Board Evaluation: When and How
Board evaluation has a poor reputation, and largely a deserved one. A questionnaire circulated in December, results presented in January, a paragraph in the annual report confirming the board considers itself effective, and nothing changes. Done that way it is a compliance exercise that consumes …
The Company Secretary in an M&A Process
A transaction is the moment a company’s governance record stops being an administrative matter and becomes a commercial one. Gaps that nobody minded for five years are found by a buyer’s solicitors in a fortnight, and they arrive back at the board as warranty requests, …
IT Director vs CIO: The Difference
An IT Director keeps the technology working. A CIO decides what the business should be doing with it. Both are legitimate and necessary; they are not the same job, and the businesses that struggle are usually those that appointed one while needing the other. The …
VP Engineering vs CTO: Which First?
The short version: a CTO decides what to build and on what; a VP Engineering makes sure it gets built. Most scaling businesses need the second before the first, and appoint the first because it sounds more senior. That inversion is the commonest structural mistake …
Hiring an MD for a Family-Owned Busines
Appointing the first non-family Managing Director is usually the most significant decision a family business makes, and it is rarely treated as such. The search runs like any other director appointment, the successful candidate arrives, and within eighteen months one of two things has happened: …
Managing Director Job Description Guide
A Managing Director job description does a different job from every other one a business writes. Nobody at this level is scanning it to decide whether they can do the work — they can. They are reading it to work out whether the business knows …
Outsourced vs In-House Company Secretary
Most UK private companies start with outsourced company secretarial support, usually bundled with the accountant or a corporate services provider. It is cheap, it works, and for a business with three directors and no outside shareholders it is entirely adequate. The question is when that …
Company Secretary vs Governance Manager
Governance job titles have proliferated over the past decade. Company Secretary, Governance Manager, Head of Governance, Governance and Compliance Officer, Assistant Company Secretary — boards now see all of these on CVs and in job adverts, frequently describing overlapping work at very different levels of …
Operations Director vs Head of Operations
Two titles, frequently used as though they were the same job. In most UK businesses they are not, and the difference is not simply one of seniority — it is a difference in what the role is allowed to decide. A Head of Operations runs …
What Does an Operations Director Do?
An Operations Director is accountable for how a business delivers what it sells. That covers the people, processes, systems and physical infrastructure that turn a customer order into a fulfilled one — and, critically, the cost of doing so. Where a Sales Director owns whether …
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