Have you taken a business from £15m to £50m? That is the whole job.

Location
Clerkenwell, London EC1 — five days a week on site
Salary
To £150,000, with room above for an exceptional candidate
Type
Full-time, permanent
Reporting to
The two co-founders
Direct reports
Finance Manager, Finance Coordinator
Reference
FD/CLK/26

FD Capital is retained on a Finance Director appointment for a fast-growing, design-led procurement business based in Clerkenwell. They specify, source and deliver into the commercial interiors sector, working alongside leading architects and design practices rather than competing with them, and their work sits behind a number of well-known London projects.

This is the first permanent Finance Director in the company's history, and it exists because the business is about to attempt the hardest stretch of growth any company faces — the one where the systems, the cash cycle and the reporting that got you here all stop working at the same time.

They do not want someone who will learn that on the way. They want someone who has already done it.
The business

Founder-led, established for over a decade, and a team of fewer than twenty. The client base runs to blue-chip London developers and landlords, and the supply chain runs to a large network of manufacturers, the majority of them European.

They are independently certified against recognised sustainability and environmental standards, and this is not a marketing line — it is a substantial part of why clients choose them over conventional suppliers. The incoming Finance Director will own the impact and environmental reporting data that underpins those certifications, alongside the financial reporting.

The growth ambition is explicit: the founders intend to take the business through a step change in scale over the next five years, and they are actively considering their funding options to get there.

Why this role is genuinely difficult

The growth is real, but so is the strain, and it is worth being honest about where it sits.

This is a procurement business. That means the money is tied up in the middle of the cycle rather than at either end: client deposits taken up front, prepayments made to European factories, long manufacturing lead times, currency exposure across the supply base, staged delivery and installation, and retentions held back on fit-out programmes. In a model like this, revenue growth consumes cash rather than generating it. The balance sheet has already changed shape substantially in a single financial year, and the next phase will stretch it further.
You will be the first person in the business whose job is to see the cash cycle clearly and act on it before it becomes a constraint on growth.

There is a second layer of difficulty. At this size you are not going to have an FP&A team, a treasury function or a systems department to delegate to. You will have a Finance Manager and a Finance Coordinator, and everything above and around them is yours. Candidates who have only operated with a full infrastructure underneath them tend to find this harder than they expect.