Your Finance Team Isn’t Stuck. They’re Unsupported.

Why I’d rather mentor the team you’ve already got than sell you a pair of hands.

I have the same conversation two or three times a month and it nearly always starts with an apology.

“I know we should be doing more with the numbers, Pauline. I’ve just not had the time to work out what.”

Then comes the bit they feel guilty about. “And I don’t want you thinking there’s a problem with my finance manager. He’s brilliant. He’s been with us fifteen years.”

They’re right on both counts. The finance manager usually is brilliant and something usually is missing. Those two things aren’t a contradiction and understanding why is the whole reason I do the work the way I do.

The gap isn’t capability. It’s direction.

In most owner-managed businesses, the finance team is perfectly competent. They close the month, they get the VAT return in, they chase the debt, run the payroll, keep the auditors happy and they do it while being asked for six other things before Friday.

What nobody has ever given them is a clear line of sight to where the business is actually going. Nobody has sat them down and said: here’s what we’re trying to achieve over the next two years. Here’s the contract we’re bidding for. Here’s the machine we might buy. Here’s the customer who’s 40% of turnover and keeps me awake at night. Here’s the decision I’ll have to make in March, and here’s what I’ll need to know to make it well.

Without that, even a very good finance team defaults to the only work that comes with a hard deadline attached – compliance and period ends. So you get accurate reporting about last month, delivered on time, that doesn’t answer the question you’re actually asking. Reactive rather than proactive. Not because anyone is failing, but because nobody has pointed them at anything else.

Why nobody ever fixes it

Because it’s never urgent. HMRC has a deadline. Payroll has a deadline. “Sit down with the team and work out what we really need from these numbers” has no deadline at all, so it slides to next month and next month is always busier than this one.

It’s the boiler service you keep meaning to book. You know it matters. It just never beats the thing that’s on fire today. That’s the real reason most finance functions stay stuck in the rear-view mirror. Not incompetence, not laziness, just the ordinary gravity of a busy business.

It also means the problem creeps up on you rather than announcing itself. If you’re not sure whether this is your business or not, I’ve written separately about how to know when your finance team needs to upskill – the signs are usually there well before anyone says anything out loud.

Where my version of this comes from

I’m a CIMA Fellow with an MBA, which tells you I can read a P&L. Plenty of people can.

What shaped how I mentor is the other thirty years: standing on factory floors in China negotiating supplier terms, spending three weeks in Mexico working out whether a manufacturing partner could halve a client’s lead times, moving 60% of an importer’s operations to the Netherlands before Brexit closed the door on their European market.

None of that judgement came out of a textbook, it came from being in rooms where a decision had to be made on incomplete information and somebody had to own it.

That’s precisely the layer that’s missing in most finance teams and it’s the layer you can’t hire in a job advert or download from a webinar. It has to be passed on by someone who’s had to make those calls. That’s what mentoring is for.

What it actually looks like

The work happens in two halves and both matter.

First, I spend time with you. You, and usually your functional heads – operations, sales, whoever’s running the parts of the business that generate the numbers. What are the objectives? Where’s the growth coming from? What’s squeezing the margin? What’s coming down the track, and what would you need to know to face it with any confidence?

This part is quick, but everything else depends on it. You can’t build useful reporting without knowing what it’s meant to be useful for.

Then I work with your finance manager. Not over their head, but alongside them. We take what came out of those conversations and turn it into something they can produce and own. Cash flow forecasting that reflects how your business genuinely behaves, not how the software assumes it does. Management reporting that answers your questions rather than the accounting package’s default ones, processes that stop eating their week and the commercial thinking underneath it all: what does this number mean, what’s driving it, and what are we going to do about it?

They get support, accountability, and someone to ask the questions they’d feel daft asking you. You get a finance function that finally looks forwards.

Mentoring, not training

There’s a real difference, and it’s worth being blunt about. Training shows someone how to do something once. Mentoring means I stick with them. Regular check-ins, honest feedback and someone holding them to it while the new way of working becomes the only way of working. The accountability is the active ingredient, not the information. Most people already know roughly what they should be doing. What they haven’t got is anyone making sure it happens.

Why this beats the alternatives

If finance isn’t giving you what you need, there are three routes. Recruit someone senior, outsource the work or develop the people you’ve already got.

Recruiting is slow and expensive and it can be brutal for a loyal, long-serving team member to watch someone get hired in over their head. Outsourcing gets the work done, but the understanding walks out with the invoice every month and whoever’s doing it will never know your business the way your own team does.

