Direct interim finance for PE-backed businesses. Board-ready reporting in weeks, not quarters — delivered by the same operator who leads the team through it.
Most consultants give you slides. Most interims give you hands. PE-backed businesses need someone who does both — and switches between them inside the same week.
The reconciliations, the reporting automation, the monthly close. Board packs that lenders trust and auditors don't push back on. I do the technical work myself — not delegated, not outsourced.
Running the function, coaching the in-house team, presenting to the board, and interfacing with sponsors and lenders. The commercial judgement that permanent leaders take months to rebuild after a CFO transition.
Productised scopes, clear durations, defined deliverables. Every engagement draws on the same capability set — deployed where it's needed most.
Post-deal finance stabilisation.
Day-one reporting baseline, board-ready management accounts, and a monthly close process that works. For platforms and bolt-ons where the finance function inherited from the deal isn't fit for the VCP.
Pre-sale finance clean-up.
QoE-grade data, a clean audit trail, and a KPI pack that holds up under diligence. Begun 12–18 months before process — because buyers price uncertainty with a discount.
CFO-transition cover.
Continuity during CFO or Head of FP&A gaps. Running the function end-to-end while the permanent hire search is underway — with a handover plan that protects the team through the switch.
The building blocks deployed inside every engagement.
Every engagement is designed around what sponsors actually ask for in monthly reviews and investment committees. No translation layer between you and the work.
Anonymised vignettes from recent engagements. Different sectors, different scales, the same signature — reporting you can trust, on a timetable you can hold.
A specialist lender with £820m AuM was reporting to the board and to senior lenders on a five-working-day close. The cycle was manual, spreadsheet-driven, and a bottleneck heading into the deal.
Directed the FP&A function through the transaction. Re-engineered the reporting stack — Amazon Redshift warehouse, Tableau front end — so the loan book and AuM numbers landed at WD1. Rebuilt the monthly pack (P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, borrowing base, distressed-borrower analysis) around the new source of truth. Partnered the CFO on financial due diligence and IM preparation.
Close cycle compressed from WD5 to WD1. Lender-grade reporting delivered on time through the transaction. PE investment completed; three analysts developed and a permanent Head of FP&A hired.
Three-plus years into the hold, and the sponsor needed sharper commercial decision-making to support an extended value creation plan. Operationally complex economics — seasonal, yield-driven, multi-site — and the in-house model didn't reflect how the business actually ran. Commercial sensitivity analysis was taking five days to run and landing too late to be useful.
Built the group's financial model from operational drivers up, working directly with the FD and operational heads to integrate site-level metrics into planning. Engineered SQL extraction from the data warehouse so the finance team could reach datasets previously beyond their technical capability. Embedded modelling and data-analysis practices through structured upskilling, so the capability held after the engagement ended.
Commercial sensitivity analysis compressed from five days to sixty minutes. Finance team self-sufficient on the new model and the underlying data by handover. Operational and financial planning joined up on a single source of truth.
Reporting credibility lost following a global finance systems transformation. The month-end pack was late, inconsistent across platforms, and the C-suite had stopped trusting the numbers — net profit, fee income, production, recovery, utilisation, debtors, WIP, cash.
Led month-end production and reconciliation across all metrics, driving a single version of the truth. Rebuilt the budget net profit reporting with new templates and macros for speed and accuracy. Resolved VBA and Excel errors carried over from the transformation. Established a robust reporting timetable and held it. Managed two management accountants, rolled out Power BI training to the wider team, and built the dashboards that replaced the spreadsheet layer.
Reconciliation variances resolved to zero. C-suite credibility in the numbers restored. Reporting delivered reliably to timetable on a single source of truth.
When you hire through a recruiter or a Big 4 interim desk, a significant share of the day rate pays for account managers, sales overhead, and bench marketing — not for the operator doing the work.
Working direct means a cleaner commercial relationship, faster onboarding, and a material cost difference on engagements that run longer than a few weeks. No sales layer, no change-of-consultant risk, one accountable operator.
Specifics discussed in scoping conversations — every engagement is priced to its actual scope.
Indicative · Industry benchmarks · UK mid-market
A 20-minute scoping call to understand the situation, the portfolio context, and whether one of the three engagements fits. No pitch deck, no pipeline follow-up.