Work your way, together

We’re a hybrid business, which means you’ll have flexibility alongside time together with your team. In this role, you can expect 3 days a week in the office or on-site, helping you stay connected, collaborate and do your best work for our customers.

What the role requires of you

Leadership of your team, including direct line management of Finance Managers and coaching and development of the broader team

Primary outcomes of the team include:

• Production of weekly and monthly reporting
• Forecasting, budgeting and strategic planning
• Decision support, from tactical decisions up to large strategic projects, including financial appraisal
• Insight and analysis to better inform decision making
• Challenge and support to business functions and, where relevant, to third party suppliers
• Ensure the month-end is closed accurately, timely and in accordance with policies as set by Financial Reporting (P&L and balance sheet)

Partner directly (and indirectly via the team) the Exec and Dunelm Leadership Team members in the functions you support – acting as ‘critical friend’

• Direct ownership, leadership and presentation of regular or ad hoc outputs and meetings. E.g. Weekly Trade, Steering Groups for focus areas, acting as Finance Lead
• Identifying business opportunities or risks and influencing stakeholders to take action. Questioning the status quo and coming up with improvement ideas.
• Constantly re-review the prioritisation of your team’s workload, looking for better ways to do things and being brave in stopping activities.

Specifics for Trading Finance

• End to end ownership of sales, margin and stock from a finance partnering perspective, from planning through to performance
• Ownership of budgeting and forecasting cycles (specifically sales and margin planning, plus channel-based sales driver expectations like traffic, levers etc), across commercial categories and sales channels – ensuring alignment across target setting and wider business planning
• Ownership of weekly Trade content and trading story, helping the business to understand performance and areas of focus. Follow up of ad-hoc Trade actions that support diagnosis of business trading performance.
• Partnering of Exec and Leadership Team stakeholders to achieve targets and identify areas of opportunity/optimisation (through eventing, margin investment, clearance decisioning etc); specific critical challenge on strategic planning
• Reporting support; partnering where required to surface important content to aid decision making. Continuous review of existing reports to prevent inefficiency or duplication.
• Month end responsibility areas: ownership of sales, product margin and commercial gross margin adjustments (including freight and volume rebates)
• Management and prioritisation of Exec/DLT asks (capacity, nature of ask, importance of output to decision making)
• Development of team members through coaching, nature of task, and level of exposure
• Continuous improvement mindset embedded in the team

Essential Skills

• Proven line management experience, delivering through others
• Commercially minded, with a genuine drive to make a difference and support Dunelm to achieve its growth and profitability targets
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills, able to condense complex information into clear messages to gain understanding and buy-in
• A good relationship builder building trust with key stakeholders and able to influence
• Finance qualified, with broad finance experience and knowledge, able to represent the whole finance function with stakeholders
• Equally comfortable in the high level and directional as the detailed and accurate and able to flex approach based on the circumstances.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and changing priorities and able to lead a team through continuous re-prioritisation to ensure the best value outcomes are delivered

Behaviours

• Communicating – Making the complex easy to understand, influencing and engaging others to achieve support for decisions and actions
• Curiosity – A desire to truly understand the business operations and to question why things are done the way they are. Always probing beyond the first answer.
• Adapting – Having the courage to change direction to achieve outcomes. Creating a safe environment for the team to experiment and learn.
• Thinking Big – Using internal and external networks and knowledge to suggest and influence change
• Challenging – Being the voice of constructive dissent to help reach better outcomes; shape opinions and challenge thinking
• Making It Happen – Cutting through complexity to deliver agilely against the most important outcomes. Set clear roles, responsibilities and expectations with your team.