Simon Bevan is a qualified accountant with over three decades of advisory and auditing experience focused especially on professional services and real estate businesses, operating as partnerships, PLCs, PE-backed and family businesses. He is the former UK Managing Partner and Senior Partner of BDO LLP and a Board member and a Partner at Grant Thornton UK LLP, (BDO and Grant Thornton are the fifth and seventh largest accounting networks globally). At Grant Thornton, Simon is the Head of Partner Matters and chaired the Partner Selection Panel and the panel that selected the firm’s CEO in 2018. He is experienced in M&A, leads on the firm’s relationships with Chinese business and, as Head of Partner Matters, leads on all aspects of wellbeing for the firm’s partner group.He is accredited as a coach and coach supervisor with the European Mentoring & Coaching Council. He is a Non-Executive Director (having spent more than a year as interim CEO) at Unifrutti, the $750m revenue international fruit group, as well as being on the boards of two Not-For-Profit organisations: the Bromley by Bow Centre (where he is Interim Chair) and the Churchill Fellowship (where he is Treasurer and chairs the Audit, Risk and Governance Committee). He has permission for further NED / Audit Chair roles alongside his ongoing part-time role at Grant Thornton.Simon is a former Chairman of the Association of Partnership Practitioners; Member of the CBI’s International Advisory Group; Visiting Professor at Xiamen University, China ; and Advisory Board Member of the Department of Economics & Finance at Brunel University.