Andrew Thompson

Finance Director, Chartered Accountant based in Yorkshire with extensive experience in practice and industry. Commercially aware and proactive with a common sense approach. Focused on fully understanding a business to ensure that finance fully supports the management process. Emphasis on ensuring strong systems and controls, relevant and timely reporting and developing team members to promote responsibility and accountability. Comfortable working at all levels, with financial and operational staff. Results orientated, always looking for further improvements.

Andrew qualified as a chartered accountant in London and then spent a short time with Coopers & Lybrand before moving to a head office role with a global media company.

Moving out of London and working for many years in Wales, he is now based in Yorkshire and has held roles at Finance Director and Financial Controller level for a variety of companies from small owner managed to large multinationals in a variety of industries including engineering, manufacturing, social care, property and retail.

Working with these companies as a Finance Director he has:

• Developed business plans to support growth and obtain equity investment and debt facilities from banks and Peer to Peer lenders
• Managed cash flow and cost control initiatives.
• Strengthened budgeting, forecasting and reporting.
• Influenced management to implement changes in working practices, utilising KPI’s to increase awareness and highlight financial impact resulting in significant cost savings.
• Worked with advisors to understand business rates issues and obtain substantial savings.
• Reviewed systems developed specifications and led implementations and upgrades ensuring that these support the business.
• Reorganised and mentored finance teams, improving relationships with other departments and developed a culture of responsibility and accountability.
• Nurtured relationships with external stakeholders such as banks, HMRC and professional advisors, tackling issues and improving confidence.
• Prepared Information Memorandums and led the finance aspect of Sale and Purchase Agreements through to agreement of the Completion Balance Sheet for successful company acquisitions and disposals.
• Helped owner managers to understand financial and commercial aspects of the business and develop strategy for growth.

Testimonial:

We met up with Andrew and the support he gave us from that point was excellent. We learnt a lot from him in that difficult time and we were really pleased. Some of the main things we liked was how quickly Andrew would turn around a task. Anything that was set he’d do without having to be asked twice, and he’d be finding more work and coming back to us saying “we need to do this”.

Steffan Bowen – Managing Director – M&D Care Limited

Case Study Growing Company

Background

The company was expanding but suffering from a lack of working capital to support growth. A venture capital house was willing to invest but required a clear business plan supported by financial projections. Systems used were inadequate to prepare financial information and unsuitable for the business which needed a contract based system capable of allocating costs to the different projects.

Challenge

Improve relationships between the finance function and engineering to establish a clearer reporting mechanism and use this to develop a budgeting and forecasting tool supporting the business plan. Work with the venture capitalist to gain confidence and ensure the company could fulfil their requirements, both in production of the business plan and ongoing reporting. Ensure systems were capable of providing information to properly control and monitor revenue and costs against the business plan.