Jobs in Essendine

Senior Commercial Finance Business Partner

Location: Peterborough
Reporting to: CFO
Type: Full-time
Progression: Head of Commercial Finance → Commercial Finance Director

About Trade Mastermind

Trade Mastermind is one of the UK's fastest-growing business education and funding platforms for trades and home improvement businesses. We help thousands of business owners scale their companies through industry-leading training, events, and finance solutions.

We're looking for a Senior Commercial Finance Business Partner to become a key driver of growth across the organisation. Reporting directly to the CFO and working closely with the board, this is a highly influential role with a clear progression pathway to Commercial Finance Director.

This is not a traditional finance position focused solely on reporting and compliance. It's a commercial role designed to improve performance, challenge thinking, drive better decisions, and create measurable impact across every department in the business.

The Role

As Senior Commercial Finance Business Partner, you will work directly with leaders across Sales, Events, Customer Accounts, and Marketing. Your role will be to understand how each area operates, uncover opportunities for improvement, challenge assumptions, and provide actionable recommendations that improve performance.

Rather than simply reporting numbers, you'll immerse yourself in the operational side of the business, understanding the drivers behind every key metric and helping department leaders make better decisions. You'll translate data into clear commercial actions, ensuring every team has the insight required to improve revenue, margins, customer outcomes, and efficiency.

You will also play a central role in developing Trade Mastermind's finance function, building scalable reporting systems, improving automation, mentoring junior team members, and supporting strategic growth initiatives including acquisitions.

The successful candidate will act as the bridge between finance, operations, and strategy, helping transform data into commercially valuable decisions.

Key Responsibilities

You will partner closely with department heads across Telesales, Event Sales, Upsells, Customer Accounts, and Marketing, embedding yourself within each function to understand processes, challenges, and growth opportunities. By attending team meetings and engaging directly with operational leaders, you'll gain a deep understanding of what drives success and where improvements can be made.

A key part of the role will involve providing weekly commercial insights and practical recommendations that improve performance. You'll challenge departments constructively, helping them enhance profitability, increase revenue, improve operational efficiency, and optimise resource allocation. You will also lead pricing reviews, commission structures, incentive schemes, and promotional modelling to maximise commercial outcomes.

From an analytical perspective, you'll conduct detailed reviews of sales funnels, conversion rates, revenue streams, margins, and customer cohorts. You'll build and maintain sophisticated models around customer lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, marketing return on investment, payback periods, forecasting, and scenario planning. You will also evaluate event performance by assessing profitability and breakeven points to ensure maximum commercial effectiveness.

The role requires a highly data-driven approach. You'll work directly with large datasets, writing and running SQL queries to investigate performance and identify trends. You'll be responsible for streamlining business processes, automating reporting workflows, improving connectivity between systems such as Xero, CRM platforms, and business intelligence tools, and moving the organisation towards self-service reporting and dashboarding. Identifying bottlenecks and redesigning inefficient processes will be a key part of your remit.

You will own the production of weekly and monthly board packs, developing KPI frameworks and dashboards that provide clear visibility across the business. You'll lead budgeting and forecasting processes, deliver insightful variance analysis, and support annual planning cycles by providing robust financial and commercial insight.

As the business continues to grow, you'll support major strategic initiatives through the preparation of business cases, investment appraisals, sensitivity analyses, and financial models. You'll play a leading role in evaluating new products, events, hires, and expansion opportunities, while also supporting merger and acquisition activity through financial analysis, due diligence, modelling, and post-acquisition integration planning. Identifying emerging risks and opportunities before they impact performance will be a core expectation.

Beyond the technical and analytical responsibilities, you will help shape the future of commercial finance within Trade Mastermind. You'll mentor junior finance professionals, establish best practices, influence senior stakeholders, and ensure department leaders remain accountable for their performance and results.

What Success Looks Like

Success in this role means becoming a trusted adviser to business leaders who actively seek your insight before making major decisions. Your recommendations will lead directly to measurable improvements in performance across multiple departments. Clear KPI visibility will exist throughout the organisation, supported by effective dashboards and reporting systems.

Manual processes will be replaced by scalable automation, improving efficiency and reducing administrative workload. Revenue growth, margin expansion, and operational improvements will be clearly linked to your contribution. Most importantly, finance will be recognised across the business as a proactive driver of growth and performance rather than simply a function that reports historical results.

Ideal Background

We're looking for a qualified accountant (ACA, ACCA or CIMA) with a strong track record of successful commercial business partnering. You will have demonstrated your ability to improve business performance by challenging stakeholders, influencing decision-making, and implementing practical improvements that deliver results.

You should possess advanced financial modelling capabilities and be highly proficient in Excel or Google Sheets. Strong SQL skills are essential, enabling you to interrogate data independently and uncover actionable insights. Experience building automation solutions, streamlining business processes, and implementing reporting improvements is highly desirable.

You will be comfortable operating at a senior level, presenting complex information to executives and board members in a straightforward and commercially focused manner. Experience mentoring or developing junior finance professionals is also important.

Additional experience within SaaS, business education, events, subscriptions, or high-volume sales environments would be advantageous, as would familiarity with CRM platforms such as HubSpot, Ontraport, or Salesforce. Exposure to business intelligence tools including Power BI or Looker and involvement in M&A or corporate development activities would also be beneficial.

Personality Fit

We're seeking someone who thinks like an owner rather than a scorekeeper. You'll be ambitious, commercially minded, and motivated by the opportunity to progress into a Commercial Finance Director role.

You should thrive in a fast-paced environment, enjoy solving complex business problems, and be comfortable getting into operational detail when required. Strong communication skills are essential, with the ability to explain financial concepts in simple, practical language that drives action.

The ideal candidate is proactive, resilient, hands-on, and continually looking for ways to improve performance. You'll enjoy working closely with operational teams, challenging ideas constructively, and helping others achieve better results.

If you prefer focusing on month-end journals rather than driving commercial performance and business growth, this role is unlikely to be the right fit.

What You'll Get

In return, you'll receive direct exposure to board-level decision-making, strategy development, and acquisition activity in one of the UK's fastest-growing businesses. You'll have genuine ownership, influence, and visibility from day one, alongside a clear pathway towards becoming Commercial Finance Director.

This is an opportunity to join a fast-paced, entrepreneurial environment where your work will directly impact business performance and growth. You'll receive a competitive salary, performance-related bonus, and significant long-term career progression opportunities