Michel Lerendu brings 25 years of CFO experience with high growth companies running international operations. He has served both on the companies’ side and the investors’ side.
He most recently contributed to the growth of Neolane (a French software company acquired in 2013 by Adobe systems) and of Nexthink (a Swiss software provider based in Lausanne).
Bring meaningful experience to CFO/CEO’s who are in need of advice, external mentoring and benchmark from an experienced peer in handling financial issues in high growth ventures, based on a trusted personal relationship.
In support of CFO/CEO’s who are most often alone to address short term challenges requiring a vision of what their company is heading for in the long term.
Reduce both the time frame necessary to address such challenges and minimize the associated risks.
Share best practices to ensure a safe path to exit and, when relevant, to support their timely adoption.
Assist companies in need of assessing their F&A organization:
Check adequacy of individuals holding key responsibilities.
Provide support in hiring processes.
F&A agility is key to its capacity to efficiently and quickly adjust to a fast changing business environment.
Assist Companies to streamline their organization and systems to both meet their growth requirements and ensure the overall efficiency of F&A:
Help companies adopt a lean F&A cost structure whilst also meeting their objectives and preserve their agility.
Mastering the quote to cash cycle is essential to support revenue growth and control net working capital requirements.
It is aimed at securing the processes for closing business from an organizational and procedural standpoint and also through the integration of systems.
Its objective is also to master collection delays. It is meant to secure revenue recognition and the long term interests of the company through a review of business agreements and of the insurance coverage.
It finally should be measurable through the implementation of KPI’s designed to quickly identify improvement areas.
Identify the main stages in the Company’s growth plan and how they translate in terms of objectives and priorities for F&A:
Assist the determination of the relevant team structure at each junction and the triggering events for the creation of new roles.
Likewise, assist the identification of critical systems to be implemented in support of the Company’s growth.
Support to the definition and implementation of processes for F&A to properly integrate with operations as they grow in complexity and geographical scope.
Addressing fast changing market requirements and an uncertain environment calls for a relevant financial planning tool in close adequacy with your Company’s challenges : both rigorous and agile in terms of implementation.
In close relationship with Management, define expected deliverables, develop a planning tool in adequacy with your Company’s organization and performance measurement and monitoring tools.
Shifting from a sales model to another most often calls for a fair amount of technical and organizational reengineering, as it also calls for an adjustment of the business KPI’s.
Assist Management in selecting the relevant KPI’s to properly track its performance and match market practices. Assess the availability and reliability of the Company’s systems to deliver such information and, when appropriate, adjust their operation or possibly also adopt new tools.
In conjunction with the above, recommend as appropriate, changes to the teams in charge of operating the Company’s information systems.
Localizing activities in France is a challenging venture for foreign companies because of the specifics of the regulatory environment.
To optimize its cost and implementation delay, a single entry point able to readily action the most relevant ressources and to ensure their coordination will be decisive.
Assist Management in scoping:
Reporting pack presentation.
Provide assistance for the production of reporting information.
A successful fund raising, shareholding restructuring or exit is dependent on the availability and reliability of business, financial and legal information.
Assist Companies in structuring their operations and in setting up a team and systems to efficiently have such information readily available and conform to best of breed market practices.
Assist Management to determine the right timing and drivers to ensure the appropriate corporate transaction readiness at each stage of the Company’s business plan.
