Solid Bond.

Finance and Commercial Director

My role is to provide finance support to a portfolio of businesses. the level of support and the type of support needed varies significantly from business to business. 

Typical Responsibilities:

- Business Planning/ Budgeting
- BI Implementation/ Management Accounts
- Attended and presented financials at board meetings
- Power BI report writing
- Tax Planning/ Liaising with Tax Professionals
- Lead on Software Implementation 
- Liaising with External Accountants
- Investment Appraisals/ Due Diligence
- Preparing investment paperwork with lawyers
- Staff management of transactional finance team

Finance Manager

Safran

Main purpose of the role is to help control the direct purchases for over a £110m spend and to business partner with the purchasing department. 

- Set the budget for direct purchases for all products, budgeting for a spend of over £110m
- Monitor and work with budget holders to control the expenditure on 4 purchasing cost centres and carriage in costs
- Present the monthly KPI pack to the Purchasing director and to senior management occasionally
- Calculate and monitor the purchasing overhead absorption rate (purchasing fee) and explain any over/under recovery
- Provide detailed and complex variance analysis on gross margins for the wider cost of production team. 
- Complete balance sheet reconciliations. 
- Provide detailed analysis of the GRNI account in working through credit notes owed by suppliers. 
- Calculate and post amendments to stock to value at actual cost at the year end.  
- Led and successfully delivered the annual standard costing by coordinating the work of 3 other accountants.

Management Accountant (Supply Chain Controller)

- Finance lead responsible for reviewing the industrial/ operational performance of one of the business operations. 
- Prepare budgets and quarterly forecasts with budget holders.  
- Set the annual labour budget for 300+ employees. 
- Close out month end in a tight 2.5 day deadline. 
- Prepare journals for accruals, prepayments and ad hoc movements of cost. 
- Identify potential risk and opportunities and flag these to senior management.
- Cost control of site general/ travel expenses, over £15m per year. 
- Developed detailed reports on general/ travel expenses and to coordinate the delivery of a £2m expense reduction challenge set by group. 
- Use of SAP and Hyperion accounting systems (loading budgeted hourly rates, purchasing fees and expenses and forecast data into both). 
- Utilised strong Excel skills to automate many tasks savings over 2 hours at month end and simplify tasks during the month. 
- Involved in headcount reporting and standardising headcount reports between HR and finance to present consistent figures to senior management. 
- Business partner with the sheet metal/ components operation of the business.
- Audit support both internal and external. 
- Standard setting and material validations.
- Deliver the annual costing run to re-set standards for the new year. 
- Conduct frequent cost centre reviews with over 10 budget holders. 
- Work effectively with French counter parts.

Management Accountant (Industrial Controller)

Fujitsu

Worked as the finance lead for over 20 cost centres/ budget holders managing a cost base of over £20m per year.

Responsibilities included:
- Accurate creation of monthly management accounts
- Preparation of monthly journals
- Process and post accruals and prepayments on a monthly basis
- Managing the month end process
- Performing ad hoc analysis to provide information to the Finance Business Partner
- Created detailed business review packs for operational managers in their business reviews
- Provided detailed utilisation reports and variance analysis
- Prepare annual budgets and quarterly forecasts
- Perform a variance analysis between quarterly forecasts with commentary to the Finance Business Partner
    - Examples include:
        - Impact of new day rates on the forecast
        - Impact of changing rules of how group property costs are applied

- Conduct quarterly forecast reviews with operational managers and remove errors from the forecast
- Use of accounting packages such as Oracle and Hyperion Financial Management
- Developed excellent Excel skills

Finance Graduate - Cost Accounting

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Lead Teacher at the Missionary Training Centre. Oversees the training for the English department consisting of 8 members of staff, while still maintaining all the responsibilities of an MTC Teacher. 

- Responsible for setting and managing the departments work schedule
- Participate in an interview panel for new teachers in the English department. 
- Delivers tailored training on the curriculum to staff on a bi-weekly basis
- Analyse effectiveness of teaching and offer training to improve quality of teaching.