Mentoring is faster than both, because your finance manager already understands your customers, your seasonality, your systems and all your peculiar little exceptions. I’m not starting from scratch, I’m adding a commercial and strategic layer to knowledge that’s already sitting in the building. And it compounds. Every month, they need me slightly less.

I’m working towards not being needed

I’d rather say this out loud than let you find out later. When I mentor properly, the capability ends up in your business instead of in my diary. The forecast gets done because your team does it, not because I turned up on Tuesday. Some clients keep me on for the occasional strategic conversation or a specific project and others move their team onto the Profit Harmony® Hub.

“My team will hate this”

They won’t, though they might be nervous and that’s completely normal. Almost everyone worries about looking daft with numbers. Finance people included, sometimes especially.

My style is supportive and practical. No judgment, no jargon. We start with what’s actually in front of us and build from there. In my experience, a finance manager who’s been quietly holding a business together for years is relieved that someone has finally taken an interest in their development.

“TAHA International already have a strong and capable finance and commercial team in place. Pauline’s support complemented the team by bringing additional strategic CFO experience, an external perspective and specialist knowledge of international finance and trade. She worked collaboratively with both our finance and senior leadership teams, helping us enhance our management reporting and provide clearer financial insight to support decision making and continued efficiency. Although Pauline is based in the UK, the virtual working relationship was extremely effective. Her onsite visit also allowed her to develop an even deeper understanding of our people, operations and international business. I would happily recommend Pauline to other manufacturing businesses that already have a finance team in place but would benefit from additional CFO-level support, particularly those operating internationally or involved in international trade.” Frank Pollmann

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does mentoring take before we see a difference? You’ll feel the first change quickly, usually within the first couple of sessions, because getting clarity on what the numbers are actually for changes the conversation immediately. Real, embedded change in how the team works takes months rather than weeks. Most mentoring engagements run over three to twelve months and clients typically have far better cash visibility inside 90 days.

What does it cost? Retainers and projects start from £1,500. What’s right for you depends on the size of your team, how far there is to go, and whether you want me in regularly or checking in monthly. If you want a taste before committing to anything, a Business Booster call is two focused hours and a written plan you can act on.

We already have an accountant. Isn’t this the same thing? No, and it’s a common mix-up. Your accountant handles compliance such as statutory accounts, tax, making sure everything is filed correctly and on time. That work matters, but it’s fundamentally about the past. Mentoring is about the future: forecasting, planning, commercial decision-making and building capability inside your team. I work happily alongside accountants; I’m not there to replace them.

How is this different from just booking my team on a training course? Training shows someone how to do something once. Mentoring means someone stays with them until the new way of working sticks. It’s the accountability, not the information, that makes the difference – most teams already half-know what they should be doing.

Do you take over the finance function? No. That’s the opposite of the point. I work alongside your finance manager so the capability stays with them and in your business. If you want someone to simply do the work instead, that’s a different service and I’d tell you so.

What if my finance manager isn’t formally qualified? That’s very common in owner-managed and family businesses, and it’s rarely the barrier people assume. Some of the most effective finance managers I’ve mentored came up through the business rather than through exams. What matters is that they know your operation and they’re willing to learn – the strategic and commercial thinking can be built on top of that.

What if we invest in them and they leave? People are much more likely to leave a role where nobody has ever invested in them. Development is one of the cheaper retention tools available, particularly for a long-serving team member who’s plateaued and doesn’t know how to say so.

Do you work with businesses like mine? I specialise in manufacturing and distribution, typically between £500K and £30M turnover, and I’ve a particular depth in businesses that buy, sell or ship across borders. That said, the mentoring principles travel, I’ve done this work with service businesses too.

Is it in person or remote? Both. I’m based in Lancashire and regularly visit businesses across the Northwest and further afield, and I mentor teams remotely across the UK and internationally. In practice most engagements are a mix, with an onsite visit early on because there’s no substitute for walking the floor and meeting the people.

What’s the difference between this and the Profit Harmony® Hub? Mentoring is one-to-one and built entirely around your business. The Profit Harmony® Hub is the group version with ongoing CFO-level development for business owners, functional leads and finance leads, at a lower commitment. Plenty of people start there and move to one-to-one support later, or run both alongside each other.

What next?

If any of this sounds like your business, the next step is half an hour on a call. No pitch, no obligation just a straight look at where finance is now and what would make the biggest difference. Book a free call.

If you’d rather start smaller, the Profit Harmony® Hub is the group version: ongoing CFO-level development for business owners, functional leads and finance leads, alongside other people wrestling with exactly the same things.

Your team is probably better than you think. They just need someone to point them in the right direction and then stay long enough to make sure they get there.