United Kingdom
• Serving as Non-Executive Director (NED) for Sweet Squared, contributing strategic insights and governance. • Transitioned from full-time employment to focus on personal pursuits while maintaining a commitment to the business. • Engaged in high-level strategy to guide the company's direction and support its growth initiatives.
• Oversaw Operations, Finance, Supply Chain, IT, and HR for Sweet Squared, a leading distributor of exclusive hair and beauty brands. • Strengthened structures, internal processes and developed teams to enhance service resilience and customer support. • Successfully implemented a new warehouse management system integrated with the ERP engine, improving operational efficiency. * completed 2 bolt on acquisitions and raised growth funding from bank for future organisation development.
Set up in private practice and regulated by ICAEW. Clients assignments included: Specialist accounting advice in support of defence of a material claim against a plc. Claim withdrawn based on evidence. Specialist advice to restate and complete accounting records after an acquisition and integration including exercising a business transfer agreement and dealing with post integration settlements. Advice to charity about trustee duties surrounding funding difficulties and exercising diligence on business plan making several recommendations. Advice to trustees on funding proposal and conditions. Conditional funding secured. M&A support to start up business on acquisition strategy, reviewing targets and desk to diligence and review funding proposals received.
St Michael’s Hospice. Trustee and Finance/Audit chair.
Group CFO of high growth AIM listed insurance claims management business. Bought by Quindell PLC, later Watchstone PLC. Grew business from £30m to £120m organically during my tenure. Responsible for: Finance; IT; Co Sec and HR. Strengthened business for growth, which included: Implementing and in house developed claims management system integrated to finance system; Review and strengthening of management teams; Establish and leading a growth planning team ensuring all areas if the business had capacity to execute on different growth scenarios; Replacement of bank and agreement of £30m funding line. Management of sales preparation working with NOMAD. At Quindell I established financial disciplines to assist their preparation for a potential move to full market listing and raised bank funding for the legal and medical reporting businesses,before leaving to join their JV with RAC to roll out telematics. Quindell suffered adverse publicity of its corporate governance and a new was appointed and the company hanged its name to Watchstone. I was offered a role of chief strategy officer reporting to the CEO. Both growth and sale opportunities were explored. Subsequently a £600m sale of the legal motor and medical repoqrting businesses was agreed and within my role I led bank relationships, managed exit planning, led a technical project to restate Quindell’s prior accounts and led a planning exercise to support obtaining court approval for a £400m capital return. Then led a process to sell other businesses within the group and left when the group had downscaled.
Director of Financial Control & Reporting for UK general insurance business. Led comprehensive review of the financial performance of the business for UK and PLC boards. Led financial components of group SARBOX implementation project. Led financial change project to rationalise finance function, leading to significant process and personal changes and successfully addressing necessary control and efficiency improvements.