Founder's Background
Who I am, what I do and what you can expect from me:
I am a commercially minded CFO and UK Chartered Accountant (CPA equivalent) with a 30-year international career in Finance and Operations, including 6 years of corporate recovery/turnaround work with PwC, 9 years in senior financial roles in a major UK based international building materials company and 10 years as a public company CFO in two Aerospace and Defense companies.
I now work with a portfolio of small and growing companies in the San Francisco Bay area. My singular goal is to help improve the overall market value of each company I work with. I deliver strategic recommendations, and operational and financial improvement action plans to enable more effective governance and sustainably higher company valuations. I work on a project or retainer basis as well as providing Fractional COO/CFO services to CEO’s and Boards. My skills can be utilized in both growth and turnaround situations, where I have significant experience in my early career with PwC.
My passion and background is real Value Creation. I use a Five Pillars of Value Creation model focusing on optimization of the underlying value drivers in a business (Growth, Profitability, Cash Flow, Return on Assets, and Governance) developed from the Stern Stewart principles of Economic Value Added or EVA. Using this methodology I have worked in, and sat on the Boards of, various companies that have added over $2.5bn of tangible shareholder market value.
I also lead and develop Finance functions that are true business partners.
A typical client for me is one that is showing signs of success (Revenue growth, profitability, and/or cash), where the CEO or Board know there potential to scale and to produce significantly more profit and cash, but they do not know why this is not readily achievable. I will be able to diagnose the underlying issues and provide a framework and road map for success. Some attributes I have seen in these types of clients are:
- Lack of strategic plan aligning the business behind common objectives.
- No integrated Budget that reflects year 1 of the Strategic Plan, with limited or no clearly defined initiatives or objectives.
- Struggling to identify, measure and report on the handful of KPI’s (Value Drivers) that will lead to sustainable long-term success.
- Struggling for cash and unable to diagnose and solve the underlying root cause of operational issues.
- Ineffective governance system with a lack of understanding of the value of effective performance management and Enterprise Risk Management.
- Lack of accountability in the management team – lots of fire-fighting as issues drift and take an unnecessarily long time and effort to resolve.
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