One accountable team
Finance, strategy and marketing decisions are made together. Growth plans arrive costed; budgets arrive with commercial intent behind them.
Management · Accountancy · Marketing
Considered counsel for companies that intend to lead.
Vader Barclay Consulting brings financial control, business strategy and commercial marketing into one accountable team — so your plan, your numbers and your market finally point in the same direction.
Most businesses buy advice in pieces. Nobody owns the arithmetic between them.
An accountant closes the year. An agency spends the budget. A consultant writes a plan. Vader Barclay exists to close that gap — one engagement lead, accountable for whether the three add up.
Senior people on your work
The advisers who scope your engagement are the advisers who deliver it. No pitch team, no handover to someone you have never met.
Measured in your P&L
Every engagement carries agreed commercial measures, reported monthly. Progress is something you can read in the management accounts.
Implementation, not paperwork
We stay through delivery. A strategy that was never executed is a cost, not an asset — so we work alongside your team until it lands.
Where we usually start
Most clients arrive saying one of four things.
If one of these sounds like your last board meeting, the discipline that answers it is linked beneath. It is usually the right place to begin.
We are growing, but I cannot tell you which growth is profitable.
Revenue is up and margin is not. The management accounts arrive too late to act on, and they never quite reconcile with the marketing report.
Financial ManagementWe have a plan. It did not survive contact with a busy quarter.
The strategy exists as a document. Nobody owns the next ninety days, and the operating rhythm of the business never actually changed.
Strategy & ExecutionWe are spending on marketing and cannot defend the number.
Channels multiply, agencies report activity, and nobody can state acquisition cost against lifetime value with a straight face.
Strategic MarketingSomeone has approached us and we are not ready to be looked at.
An investor, a buyer or a lender is interested. The numbers would not survive a fortnight of diligence in their current state.
Financial Guidance
The six disciplines
Engage one. Or the whole practice.
Select a discipline to see what the work covers and what you hold at the end of it. Most relationships begin with a two-week diagnostic and expand from there.
Financial Management
Bring order and foresight to the numbers. We build the management reporting, cash-flow forecasting and financial controls that let you make decisions early rather than explain them late.
- Monthly management accounts
- 13-week rolling cash forecast
- Budgeting & reforecasting
- Board reporting packs
- KPI frameworks
- Financial controls
Business Planning, Strategy & Execution
Decide where the business is going and how it will get there. We pressure-test the operating model, size the opportunities honestly, and convert the plan into a delivery cadence your team can actually hold.
- Growth strategy
- Operating model review
- Market entry
- Business planning
- 90-day execution cycles
- Board advisory
Strategic Marketing
Marketing judged on contribution, not impressions. We fix positioning first, then build the demand engine around unit economics you can defend to a board or an investor.
- Positioning & messaging
- Brand architecture
- Demand generation
- Channel & budget plan
- CAC and lifetime value
- Campaign governance
eCommerce & Digital Commerce
From platform choice to contribution margin. We design commerce operations that convert, retain and scale — and we identify which of those three is actually costing you money.
- Platform selection
- Conversion programme
- Marketplace strategy
- Retention & subscription
- Fulfilment economics
- Analytics & attribution
Financial Guidance & Capital
Be ready before the conversation starts. We prepare the model, the narrative and the data room so that funding, refinancing or an exit is run on your timetable rather than someone else’s.
- Funding readiness
- Three-statement modelling
- Investor materials
- Valuation support
- Due-diligence preparation
- Exit planning
Performance & Transformation
Protect margin while you grow. We find the cost, process and systems drag that quietly caps profitability, then remove it — with interim leadership where a role needs holding while you hire.
- Cost optimisation
- Process redesign
- Automation
- Systems integration
- Interim leadership
- Change management
Method
Four stages, published in advance.
You will know what happens, who is doing it and what you receive at each stage before anything is signed. No discovery phase that quietly becomes the engagement.
Diagnose
A structured review of your financial position, market standing and operating model, drawing on your records and interviews with the people who run the business.
- Output
- Written findings
- Duration
- 2 weeks
Design
A prioritised plan with named owners, sequenced timelines and a financial case for each move — so the board approves on evidence rather than optimism.
- Output
- Costed plan
- Duration
- 2–4 weeks
Deploy
We work alongside your team through implementation, holding the cadence, unblocking decisions and absorbing the work your people have no capacity for.
- Output
- 90-day cycles
- Duration
- Ongoing
Drive
Monthly reporting against the agreed measures, with the plan adjusted to what the data actually shows rather than what it originally assumed.
- Output
- Monthly review
- Duration
- Ongoing
Client perspective
They were the first advisers who asked to see the management accounts and the marketing plan in the same meeting. Within two quarters we could finally tell which growth was worth having.”
Sectors
Where our advice tends to earn its keep.
We are generalists by discipline and specialists by situation — businesses at the point where instinct alone has stopped being enough.
- Founder-led SMEsScaling past instinct
- Professional servicesUtilisation & pricing
- eCommerce & consumer brandsContribution margin
- Family businessesSuccession & governance
- Manufacturing & distributionCost & capacity
- Property & constructionProject economics
- Technology scale-upsUnit economics
- Private-equity portfoliosValue creation plans
Journal
Written for owners, not for other consultants.
Short, practical pieces drawn from live engagements.
The management pack that actually gets read
Most board packs report the past accurately and the future not at all. Six changes that turn monthly reporting into a decision-making tool.
Your value proposition is a pricing decision
Why positioning work that never touches the P&L rarely survives a budget review — and how to write one that does.
Is your website data telling you the truth?
A short analytics audit checklist. If three of these are wrong, every acquisition decision you made this year rested on bad numbers.
Before you get in touch.
Most of our clients turn over between £1m and £50m, or are approaching that range quickly. Below that, a diagnostic and a focused piece of finance or marketing work is usually the right scope. Above it, we typically work alongside an existing finance function rather than replacing it.
Diagnostics are a fixed fee agreed before we start. Ongoing advisory is a monthly retainer scoped to an agreed set of deliverables and reporting. Project work is quoted as a fixed price against a written scope. We do not bill in unexplained hourly increments.
No. Your accountant handles compliance, statutory accounts and tax. We handle the management information, forecasting and commercial decisions that sit on top of it. We work with your existing practice and are happy to sit in the same meetings.
An introductory consultation is normally arranged within a few working days. Diagnostics usually begin within two to three weeks of scope agreement, depending on the availability of your financial records and the people we need to speak to.
Both. Diagnostic interviews and delivery workshops are markedly better in person, so we come to you for those. Reporting, modelling and monthly reviews run just as well remotely, which keeps costs down and pace up.
That is where most of the value is, so it is where we stay. We work through implementation with your team and report monthly against the measures agreed at the outset. Retainers can be paused or ended with a month’s notice — the relationship should continue because it is working, not because of a contract.
Start the conversation
Tell us what is actually holding the business back.
An introductory consultation is a straightforward conversation about your position and your priorities. Forty-five minutes with a senior adviser. No charge, no proposal deck, and no obligation to go further.