Forum Speaker

Craig is a highly experienced PLC & Large Cap Private Equity Main Board Group CFO, with 25 years’ experience in a wide variety of businesses of between £500m -£7bn in turnover and across a substantive number of different industries, geographies and stages of investment. This experience has encompassed 14 years of Group CFO roles in FTSE 250 (N Brown Group Plc) and PE (Apax, Blackstone, Inflexion) sponsored businesses as well as time as CFO for Marks and Spencer Food during the 2020-22 period of its successful transformation. These businesses have been both B2B and B2C and have spanned Digital pure-play’s through to complex physical site businesses of >1,000 locations.

Across his CFO roles, Craig has had an increasingly broad and deep remit, leading teams of 50-400 colleagues, delivering material improvements in financial performance and leading financial & operational restructuring/turnarounds. In addition, he has demonstrated a proven ability to lead across a broad commercial and operational remit incremental to Finance – including IT, strategy, procurement, pricing, legal, governance & data & analytics functions. The businesses Craig has been part of leading have experienced a wide variety of business cycles – transformation, growth/acquisition through to large scale restructurings, often involving undertaking complex capital markets transactions with significant leverage.

Craig graduated from the University of Reading with a BSc in Land Management, and prior to his CFO roles, qualified as a Chartered Accountant with PwC with whom he spent 9 yrs, 4 of which was based in San Jose/San Francisco during the formative dot.com period of the early 2000’s. He has also worked in a variety of international roles with Electronic Arts and Regus Plc.