From Standing Start to Immediate Scale
The Stakes: Rising from the Ashes as a Phoenix, Without Catching Fire
In February 2024, Groove Pillows, the successor brand to EasySleeper, was bought from administration and began trading again. Despite having a high-performing product, the business had become unviable due to increasingly uncontrollable overtrading.
The brand was bought back by one of the original founders with a singular objective: Start again, but do it right. This wasn't just a save, it was a standing start requiring a complete re-engineering of the business to ensure the new entity didn't inherit the friction of the old one.
As the assets of the former brand sat quietly gaining in SEO and Domain Authority, once the switch was flipped a Strategic Diagnostic was needed at speed, identifying:
Finance Ground-Zero: There were few finance processes, complicated multi-currency transactions, and systems weren’t properly configured resulting in VAT errors.
The Tax Trap: The new brand was registered in the US with international operations in UK and China, all with competing tax obligations and complex compliance.
Supply Chain Vulnerability: A deal to buy stock from the previous 3PL had a tense relationship, mishandled records, and had heaps of unreconciled data.
Unknown Unknowns: The blind spots around finance were creating significant risk that agile decisions were unknowingly being made at the expense of long-term consequences.
The Intervention: Building Foundations to Withstand Instant Velocity
Audeo Fortis was engaged to set-up the finance function from scratch whilst simultaneously building a finance transformation plan and risk mitigation strategy:
Financial Architecture (The Money Lever): We built a clean, multi-currency financial structure designed for global eCommerce, implementing real-time management information (MI) to provide total visibility on margins and performance KPIs.
Supply Chain Precision (The Operator Shift): We redesigned the supply chain workflows to align to the finance function so that critical impacting data was fed into forecasts, and reconciled the historic data to provide visibility on Landed COGs and cash flow.
Compliance as Value Add (The AF Approach): We created SOPs and essential operational databases to ensure worldwide tax compliance and kicked off an international tax project with a partner firm to review risks and opportunities baked-in the corporate structure.
Strategic Intent (The Knowledge Strategy): We shared expertise with management and the team on best-in-class approach for board packs, building strategic and financial plans,
The Results: Frictionless Path to Scale-Level Growth and Risk Elimination
Starting from a position of data-led precision set the tone that agile scaling is more achievable if it’s built on a rock solid foundations of essential processes and compliance:
Elite Performance: 29.7% growth from Y1 to Y2, over $1m in net assets and $0.5m in net cash in just 24 months.
Empowered Team: Continuous improvement to processes and a reduction in the month-end tasks from 3.5 days to 1 day per month.
Slick Data: By aligning operational and finance processes, agility and responsiveness has been made possible through high-quality data sets providing instant feedback for course correction.
Future-proofed: Management fully informed on weighing up risk and opportunity and having a tool-kit to understand and analyse the financial impact of strategic decision making and viability of growth plans.
“With Audeo Fortis by my side I have the confidence to make large changes and dare to push my own technical boundaries knowing I have unconditional support and professional consultation along the way.”
— Nicola Caswell-Thorp, Founder of The CV Righter