Strategic business partner for the company founders (including CEO) overseeing Finance, HR, Legal, Business Intelligence and Commercial negotiations. Responsible for defining the financial and funding strategy, defining and monitoring the group KPIs, ensuring robust financial and reporting controls and setting and monitoring the annual budget. Key AchievementsIncrease in the company valuation from £10m to £125m in 30 months resulting in a full exit in July 2022. Between October 2019 and July 2022 the business grew 10x in revenue with enterprise value increasing to £125m. Following an onerous 3 month due diligence and legal period, a successful exit was negotiated and completed on crystallising a value of £125m for shareholders.Generated £16.5m in cash to help scale the business – in September 2020 I led and closed the first material private equity fundraise in the history of the business worth £5m in equity which was then supplemented by a £10m debt raise in December 2021. Further to this, through a combination of working capital management and accounting corrections, I was able to generate a further £1.5m from credit lines and cash recovered from HRMC.Advised and defined the wider 3-year and 5-year business strategy alongside the CEO – worked closely with the CEO to define and rollout the enforcement and B2B technology strategy of the business as part of which business activities were set up in Ireland and Germany with Australia to follow shortly.Defined and delivered the cash management strategy required to survive COVID – COVID resulted in a material decline in revenue. This impacted the business prior to the investment therefore required a robust cash management strategy for the business to remain liquid. Through supplier management, internal restructuring and short-term borrowing such a strategy was defined and successfully delivered.

The Divisional Finance Director of Ingenuity; a division made up of five businesses with consolidated revenue of £90m and EBITDA of £18m. I was responsible for all management accounting, commercial reporting, accounts payable and accounts receivable functions across the division and supported by fifteen finance professionals split between Manchester, London and Utah. Key AchievementsLed the acquisition of three businesses - I led the acquisition financial due diligence, financial integration and restructuring of the UK2 Group (THG’s largest acquisition at the time), Hangar 7 and Language Connect. This included the integration of the Management Accounts, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and Treasury functions. Materially strengthened the financial performance of the division - over a twelve-month period, improved the UK2 gross profit margin from 32% to 39% and EBITDA margin from 14% to 24% contributing an additional annualised EBITDA of £5m. The key contributors to this were: - Challenging existing the incumbent accounting policies and agreeing changes with our auditors resulting in a £1.2m annualised EBITDA improvement. - Identifying and working with the wider leadership team to migrate out of the business £500k of synergistic savings; and - Working as the commercial lead with the wider UK2 leadership team to change the incumbent commercial arrangements of our most significant revenue stream to recover £2.4m of costs previously unrecovered. Scaled the finance team to support growth - grew the Ingenuity finance team from three heads to fifteen through a combination of integrating the acquired teams, internal and external hires. This allowed me to overhaul the inherited financial processes and controls to provide the wider business with insightful financial and commercial reporting and a robust financial control environment.

Audit manager responsible for the delivery of engagements on a timely basis and within budgets. Managing the day-to-day operations of my field teams and liaising and challenging clients throughout the audit process.Key achievements:- Managed a client portfolio in the Melbourne office with fees worth c. $2,000,000;- Personally won in excess of $200,000 of new work for the Melbourne office during the FY 2015 financial year;- Leading the innovation of the audit approach to make engagements more insightful for clients and more interesting for staff. The corner stone of this being the introduction of data analytics into the audit approach;- Audit Manager of the largest client in the Southampton office being the UK Xylem Group which consists of 13 entities and attracted an audit fee of $900,000;- In conjunction with the Corporate Finance team I developed and delivered a series of training seminars to Deloitte staff and clients on acquisition accounting; and- Delivered a series of other client training programs tailored based on their individual requirements noted through the audit and changes to accounting standards.

DSH are a medium sized accounting firm based in the London area and was where I trained for the ACA. Due to the size of the partnership I was heavily exposed to SMEs, particularly owner managed businesses. Due to the breadth of service offered by DSH gained experience in:- Preparation of management accounts;- Preparation of statutory financial statements;- Statutory auditing;- Preparation of VAT returns; and - Calculating corporate tax expenses and provisions, submitting tax returns and liaising with HMRC to negotiate payment plans.