Incisive Financial Understanding

PROFILE - COLIN FITTALL FCA

After qualifying as a chartered accountant with Ernst & Young in London 18 years ago, Colin Fittall saw first-hand how cash flow had the capacity to shock while working in the venture capital field. Without warning, two dynamic young businesses, seeking money to fund growth, ran out of cash mid-deal. 

"It was dispiriting - such a waste of talent - but I was also intrigued. Both companies had their own Financial Controllers. I found myself hooked."

After undertaking what he describes as a modern-day apprenticeship in Finance; subsequent time working with struggling and insolvent businesses confirmed a growing conviction that the underlying 'financial design' of a business was critical and the implications for the future not foreseen.

"If the weather report focused on the week just gone, not the week ahead, we wouldn't watch it. But backward-looking management accounts land on desks month in, month out yet few bat an eyelid."

Since creating Bottom Line Impact in 1999, Colin has helped start-up and established businesses, often in extremely tough competitive environments, steer through (at times acute) cash flow pressures and go on, in some cases, to achieve astounding success.  Regardless of the starting point, Colin has been able to highlight and ‘design-out’ financial pressures and ‘design-in’ the essential targets and strategies to deliver financial strength to businesses he's worked with. 

Illustrative material, in a highly visual form, was originally created as an integral part of Colin's turnaround work - empowering those he worked with to be more self-reliant.

"Show people the real dynamics at play with the numbers and the impact different actions will have and they see through the traditional ratio-based approaches in an instant."

The training, now a central part of the work, has been widely credited with bringing much needed clarity and transparency to finance.

Past work has included being commissioned to design and deliver the financial training for all (100+) advisers working for the largest Business Link in the country and numerous company directors and managers. 

Colin has also won an innovation grant to create a new form of financial projection software which is currently being developed in conjunction with one of the London universities.

"The challenge is to help those we work with (regardless of their background) engage with the numbers and get to the heart of what's really happening in the business; confident in their own understanding and willing to back their own judgement."

You can gauge from clients' testimonials as to whether we succeed in this aim.