IB Woman
Issue No. 48 - August/September 2009
Shirley’s super life
by Penelope Herbert
Are you passionate about numbers? People who don’t work with numbers may misunderstand why people choose to be accountants, auditors and financial planners. Shirley Schaefer is very clear about her passion for order and process, but she also sees the exciting and creative side of working with numbers.
“Actually, it’s less about numbers and more about assisting people to obtain their best advantage through managing their finances,” says Shirley.
“As an auditor, I worked in compliance striving to keep the regulators out of people’s lives by ensuring their business was fully compliant. This had a technical focus involving concepts and government boundaries. My current work is in the area of self-managed superannuation funds so my auditing background is very useful, but I now have more creative options.”
As a Partner at BDO Kendalls, Shirley has developed the self-managed super funds division from scratch. In 1996 she was a manager with an idea she took to management requesting one staff member to help her. Now, the division has six staff working in two core areas and provides services in three states.
But developing the self-managed super division wasn’t the most challenging decision of Shirley’s career. In the early 1990s she took a sideways step because she wasn’t being challenged and stimulated. Her career hiatus took the form of lecturing at TAFE and university, presenting accounting concepts in a legal environment such as the ...
