initiatives next year. I can promise you we’ve got more than 20 great ideas, but if you try to do 20 things, you fall flat,” Harrison admits. “The process you have to go through is what are the five things that we want to double down on and really get behind.”

This selective approach becomes even more critical in today’s uncertain business environment. Harrison points to continuing elevated interest rates and potential tariff impacts as key considerations. “The world is a more uncertain place now than it certainly was 10 years ago,” he observes. “We’ve got to be agile. We’ve got to be ready to address changes in a really sort of agile, nimble fashion.”

Despite these challenges, Harrison remains optimistic about AutoStore’s future. The company’s inherent sustainability advantages – delivering more dense storage configurations with greater energy efficiency – position it well for future growth. As he puts it, “That world isn’t standing still, quite rightly either. So there’s a lot of change that you have to be ready to manage.”

For Harrison, this constant evolution brings him back to that architectural mindset he might have pursued in another life. In both architecture and finance, success comes from building strong foundations, embracing creativity, and always looking ahead to what’s coming around the corner.

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