Director Of Finance SPRING 2017 | Page 21

FEATURE | The Big Interview Striking impact: sculptures by the award-winning Littlehampton Welding always look good in front of Goodwood House dofonline.co.uk because we are so diverse and nobody is sitting at a desk waiting for an email from me. “When I arrived, we were about a £49m turnover company with no profitability and, as a consequence, investments were funded by borrowing. Now, at the end of 2016, we were just shy of £100m turnover and we generated around £8m of free cash. We’ve had double-digit growth every year since 2008.” So how did he bring about this transformation? “First of all, we stopped investing without having the cash to support it and started to plan investments based on what we were generating,” says Williamson. “As the business started to grow just fractionally – 2008 and 2009 were pretty lumpy years through the worst of the downturn – we were able to generate small returns and we carefully invested that. We weren’t expecting to grow our cash balance but we were able to prevent it from going backwards. It was a fairly simple plan and we invested around £2m a year for the first couple of years just taking stock really. From there we were able to set some quite ambitious plans around the two main motorsport events – The Festival of Speed and The Revival – because there was absolutely an appetite in the market for those two products. “We were able to grow our partnership lines. Hospitality was very resilient and the retail side just grew and grew which has been fantastic. We added a day to the Festival of Speed which, in 2008, had around 135,000 customers while last year there were 200,000. That’s a growth story in itself because the event has not become breathtakingly more expensive to build so the yield of that extra 70-80,000 people has been significant.” Williamson is certain that his prior experience as finance director helped him when he moved up to the top role. “Being FD was hugely important,” he confirms. “When there is such a fine balance between success and failure – and the strength of your balance sheet is almost irrelevant because it’s not liquid and, although you have all of these assets, you are not going to sell them – you have to have a really strong financial diligence about you in order to make good decisions. I think we now have a good balance between being brave, taking bold decisions and also keeping the business on track so when Lord March’s R DIRECTOR OF FINANCE 21