Dermot Campbell.

Where I add value

Experienced judgement, laid over a foundation that is largely mechanical.

Much of a finance function is now mechanical: modern tools do the execution quickly and well. The value is not in that work but in the experience laid over it, knowing what the numbers need to say, and the project management to actually make it happen. These are patterns that recur, not client stories.

There is a thread running through all four.

Whatever the presenting problem, the underlying work is usually the same: making the business legible. Legible enough to run on evidence rather than instinct, and, in the end, legible enough to answer the question that sits under everything, are we going to run out of money. That question surfaces hardest at a raise, when someone from outside looks harder at the numbers and the decisions than anyone inside ever has, but it is there long before the raise, every month, whether or not anyone is looking.

01

The numbers do not tell the truth yet.

The situation

Revenue is growing but the margin makes no sense, or moves around for reasons no one can explain. The accounts are technically correct and still tell you nothing useful. Often the cause is simple: costs sitting in the wrong place. Client-services salaries booked as overhead when, in truth, serving more customers means hiring more of those people, so they belong in cost of sales. Until that is fixed, the gross margin describes a business that does not exist.

The work

Rebuilding the chart of accounts so it reflects how the business actually works: what truly scales with revenue, what is genuinely fixed, where each cost belongs. Then the reporting sits on top of a foundation that means something.

What it is worth

The founder finds out whether the margin problem is real or an artefact of bad classification, which are opposite problems with opposite responses. The numbers become something to steer by. And they become defensible, which matters the moment anyone else starts asking.

At the raise: this is the first thing an investor tests, and the fastest way to lose their confidence is a gross margin that does not stand up.

02

The tools are there. Nobody has said what they should produce.

The situation

Setting up Xero, or pointing an AI bookkeeping tool at the business, is the easy part; it can be done in an afternoon. The hard part is the question nobody has answered: what are the numbers actually supposed to say? Take gross margin, the single biggest driver of a company's valuation. Ask what it is meant to capture for this business, what belongs above the line and what below, and very often no one can say. And if you cannot say what you want the number to be, you cannot set up any tool to produce it. You just get a fast, tidy, wrong-shaped answer.

The work

Answering the prior question first: deciding what each key number needs to mean for this business, how the accounts must be structured to produce it, and only then configuring the tools to deliver it. The mechanism is cheap and capable. What it needs is someone who knows what good looks like to specify it correctly.

What it is worth

The business gets numbers that mean something, built on a definition someone has actually thought through, rather than whatever the software produced by default. Gross margin, unit economics and the rest become figures you can steer by and defend, instead of outputs nobody quite trusts.

At the raise: an investor interrogates the margin and the model. Numbers produced by a well-specified system stand up; numbers a tool generated without anyone deciding what they should say do not.

03

The board takes time and produces nothing.

The situation

The meeting is a long, unstructured conversation that wanders and settles nothing. The minutes, if they exist, are either a transcript nobody will ever read or a few lines that record nothing worth recording. Decisions get discussed and then drift, because it was never clear who owned them or by when. Two days of preparation go in, and very little comes out, least of all a record that would protect the directors if the decisions were ever questioned.

The work

Giving the board a rhythm: an agenda that starts with decisions while energy is high, clears routine approvals quickly, and spends its real time on strategy and risk. A pack that informs rather than impresses. And minutes that capture only what matters, the decision, the reason for it, and an action owned by a named person with a date, reviewed at the top of the next meeting.

What it is worth

The founder stops losing days to preparation that achieves nothing, and the board starts earning its place: sharper decisions, clear ownership, follow-through between meetings, and a clean record behind them. Good governance here is not compliance. It is the fabric that lets a company be led well, and the evidence that it was.

At the raise: an incoming investor will take a board seat and ask hard questions. A board that already runs well is what you want them to walk into.

04

Sales cannot explain itself.

The situation

Deals are not landing and the team disagrees about why. Nobody can say clearly why the customers who buy, buy, or why the ones who leave, leave. The sales effort is all push and no listening: chasing orders rather than learning what would actually make them close. Without that, there is no way to tell a product problem from a market problem, and they need very different answers.

The work

Building customer discovery into the sales motion itself, so the team elicits why buyers buy, what nearly stopped them, and why others churn, as a routine part of every conversation rather than a separate research exercise. The evidence then feeds back into positioning, priorities and the pitch.

What it is worth

A sales process built on evidence instead of hope, and a clear read on whether the real problem is the product or the market. This is exactly the discipline that took Kuber from an idea to a working sales operation: the sales team learning, not just selling.

At the raise: a growth story an investor will interrogate has to rest on evidence about real customers, not assertion. This is where that evidence comes from.

Next step

If any of that sounds like where you are, let us talk.

A short, no-obligation conversation about the pressure point is the place to start. We work out whether there is a clear value case, and if there is, define a focused first piece of work.

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