About Us

Mark Coward (Director)

I'm passionate about using financial information in a smart way to aid businesses with their operational decision making. With any assignment, my aim is that the business should be able to achieve one of three things - increase revenue, reduce costs, or increase efficiency/reduce time. Professional Qualifications I am a qualified Chartered Accountant originating from the UK, with an ACA qualification - the UK equivalent of an Australian CA I have been practising as an accountant for over 11 years, and have 8 years post qualified experience, 6 years of which have been spent in Australia Key Achievements and Practical Experience My post-qualified experience has been largely in planning & analysis and commercial management roles, business partnering with Board and operational level management through the provision of financial and commercial support My main areas of focus have been budgeting, forecasting and financial modelling to support deals, decisions and business case creations My key achievements include: business partnered with operational management to provide them with deal support on Tier 1 accounts, which enabled the sales division to finalise significant long-term deals ranging from $5-70m and both keep key customers and win new business performed a post-implementation review of the largest deal by the company (c.$130m), identifying and presenting material risks to revenue of c.$30m to management, as well as cost saving opportunities analysis of key cost areas which enabled the company to cut c.$17m from the cost base following the global financial crisis implementation of a daily cashflow management system to better enable the company to prioritise payments and reduce risk of breaching bank overdraft or covenants conception, implementation and communication of a new commission scheme which better incentivised the sales force, yet also proved more cost effective for the business built long-term forecasting model designed to project the annuity revenue for the business over a 5+ year period, and identified key risks to the annuity stream which I presented to the Group MD. Also invited by the Group MD to present to overseas Head Office management at the company AGM, following a project I ran to determine the key causals of decline in our annuity business creation and implementation nationwide of a bottom up planning process for the $300m sales division, including education of and business partnering with operational management to build their sales plans  Industry Experience I have extensive experience in a range of accounting roles and organisations, both in Australia and UK My industry experience includes the engineering, technology, recruitment and mining sectors I have worked for: a Big 4 professional services firm in London (where I trained to be an accountant), within their audit department the Head Office of a FTSE 100 listed conglomerate in London an ASX listed recruitment business with offices across 3 continents the largest subsidiary within the Asia Pac region of a multinational Japanese technology giant, based in Sydney