Mathematician, investment banker, mother of three, chief financial officer.
That is the condensed but nonetheless impressive resumé of RemSense’s Jillian Rosich.
Rosich took charge of the finance department in May last year after founder and Managing Director Steve Brown, a former colleague of her husband, Michael, suggested she apply for the role.
“I met Steve through Michael when he [Steve] was still working at [offshore services company] DOF Subsea and we stayed in touch from there,” she says.
‘When the RemSense CFO role came up, he talked me into applying as subtly as only Steve can.”
Possessing an affinity for numbers from an early age, Rosich was the first in her family to obtain a tertiary education, earning an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Perth’s Edith Cowan University. Later she added post-graduate qualifications in Finance and Investment and Professional Accounting to round out her skill set.
After graduating, she landed a plum job as a project analyst in the Wesfarmers business development department, which was led by the highly regarded Gene Tilbrook at the time.
Wesfarmers had just completed the acquisition of Bunnings and would shortly launch a bid for Perth Airport as part of a consortium. As you can imagine, Rosich says it provided her with an invaluable grounding in the business world.
She left the company to experience life overseas with her husband, landing up in Aberdeen, Scotland.
It was in there that she gained exposure to the high-octane world of investment banking as an associate with oil and gas specialist Simmons & Company International.
In this role, Rosich mainly advised on buy and sell deals for oil and gas services companies and it was typical of many people’s experience in investment banking, with 80-hour weeks the norm.
Full-time work gave way to full-time parenting with the arrival of eldest daughter Sophie in 2002 and it would remain the focus for the next 10 years as the couple welcomed a second daughter, Evie, and a son, Cameron.
Rosich returned to the workforce in 2010, gaining business consulting experience at Englehard Consulting and ASX-listed company experience with goldminer Kingsrose Mining and corporate advisory firm Trident Capital, which was her most recent role before joining RemSense.
Rosich’s career to date has given her the perspective to think that RemSense is “a lovely size” for a company, where she feels she can influence its direction and instill the necessary processes and systems.
While she recognizes the importance of the engineering solutions side of the business, she sees the real potential for the company in the development of the company’s Virtual Plant industrial digital twin product.
“[Chief Digital Officer] Anthony Roe and the product development team are turning Virtual Plant into a product that can be marketed to a very wide audience,” she says. “It will almost be like companies will have their subscriptions to Office 365 and they’ll have their subscriptions to Virtual Plant as well.
“We are perfectly placed in WA to take advantage of the markets Virtual Plant best serves – mining, oil and gas, construction – and then there’s the rest of Australia and the world.
“The market size for digital twins runs into the billions and if we are able to capture just a small slice of that we will be doing very well.”
From her experiences with her own brood, Rosich is comfortable that schools are doing enough these days to encourage children – and particularly girls – to follow careers in STEM as she did.
“There is already a massive push to get kids into STEM, the girls are already being steered down that path,” she says.
