The Brilliant FD Development Days

I just love something which I started up this year and keeps getting better: The FD Development Day which happens every month. On the day itself we bring all the Thames Valley FD Centre FDs together to keep them up to speed with latest developments whilst earning some handy CPE points (Continued Professional Education) along the way. We get a good mix of top quality accountants, tax experts and lawyers to come in each month and a variation of other experts in fields such as insurance, pensions, marketing and sales.

We also have a slot that we all really enjoy which is when one of our own FD team talks about an area where he or she particularly excels – we all love that slot the best. So maybe an FD will talk about how he has introduced strong Key Performance Indicators into a business, how he went about identifying those KPI's and then demonstrate the reports he’s put in place and the value he’s added for his client. Another guy is a strong strategist and he had a great time talking about how he has helped a company evolve their own strategy. It gives the other FD's the confidence to go and do the same things themselves and it’s one of the ways we are continually looking to add value into those business's we serve. We don't want to stagnate as an organisation so this keeps us FD's up to date with what’s happening in the industry and brings new ideas of how we can add value for our clients.

This week it's being hosted by Shaw Gibbs of Oxford and as well as the usual tax and accounting update we're looking at how we can maximise the company value for our I.T. clients and also how businesses can benefit hugely from using a content provision service for their Social Media Optimisation (SMO) campaigns.

For me, a great FD Centre strong point will always be that there are over one hundred FD's across the network, so we’ll frequently get emails flying around saying “Does anybody know about this or that software issue?” and asking each other advice on all sorts of trends. So by getting to know each other, the Thames Valley FD's effectively give each client the collective brainpower of over 100 FD's nationwide!

Ali

fuelled by www.Tinderblogs.com

Meet My FD Dream Team

I absolutely adore my team – I just love them. Most of them are hand picked by me, and as I get such a large number of highly qualified people applying to join the Thames Valley Financial Director Centre I can afford to be very particular about who comes on board.

I want my team to reflect our customer base out there so I’ve got all sorts of different personalities, all sorts of different skills and different types of experience built into the team. I like to ensure we have manufacturing experience, legal experience, software and I.T. experience and at the same time it's my responsibility to decide which FD best fits each particular company we work with and in doing that I need to take into account the personality of the business drivers and the sector skills required.

I put a high premium on recruiting people with great personality. So there’s always a danger that I’ll keep recruiting people like myself: loud, extrovert FD’s who are all very go getting. But as I’ve come to see that not everybody wants a big personality as an FD, I’ve created a great mixture and depth of personalities. We have got some very serious guys, we’ve got some very studious guys and some very casual guys.

I have one to ones with each team member on a regular basis, I love listening to them and working with them to bring success within their own customer base. It's great to sit down with them, one to one, to develop and review the work plans they have in place for each of their clients. We run six to eight month plans for what we are going to do and what value we are going to add for each client and I just love working on their challenges with them.

Isn’t it good to know that your business too can benefit directly by working with the Thames Valley FD dream team?

Ali

fuelled by www.Tinderblogs.com