During my employed career working for a range of smaller privately owned businesses I always had a vision that I could perform the FC/FD role across a much wider range of businesses. In each work role I made an impact by just doing what came naturally to me; getting stuck into the numbers, working out the key drivers, assessing the different personalities, getting the right information at the right time to the right people, planning the future with all the potential scenarios. So I took a leap of faith!
15 years on…
I realised that I’ve now spent as much time in my current career than all of my other roles put together, so it was a successful career move. It wasn’t plain sailing in the beginning, I had to fill some gaps with contract work, but I backed myself and my passion for getting the numbers right and giving true commercial insight to smaller business owners and managers. The strongest business relationships I have today go back to those first few years of trading.
In celebration of this achievement, over the next few months I plan to share some of my thoughts and experiences gained over the last 15 years. I am hoping this will provide encouragement and insight to those who are following, or planning to follow, a similar career path.
Cheers
Mark
http://www.avalon-ma.com
Mark Tomsett, Avalon Management Accounting Limited
Celebrating 15 years as a Freelance Management Accountant
Business Accountant 
Mark,
We guess that one of your future articles will address the issue of ‘locus of control’ and availability, which on the face of it, is not insurmountable, but does require some ‘expectation management’ skills.
To illustrate the point: How do you overcome the challenge when at 10:10 after that important sales / operations / impromptu meeting the MD ‘walks’ out of the meeting to query an important actual, YTD or variance number on the MIS, but you, the virtual FD / FC is not there, down the corridor to answer the question?
This and many other ‘behavioural’ challenges are some of the issues we encounter in this ‘fractional CFO / FD / FC’ world you describe…
Look forward to future updates
Thanks Mark, I look forward to hearing more. Best, Edward
.
Congratulations Mark. I’m sure lots of us will be really interested to hear more about how you transitioned and built a successful business and will undoubtly inpire others to take that leap of faith!
Best Wishes
Kim