Clare Beresford – Laurence Simons

Speaker: Clare Beresford, CEO, Laurence Simons

Clare Beresford: Thank you to Carrie-Jo Baker from The CFO Centre for all you do for us at Laurence Simons. Your help and support, since you joined us as our consultant, Chief Financial Officer has been extraordinary. Your intelligence drive, can do and knowledge has been an absolute credit to you and you have transformed our function.

Clare Beresford: I think the issues list is probably too long to, to mention in the time that we have available, we didn’t have any financial information that was allowing us to have good insight, management tools to allow us to make informed decisions. We were not able to have the overview from a financial standpoint of how we were doing as a business. Yes, we understood the numbers, but we didn’t really understand the numbers. We had numbers. It was, it was that intelligence and real MI to be able to see how we were tracking. And to have that data and that analysis has been transformative.

Clare Beresford: Working with Carrie-Jo was and is, continues to be a real collaboration of the powerhouse that she is from a capability and capacity. Her ability at the beginning to just grab the the finance department by the scruff over the neck and really put together a hit list of what was going to happen when and in what order and the outputs from that were, were phenomenal. I mean, we saw the changes immediately just being in the intelligence from a sales perspective to really drill down into what our numbers were telling us what our revenue numbers were where we were against target. Some of this sounds very basic from a, you know, a management information. But it’s transformative when you have it. And equally, I think what I’ve been delighted in working with Carrie-Jo is how she is able to really understand our business, which is critical and her curiosity and and ability to learn, have been so valuable to us because then the insight and advice that she’s offering is steeped and weighted in the Laurence Simons way.

Clare Beresford: The benefits that we’re seeing at Laurence Simon, since we started working with Carrie-Jo Baker from The CFO Centre have been, I was going to say revolutionary, but it’s, it’s deeper than that. Actually, it’s, it’s transformative. The underpinning that finance has across the entire business has been so transformative because it’s not only dealing with our suppliers and we, we work in different countries. So we have local accountants that they have to work with, got five sets of VAT returns, this complexity for a business of our size that is sometimes overwhelming and taking that all together. the benefits to the business, to the team, having somebody who is running a department where they’re now a go to for the team, before it was sort of avoided all costs really. But now the that capacity to help and support has meant that it’s allowed us to move forward with ready available information, data and the insight to make really informed business decisions. That’s a huge benefit to us and to the entire team.

Clare Beresford: The next year with, with Carrie-Jo and the team that she’s building here at Laurence Simons, it’s really exciting. Actually, we are, we’re moving into our next year of our five-year plan and Carrie was instrumental in helping us build that out to really understand what in terms of our growth plans, what finance needs to underpin that what we need in terms of cash, how we’re going to manage the cash, what working capital we need all of those extraordinary things. And equally that she has got some real deliverables in the next 12 months that are going to allow us to become much more effective and efficient in the business in terms of the technology that we can use and how that can underpin effectiveness and efficiency. So, that and I would say alongside how we are able then to, to connect those dots. So it’s about how a particular the sales team, how we raise invoices, is that a seamless process? Can we use our CRM for it? And that whole AP/AR size that is often quite laborious, the tech that we can use to transform that as well as payroll, all of the, all of the things that are administrative but are actually if you crack them, are unable to deliver those speedily and efficiency, the the customer service that is being delivered into the business by finance is transformed. So that’s really exciting what we’re going to achieve in the next 12 months with Carrie.