Le Wagon
Helping the world’s No.1 coding school get a grip on their numbers.
With campuses across 39 countries, French startup Le Wagon are already a global success story. But while they had ambitious plans to get their cool coding bootcamps to even more wannabe tech professionals around the world, they didn’t truly understand the profitability of their UK site in London. Not only that but they lacked the regular management and group reports that would help their board make decisions to support their growth plans.
To give them visibility of their numbers, we immediately set up bespoke quarterly reporting through Xero, as well as quarterly accountability meetings on profit, tax and cashflow, where we acted as their CFO sounding board for major management decisions. We also helped them guide the business through the Covid pandemic, providing ongoing advice and applying for all available Government support.
Our work gave Le Wagon’s management teams more accountability on the performance of their UK business. The Group has since raised $19m in funding and is set to widen its reach by offering several new courses across a range of new countries.
Press Coffee
Giving one of London’s best boutique coffee shops the confidence to grow.
If you’re ever on Fleet Street, pop into Press Coffee for one of London’s best flat whites. We tried it for the first time back in 2014, when the company was just a year old. They were thinking about opening more shops across the capital, but like many startups, they didn’t know whether it would be viable. So they came to us looking for better financial controls, starting with a month-by-month view of their profitability and cashflow.
We built their full finance function, giving them up-to-the-minute control of their numbers, and training their staff how to use the new systems. We also set up monthly management meetings, with financial analysis for better decision making. This allowed the management team to see exactly how much money they were making, and whether an expansion would make sense. It did, and they’ve since opened four new shops, as well as a roastery to serve retail, online and wholesale customers.
In 2020, we supported Press Coffee throughout the Coronavirus period too, making all furlough claims and evaluating their debt and equity for the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme – to finance their continued growth after the pandemic.
JBM
Freeing up valuable time for one of the UK’s most disruptive recruiters
Many believe that recruitment’s all about relationships, rather than being a numbers game. But when executive search firm JBM wanted to grow their business, they knew that the numbers in their accounts held the key to success. Being time poor and knowing that they should be spending their time doing what they are best at, JBM turned to us to give them the management information they needed. Helping them get a clear view on profitability and cashflow to support their growth plans.
We came in to manage their day-to-day finance function, which included weekly payment runs for suppliers and monthly accountability calls on profit, tax and cashflow to give management more confidence when deciding their next steps. We also supported the company through Covid-19. Ensuring they’d claimed for all available schemes and sensitively guiding them through the process of furloughing staff.
This allowed the founder James to get on with running the business and building a profitable team, rather than being bogged down with financial management. As you can see from the testimonial video on our homepage, this partnership has allowed JBM to achieve impressive year-on-year growth and scale at the speed they want, without the worry of whether their finances can keep up.
