A commercial finance career built in the engine room.

For the last eleven years I have done something most finance leaders never do: put my own capital at risk. I have built and run a UK direct-to-consumer business end to end, to a seven-figure (USD) peak year earned across Amazon's US, UK and European marketplaces and a Shopify storefront, with sourcing and cost of goods managed in the Far East and the freight, duty and inventory cycles that come with it. The finance function has been mine throughout: statutory accounts, VAT, cash and margin, and a paid-acquisition budget held to customer-acquisition-cost discipline. It survived a 70%+ category collapse in COVID and traded through to the rebound. Advising on a P&L and owning one are different educations; I have had both. And it was general management, not a side venture: product, marketing, technology, supply chain and finance, run simultaneously for eleven years, taken to category leadership in its primary product line and held through a 70%+ collapse to the rebound.

It retrained leadership itself: an extended enterprise of manufacturers, freight forwarders and agencies, held to performance by relationship rather than title. That is the influencing an interim walks in needing on day one.

Before that came sixteen years inside listed and family-owned groups. At Accord, as interim European Finance Director, I diagnosed and architected a £2.5m savings programme and an 11% EBITDA improvement plan across 22 entities and 32 markets, in five months. At Parexel I took on the Early Phase unit, which had never made positive operating income, and left it with its first: a $13m profit swing, receivables down from 65 to 40 days, and a 40-person team recognised as the company's best finance function.

Pharma was the long arc before that. At GSK, across four years and two Finance Director roles, I partnered the R&D pipeline and the M&A and licensing agenda, matured demand modelling into the forecasting used in transaction valuations, and jointly led the finance side of GSK's largest UK transfer-pricing defence of its time, closed within the provision held. At Mayne Pharma I led group performance for the global generics business and the finance of being acquired: built and proofed the analysis behind the shareholder documentation through Hospira's takeover. At Chiron, across three senior roles, I ran finance for European Distributor Operations, seventeen countries through third-party distributors, achieved record revenue and contribution growth of 20% on prior year, converted the Austrian market into a direct affiliate, introduced patient-based modelling through long-range planning, and led the flip of the European distributor operations into the Novartis affiliate structure.

The commercial instinct was there from the start. At O2, at the height of the mobile land-grab, I built subscriber economics, annualised ARPU, churn and customer lifetime value by tariff, device and sales channel, before such analysis was standard in the sector, and partnered the commercial teams as it steered the division to 33% profitable sales growth: the discipline I would later translate from customers to patients. Before that, group FP&A at IMS Health's global headquarters, a subscription-based healthcare information business, covering group consolidations, the quarterly legal close and MD&A contributions to SEC filings. I trained in Accounting and Management Control at Sheffield Hallam, including a year in audit practice at Winter & Co, and qualified ACMA with CIMA in 2002, later adding the CGMA designation and an Executive MBA at Cranfield, completed over two years alongside a full-time Finance Director role at GSK.

Throughout, the foundations of the chair (statutory and legal-entity reporting, the quarterly close, US GAAP and IFRS, Sarbanes-Oxley, audit, taxation, treasury) have been the given: done rigorously from an audit-practice grounding and IMS Health's SEC filings onward, and treated as the licence to operate rather than the point of the job. The value is created above them.

What draws me back to larger organisations is the part I have missed most: building and leading teams, at a scale a founder-run business deliberately avoids. The timing is deliberate too: finance has its best opportunity in a generation to drive how businesses decide, with AI as the lever, and I want to drive that from inside an organisation with real scale.

And the commitment is whole. The company runs without my daily involvement by design, so an engagement, interim or permanent, gets all of me. Today I am open to interim, fixed-term and permanent finance leadership, with contract engagements handled through Belmont London Ltd, and I bring one more thing: genuine working fluency in AI. Claude, Claude Code, Claude in Excel and ChatGPT are embedded in how I analyse, forecast and model, checked the way an analyst's first draft would be. Boards are asking their finance leaders for an AI plan. I have been running mine.