The entrepreneurial FD
Monday, 26th November 2007 by Catherine Woods
Colin Glass didn’t have to give up his day job to satisfy his entrepreneurial spirit. He’s combined his passion for SMEs with a profession that brings in the cash – accountancy.
Twenty years ago the firm he founded – Leeds-based Winburn Glass Norfolk Chartered Accountants – started offering FD and other accountancy services to SMEs that couldn’t otherwise afford in-house support.
“We started our practice from scratch in 1975. We had to have a bit of an edge and I fancy myself as being a bit entrepreneurial so we decided to offer this model. It’s worked quite well. We’ve taken four companies from start up to AIM,” Glass says.
The model is this: the firm is prepared to “roll up” traditional time costs, and risk that they may never be recovered, but take a small equity stake in the business “as we believe we can add value”.
One of the small companies Glass is FD of is Yorkshire-based Go Sim, which produces international pre-paid SIM cards. “They needed to raise some funding and I specialise in raising funding and helping small companies develop,” Glass says.
The idea is for the companies to grow to a size where they can provide their own accountancy support in-house.
“Not too many firms have copied us because it’s high risk. Only a few deals come off,” Glass says. “You’re always lagging behind on the traditional time-cost basis.
“We would like to think we can recover those costs but it’s not always possible so we hope the small equity holding we have will produce a capital gain.”
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