Lead Teacher

Teacher at the Missionary Training Centre. Deliver a 2 week training programme to groups of 6-10 students in preparation for a 2 year, or 18 month, voluntary mission. 

- Deliver tailored training on core teaching skills to groups of 6-10 students
- Create specific personal development plans with students.
- Communicate clearly with team members on students progression 
- Employed time management skills in adhering to a fixed schedule 
- Utilised Microsoft Office in creating classroom learning materials

MTC teacher

University of Surrey Careers Service

Temporary campaign to produce university employability statistics by gathering information from recent graduates. This campaign contributed the University being ranked 6th best in the UK. 

- Developed a professional telephone manner through the calling of graduates
- Employed attention to detail while recording vital information
- Maintained an accurate database of potential leads
- Coordinated daily workload with colleagues to maximise results
- Analysed results which identified certain leads to target resulting in increased results.

Data Collector

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints

Worked in a voluntary role as an assistant to a leader of a local religious organisation.

- Prepared agenda's for weekly meetings and recorded action points
- Employed Microsoft Office skills in preparing visual materials for audiences
- Maintained an accurate database of membership information
- Managed the local leaders schedule
- Coordinated interviews with individuals and management
- Developed strong communication skills in coordinating with members of the organisation

Administrative Assistant

Was a full-time voluntary missionary/ official representative of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Scotland, Northern and the Republic of Ireland. Responsible for finding and teaching individuals wanting to learn about the organisation.

- Consistently worked 10-11 hour days to achieve targets
- Managed a team of 30 volunteers and set and reviewed their targets on a weekly basis
- Created PDP's with members of the team and periodically followed up with their progress 
- Developed a training programme which resulted in the doubling of new leads within the team
- Produced statistical reports for management using Excel
- Advanced interpersonal skills by training individuals on a 1 on 1 basis

International Volunteer

Vodafone

Placed in the busiest store in the region as a sales assistant in a high street telecommunications company.

- Employed communication skills in responding to customer queries, complaints and then, resolving customer concerns.
- Demonstrated leadership skills managing the shop floor and assigning work to team members 
- Developed an ability to manage time working with customers with limited time
- Converted new leads into customers
- Implemented staff training to increase effectiveness as a sales assistant

Sales Assistant

Looking for and working with high growth starts ups. We invest in and give active support to great founders to help grow and scale their businesses. 

Dan is the Finance and Commercial Director at Solid Bond Capital, where he provides finance leadership to the Solid Bond portfolio, works with founders through investment rounds and processes, leads on the finance support given to the portfolio companies and evaluates businesses pitching for investment taking them through from first pitch, investment, and post investment support. He is a chartered management accountant and graduated with a 1st class honours degree from the university of Salford. Following graduation Dan qualified in industry working with several businesses in accounting/ finance business partnering roles focused on financial and operational reporting/ performance improvement prior to joining Solid Bond Capital in 2019.

Founders, please include a deck when doing cold outreach via email or LinkedIn.

I've been getting quite a lot of cold outreach which is some loose description of what you do and then a strong ask to jump on a call.

As much as I wish there was enough time to jump on calls with everyone that asked, there just isn't enough time. That's why the deck, as much as some people don't like this, is one of the simplest ways to worth out if a call is work taking. Really the only point of the deck is to be able to secure a meeting!

The best way for me is to send over brief but relevant info, a deck and a bit about why it's in scope for us. I'd be much more inclined to take a call once I've got all the info needed to work out if it's relevant. 

#venturecapital #preseed #founders #startups

Dan Dudley

Pre-seed Investor at Solid Bond | Actively Investing | Finance and Commercial Director |

At Solid Bond. we are always on the lookout for #preseed #startups to back.

If you are:

▶️Raising between £150k - £500k pre-seed

▶️A founder with sector expertise

▶️A Tech/ Tech-enabled business

▶️UK Based

Then we'd love to speak to you.

