Stuart Wilson

My first job, in 2002, was at law firms. I made the tea and coffee, and I wrote the cheques. Nobody would call it glamorous, but it taught me something I still use every week. Every figure in a set of accounts starts with somebody doing something by hand, and that is where most mistakes get in.

From 2005 to 2012 I worked in fund accounting. I was a Fund Accountant at Citigroup in Edinburgh, then a Specialist Fund Accountant at ABN AMRO Mellon, and I went on to head fund accounting. It is exacting work. Administrators, auditors and investors all check the numbers, so you learn to get them right and to show your workings.

In 2012 I became Financial Controller at Arle Capital Partners in London, where I built a forecasting model in Python. The next year I qualified as a chartered management accountant with CIMA, which is what the ACMA CGMA after my name means.

Then came the job that shaped how I work today. From 2017 to 2024 I was Group Finance Director for a portfolio of small and medium-sized businesses under private ownership in London. For part of that time, from 2017 to 2018, I was also Finance Director at Bancroft Private Equity in Vienna. Running finance for small businesses is different from big-company finance. There is no team of twenty. There are one or two people, an accounting package and a lot of spreadsheets, and an owner who needs to know whether there is enough cash to pay everyone next month. I set up the accounting as new businesses joined the group, and moved invoicing onto a web-based system.

In 2024 I was Group Finance Manager at Clyde Blowers Capital, and in 2025 I started BlackpeakCFO.

The other thread running through all of this is systems. Along the way I moved fund accounting off manual spreadsheets and onto the Linedata and Thomson Reuters platforms, and I have done other accounting-software migrations since. In 2018 I started writing code, mostly JavaScript and Python, and I built this website and the systems behind it myself. So when month-end takes days because someone is copying figures from one spreadsheet to another, I can fix the process and build the tool that does the copying.

That is what I offer UK small businesses now: someone who has done every job in a finance team, from the bottom up, and who builds the systems that take the manual work out.