Senior Finance Leader | PE-Backed Environments | ACA Qualified
There’s a particular kind of finance professional that PE-backed businesses need but rarely find: someone equally comfortable in the boardroom presenting to lenders as they are rebuilding a month-end close process from the ground up. This candidate is that person.
A qualified ACA, their career spans Big 4 advisory, high-growth scale-ups, and complex international businesses — all with a consistent thread of technical rigour and commercial pragmatism.
They cut their teeth at a Big 4 firm in a specialist Venture Capital taxes team, advising on the full private equity lifecycle — from deal structuring and refinancing to vendor due diligence and portfolio exits. That early immersion in how PE operates has shaped everything since. They understand what sponsors want, how lenders think, and what “value creation” actually means at a transactional level.
Moving into industry, they’ve spent the last five years as a senior finance leader within a PE-backed business scaling from a single geography to a multi-entity European operation. In that time they’ve owned everything: a $200m+ debt facility and lender relationship, group consolidation across US and four European jurisdictions, global tax and transfer pricing, treasury and FX risk management — including implementing an interest rate hedge saving the business c.$1.5m annually. They’ve also led five acquisition integrations and navigated both the buy and sell-side of a full PE ownership change.
What sets them apart isn’t just breadth — it’s the ability to build whilst the plane is flying. They reduced month-end close cycles by over 50% in two separate businesses, remedied a transfer pricing gap that eliminated a $1m price chip ahead of a sell-side process, and identified £400k of previously invisible revenue at an earlier role. These aren’t incremental improvements; they’re the kind of interventions that change how a business presents itself to investors.
They’ve also demonstrated genuine leadership beyond finance — running a cross-functional European growth initiative, establishing legal entities across four countries, and managing teams of 12+ across accounting, payroll and FP&A.
Where they add value in a PE-backed context: For a business preparing for a capital event, mid-hold transformation, or European expansion, this candidate brings rare end-to-end credibility — someone who has lived the process from both sides of the table and knows what good looks like at every stage of the PE lifecycle.
