With over 25 years of experience in Finance and financial management, Jon is a seasoned specialist who learned his craft in the SME-focused operations of big-name consultancies like KPMG and Grant Thornton.

This background, combined with the experience of running his advisory firm, has equipped Jon with extensive insight into the challenges and opportunities that small and medium-sized businesses encounter, and he sees himself very much as a problem-solver, removing the obstacles to success and facilitating business growth.

Jon achieves this by working closely with business founders and owners to capture and analyse data, and by helping them and other stakeholders understand the story that the numbers tell. This informs careful forecasting, planning, and measurement that enable Jon to align Finance actions with the business’s strategic objectives through all stages of its evolution - start-up, scale-up, raising finance, mergers and acquisitions (M&A), and exit.

In his career, Jon has applied his skills and expertise in SMEs across many sectors, in both product and service industries, as well as in charity and voluntary organisations.

A geophysicist by education, Jon is also a qualified Chartered Accountant, and in his long career he has built up a wealth of experience and favourable outcomes in many fields, including, amongst others, these examples:

• Buying and selling businesses: Working with owner-managed businesses, investors, and potential buyers to cover all the angles involved in acquiring or selling a business, and ensuring the best outcome for all parties
• Management information (MI): Developing and improving MI to enable a construction company to improve cashflow and renegotiate finance
• Optimised business exit: Enabling shareholders to navigate the sale of their stake and obtain the best possible value; structuring a management buyout in a procurement audit business to ensure the best financial outcome for those involved
• Expansion and growth: Arranging alternative finance and refining plans to enable a tourism centre to go ahead with revenue-multiplying expansion despite being turned down by the banks; enabling a healthcare business to untangle its finances and identify where to focus investment most effectively for maximum growth
• Crisis turnaround: Advising an international supplier of cooking equipment to reduce its financial exposure to a European customer.

1. Big Four consultancy background, specialising in SMEs and owner-managed businesses.
2. Extensive experience working with private equity organisations on both investment and exit.
3. Multi-sector experience spanning construction, tourism, childcare, healthcare, and cookery supplies, amongst many others.
4. Supports voluntary organisations as charity trustee and chair of governors at a local school

1. Review and appraisal of existing management information
2. Investment analysis
3. Financial modelling
4. Structuring and raising finance
5. Exit planning
6. Project management
7. Supporting clients on projects where they don’t have either the skill set or time

A keen swimmer, cyclist, and tennis player who also likes to cook for family and friends, Jon says EFM’s operating model and flexible working hours enable him to achieve a good balance between work, family and his hobbies.