Taking the Long view: New financial services expertise for S&W’s consulting team

Sophie Long is S&W’s newest Partner and its Financial Services Leader in the consulting team. With over 20 years’ experience in the sector, she joins S&W from regulatory consultancy Thistle Initiatives. As she explains, now more than ever in their growth journeys, businesses need advice that goes the distance.  

I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit. I started a personal training business at eighteen before moving into recruitment, focused on investment banking. There, I looked after large-scale change and transformation programmes and developed several large accounts before joining Thistle. I was one of its first employees, joining as Sales Director and becoming Group Managing Director in 2021. Together with the Founder, we grew the group ambitiously over 12 years and took investment from Copper Street Capital in 2022, before I took over as Group CEO in April 2023.  

It made a huge difference. We had to rapidly professionalise operations, focusing on our people, processes and data strategies. We had to clearly set out our direction as a business and stick to the strategy. Previously, everything was very spontaneous. With PE investment, we needed a much more structured, formalised approach, but still with a relentless focus on creating value and without dampening the entrepreneurial drive that helped grow the business.  

For businesses looking for private equity investment, data is a critical issue. It’s among the biggest pain points for transactions. If you can’t evidence accurate financial, sales, commercial and people data and use it to articulate the business case for investment, you will knock multiples off your valuation. One lesson I learned from overseeing rapid growth is the importance of data and how you can grow your business with good data and systems.  

You don't want overkill in the back office at the cost of growing the business, however. It’s about value creation, being sensible and proportionate, and focusing on what made the business great in the first place. 

Good advice helps, and that comes with experience. Like a lot of Partners at S&W, I’ve sat in the CEO’s seat; I’ve helped grow a business; I’ve worked with private equity investment. We have former CEOs, CFOs and Financial Directors across sectors, so we understand the challenges and the commercial realities these businesses operate under.  

At the same time, as external advisors, we see the whole of the market, what other businesses in the sector are struggling with, and what strategies work. We can a take a broader view  and are able to provide appropriate benchmarks.   

The other area where S&W is particularly strong is its ability to support businesses through their growth journey. In practice, that means we can support a founder looking to exit with everything from personal tax to structuring and share schemes or a large corporate looking to expand internationally or undertake a large-scale transformation. Yet we are also flexible enough to meet a range of needs. Transformation doesn't have to be a huge, multi-year project; our clients also work with us on tactical wins that can make a significant impact in their business. 

Increasingly. The financial services sector and, more recently, the fintech sector are great British success stories, and there’s increasingly little distinction between them. Who isn’t onboarding their clients electronically and offering them digital services now?  

The government’s been keen to promote and support the fintech sector and the industry’s digitisation, but that tech enablement increasingly means they can be based anywhere. There’s a lot of concern in the industry over the upcoming Budget, the economy and the competitiveness of the UK. Many financial services businesses and the sector’s people are looking internationally either for growth or as a base.   

With S&W, I’m able to offer them support wherever their journey takes them.