Mike Fletcher

Mike is a highly skilled and resourceful Chartered Accountant, having worked in financial services for more than 20 years at large global & domestic financial institutions, and small financial boutiques.  He has strong experience in sales, marketing, operations, finance, client service, risk management and strategic functions, as both a leader of small specialist teams, large generalist teams, as well as managing cross-functional teams. He has successfully been able to translate these skills to the SME sector, using his wide-ranging experience to add rigour, accountability and transparency to SME companies to support their growth ambitions.

Mike qualified as a Chartered Accountant in South Africa and, after completing articles at Deloitte and compulsory conscription at the local tax office, worked as a tax consultant with an international professional consulting practice. He then moved into financial services where he undertook a wide variety of roles at several firms in both Johannesburg and London over more than 20 years. He has since spent time in the service-related SME sector, adding value by employing skills and experience obtained in his career to date.

He is flexible and a resilient self-starter, working well either alone or as an effective team player. He is a goal-driven individual, action-orientated with a can-do attitude and a fine eye for detail.

Over the course of his career as a Senior Finance Leader and Transformation Expert, he has:

• Assisted management on the buy-side of an MBO of a financial services firm, providing support with structuring and negotiating for financial close of a successful transaction.
• Built a comprehensive management reporting tool for an accounting professional service group so its owners could understand and improve the professional staff’s productivity and chargeability.
• Constructed and formulated a financial forecasting & costing model for a business services firm to map in financial terms the route to owners’ strategic objectives, and to perform scenario analysis to understand the cash impact of various new initiatives including weaning off invoice finance.
• Built a financial forecasting model for a financial services firm to articulate how it would achieve the exit ambitions of the owners, highlighting areas to increase profitability and managing cashflows.
• Developed a management information system for a legal professional firm to provide business intelligence on operations of the business and to cascade KPIs for staff members’ performances to be assessed against.
• Implemented technology solutions to assist a legal professional services firm to monitor and control credit risks in its customer base.
• Developed a triennial operating budget for a financial services firm to monitor operating and financial performance against their agreed action plan.
• Deployed a rigorous management reporting pack for directors’ monthly meetings showing performance against their plan, KPIs and cash management.
• Designed an innovative incentive scheme for a legal professional services firm to recognise and attribute value added by functional teams and high-performing individuals within each team.
• Mapped business processes for an international financial services firm in order to improve quality of workflow, remove waste, lower costs and reduce risk.
• Structured and implemented an innovative funding solution for a client’s growth ambitions.
• Prepared cash flow analyses and a restructured funding package for an underfunded multi-national services company.
• Built a detailed financial model to undertake dynamic sensitivity analyses of cash flow projections.
• Installed a Process Management System measuring workflow performance and monitoring KPIs.

Testimonial:

“Mike understands the needs of a small, growing business. He has great awareness of the disciplines we needed to adapt and the support we needed to continue to grow”.

James Post, Managing Director, Ashbury Labelling

Background

An international bank’s loans were processed by a variety of separate departments across each region, but there was no activity based costing to properly measure the profitability of each loan.

Challenge

There was a lack of understanding of how the different activities involved in processing loans were to interact with one another.  Further, there was lots of waste due to poor quality of handovers…