Nine Ways We Add Value

Board-level finance leadership on a fixed-term basis, available from as little as one week’s notice. Suited to businesses covering a parental leave, navigating an unexpected departure, managing a PE transaction, or bridging to a permanent hire during a period of rapid change.

Graeme has operated as interim CFO in PE-backed businesses across SaaS and events, with direct experience of investor reporting, liquidity management, acquisition integration and finance team stabilisation. He joins as a full member of the board or senior management team, accountable for all financial outcomes during the engagement.

Part-time CFO engagement — typically one to three days per week — for businesses that need CFO-level strategic thinking and financial rigour but are not yet ready, or do not need, a full-time hire. Common in businesses between £2m and £20m ARR where the finance function is growing but the demands on it are becoming more complex.

A fractional arrangement provides continuity and a genuine relationship with the business, rather than one-off advice. Graeme works across budgeting, forecasting, board preparation, investor relations and ad hoc financial questions as a trusted member of the leadership team.

For growth-stage businesses whose finance function was built for a much smaller operation and has not scaled with the business — or for early-stage companies that need to implement a proper finance infrastructure for the first time.

This typically involves selecting and implementing an ERP (or upgrading the existing system), designing the chart of accounts and reporting hierarchy, building the management reporting pack, establishing internal controls, and putting in place the team and processes to support continued growth. The goal is a finance function that is credible to investors, reliable to management, and capable of operating without constant firefighting.

Python-powered analytical systems that replace static Excel reports with living dashboards and predictive models. Graeme is enrolled in the MIT Professional Education Applied AI & Data Science Program (2026) and applies techniques from that program directly to client mandates — not as a data scientist working in isolation, but as a CFO who understands both the business context and the analytical methodology.

For SaaS businesses this typically means a churn risk scoring model, ARR waterfall analysis and LTV:CAC tracking. For events businesses it means event-level profitability dashboards and yield analysis. For any business it means replacing hours of monthly manual consolidation with automated reporting that updates at source.

Eliminating the manual, repetitive work that consumes finance teams and introduces errors — by building lightweight integrations and automated pipelines between the systems your business already uses.

Common examples include automated uploads of subsidiary data into a group ERP, deferred revenue recognition engines that update from billing system outputs, payroll data integration into management accounts, and CRM-to-accounting integrations (such as PipeDrive to Xero) that eliminate duplicate data entry. Graeme builds these in Python and JavaScript, keeping them simple, maintainable and owned by the finance team rather than an IT department.

Rigorous technical accounting work — the kind that is needed in connection with acquisitions, audits, PE transactions and complex group structures — executed by a CA(SA) with hands-on experience of the most demanding scenarios, and communicated clearly to non-technical stakeholders.

Recent technical accounting work includes Purchase Price Allocation modelling for multiple acquisitions at Dext and Informa, a group-wide going concern assessment, impairment reviews (including DCF modelling for goodwill impairment), deferred and contingent consideration fair value calculations, worldwide transfer pricing implementation, and a material prior-year restatement identified and resolved during a group statutory audit.

Financial advisory support across the deal lifecycle — from early-stage valuation work and target assessment through to financial due diligence, deal structuring input and post-deal integration. Available on both the buy-side (supporting acquirers) and sell-side (preparing businesses for sale).

Graeme has led financial due diligence processes on multiple acquisitions, prepared and reviewed company valuations using DCF and market comparable methodologies, and has been instrumental in post-deal integration at both FTSE 100 and PE-backed SME level.

Sophisticated financial modelling that goes beyond the standard Excel budget — using regression, time-series analysis and scenario planning to build forecasts that genuinely reflect the drivers of your business rather than last year’s actuals multiplied by a percentage.

For SaaS businesses this means ARR and churn forecasting built on cohort data and regression analysis, enabling boards to model the impact of pricing changes, product launches and sales team changes with statistical rigour. Cashflow forecasting is built as a 12-week rolling model updated weekly, with scenario analysis (base, stress, upside) and daily cash management discipline built in.

Structured finance integration from Day 1 post-signing through to the first clean month-end in the parent’s systems — with the governance, pace and attention to data quality that PE investors and listed company CFOs require.

Graeme led the finance integration of two acquisitions at Informa (EV $340m and £22m), covering chart of accounts mapping, opening balance sheet review, deferred revenue and earnout accounting, six months of ETB management and upload to SAP FC, governance structure (RAID log, integration step plan, Steerco) and policy alignment. He has also led acquisition integrations into NetSuite at Dext Software across multiple jurisdictions.