About David
Most FDs have visited Commercial and Operations teams. I've worked inside them.
David Lawson FCA
KPMG-trained · Nine organisations
Finance · Commercial · Operations · Governance
Fractional Finance Director · Buckinghamshire & Thames Valley
Professional background
KPMG-trained.
Nine organisations.
The thread running through all of them is the same: going in, understanding what is really happening, fixing what is broken, and building what comes next.
My career has always gravitated towards the same situation: a business where something needs diagnosing properly before anyone can fix it. Pre-sale financial 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. I've worked inside sales functions as a commercial finance partner. I've held governance roles at board level. Across nine organisations, not as a visitor.
That's why the Business Maturity Mapping 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.
The evidence
Career in numbers.
3
Functions
Finance, commercial, and operations, worked inside all three at senior level, not just visited them.
£500k
Turnaround
Near-zero cash. No management accounts. Fundamental controls missing. Eight months later: £500k in reserves.
9
Organisations
FTSE-listed to owner-managed. No two the same.
Zero
Post-completion adjustments
Vendor-side FD. VC-backed trade sale. The numbers were tested hard. They held.
Spanning FTSE-listed and owner-managed businesses across multiple sectors. Finance, commercial, operations, and governance.
£41m
Business sale
Commercial finance partner to the MD for ten years.
£1m
Fraud Detection
Applied probability modelling to client transaction data. Spotted a pattern nobody else had seen. Saved £1m.
6
Dimensions
The Business Maturity Mapping model, built from experience.
£4M
Margin Improvement
Nobody knew which clients were profitable. Rebuilt the reporting bottom-up. £4m of recoverable gross profit became visible for the first time.
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.
The diagnostic work and the build that follows don't require five days a week. They require deep attention on the days that matter. The fractional model means you get senior capability without paying for time you don't need.
Most of my clients work with me one to two days a week. That's enough to make a material difference to the finance function and the decisions it supports. I go deep into a small number of businesses rather than spreading thin across many.
Every client gets the same attention I gave when I was a full-time FD. You're not paying for the days in between. The value is in the thinking and the decisions, not in the hours at a desk.
Beyond the numbers
The photographs throughout this site are my own.
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 served as a Coach and Finance Officer at Penn and Tylers Green FC for over fifteen years. 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.