Product Profitability for a Small Business
Firefly Merchandise is a merchandise company specialising in organic, recycled, and sustainable products. As the business grew, Carol wanted stronger financial clarity, better insight into profitability, and the confidence that her decisions were grounded in professional financial guidance. She chose Pauline’s Outsourced CFO project support, which focuses on helping businesses get control of margins, forecasting, and […]
Fractional CFO Edtech
Learning by Questions (LbQ) develops and provides award-winning, curriculum-aligned software for schools, combining real-time assessment and instant feedback to drive faster learning and improved attainment. They also used to provide hardware to schools across the UK. As demand grew, Pauline was hired to support the team across supply chain management, finance processes, internal reporting and […]
Building Supplier Redundancy: Lessons from Diversifying Beyond a Single China Source
I’ve spent a lot of my career on factory floors in China, negotiating supplier terms face to face rather than reading about them in a report. That first-hand travel to source and qualify manufacturers built an in-country network my clients still draw on today. For one importer, that meant direct introductions to vetted Chinese suppliers […]
What Domestic-Only Advisors Miss About Cross-Border Risk
Most accountants and fractional CFOs can read a P&L and a balance sheet. Far fewer have stood on a factory floor in China negotiating supplier terms, restructured a European logistics hub ahead of Brexit, or spent three weeks in Mexico working out whether a new manufacturing partner could halve a client’s lead times. I’ve […]
How to Cut Lead Times Without Sacrificing Quality: Mexico
Most businesses I meet treat lead time and quality as a trade-off. Go faster and something slips. Protect quality and you accept the wait. My experience says that’s usually false. In most cases the lead time isn’t long because the work is careful, it’s long because of distance, batching, routing and a supplier relationship nobody […]
Expanding Into The UAE? Avoid These Common Pitfalls UK Businesses Miss
I’ve spent more than two decades inside global supply chains rather than looking at them from a spreadsheet, qualifying suppliers on factory floors in China, assessing a manufacturing partner in Mexico, moving a client’s operations to the Netherlands ahead of Brexit. Along the way I’ve helped UK businesses with customers in the UAE navigate regional […]
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 […]
The Freight Routing Decision Most Distributors Get Wrong (And What It Costs Them)
If you run a distribution business that imports or exports goods, there’s a good chance your freight routing decision was made once, years ago, and never looked at again. That single oversight is one of the most expensive and most fixable mistakes I see as a fractional CFO working with importers and exporters. Most […]
Entering Latin America: What Manufacturers Need to Know Before They Ship
There’s a particular kind of enthusiasm I see in manufacturers when they first start talking about expanding into Latin America. It’s usually triggered by one good conversation with a distributor at a trade show, an inbound enquiry from a buyer in Mexico City or São Paulo, a gap in the market that looks too […]
How to Know When Your Finance Team Needs to Upskill
I’ve spent more than thirty years working inside the finance functions of businesses that buy, sell, and manufacture across borders, qualifying suppliers on factory floors in China, restructuring a European logistics hub in the middle of Brexit, and spending weeks in Mexico working out whether a new manufacturing partner could actually deliver what they […]