About David
Most Finance Directors have visited Commercial and Operations teams. I've worked inside them.
David Lawson FCA
I'm a KPMG trained Chartered Accountant, with Finance Director roles across different sectors and experience as Company Secretary and Group Financial Controller of a listed plc.
My background also spans commercial and operations leadership. I've sat on executive committees, chaired trustee and finance committees and led businesses through significant change, including three crisis responses that required calm, systematic leadership well outside the normal finance remit.
I've led an operations team and worked inside sales teams as their commercial finance partner.
Key Skills
Board advisory · Financial stewardship · Financial leadership · Commercial judgement · Operational improvement · Team leadership · Transformation & change · M&A
Sector Experience
B2B Services · Marketing & Creative Agencies · Professional Services · Employee Benefits · Gift Cards · Prepaid Cards · Academy Trusts · Community Organisations
The evidence
Career in numbers.
£500k
Turnaround
Near-zero cash. No management accounts. Fundamental controls missing. Eight months later: £500k in reserves.
Zero
Post-completion adjustments
Vendor-side FD. VC-backed trade sale. The numbers were tested hard. They held.
£41m
Business sale
Ten years as commercial finance partner to the MD. Exit at P/E 20.
30 to 3 days
Stock Reconciliation
Cross-functional process redesign across the business. Process reduced from 30 days to 3 days. Three FTEs freed. Productivity up 17%.
£4M+
Margin Improvement
Generated through commercial reviews, pricing models, and supplier negotiations across the EMEA incentives portfolio
6
Dimensions
The Business Mapping Review model, built from working inside finance, operations, commercial, and governance.
3
Functions
Finance teams led. Operations functions built. Commercial roles held.
9
Organisations
FTSE-listed to owner-managed. No two the same.
Professional background
KPMG-trained.
Nine organisations.
The thread running through all of them is the same, understand what's really happening before you try to fix and improve it.
My career has consistently landed in the same situation, a business where something needs diagnosing properly before anyone can fix it. Pre-sale clean-up, turnaround, building a finance function from scratch. The diagnostic work is the common thread.
What makes that possible is the breadth. Most FDs have visited Commercial and Operations teams. I've worked inside them. I've led finance teams, but I've also led operations teams and worked inside sales functions as a commercial finance partner. I've held governance roles at board level. Across nine organisations.
When a CEO asked me to lead two cross-functional projects, a Business Process Redesign and a Commercial Review Project, with the full backing of the Executive Committee, what we found was a business running on disconnected processes, complicated and not standardised across every function. We papered the walls with flowcharts before we could even begin to fix it. That's what you find when you look properly across the whole business rather than just the numbers.
That's why the Business Mapping Review model covers six dimensions, not one. When you've worked inside operations, commercial, and governance, you see things an FD who has stayed in finance cannot.
Why fractional?
Part-time
in presence,
not in commitment.
Fractional does not mean less committed. When I'm in your business, I'm fully in.
Most businesses at the £1m to £15m revenue stage don't need a full-time FD. But they do need FD-level thinking. The decisions, on pricing, cash, growth, acquisition, require senior financial judgement. They just don't require it five days a week.
A fractional arrangement delivers that judgement without the £80,000 to £120,000 salary commitment. You get the capability when you need it, not a full-time hire you're finding work for on the quiet days.
The time commitment flexes as the business does. Some clients start with a diagnostic. Others come straight into a retained relationship at one or two days a week. As the business scales towards acquisition, fundraising, or exit the days may increase to match. The engagement grows with the business rather than locking you into a fixed cost.
A fractional FD has worked across multiple businesses, sectors, and situations. That breadth is hard to replicate in a full-time hire who has grown up inside one organisation. The pattern recognition that comes from that is what lets me tell you what I actually think.
When something comes up between visits, I'm a phone call or an email away.
I work with a small number of businesses at any one time. That's a deliberate choice. It means I know your business properly, carry the context between visits, and can give you the same attention I gave when I was a full-time FD.
Beyond the numbers
The photographs throughout this site are my own.
This is a corner in Málaga. Shot in black and white because colour would distract from what's there, the ironwork, the balconies, the way the facade has accumulated detail over decades. You have to look slowly to see how it fits together.
I've always been drawn to landscapes and cityscapes where structure reveals itself gradually, the way buildings layer, how light picks out contour and detail, the patterns you only see when you look carefully rather than quickly. That's how I approach a business. The surface tells one story. What sits underneath is usually more interesting.
I've been with Penn and Tylers Green FC for over fifteen years, as a coach and more recently as Finance Officer. Forty-one teams, around seven hundred players. The finance role matters, but it's not why I'm there. Football at this level is about what happens off the pitch as much as on it, the life skills, the character it builds, learning to win gracefully and to lose courageously. Those things matter to me. They show up in how I work.
