Colin Mills has expanded his part-time finance director business through a merger with rivals FDUK to create the biggest company of its type in the UK.
The FD Centre is targeted at firms which cannot afford or do not wish to employ a full-time finance director but that require someone with high calibre accounting skills and business experience.
Since it began trading in 2001, the business has grown rapidly and employs around 60 finance directors that work with growing businesses on a part-time basis.
The recent deal will raise this number to 100 and in particular will increase the company’s presence in the South West and West Midlands. It also means that the FD Centre has experience in working in nearly all sectors of the economy. The combined business will now trade solely as the FD Centre.
FDUK approached Mills in the spring of this year to discuss the prospect of combining the businesses and they spent the summer ironing out the details.
“The deal was done quite quickly as it was the classic situation that we both wanted the same type of agreement,” Mills says.
Mills is confident that he has the specifics of the financial agreement right, which was aided by the fact that the company’s business models are very similar, but that his main challenge is now to make sure the people aspect of acquisition works.
“While there is the commercial aspect of the deal, the other area of where we must succeed is how we fit the people together - this is a people business that sells to business owners.”
He also anticipates considerable growth for the future as the market place for part-time FDs is big. “There are about 25,000 businesses that have between 10-250 employees and they are our main focus. However, we have only really scratched the surface of this number so there’s considerable room for growth.”