Bryan Carson ACMA CGMA
I built this for the owners nobody was actually advising.
- Chartered Management Accountant, ACMA CGMA
- Industry, Big 4 and private-equity-backed businesses
- M&A and post-acquisition integration
Most of my career was spent inside businesses where finance was properly resourced. A team behind the numbers, a board asking hard questions, and someone whose job it was to say what the figures meant rather than just produce them.
Background
Where the experience comes from.
I started in manufacturing, close enough to the operation to see where margin was actually made and lost. That is still how I look at a business.
From there to a Big 4 firm, where I ended up managing a team of ten on a large transformation programme. That work was never about producing accounts. It was going into a business, finding where the money and the time were leaking, and rebuilding the process that caused it.
After that came senior finance leadership in private-equity-backed and international businesses. Board packs, investor reporting, budgets defended line by line to people who do this for a living, and cash forecasts that had to be right because somebody was about to act on them.
I have worked on acquisitions and on the integration that follows, which is the part that decides whether a deal was worth doing. So when a buyer starts arguing about what counts as sustainable earnings, I have sat on both sides of that table.
Then you sit down with an owner turning over four million, running a genuinely good business, deciding whether to take on a second unit or five more people. The best information in the room is a set of year-end accounts that is nine months old. Nobody has ever been paid to tell them what it means.
That gap is the whole reason this practice exists. What you get is that same standard of finance, in a business your size, for the days a month it actually needs.
Why the practice exists
Compliance is handled. Decisions are not.
You already have an accountant, and probably a bookkeeper. Between them your statutory obligations get met, the VAT goes in on time and the year-end accounts arrive.
None of that answers whether your pricing is right, which clients are actually costing you money, or what happens to the business if you are not in it.
I work across sectors rather than in one, because the questions are the same. A manufacturer, a professional services firm and a multi-site operator all lose money in recognisable ways.
The name
Whitepark Bay, County Antrim.
The practice takes its name from the bay on the north Antrim coast.
I work from Northern Ireland, with clients across the rest of the UK and Ireland, and the work is the same wherever it happens.
Thirty minutes, and you will know if this is useful.
A conversation about where the business is now, what is concerning you about it, and whether any of this would be useful.
Book a callThirty minutes, and you will know whether it is worth taking further.