Galeta
Group Finance Director
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Group Finance Director
Galeta Group, Farringdon
Galeta exists to become the best loved wholesale bakery in the UK.
We are a good way down that road. We supply more than 1,500 of the country's best cafés, restaurants, hotels and cultural institutions, and our vans are out before most of London is awake. The business started as a market stall fifteen years ago. It is now a group. Galeta and Bread Bread are the bakeries, Joe Blakes is the coffee and food group with sites across London, and a head office in Farringdon holds it together. We have passed a £20m run rate and we intend to build something a great deal bigger.
I am looking for a Group Finance Director to own finance across the whole of it.
The Role
You will sit at the top table with me and the Chief Operating Officer. Between us we will decide how this group grows, what it invests in, what it buys, what it charges and where it stops. Nothing of consequence will happen here without your number in the room first.
That is the point of the role. Finance in most businesses reports on what happened. Here it shapes what happens next. Before we open a site, buy a business, set a price, add a shift or sign a lease, we will want to know what it does to the margin, the cash and the value of the group, and we will want to hear it from you with conviction, before the decision rather than after it.
I will be honest about where we are. Finance has kept up with a fast growing bakery. It now needs to get in front of a group. We have real scale, a strong team and more data than we have ever had. What we do not yet have is one trusted view of where we make money and where we lose it, by business, brand, customer, product, channel and site, and a plan and cash forecast that the whole leadership team runs against. You will build that and you will own it.
The Work
The whole of finance, across the bakeries, the retail group, head office and anything we acquire. Financial control, reporting, planning, cash, tax, treasury, banking, commercial analysis, systems, governance and the team itself.
Some of that is the discipline of a well run finance function. Clean month ends. Consolidated management accounts that land on time and that people trust. A group budget, rolling forecast and cash flow model that get used rather than filed. Audit and year end without drama. Controls that hold without slowing down a business that runs on speed.
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Most of it is commercial. We are a high volume, low margin business and the money is made or lost in small numbers repeated thousands of times a day. Labour as a percentage of revenue. Yield and waste on the bakery floor. The price of butter. The terms we give a customer and whether they pay to them. The transfer price between the bakeries and the sales company. Which accounts, products and routes make money and which only look like they do. You will bring those numbers into the light and use them to change how the business behaves, sitting with Production, Operations, Sales and Retail rather than sending them a report.
Then there is growth. We will buy businesses. You will value them, run the diligence, structure the funding, get the deals done and then hold what we bought to the case we bought it on. You will own the banking relationships and our funding headroom, and if we change the capital structure of the group you will lead it.
What Good Looks Like
By the end of your first six months I want to be able to look at one set of numbers and know exactly where the group stands. I want pricing, labour, purchasing and investment decisions made on evidence, and made faster because the evidence is there. I want cash tightly held, controls that work, and a finance team, a systems roadmap and an automation programme designed for a business twice this size. And I want you to have changed my mind on something important because you had the numbers and I didn't.
Who You Are
You are a qualified accountant, ACA, ACCA or CIMA, who has led a substantial finance function and wants to carry the whole weight of one. You may be a Finance Director already, or a Group Financial Controller or Head of Finance ready for the step up. What matters is that you have done the real work. Multi entity, multi site, operationally complicated businesses. Budgets, forecasts and cash. Banks and funders. Acquisitions, diligence and the unglamorous months after completion. Systems that got fixed rather than tolerated.
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You are commercial before you are anything else. You care about accurate numbers and tight controls, and you understand they exist so that the business makes better decisions, not so that finance has something to defend. You can hold your own in a boardroom and on a bakery floor at five in the morning, and you speak plain English in both.
You are direct. You establish the facts, explain the trade offs and say what you think we should do, and you will tell me and the COO when we are wrong and show us why. You are calm when the numbers are bad. You build structure without bureaucracy. You carry accountability without needing to be asked.
Experience in food manufacturing, wholesale, retail or hospitality will help a great deal, as will time inside a founder led business that was growing quickly and growing up at the same time.
The Pace
I want to be clear about the pace. This is a full on sprint. The group is growing fast and the people running it are always on, and you will be expected to be the same. Some of the work will happen out of hours. Calls will sometimes come late at night. Weekends will sometimes be spent fixing a problem with the other senior people in the business, because that is how high growth works. If you want a role that ends at six, this is not it.
How We Work
This is a full time role based in our Farringdon office five days a week, with regular time in our London bakeries. It is not hybrid and it is not remote. We are a bakery. We are in the building. You report to me. You lead the group finance team and you own its structure, capability and performance.
The package includes a highly competitive salary, performance related bonus and the future potential for equity in the group, alongside private healthcare, a company pension and staff discount.
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