About Simon
Thirty years helping businesses grow.Cash first. Then everything it makes possible.
I’ve spent around thirty years helping and guiding businesses: inside them, as finance director and finance manager, and outside them, as a consultant guiding owners through growth.
Over that time one thing has held true. Every business is founded on its ability to generate cash. That’s why I start there, and why my book starts there too.
But cash is the foundation, not the destination. The work I enjoy most is what it makes possible: helping an owner plan growth, build a team that can run the business without them, and choose how and when to leave it.
I also have deep, hands-on experience with AI. I’ve built AI systems in my own businesses and I help my clients implement it in theirs: choosing where it will pay back, building it, and training their teams to use it well. It doesn’t replace experience. It means experience gets applied faster.
I now work part-time with a small number of owner-led firms, so each one gets proper attention.
Who I work with
Owner-led businesses that have outgrown the bookkeeping but don’t need a full-time FD.
- SizeTurnover of roughly £2m to £5m, usually 15 to 50 people.
- OwnershipOwner-managed limited companies, often family-run, with the decisions made by one to three people.
- FinanceA bookkeeper or accounts team in place, and no finance director.
- StageAnywhere from getting cash under control to planning an exit.
- WhereHertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, north London and west Essex. I’m based in Stevenage.
- TimeTypically a day or two a month, on a rolling basis, for a fraction of the cost of a full-time finance director.
The book
The Cash Gap
The SME Death Trap: Why Profitable Businesses Fail and How to Make Sure Yours Doesn’t
I wrote The Cash Gap to start at the beginning of the journey. It follows four real businesses, a printer, a mortgage company, an agency and an owner who ran everything on instinct, and shows why each was profitable and still ran short of cash.
It’s short, practical and written for owners rather than accountants.