Case Studies

Most recruitment websites show you a wall of client logos. We would rather show you a small number of engagements in enough detail that you can judge whether we would be useful to your business.

The three below are real FD Capital clients. Each testimonial comes from the person who ran the relationship on the client side, and each engagement is a different shape: an interim Finance Director in an owner-managed transport business, a long-running fractional FD/CFO in insurance services, and a defined six-month fractional CFO engagement in a technology company. Between them they cover most of the reasons a business picks up the phone to us.

We name clients only where they are happy to be named. Where a business has asked us not to, or where naming it would serve no purpose for the reader, we describe the engagement without identifying it.

Case study one

Interim Finance Director · Transport and logistics · West Midlands

The situation

An owner-managed haulage and distribution operator in the West Midlands — the kind of business that fills the Black Country and the M6 corridor, running its own fleet against contracts with retail and manufacturing customers.

Businesses of this size and type almost always run on a thin finance function: a bookkeeper handling purchase ledger and payroll, an external accountant preparing statutory accounts several months in arrears, and an owner who knows the operation intimately but is making decisions from the bank balance rather than from a forecast. That works until it doesn’t — typically when the business grows, when a major contract is renegotiated, or when the asset finance book gets large enough that the bank starts asking harder questions.

Why transport is harder than it looks

Road haulage is a working-capital business with an unusual set of pressure points, and a finance leader who has not worked in it tends to miss them.

Fuel is bought now and recovered later, if the contract has a fuel escalator clause at all. Vehicles sit on hire purchase or lease, so the balance sheet carries real debt against depreciating assets, and the residual value assumptions matter more than most owners realise. Customers in retail and manufacturing pay on 60 or 90 days while drivers are paid weekly, so the cash cycle is permanently against you. Margin per job is thin enough that a pricing error of a few percent compounds quickly across a fleet. And the operator licence sits behind all of it, with financial standing requirements that the Traffic Commissioner can and does test.

What the engagement involved

The Finance Director’s job in that environment is unglamorous and specific. Get management accounts out on a reliable monthly timetable, so the owner is looking at last month rather than last quarter. Build a rolling cash forecast that accounts properly for fuel, wages, VAT, PAYE and finance instalments, and that the owner trusts enough to make decisions from. Establish genuine cost per vehicle and cost per route, so pricing and contract renewal conversations are informed rather than instinctive. Manage the bank and asset finance relationships deliberately — covenant headroom, facility renewals, the funding mix across the fleet — instead of reactively, when something is already tight.

That is the work Adrian Lawrence FCA did here, across a two-year engagement as the business’s Finance Director.

Case study two

Fractional FD/CFO · Insurance services · Three-year relationship

The client

SBS Insurance Services Ltd provides outsourced claims handling and back-office services to the insurance market — the operational layer that insurers, brokers and managing general agents rely on to process volume work accurately and to service level.

It is a people business with contract economics. Revenue is earned per claim handled or against a fixed service fee; the cost base is overwhelmingly salaries. That combination makes the finance function unusually load-bearing, because margin lives or dies on three things: whether work was priced correctly at tender, whether the team is utilised properly against the volumes actually received, and whether service-level performance is being met without burning unbudgeted hours to get there.

Why a fractional FD rather than a full-time hire

A business of this profile needs genuine Finance Director capability — someone who can sit opposite an insurer client’s procurement team, build a tender model that holds up, and answer a due diligence questionnaire properly. What it does not need is that person five days a week at a full-time salary.

Serving the insurance market also imports governance expectations well above what an SME would otherwise carry. Insurer and broker clients run supplier due diligence that reaches into financial stability, data protection, operational resilience and business continuity. Where client money is handled, the control environment has to stand up to inspection. The finance function has to be able to evidence all of it, not simply assert it.

A fractional FD is the right answer to exactly that shape of problem: senior capability, applied to the handful of things that genuinely need it, at a cost the business can carry indefinitely.

