Sara Daw is Co-Founder and CEO of The CFO Centre and The Liberti Group. Operating in 17 countries, The CFO Centre is the global leading provider of fractional and part-time C-suite portfolio professionals to entrepreneurial, owner-managed, mid-tier businesses, and larger organizations.
Along with publishing the first research on the Access Economy for C-suite talent, Sara’s latest book (published by Routledge) made the Amazon Kindle Best Seller list in HR and Personnel Management. Strategy and Leadership as Service isn’t just a nice idea as it is also a practical alternative vision of the future of work for senior executives that is gaining significant interest and is being adopted by businesses globally. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Sara Daw to learn more.
Sara Daw’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Daw said:
“I graduated from Oxford University with a Chemistry degree and then became a Chartered Accountant with Deloitte. However, it was when I started at L’Oréal that I finally looked up from a spreadsheet. Working in industry made me realize there was more to life than finance and I decided to embark on a full-time MBA at The London Business School to find out more and learn about all aspects of business, management, and strategy. On completion it was the investment banks who wanted to hire me. After all, I was a CA with an MBA!”
“However, I really didn’t want to go back into corporate life. By this time, I was married and had started a family. I just couldn’t see how I could bring up my children and combine being mother with having a corporate career – I wanted more flexibility, variety, and control over my life so that I could be with my daughters for part of my week AND have a fulfilling career for the other part of my week. It was the need to find a solution to this problem that brought me to consider going the self-employed route and becoming a fractional CFO, as it is called now.”
“This was a brand-new concept that was just emerging in the early 2000s. The idea would be that I would offer my CFO services on a self-employed basis to SMEs who recognized they needed the skillset but didn’t want, didn’t need, and couldn’t afford it full-time. I would work to build a portfolio of local SMEs for 2-3 days per week in this way, perhaps a day a week for one and a couple of days per month for a few others. Then the rest of the week I could spend with my young daughters.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for the company come together? Daw shared:
“Once I got going as a fractional CFO, I realized that I wanted to be part of a team. I started looking around for others working this way and found Colin Mills, who had started The FD Centre (later rebranded to The CFO Centre) a few years earlier. He was seeking freedom from corporate life and was busy building his portfolio of SMEs to work with. We met up. I liked the idea of The FD Centre and joined him. I built up my portfolio of three clients rapidly within six months and even managed to continue growing my family as I had my third daughter in the first few years of starting out on my new career.”
“Over the years, many more CFOs have gravitated towards us. We have built The CFO Centre into a global business, with 800 fractional CFOs, working across 17 countries providing the fractional CFO skills that matter most to both SMEs and larger organizations whose Group CFOs need extra support to get everything done on their never-ending to-do lists.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Daw reflected:
“I think it has to be just after I’d started out as a fractional CFO. I was heavily pregnant with my third daughter and was not going to be able to travel to the SMEs I worked with for a couple of months around her birth. I discussed this with the business owners I worked with and asked if they would like to work with another fractional CFO during this time. They all said they would rather carry on working with me and if I couldn’t travel to them, they would travel to me. And that’s what they did! I still remember one business owner standing in my dining room cuddling my new-born daughter while I was on the phone to the bank negotiating on his behalf! For me, this sums up the deep relationships I had with the entrepreneurs I worked with.”
Core Services
What are the company’s core services and who are they best suited for? Daw explained:
“The CFO Centre provides fractional CFO services to ambitious and growing entrepreneurial organizations (typically between $5 million to $100 millionin revenue) who don’t want, don’t need, and can’t afford a full-time, CFO but recognize they need the skillset on an ongoing basis or as the need arises.”
“In typical engagements, we would take ownership of the finance function and become their fractional CFO. We sit alongside the CEO or business owner to support them and become an integral part of their senior management team. We make sure that these scaling businesses have firm foundations for their finance functions, which maximizes cash and profit from operations, all fully informed by timely reporting and built on compliant systems and processes. We work strategically to plan and implement their medium and long-term finance strategies which are aligned to the overall business strategy. We manage risk, help them to sell and exit if appropriate, or if not to build a long-term business ready for succession, and ensure they have the right strategic funding in place from the best external sources to match their ambitions.”
“In addition, we also work with mid to large corporates who have a Group CFO who needs flexible support from a team of fractional CFOs to complete their never-ending to-do list. This CFO’s CFO solution is a great way for Group CFOs to focus on the parts of their role that only they can do and tap into a flexible, non-threatening talent pool of specialists. These fractional CFOs know what it’s like to do the Group CFO, after all that’s what they used to do, but they’ve moved on from that now, so they are non-threatening, and there to make the Group CFO look good. They know exactly what it’s like to sit in that seat and so they can be used to mentor those new to the role, they can empathize, and get the job done without any in-depth training – just what a busy Group CFO needs!”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Daw acknowledged:
“Covid was a very difficult time for everyone. When we were first put into lockdown many SME business owners, particularly those who were new to our services, wanted to pause working with us to keep costs down and we started to lose business. We believed this was a huge mistake because understanding your finances and navigating the disruption caused by the pandemic with careful financial planning were key to survival for most businesses. We discussed this as a team and brainstormed how we could encourage businesses to work with us. We made the decision to reach out to the entire SME market and offer to help with a variety of free-of-charge services. We also let our existing client base know that they could work with us as much as they needed without fear of their fees increasing over normal levels – basically, we took an abundance mindset and let our market know we were there for them and would do whatever it took to help them get through the pandemic in the best shape possible. The result was that we started having many more conversations with business owners and working with them to secure their future.”
