Head of Commercial Finance

Head of Commercial Finance

Department: Finance

Employment Type: Permanent - Full Time

Location: Derby, UK

This is an opportunity to shape and build the Commercial Finance function within one of the UK's fastest-growing regional law firms. Flint Bishop has ambitious growth plans, a strong track record of success, and a leadership team committed to investing in the people, systems and insight required to support the next stage of its journey.

As Head of Commercial Finance, you will play a pivotal role in helping the firm scale successfully while maintaining a strong focus on profitability, performance and financial discipline. This is far more than a traditional reporting role. We are looking for an outstanding commercial finance leader who can transform financial information into meaningful insight, influence decision-making, and help drive business performance across the firm.

You will be responsible for creating confidence in a single version of the truth, ensuring that leaders have access to timely, accurate and trusted information, while translating complex financial data into practical actions that non-financial audiences can understand and act upon.

Reporting directly to the CFO, you will lead and develop the Commercial Finance team and help shape its future direction. The function is still in its relative infancy, creating a unique opportunity for the successful candidate to build capability, establish best practice, improve processes, and create a team that becomes a trusted and influential partner to leaders across the business.

You will work closely with the CEO, CFO, Heads of Department and other senior stakeholders, providing challenge, insight and commercial support across a broad range of strategic priorities, including financial planning, forecasting, investment decisions, acquisitions, profitability improvement and long-term growth.

We are looking for someone who enjoys building as much as managing. Someone who can combine strong analytical capability with commercial judgement, communicate confidently with stakeholders at every level of the organisation, and inspire a team to evolve from producers of reports into strategic advisors and influencers of business performance.

For the right individual, this represents an opportunity to join a growing business at an exciting stage of its development, build a high-performing function, and play a central role in shaping the future success of the firm.

Reporting to: Chief Financial Officer

Management of: Two Business Partners, one FP&A Analyst

Location: Derby Head Office with travel to other offices as required

Contract: Full-time, permanent. Monday to Friday, 9.15am–5.30pm, with a one-hour unpaid lunch break.

Key Responsibilities

Team leadership and functional delivery

• Lead, manage and develop the Commercial Finance team, setting clear objectives, standards and accountabilities.
• Allocate work across the team, balance planned priorities with urgent requests and protect capacity for high-value analysis.
• Create an effective operating rhythm for reporting, forecasting, departmental reviews, action tracking and follow-up.
• Cultivate the Commercial Finance team’s technical and commercial capabilities.
• Develop succession plans required for the long-term success of the function, ensuring individuals are supported to grow and the team can scale with the firm’s ambitions.

Planning, forecasting and performance management 

• Own and lead the annual budget, periodic forecast and longer-term financial planning processes.
• Identify risks and opportunities and provide the CFO with a consolidated firm-wide view.
• Own the monthly financial performance cycle, ensuring results are understood, actions are agreed and delivery is followed through.
• Maintain clear visibility of performance against budget, forecast, strategic priorities and agreed improvement plans.
• Set clear timetables, assumptions and quality standards for planning activities, coordinating and constructively challenging submissions from Business Partners and operational leaders

Commercial Insight & Business Partnering

• Act as the senior point of contact for firm-wide commercial finance matters and lead complex, sensitive or cross-firm assignments.
• Ensure the team provides practical challenge and insight to the business, focusing on decisions and actions rather than report production.
• Analyse the drivers of revenue, profitability, pricing, utilisation, recovery, resourcing, matter economics and cost performance.
• Lead or oversee commercial modelling, scenario analysis, investment appraisal, tenders, pricing decisions and business cases.
• Identify opportunities for sustainable growth, margin improvement and cost efficiency, and track whether agreed benefits are delivered.

Reporting, data and systems

• Own the content, quality and relevance of firmwide financial reporting
• Ensure reporting is timely, accurate, consistent and tailored to the decisions each audience needs to make.
• Lead the development of dashboards, reporting tools and forward-focused planning models to improve decision-making across the firm
• Set data definitions and quality expectations for Commercial Finance outputs, working with the wider Finance, IT and data teams to resolve issues.
• Drive automation and simplification so that team capacity moves progressively from manual production towards analysis and business partnering.

Strategic and growth support

• Support the CFO and CEO on strategic decisions, investment, acquisitions, integrations, lateral partner hires and long-term growth.
• Provide financial leadership on cross-functional projects and ensure that proposals include robust assumptions, sensitivities, benefits and delivery measures.
• Translate strategy into financial plans, performance measures and actions that can be monitored through the management cycle.
• Maintain strong financial discipline while working pragmatically in a fast-moving and entrepreneurial environment.

Process, Governance and Technology

• Continuously review Commercial Finance processes, identifying opportunities to simplify, standardise, automate and improve the quality of outputs across the team.
• Actively identify, evaluate and champion opportunities to leverage technology, data and automation to improve decision-making, reporting quality and operational efficiency.
• Develop robust business cases for investment in systems, tools and technology enhancements, demonstrating clear benefits, costs, risks and expected return on investment.
• Reduce key person dependencies, ensuring critical activities are documented, knowledge is shared, and appropriate cross-training and cover arrangements are in place across the team.
• Maintain visibility of operational, delivery and capability risks within the function, ensuring proportionate mitigating actions are owned and implemented
• Establish a culture of continuous improvement, encouraging innovation, challenging existing ways of working and promoting accountability for delivering sustainable improvements.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

You will:

• Be a qualified accountant (CIMA, ACA or ACCA) with substantial post-qualification experience in Commercial Finance, FP&A or a closely related discipline.
• Be a credible people leader with experience of setting standards, developing capability and managing delivery through others while remaining hands-on when required.
• Have a strong track record of budgeting, forecasting, management reporting, commercial modelling and performance improvement.
• Be able to turn complex financial and operational information into clear insight, recommendations and action.
• Be confident and constructive senior stakeholder management, with the judgement to challenge, influence and escalate appropriately.
• Have commercial understanding of a people-led or professional-services environment; legal-sector experience is desirable but not essential.
• Have advanced Excel and financial modelling capability, with practical experience of dashboards, reporting tools and process automation.
• Be adaptable, pragmatic and resilient, able to create clarity and maintain control in a fast-paced and changing organisation.

Disclosure will be required in the event that a position is offered.

Financial checks will be required in the event that a position is offered.

Benefits

What we offer?

• Competitive salary
• Bonus potential
• Career development opportunities
• 25 days holiday plus bank holidays
• Options to buy & sell 1 week’s holiday
• 1 week’s holiday carry over
• Extra day off for your birthday
• Staff card discount scheme for local shops
• Social days and evenings on the firm
• Staff discounts on legal services

Positive Work Environment

• Be part of a supportive team that values collaboration and teamwork.