What three years tells you

Most fractional engagements are measured in months. A relationship that has run for three years has moved past stabilisation into something ongoing — the finance function is being run, not rescued. That is the outcome we want from a fractional placement, and it is the one that is hardest to fake.

Case study three

Fractional CFO · Technology · Six-month engagement

The client

MAS Technicae Group (International) Ltd, a technology business based in West Sussex, engaged FD Capital for a defined six-month fractional CFO assignment.

Why technology companies need a different finance conversation

Recurring and contracted revenue changes both the accounting and the management information, and it catches out finance functions that grew up in a product or services environment.

Revenue recognition is the first issue. Multi-year contracts, implementation fees, support and hosting elements all have to be separated and recognised over the right period, which means deferred income sitting on the balance sheet and a permanent gap between cash collected and revenue earned. Get it wrong and the P&L flatters or punishes the business arbitrarily, and the first auditor or investor to look closely will find it.

The second issue is that the numbers a technology board actually needs are not the statutory ones. Annual recurring revenue, net revenue retention, gross margin struck after hosting and support cost, the payback period on customer acquisition, and cash runway stated in months rather than as a bank balance. Those are the figures that drive decisions about hiring, pricing and funding, and most SME finance functions are not producing them until someone senior insists.

What a six-month engagement is for

A short fractional CFO assignment has a specific job: make the numbers trustworthy, build the reporting the board or investors need, put the right disciplines into the monthly cycle, and leave the business able to run it without you. Six months is long enough to do that properly and short enough that the scope stays honest. It is one of the most common briefs we are given, and it works best when the business is clear from the outset about what it wants to be true at the end.

What the three have in common

Three very different businesses — a haulage operator, an insurance services provider, a technology company — and three different engagement shapes. The common thread is worth stating plainly.

None of them needed a full-time Finance Director. All three needed Finance Director capability. Those are not the same requirement, and conflating them is the single most expensive mistake we see owner-managed businesses make. A full-time FD at £90,000 to £130,000 plus employer costs is the right answer for some businesses and a serious overcommitment for others.

All three started with the same underlying problem: numbers that arrived too late, in too little detail, to make decisions from. Not fraud, not crisis — just a finance function built for compliance rather than for management, which is the normal state of affairs in a business that has grown faster than its back office.

In each case the person placed was senior enough to be useful immediately. A fractional or interim engagement has no ramp-up period built into it. If someone needs three months to become productive, half the value of a six-month assignment has already gone. That is why we place people who have held the role before, in businesses of a comparable size and shape, and why we are more interested in what a candidate has actually run than in what their CV claims they are capable of.

How an engagement with us works

A conversation about the problem, not the job title. Most clients come to us asking for a job title and leave the first call having described something slightly different. Whether you need an interim FD, a fractional CFO, a part-time FD or a financial controller is a conclusion, not a starting point.

A shortlist quickly. On fractional and interim work, speed is not a nicety. The business has a gap now, and candidates at this level are usually talking to more than one opportunity. We work to get a credible shortlist in front of a client within days rather than weeks.

Candidates we have actually spoken to. Every person on a shortlist has been interviewed by us about this specific brief, with availability and rate confirmed. We would rather send three people who fit than ten who might.

A search led personally. Every finance leadership search through FD Capital is led personally by Adrian Lawrence FCA, a Fellow of the ICAEW and a former listed-company Finance Director. The judgement being applied to your shortlist is that of someone who has done the job being filled.

References and further reading

• ICAEW — the professional body for chartered accountants in England and Wales.
• Companies House — statutory filing requirements and public company records.
• Financial Reporting Council: UK accounting standards — FRS 102 and the UK revenue recognition framework.
• Traffic Commissioners for Great Britain — operator licensing and financial standing requirements for road transport.
• Financial Conduct Authority — regulatory framework for firms operating in and around the insurance market.