Or please tag anyone you think we should speak with!

Zayn Sulaman Shaz Sulaman

#preseed #founders #startups #venturecapital #fundraising

Don't include all the advisors you've ever spoken too on your team slides in a pitch deck!

The team slides are to give confidence that this is a winning team. If you can't explain exactly how all those people have meaningful involvement it doesn't reflect well. 

#venturecapital #pitchdeck #founders #startups

Bottom up market sizing I find is the only approach that makes sense. 

Bottom up is simple where instead of quoting generic market sizing figures you based it on the actual number of customers you could serve x your contract values. 

Then overlaying general trends like market growth etc. all helps. 

Take that, multiply by your pricing (appreciating that pricing might also change over time) and that's your market size. 

Quoting a Goldman Sachs report on general market size is often just too vague and doesn't correlate to a companies actual revenue potential. 

#startups #venturecapital #preseed

So I've been testing Claude vs ChatGPT, thought I'd share some learnings on which is best.

Claude:
I've only started using Claude so this might be shorter but will cover the bits that have jumped out quickly.

- Integrations - it absolutely buries ChatGPT for the quality and speed of it's integrations. HubSpot integration is great. Notion is great, has write access which has been really useful. 

- Technical tasks - whether coding tasks or getting it to walk you through through something (I was stuck on a Notion automation) it is proving to be correct more often. Chat GPT often takes you down 1 route to find out there is a blocker mid way through the process that means you have to go down a different route. Claude does this less.

- Artifacts - this has been interesting to play with. Build essentially front end apps that you can use within Claude. I can see this becoming really useful!

- Writing Style - I know I could fine tune Chat GPT instructions a bit more but the Clause writing style is just a bit more plain speaking, not salesy and has less confirmation bias in the responses. I find Chat GPT often gives you the answer you want rather than an impartial assessment. 

- Research - I feel this sites way more sources than Chat GPT. I had one the other day which used 300+ sources whereas Chat GPT will use around 25-30. 

Chat GPT:

- Agent Mode - Have only used to order a set of drum sticks but once I've gotten into the habit of using this I'll probably love it.

- Chat sessions - Claude struggles if a chat gets too long, makes you start a new session or asks you to prod it to keep going. The chat history can get very long in Chat GPT before it struggles to load the full conversation and you need to start again.

- Voice Mode - I use it all the time in the car. Big feature!

- Speed - unless using reasoning models the responses are just faster. 

- Pricing - Claude's cheeky model throttles usage even on paid plans. I hit my limit (which doesn't feel really high) and couldn't use it for 3 hours unless I signed up for the £75 pm plan (which gets like 5x the usage). Has made me question how much money Open AI actually makes on an unlimited use model for $25 pm. Also the min 2 seat team pricing for Chat GPT is better than Claude's 5 user min.

- Memory - Such a good feature. I can see this really driving lock in over time. I don't have to tell a new chat what I do or the context for which I am asking it in as much detail because it has all of that data stored. Is helping get more relevant output faster. 

I'll keep testing and sharing but I've actually really liked using Claude and the integrations piece is just really powerful. I had it look at all out deal flow at Solid Bond. and summaries what channels provide us the best deals, which channels progress further through the pipeline and start to analyse trends in what makes a company more likely to get rejected from certain fields in HubSpot. 

#startups #founders

Lovable predicts £1bn ARR in the next 12 months. 

Bold prediction to put out there but let's see! Certainly feels that they are slotting into the go to vibe coding platform. 

Interested to see if Replit will keep up.

Open article: Lovable projects $1B in ARR within next 12 months | TechCrunch by techcrunch.com

Lovable projects $1B in ARR within next 12 months | TechCrunch

Have recently started testing Claude over Chat GPT. Anyone made the change??

Testing out Claude for the list of integrations far better with some with write access (Notion in particular).

Interesting in what people have found better.

Taplio

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