Date: Thursday 25th April 2024
Time: 15:00 - 15:45
Venue: Virtual (Zoom)
We are delighted to invite you to the next in our series of Contemporary FD Bitesized webinars, jointly hosted with our strategic partners Evelyn Partners. These are designed to supplement our live annual Contemporary FD Summit, scheduled for September 2024, where the CFOs and FDs of the country's most exciting, innovative and ambitious companies come together to share ideas.
For this session Sarah Hunt, CEO and founder of EquityFD will be in conversation with Edwina Surtees.
Edwina is CFO of Trouva. As a marketplace, it is essentially a complex technology platform enabling customers from around the world to discover and buy products from hundreds of unique, independent Boutiques.
Edwina’s time there has been, to put it mildly, pretty wild but immensely rewarding. It has required striking flexibility with her roles covering finance, legal, people, culture, performance marketing, logistics and customer operations. She started with a small team and has had to build it on the run. She was Head of Business Operations then the Finance Director, then CFO. She has had to become much more technical herself as her roles have involved working closely with product and data teams.
The ownership structure of the company has (due to no fault of Trouva itself) been the subject of considerable change, initially backed by venture capital firms with funding rounds and debt raises being the key focus in the first few years.
Then as part of the leadership team, Edwina sold it to Made which seemed like a strong fit but Made, alas, went into administration within 6 months of acquisition, necessitating Edwina and the COO to find a new owner.
She successfully sold Trouva to Restore as majority owners (‘it’s not every year you end up selling the same business twice’), but with additional Angel/VC fundraising on the horizon.
For customers and the boutiques, mercifully, much of this has been invisible but it had an impact on the team and taught Edwina a lot about effective communication and team management at times of crisis.
There was also maternity leave thrown in and Brexit, COVID-19 and the cost-of-living crisis created a few complications too.
All in all this will be a lively 45 minutes!
We will also be joined by an Evelyn Partners representative who will be sharing some up to date insight from their dynamic client base.
The style of these webinars is conversational sharing knowledge and advice with our networks.
We hope you can join us for what will be an energetic, informative session with time for questions at the end. If you are able to join, please register via the button below. This will take you to an Evelyn Partners webpage.