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. Where …
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 almost every other one a business writes. Nobody at this level reads it to find out whether they could do the work. They read it to judge whether the business knows what it wants, whether …
Outsourced vs In-House Company Secretary
Most UK private companies start with an outsourced company secretarial service, often bundled with the accountant or a corporate services provider. For a business with a handful of directors and no outside shareholders it is usually adequate: the filings go in on time, the registers …
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 …
COO Recruitment at Fintechs: SMF24 Considerations in Scale-Up Environments
For a scaling fintech, the point at which it needs a genuine Chief Operating Officer — and the point at which that role becomes a regulated SMF24 function — rarely arrive at the same time. A fast-growing fintech often needs operational leadership well before authorisation …
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