David Freel

Strategic Finance

• Conducted various fundraising activities
• Successfully pitched for 2 separate interest free loans from companies supporting start-up’s
• Successfully secured low-interest debt
• Created pitch decks which secured several rounds of angel investment
• Tracked and reported on cash flows, highlighting concerns several months in advance. Devised and implemented strategies to manage, such as offering annual subscriptions to specific customer cohorts to cover shortfall months
• Created a ‘live’ P&L & Cash flow allowing the board to self-serve on financial information
• Prepared management accounts, identifying significant trends and variances
• Assisted with the preparation of budgets required by WPP, with spending plans approved by the head office
• Analysed the business regularly and identified projects that would increase business profitability, such as renegotiating historic pricing packages which resulted in a 10% MRR uplift within 3 months
• Assessed financial strengths and weaknesses of proposed company strategies

Operational Finance

• Managed day-to-day bookkeeping, accounts payable and receivable
• Sole responsibility for managing several bank accounts and relationships
• When joining the business invoices were printed and posted, with payments received expected by bank transfer. I implemented automatic digital invoicing and payment collection processes
• Grew the finance function from one employee, to many, ensuring we continued to operate lean and minimise costs in proportion to revenue. Trained staff along the way, upskilling them on all processes throughout the business and creating an independent, motivated finance function
• Prepared and filed year end accounts and taxes for several years
• Fully operated payroll and handled payments to staff, taxes, employee queries. Took payroll from a manual process to a near fully automated system ensuring all staff received accurate pay with minimal effort
• Implemented expense tracking and logging, automatically ensuring spending remained within approved budgets
• Handled credit control and debt collections. Initially very manual to track, introduced automatic chasers, reminders, and payment gateways, drastically reducing DSO
• Introduced new payment flows into our SaaS products, enabling the business to efficiently handle large volumes of customers and minimise human input required
• Arranged and processed accurate and on-time VAT returns to HMRC

M&A Activity

• Along with the CEO, courted a buyer for the business when the shareholders desired an exit, resulting in ChannelGrabber being sold to Cloud Commerce 2019 for 2x revenue. During the sale, the buyers stated a strong motivating factor of the sale was to increase the strength of their leadership team by retaining my services
• Prepared the financial models and supported the shareholders in securing the sale of Cloud Commerce to WPP in 2022 for 10x revenue
• Led the finance, legal and tax due diligence process, on behalf of the sellers, in both instances, resulting in successful exits for the owners and favourable outcomes for the staff
• Actioned the integration work following both acquisitions. Migrating all customers, suppliers, and employees into a single entity, and aligning business processes, policies, and procedures.
• Consolidated banking operations, unified teams and established common work practices and procedures in the aftermath.

Business Operations

• Despite occupying a finance role for my entire career, I’ve had huge involvement in various business operations.
• Implemented project management system into the customer onboarding teams
• Conducted an end-to-end review of the process, with all stakeholders, and implemented a new project template, increasing accountability and unifying the workload behind a single flow
• Introduced new billing terms into the same team, resulting in higher customer engagement and increased revenue for the business
• Introduced time tracking for the onboarding teams which identified which areas most of the time was lost at. I then analysed this data and used it to direct development resources to remove major system blockers
• Within 12 months these changes resulted in the average time for a customer to go live with the system dropping from 6 months to 2 months.
• Constant review of software infrastructure resulting in platform migrations when the benefits outweighed the disruption, or to unify post-acquisition. Successfully migrated accounting platforms, payroll systems, HR systems etc saving 100’s of hours of manual labour in the process
• Took on the role of HR, providing employees with support, answering queries, delivering disciplinary actions where appropriate and training managers on how to handle complex situations
• Led full company town halls, generated buy-in for the company vision from the employees and motivated the teams to deliver on the business objectives
• Facilitated several office location moves, ensuring staff had adequate facilities, infrastructure and amenities, whilst negotiating savings for the company on lease renewals

Reporting & KPIs

• Worked directly with company owners, stakeholders and board members throughout my entire career
• Chaired weekly/monthly meetings with managers/board members/shareholders where I would prepare the and present SaaS KPIs and other relevant metrics in
• Facilitated discussion around the key metrics, presenting actionable and meaningful data to generate discussion and assist the board/shareholders with reaching decisions.

Legal

• Successful pursued outstanding debts in the small claims court
• Successfully defended the business against various chargebacks
• Successfully defended the business against various claims brought against us
• Continuously wrote, reviewed and updated company terms and conditions, GDPR, subscription terms etc.
• Kept up to date with changes in financial regulations and legislation that may impact the company or future financial decision-making
• Oversaw all financial business affairs, verifying that they were conducted legally and professionally
• Recently worked in tandem with WPP’s legal counsel