Capabilities
The rest of the work.
Beyond working capital and the fractional CFO role, these are the areas we take on — usually inside a retained engagement, occasionally as standalone projects.
Financial problems rarely sit where they show up. Margins do not fall in the accounts department; they fall in pricing, in procurement, in the product mix, in how long stock sits before it moves. The accounts only report the damage.
Every engagement below starts in the financials and then goes looking for the cause somewhere else.
Cost and margin
Cost improvement
Not across-the-board cuts, which damage the business. Specific ones: suppliers nobody has renegotiated in four years, roles duplicated after a growth spurt, spend that continues because it always has. Typically 3 to 8 per cent of operating cost, and it stays out.
Profitability analysis
Which products, customers, channels and units actually earn their keep. The answer usually leads to two or three price corrections and one uncomfortable conversation about a large customer.
Process and systems
Finance process redesign
Procure-to-pay, order-to-cash and record-to-report rebuilt for the company's current size. A close of 15 to 20 days generally comes down to 5 to 7, with a third less manual handling.
ERP and automation support
Not implementation, but the part implementations get wrong: aligning system design with how management actually needs to see the business, and building controls and audit trails in from the start.
Management information
Reporting that connects operational drivers to financial outcomes, so a board pack explains performance rather than restating it.
Governance and internal controls
Delegation frameworks, approval authorities, segregation of duties and reconciliation discipline — enough structure to scale without adding risk.
Capital and transactions
Fundraising and debt
Financial models, information memoranda, credit committee packs, data rooms, covenant design and term sheet analysis, for debt syndication and private equity processes alike.
Acquisitions
Quality of earnings, working capital normalisation, synergies that are real as against synergies in the deck, and the hundred-day integration plan that decides whether any of it happens.
Turnaround
What has to happen in the next 60 days to stabilise cash, then the harder question of what made the business unprofitable in the first place.
Restructuring
Business unit profitability, capital deployment across the portfolio, and where the operating model is carrying cost it no longer needs.
How we work
Analysis is the easy half
Every engagement begins in the financials, because that is where the symptoms are visible. It never ends there, because that is not where the causes are.
We say what we think. If the plan does not work, or the number is optimistic, or the problem is a person rather than a process, you will hear it. An adviser who agrees with everything is of no use at this level.
And we stay through implementation, when the recommendation meets an organisation that would rather not change. A recommendation nobody executes is worth nothing.
Where it is possible to put a number on the result — cash released, margin gained, days off the close, cost taken out — we state it up front and measure it afterwards.
What we are not
We are not your auditors and not your tax advisers. You have those, and you should keep them.
We are also not a large firm. There is one principal and, where an assignment needs it, named specialists engaged for that assignment. That means you get 35 years of experience on your problem, and it means we take a limited number of clients at a time. If we are at capacity, we will say so rather than staff your engagement with someone junior.
Describe the problem
Most of this work starts with a conversation about something specific that is not behaving as it should. Thirty minutes, in confidence.