David Watts Email & Phone Number

Commercial finance lead for GL Education, a high growth private equity backed EdTech business. GL is the leading provider of formative assessments to UK schools, with the goal of enabling every child to reach their full potential.Key responsibilities:• Full ownership of the budget and reforecast processes for P&L and CAPEX investments, from initial planning and stakeholder engagement through to presenting to private equity investors for final approval.•Responsible for P&L management throughout the year, ensuring senior leadership team understand financial performance and the risks and opportunities impacting EBITDA achievement.•Ownership for all KPIs, ensuring they are relevant, accurate, actionable and understood by the SLT.• Managing two finance business partners, ensuring they are motivated and effective whilst supporting their career development.• Played a key role in the completion of due diligence when GL was acquired by Renaissance Learning in Q12023.

In Oct-23 I was appointed Head of Commercial Finance for Renaissance Global, the international arm of Renaissance Learning Inc, incorporating both GL Assessment and the existing international division of Renaissance. The scope of my role therefore expanded considerably due to the merging of these two organisations. I also became a member of the Renaissance Global senior leadership team, tasked with integrating the two businesses in order to realise the sizeable top line synergies underpinning the acquisition of GL by Renaissance.

London, England, United Kingdom

Finance Business Partner to Chiefs of Service for a range of clinical and non-clinical directorates, ensuring financial and operational performance verses targets is understood and communicated to the trust's senior management team.

London, United Kingdom

Key Responsibilities:• Finance business partner for the Investment Banking, Retail Banking, Technology and Retail sectors, AMS’s Consultancy arm plus the total corporate cost base. Providing both operational and strategic finance support for AMS senior leadership team, comprising the CFO, Sector Managing Directors and FP&A Director. • Owner of the budget and reforecast process for my stakeholder groups, covering collection of assumptions from the business, reviewing resulting forecasts with account owners and sector directors and summarising to the senior leadership team to ensure numbers and surrounding risks and opportunities are understood.• Responsible of overview and sign off of month end numbers, ensuring variances are challenged, understood and communicated to the CFO and senior leadership team.• Provide commercial finance support, including scenario modelling and communication of key financial messages, for new business development on existing clients and financial deep dives when accounts start to deviate from plan.Key Achievements:• Owned the financial modelling for a major strategic initiative to enable the company to access significant new revenue streams via an alternative route to market, developing a highly flexible model that enabled rapid and wide-ranging scenario testing ahead of presentation to private equity investors.• Lead a deep dive into a prestigious new account which was showing material negative variance from plan during implementation. Through detailed modelling I was able to quantify how much of the current and future downside was due to the client, enabling a temporary price increase to be negotiated, delivering +£1m of incremental contribution.• Owned the standardisation of how all accounts in AMS submit budget and reforecast revenue assumptions, saving 2-3 weeks of cumulative effort across both the business and the finance team and reducing forecasting errors.

London, United Kingdom

Full financial responsibility for BBCWW’s UK DVD and electronic download (EST) businesses, covering FP&A, business partnering and financial control.Key Responsibilities:• Trusted business partner across all departments, providing financial guidance to senior stakeholders and influencing company direction. Key stakeholders include UK Finance Director, UK Consumer Products Director, plus exposure to the Board on a regular basis.• Full P&L, balance sheet and cash flow responsibility for the UK DVD and EST businesses (combined revenue of c£70m) including budgeting and reforecasting, achievement of annual profit targets and ensuring external auditors sign off the accounts.• Leading and motivating a team of six ACCA and CIMA qualified/qualifying accountants to ensure they understand how their roles sit within the wider team and drive them to look for improvements and efficiencies whilst ensuring they are challenged and supported appropriately.• Responsible for all commercial finance support for the business in areas of product development and pricing, customer contract negotiations, marketing investment, DVD commissioning and supply chain management.Key Achievements:• Successfully taking on a team of six after a departmental restructure combined the previously separate commercial finance and financial control functions.• Delivering all aspects of the budget, quarterly reforecasts and commercial finance business support whilst managing the financial control environment after replacing two finance managers and assuming responsibility of a large proportion of a financial controller’s workload, delivering material headcount savings.

London, United Kingdom

• Lead the UK DVD budgeting, re-forecasting and five year plan process through liaising with Sales, Marketing, Commissioning and Supply Chain with full explanation of movements versus previous forecast and prior year and review of Risks & Opportunities.• Delivery of month and year end including full P&L review versus forecast and prior year, setting of sales provisions and ensuring auditor requirements are satisfactorily met.• Lead the investment appraisal of all indie and special commission content acquisitions for the global DVD and EST businesses.• Responsibility for recruiting, managing and developing one direct report.

London, United Kingdom

• Financial owner of all bundled cross product (combined Broadband, Voice and BT Vision) launches, prices and special offers. This requires close interaction with the Sales and Propositions teams to understand the proposed offer and volume impact to assess the financial implications.• Financial lead for all commercials involving the £750m BT Consumer Broadband product business.

London

• Ownership of the Quarterly Rolling Forecast (QRF) and Risks & Opportunities (R&O) management for the £500m wholesale broadband business. This incorporated a full bottom up build volume forecast.• Review of month end results in order to give clear explanation and insight behind any variances to forecast and to assess whether variances represented on-going risks or opportunities going forward.• Leading the QRF and R&O required presentation of forecasts to the BTW CFO to ensure they were fully understood and challenged. QRF also required presentation to both Product and Sales communities to ensure buy in to the plan. R&O process necessitated interaction with product and sales directors to identify risks and opportunities and to execute plans to either mitigate or take advantage of them.• Financial lead on a number of pricing and investment business cases including a material price increase. This required collaboration with Products, Sales and the Regulatory Affairs Department and secured the incremental margin required to hit our targets.

London, United Kingdom

• Development of detailed 5 year P&L models to assess, flex and approve proposed pricing for BT Wholesale’s broadband products. This is done in close conjunction with pricing and network costing managers.• Delivering robust cost/benefit appraisal for both pre- and in-life investment proposals to enable BT’s senior management to make their investment decisions. This includes development of P&L forecasts, NPV and cash flow analysis.• Building fully allocated, incremental and marginal costs stacks to develop both list and bid pricing proposals to maximise market share and profitability of BTW.

London, United Kingdom

• Leading and supervising audit fieldwork teams (up to 4 people)• Working on a portfolio of approximately 6 clients throughout the year, ranging from £20m to £500m turnover, operating within the pharmaceutical, manufacturing, media and food & beverage sectors.• Taking ownership of entire jobs from planning to the completion of the statutory accounts, including preparing financial statements from the client’s trial balance.• Managing resources and time efficiently and effectively including the monitoring of unbilled work and budgets.• Completing the detailed review of junior team members’ work.• Coaching junior team members and providing honest, constructive feedback• Building and maintaining good relationships with clients throughout the audit including audit fee negotiations resulting from overruns.