Our People

Tell us a little bit about your professional work history and how you came to TSG

My career began as a Junior Management Accountant working with leading fashion design manufacturer. With manufacturing sites around the world, my time there gave me a solid grounding of the finance industry.

From there I moved onto one of the largest bus and train transport services organisations in Europe, as an Assistant Financial Accountant. This allowed me to experience and understand the mechanics and processes of a much larger organisation.

As an expanding and international business, this role provided me with the opportunity to broaden and develop my skills within the finance space of a considerably bigger organisation.

I joined TSG in 2004 as Group Management Accountant and completed my Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) qualification. From there, my role evolved to regional Finance Director for the north east, then expanding again further across the northern region, including Leeds and Manchester. I was then promoted to Financial Controller for TSG, overlooking the commercial and financial operational aspects of the business.

From here I was promoted to Finance Director, and finally Chief Financial Officer, which is my current role and covers all things finance, contracts, legal and other business-supporting functions such as business services and IT.

What is the most rewarding part about your role and working at TSG?

Working with Team TSG and our customers – our focus on putting customers first and the journey we’ve been on for the last 4-5 years to implement that.

Our fantastic support teams and the levels of customer satisfaction they achieve and most importantly consistently maintain.

Our innovative project delivery teams – making a real difference to our customers and the value they derive from that innovation.

What do you think is the most innovative piece of technology to date?

Innovation is great in many ways – and when done right can be a real differentiator for our customers, but sometimes simpler reliable technologies can be taken for granted!

For me Microsoft Teams and other associated technologies (Power Apps etc) have changed the landscape for a lot of businesses. Increasing collaboration not only internally but with our partners (customers and suppliers). Couple that with some clever yet fairly simple innovation means we’ve really helped our customers exploit the opportunities to use these tools to their advantage whilst limiting their risk in using over complex/over engineered technologies.

For me the innovative piece is around developing deep insight into the challenges and opportunities our customers and their industries face, and developing and recommending the solutions that can remove the challenges and allow them to exploit the opportunities.

What does the future of technology look like to you?

See above really – I think the future of technology is different depending on the organisation you are working with, and its sometimes hard to keep up with the pace of change, especially for a layman like me!

Clearly security is high on everyone’s agenda, I also see business intelligence as a key driver in technology, using technology to bring data together from multiple sources, and use that to make informed decisions at all levels within any business. I think this is even more critical in todays technological environment where the days of a single technology platform business no longer exist.

Ultimately ensuring you have the right partner in place to help you navigate the current, and future state of technology is probably the most important aspect when it comes to the future of technology, allowing businesses to focus on their core activities.