A short case study about when finance almost failed a great business, and how they fixed it.

When the sales team landed the biggest deal of the year, everyone celebrated.

£220k annual value.
Flagship client.
Big name. Big expectations.

The ops team got stuck in straight away. Resources were reshuffled. Extra staff were brought in. A few favours were called in to make it happen.

Three months later, the project was running at a loss.

Not because the work wasn’t good.
Not because the client was difficult.
But because no one had realised how thin the margin was.

The pricing hadn’t factored in delivery time properly.
The support hours were double what they’d modelled.
And cash flow had taken a hit because payment terms were longer than normal.

By the time the monthly report flagged it, the damage was done.

The Real Problem?

The finance team was capable, but not connected.

They weren’t brought in when the deal was priced.
They weren’t asked to model delivery impact.
They were given the numbers once the deal was done, not before.

They were doing their job. But they weren’t doing strategy.

What the business needed wasn’t just finance.
It needed a layer of insight between delivery and ambition.

The Invisible CFO

When we came in, we helped them restructure things.

• A part-time FD started attending leadership meetings
• Real-time dashboards were introduced for margin and cash
• A simple deal review process was added before anything major got signed off
• The commercial and finance teams actually started speaking to each other

It wasn’t a revolution.
It was a shift, from reactive to proactive.

The kind of shift that stops the next £220k mistake before it happens.

The Takeaway?

If finance is only ever telling you what happened, you’re already behind.

The businesses that scale well don’t just have good finance teams, they have the right finance function, built for where they’re going next.

If you’re making big decisions without real-time insight, or without finance at the table, you’re not leading with clarity.

We’ve built a simple framework to help you assess your finance function and make sure it’s ready to support your next stage of growth.