Professional Services Advisory
About Brambleton
Brambleton brings vast experience and strategic insight to professional services and agency clients, offering bespoke senior consultancy to help them grow or go through corporate change.
Our core offering is financial leadership and advice on a fractional CFO basis or as a Board Advisor.
We seek to establish long term relationships to solve identified challenges, drawing on our own propretiary diagnostic toolkit and significant experience in professional services leadership. We draw where necessary on outside trusted resource.
If a corporate transaction is being considered, then we have led or been significantly involved in over 30 corporate acquisitions and disposals in the UK, in the US, and in Europe, ranging from £1 million consideration to £190 million. As such we can advise or lead transaction processes as appropriate.
What we do
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Benefit from our strategic insights to support, prompt and carefully challenge your leadership.
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Uncover the financial potential of your agency with our powerful diagnostic tools.
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We advise on Finance team development. We have led many teams.
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Navigate acquisitions, team hires, and disposals with our seasoned transactional leadership.
Agency leadership advice
Brambleton has many years experience in solving countless day to day operational and financial challenges that arise in the running of a professional services or agency business.
We apply an independent mindset and discipline to the more complex leadership challenges, whatever they are. Acting as a fractional CFO, or as an independent voice on your board, we can guide and help the decision making process.
We have seen a lot over the years, and have many relevant war stories.
Financial diagnostics
Using a proprietary diagnostic toolset, Brambleton will efficiently convert your historic and future facing financial and pipeline data into a series of powerful visual KPI’s, clearly identifying priority areas for improvement and focus.
Among others, examples could include cash conversion, pricing, utilisation, scope creep, resource planning. The list is long.
These priority areas will then form the framework for an ongoing programme of structured activity to help improve these metrics and hence financial performance and further ready the business for the next stage of development
Finance team development
One of the key questions in the development of a professional services is how to develop the finance function. When do you need to hire a financial controller? What should the new role look like? Do existing staff need training or mentoring?
Brambleton will draw on decades of experience in running high performing and stable finance functions and we will be clear about what you need and how to build it, commensurate with your size, rate of growth, and state of complexity and development.
Transaction leadership
Brambleton has experience of leadership and substantial involvement in over 30 completed M&A deals of sizes varying from £1m to £200m in the UK, Ireland, the US and mainland Europe.
We are excellently placed to advise on strategy, perform due diligence, guide you through the process, or take on total project management of the event; whether you are buying or selling. We can also help fundraising, drawing on multiple experiences of raising both simple and complex debt and equity. Typical clients include both sponsors and corporates.
A flexible, personal, bespoke and pragmatic partnership is guaranteed.
Our expert friends
If we need to, our deep relationships in the sector can draw on available trusted experts.
For example, a project could include a New Business processes guru; an experienced Human Resources or Talent Management capability; or leaders in IT infrastructure development.
We have worked with all these people, and as we know our limits, we know when to defer to others to deliver the best comprehensive solution to a challenge.
About the founder
Mark Bentley, founder of Brambleton, has had a long career of financial leadership and advisory roles in professional services and agency businesses.
With a 20 year track record as a Group CFO in AIM listed and PE backed Groups, he can quickly win the trust of operational leadership and identify the heart of any operational or financial issue.
Mark has a pragmatic style which has built and run several robust and long lasting finance teams. With heavy involvement in over 30 corporate transactions in the UK, the US, and Europe, he has detailed Corporate Finance experience ranging from deal execution to arranging equity and debt finance.
As a long standing board member and advisor and non-exec director, he has established KPI’s, built finance teams, and originated exits through a comprehensive professional network.