Finance Director | Fenestration Manufacturer, European Group-Owned SME

The Client

This business is a major manufacturer of PVCu and Aluminium windows, doors and conservatories, operating two manufacturing sites plus a distribution hub, serving more than 500 regular trade customers, including an installer network. Lead times run as short as five days, against an on-time-in-full target north of 97%.

It sits within one of Europe’s largest window and door manufacturing groups – a deliberately decentralised organisation of several thousand people and dozens of local brands spanning the Nordics, the UK, Ireland, and Central and Eastern Europe.

The Role

This vacancy didn’t arise from a retirement or a promotion elsewhere. It arose because the previous Finance Manager’s performance had not met expectations for an extended period. This included inaccurate reporting, stock integrity issues, missed monthly deadlines to Group, and a lack of leadership inside the finance team.

The brief called for a genuine Finance Director: someone to restore rigour to reporting and control, finish a stalled digital transformation (the Sage Purchasing and Stock Module, Pay by Link, and a long-promised move to paperless finance), and step up as a proactive commercial partner to the Managing Director.

Reporting to the MD with a matrix line into the group’s Executive Vice President for Western Europe, this person would lead a finance and IT function of eight, sit at the top table as part of the Executive team, and represent the business’s numbers into a Group.

The Business Challenge

The aforementioned EVP was very clear when Collingwood took this brief – this was a turnaround opportunity, which required someone of strength and conviction.

Every candidate we spoke to could read a balance sheet. Far fewer had rebuilt confidence in a function that Group had stopped trusting, while simultaneously finishing IT projects someone else had started and abandoned. That combination – part fire-fighter, part systems implementer, part boardroom operator – narrows the market fast.

Added to this, the EVP required someone who had operated within an SME manufacturing environment, who had good exposure to reporting into a parent company. Once you add the fact that they would need to be in the manufacturers main, East Midlands office, this made for an extremely challenging brief.

The Solution and Result

In summary, the following process took place:

88 potential candidates identified following initial research undertaken

62 candidates engaged with

9 CV’s received

4 candidates interviewed by Collingwood

3 candidates interviewed by the client

2 candidates taken through to final stage

88 individuals identified through researching SME manufacturing businesses within a 30-mile radius of this company’s head office is not a tight number. However, upon speaking with over half of these, it was evident that only one-third had the exposure to group level reporting. This made for an extremely shallow talent pool.

Although the four candidates recommended were of high quality, Collingwood and the EVP had to work together to ensure a smooth transition through the various client interview stage gates – keeping these three engaged and warm was paramount.

One of the four particularly shone. Although feedback was positive on two of the other three, this played out throughout the client’s interviews, ultimately resulting in an acceptance at offer stage.

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