Wrightcfo Ltd

31/08/2026

Is this you?

Everyone around you is invested in telling you yes.

Your finance director can't push back too hard — they report to you, and they have a mortgage. Your investors won't, not really. Your co-founders are too close to the decision. And your other half has heard quite enough about the business.

Which leaves nobody, right at the stage of the company when a wrong turn costs the most.

Over the past six weeks we've shared what our practice actually does — a board pack for a charity that lost its treasurer, coaching for a finance manager whose business outgrew her role, a sale we can't talk about, agency margins, funding structures. Different sectors and services, but underneath them all is one job: being the person in the room who can tell a founder they're going down the wrong path, without the fear of losing their job for saying it.

That's the real product. The spreadsheets are how it's delivered.

So — who in your business is paid to disagree with you? If you have that person, keep them. If you don't, send us a message. The first conversation is just a conversation.

24/08/2026

Is this you?

The orders are there. The opportunity is enormous. And the money to fund it isn't.

A games and puzzles manufacturer came to us doing around £400K, with global ambitions and a finance team that couldn't keep pace. Product businesses hit this wall hardest: every big order means buying, shipping and storing stock months before the customer pays. Growth eats cash exactly when you need cash to grow.

We restructured their finance team, hired them a qualified Finance Controller, and built a funding structure combining trade finance, invoice financing and credit insurance — three tools that hardly anyone realises can work together. That structure let them take on their first £1M client without the working capital choking them, and then enter the US market properly.

They've since passed £20M, picking up a Times Fast Track 100 listing on the way.

From the outside, growth like that looks like luck. Up close, a lot of it is plumbing — and someone has to design the pipes. If your product business has more demand than cash, send us a message.

17/08/2026

Is this you?

Revenue is growing, the team is flat out, and there's somehow never any cash.

The usual response is to call it a sales problem and go and win more work — which makes it worse. In almost every creative or media business we've seen stall between £2M and £5M, the real problem is three unglamorous words: utilisation, WIP and revenue recognition.

Founders tend to say utilisation is 80%; measured properly it's usually 55 to 65, and that gap is the missing margin. WIP sits unbilled for months because nobody owns the milestone. And if a year-long retainer is booked in month one, the management accounts are fiction — along with every decision made on top of them.

None of this is talent. It's installation. The agencies that cross £10M almost always have someone in the room who lives and breathes these numbers, and installing that discipline without the full-time salary is exactly what we do.

Run an agency? Ask yourself whether you know this week's utilisation rate. If the answer is no, message us.

10/08/2026

Is this you?

Your trustees get forty pages before every board meeting and still can't answer the only question that matters: are we okay?

We've worked with the social purpose sector for over a decade — museums, hospices, NGOs, faith charities. Different missions, same board pack: full management accounts, a risk register unchanged in two years, finance commentary written for accountants and read by trustees who aren't.

That isn't a failing of trustees. It's a failing of design. Most charity finance functions were built for compliance. Almost none were built for governance, which is the thing a board actually exists to do.

When one of our CFOs goes into a charity, the real work is a reserves policy trustees can defend, SORP handled without drama, and a board pack organised around decisions rather than ledger categories. Because the most expensive thing in a charity is rarely on a budget line — it's slow decisions made by good people who don't quite trust the numbers.

If that sounds like a board you sit on or run, drop us a message — or pass this to someone who needs it.

03/08/2026

This week I can't ask "is this you?" — because the business I'd like to tell you about would much rather I didn't.

We're currently helping an owner prepare their business for sale. I can't share the sector, the size or the buyer. What I can share is what the work looks like — because between them, the CFOs in this practice have sat on every side of a sale over their careers, from preparing exits to running due diligence to integrating companies after the deal. It's broadly the same everywhere: numbers that survive a buyer's accountants, profits that are provable rather than plausible, a data room built before anyone asks, and the awkward questions asked internally before a buyer asks them expensively.