Inspiration For Becoming An Author
What inspired you to become an author and can you describe the audience that this book was written for? Daw replied:
“I’ve always been a learner and as our business has grown, we’ve often looked to best practice and academia for inspiration to meet challenges. We obviously knew what The CFO Centre did and how it worked, but we hadn’t really discovered why it worked – the thought leadership and more academic concepts underpinning it. I decided to embark on a master’s degree in Change Leadership run jointly HEC Paris and Oxford University and use it to investigate our new and disruptive business model. My tutor at Oxford University encouraged me to take my work further and write a book to share my findings. Routledge was keen to publish it, and it enabled us, as global market leaders, to lead the way to help improve the business model and share and educate the wider market for others to benefit.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Daw cited:
“Becoming a national UK business back in 2008 and then starting our global expansion, first to Australia, back in 2009, have been significant milestones. The CFO Centre is now the oldest and largest fractional CFO business in the industry.”
“We then branched out in 2011 to create a community of businesses under The Liberti Group brand to deliver fractional C-suite services in other disciplines including Marketing, People, and Sales.”
“We have continued our global expansion most years and we were even able to start in Germany using a completely remote model during the pandemic.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Daw about customer success stories, she revealed:
“We work with a range of businesses. One example would be a power tool distributor with $25m in revenue but running out of cash when we first met them. Their stock holding had risen by C$3 million in a year. Within a month we had added $2m in cash to the business, helped restructure the management team, and worked with the business owner to build a deliverable strategic plan.”
“We helped another software business with $2.25m of revenue but with no real direction or plan after two of its long-term directors had retired to put in place a budget, relevant management information, and cash flow forecasting and set the wheels in motion to mentor the next layer of management to take the business forward.”
“Finally, a luxury car transportation business with $60m revenue had a sale agreed prior to starting work with us. We secured an increased $7.5m on the sale price and took ownership of the due diligence during the sale process. We have been asked to stay on for an additional two years as the owners work through their earnout.”
“These are just a fraction of examples of the thousands of businesses we help every day.”
Market Size
What is the size of the market that you envision utilizing fractional CFO services? Daw assessed:
“I believe the market size for fractional CFO services to be significant. For example, in the UK alone, the market size of mid-tier, entrepreneurial SME businesses with revenue between £2 million and £50 million is approximately 150,000 businesses. Everywhere I travel globally, I see ambitious entrepreneurs needing CFO skills to scale and CFOs seeking freedom from corporate life and wanting more flexibility, variety, and control.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Daw affirmed:
“The CFO Centre is unique in its offering to the market in that it is the global market leader, the longest established, and can offer a truly joined up solution and access to the experience, knowledge, and wider network of our 800 strong (and growing) CFO team. There is no other business out there that has our level of collective knowledge and experience of CFO expertise. For businesses who want to go global, we can call on the expertise of our international team and if a business wants to stay domestic, we can support them to build an international client base and supply chain.”
“Providing CFO and transformational finance leadership skills is also the only thing we do, and our unique team approach means that we will always find the answer for our business owners.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Daw pointed out:
“At the CFO Centre, our purpose is to be a life-changing business by defining and delivering the numbers that really matter to business owners and CFOs by bringing them together. I think it’s important to highlight that, of course, you would think that these numbers are the financial ones, the profit, the revenue, the headcount, the company valuation, and so on, and you’d be right, these are important and ones we as CFOs can directly impact.”
“However, there are generally other ‘numbers’ that sit behind these that are the true driving force for business owners and for our CFOs who support them. For example, take the business owners that have brought re-usable drinking bottles to market and are determined to eradicate single use plastic from that sector. Clearly, the number that really matters to them is zero! We want to change the lives of at least one million business owners, their people, families and ourselves by helping them achieve the numbers like these, the ones that really count.”
“To do this, we aim to penetrate our current geographical markets further—including the United States– and then going forward we will continue our global expansion by adding at least one new country each year. In 2025, we will be starting in Dubai, in the Middle East.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Daw concluded:
“I intend to continue my research into the C-suite access economy and have started a Doctorate in Business Administration with University of Warwick in the UK to do so. I’d be grateful for anyone interested in the fractional C-suite to connect with me if they’d like to join my research or learn more from my findings.”
