LISTEN: Years before Sarah Hayes was made partner at KPMG, she was growing up on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall with dreams of becoming a vet.
Hayes has spent 15 years at KPMG and was made partner in the real estate transactions services team in May. But, she tells EG’s Tomorrow’s Leaders podcast: “I’ve not come the standard route.” She studied accounting and finance at the University of Plymouth, but those around her doubted her future prospects.
Listen to the podcast below:
She says: “I remember being at Plymouth and being told that none of us would get into Big Four because you had to go to a better university. There’s a big part of me that would quite like to find that lecturer and stick my tongue out at him.”
Echoing her unconventional journey from Bodmin to KPMG – the daughter of a “a bit of a hippy” who travelled the world with his guitar – Hayes says the industry needs to focus on attracting people from a range of backgrounds. That does not mean ticking boxes or focusing just on gender or race. “Things like ‘women are terrible at networking and men are great at networking’ is something that isn’t fair to either the women or the men”, she says.
Instead, it is a question of attracting people who have the wide set of skills needed to navigate the complexity of property.
She says: “Things have improved. The debate has evolved from focusing on more stereotypical elements and thinking purely around numbers. It’s more about life and how you attract skills, and how you get that diversity of thought through.
“Fixing a problem by just promoting people so that your stats look right – that’s never going to work.”
The women in real estate forum
When Hayes reflects on her years as a woman working in the property industry, she says it is usually not an issue that even occurs to her: “I guess growing up on a farm in the middle of Bodmin Moor with a very heavily male-dominated environment meant that I’ve been quite used to it.
“I don’t think it’s ever held me back. It’s certainly not put me off doing anything. But not everybody has that background.”
That recognition is partly why she helped start KPMG’s Women Investing in Real Estate forum, an informal setting where women can talk about issues they face and share their thoughts honestly. The forum also hosts larger events, that might cover networking skills or facilitate debates about issues facing the industry.
Those issues have changed, Hayes says, and the workforce is changing with it: “Nearly all of our men – if they’ve got children – are now having to share the load a bit.
“It’s not just a matter of having a conversation with a woman about having to leave at a certain time. It’s dads, too.”
As partner, Hayes says, she shares how she lives her life with her colleagues in order to demystify how someone with a young family – Hayes has two children aged nine and six – makes that work alongside a successful career.
She says: “It’s really easy to pigeonhole people as ‘That’s what you need to be like’. Then you very quickly get into this conversation about ‘I don’t know how you do it.’
“There’s an instant mental block that that looks too hard because there’s generally a huge misperception that somebody is doing way more than they’re actually doing.”
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