Case study

This will feel familiar.

The business is growing across markets - but the way it runs hasn't kept up. Nothing is broken. But it's getting harder to see clearly, decide quickly, and trust the numbers.

Situation

A PE-backed global professional services business, scaling across the UK, US, and Singapore.

Month-end took 60 days. Numbers were debated, not trusted. Forecasts were guesswork. Decisions were made without reliable data. Things worked - but only because people kept stepping in. This pattern is not unique to this business. It shows up consistently as companies scale.

Structural shift

This wasn't a finance problem. It wasn't a capability issue. The business had outgrown the way it ran. And once you look in the right place, this becomes clear very quickly. So instead of optimising around the edges, the way the business operated was redesigned - across decision-making, processes, and data.

Outcomes

Scaling from £3.6m to £18.1m EBITDA — operational summary

Finance headcount

15.2 → 8.6

Processing more than twice the transaction volume, in a business that had almost doubled in size

Automation

44%

Of the finance function now automated or AI-assisted

Team tenure

6+ years

Average tenure across the finance team

        Decisions moved faster.
        Numbers became trusted.
        Leadership stopped being the integration layer.
      

AI wasn't the transformation. It was the reward for building the right foundations.

Insight

Nothing here was broken. Growth had simply outpaced the way the business ran. Once that was redesigned, performance followed.

In most businesses at this stage, this weight already exists - it just hasn't been made visible yet. And until it is, growth continues to feel heavier than it should. This is the space I typically work in.

There is a more complete case study that shows how this was implemented in detail. If useful, I'm happy to share it.

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