Most finance problems don't announce themselves clearly. The close drags to day 10, the board pack is rebuilt by hand every month, numbers that should agree don't - and it's rarely obvious which of these is a cause and which is just a symptom of something underneath.

So I don't open with a proposal for six months of work. I start with an assessment, hand you a roadmap you control, then build alongside your team on the parts you want delivered. Three steps, in that order.

Step one

Assessment

A fixed-scope diagnostic, measured in weeks rather than months. I map how your finance function actually runs - the systems, the data, the manual workarounds your team has built to get the numbers out - and separate the root causes from the symptoms they throw off.

You come away with three things:

The root causes under the symptoms - what's actually driving the late close, the broken reconciliations, the spreadsheets rebuilt from scratch each month.
A prioritised initiative roadmap - the sequence of work that fixes them, ordered by impact and effort so the first moves are the ones that matter most.
Quick wins you keep either way - improvements delivered during the assessment itself, yours to keep whether or not we work together after it.

Step two

Roadmap

The roadmap is yours. It sets out the initiatives in priority order, with enough detail that you could hand it to your own team, take it to another partner, or act on it with me. Owning it is the point - you leave the assessment with a plan you control, not a dependency on me.

Some clients take the roadmap and run it in-house. Others bring me back for the parts that need a hand. The decision stays with you, and it stays yours to change as priorities shift.

Step three

Embedded delivery

When you do want me building, I work embedded - alongside your finance and IT teams, one workstream at a time. Not a report handed over from the outside, but hands-on delivery that leaves your team with something they can run once I've moved on.

We take the roadmap in order - deliver a workstream, then move to the next. You see progress you can use at each step, rather than waiting months for a single big-bang result that may or may not land.

Capabilities

What delivery draws on

Delivery cuts across six capability areas. You don't buy these as separate products - the roadmap decides which ones a given workstream needs, and most engagements draw on several.