That's the difference between a good business and a sellable one — and it's built over months, not found in the final quarter.

The silence is part of the service. When word gets out a business might be for sale, staff get nervous and prices move. So we keep quiet. Terrible marketing, very good outcomes.

If a sale is anywhere on your horizon, even years out, the right time to start is before you think you need to. Message us — in confidence, naturally.

27/07/2026

Is this you?

You hired a brilliant finance manager when the business was doing £2M. You're at £6M now, and the numbers still arrive the way they did three years ago.

The instinct many founders have at this point is to replace them. Usually that's the wrong call, and an unfair one. What that person needs is what ambitious finance people almost never get: someone a few steps ahead, in their corner, showing them what the next level looks like.

We run coaching blocks for exactly this. Twelve sessions with one of our CFOs, covering commercial thinking, forecasting and cash, board communication, and how to challenge upwards. The business gets a finance function that grows with it. The finance person gets a career.

If someone on your team came to mind reading this, drop us a message. And if you're a finance person feeling the gap yourself, this works just as well when you're the one who asks.

20/07/2026

Is this you?

Year end has landed, the trustees meet in a few weeks, and the person who always translated the accounts for the board has gone.

A children's charity came to us in exactly that position recently. Kadia from our team took it on as a one-off project — a thorough review of the year-end accounts, then a board pack in plain English covering where the charity stands, the risks and opportunities, how the year compared to the last one, and what it all means for the children they support.

The founder was pleased. The trustees even more so.

"WrightCFO provided invaluable support during a period without a treasurer — a thorough financial review, translating year-end accounts into clear formats for all trustees." — Katherine Sparkes MBE, Flamingo Chicks

Not every engagement is a monthly retainer. Sometimes it's a few weeks of the right pair of hands at the right moment. If you know a charity missing that person this year end, do pass this on — or drop us a message.

24/06/2026

In February 2026, the UK filed almost exactly as many redundancy notices as it did in February 2009 — 430 then, 433 just before the last recession hit its worst.

Nobody knows what comes next. But across our clients right now, the pattern is hard to miss: redundancies, cost-cutting, founders who were hiring a year ago asking a very different question.

Most treat cost-cutting as a survival exercise — something you do reluctantly, when the bank balance forces your hand. The businesses that come through it well do the opposite. They cut before they have to, while there's still room to be surgical about it. Even the £1bn+ PE-backed group we're working with right now is doing this proactively, not in a panic.

And there's a piece of maths most founders never sit down to do: a pound of cost saved is worth far more than a pound of new sales. New revenue only gives you its margin — a saved pound is pure profit. At a 10% margin, cutting £1 does the work of winning £10.

This week's article covers why proactive beats reactive, where the painless 10% usually hides, and how to know how much to cut without cutting into muscle. There's also a calculator — put in your own numbers and see what a disciplined cut would do to your profit.

👉 https://wrightcfo.co.uk/2026/06/21/why-a-pound-saved-beats-a-pound-earned-fix-budget/

17/06/2026

Dreaming of taking your business past the £10M mark? Scaling successfully means more than just increasing sales—it’s about robust financial controls, clear reporting, and a team that’s ready for growth. If you want to know if your finance systems, governance, and margin management are truly investor-ready, take our Scale Readiness Assessment to find out where you stand

Most businesses stall before £10M — not because of sales, but because their finance function was built for a startup. Take the free 3-minute Scale Readiness Assessment and see exactly where the gaps are.

08/06/2026

Reaching £1M is the achievement everyone celebrates. Reaching £3M is the one that quietly breaks things — and almost nobody warns founders which things break first.

The founder who's still the bottleneck. The spreadsheet five people now edit. Profit up, but less in the bank. The first finance hire who's suddenly out of their depth.

None of it goes with a bang — which is exactly why it's so easy to miss until it's costing real money.

This week on The Scaleup CFO: the seven seams that tear on the way up, and how to spot them before they do. 👇

Growth doesn't break your product. It breaks your plumbing.