Head of Finance - UK&I, Nordics & Netherlands

Job Introduction

The world we live in is evolving quickly, becoming more and more digital, more demand driven by consumers and more competitive in the energy market. In this competitive world, our clients’ challenge us to constantly bring innovation and value to their sites. Key to the success of this, is robust and commercially focused finance leadership. Our vision is to become our clients’ partner to contribute, through our unique range of services, to the creation of services that improve the quality of life of our consumers worldwide.

As Head of Finance for the U.K. & Ireland, Nordics and Netherlands, you will drive performance through financial leadership and partnership with our business. In addition, the successful candidate will contribute to the leadership teams of each respective region (UK&I) and country (Netherlands and Nordics) and help leverage segment, regional and country expertise to drive positive results across the business.

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Role Responsibility

• Providing strong commercial expertise, financial engineering and contractual acumen to provide financial support to sales and commercial processes, as well as contributing to the negotiation of complex deals, and ensuring contractual protections
• Providing contract performance analysis and supporting action plans to drive execution and performance including negotiation of contract renewals & claim negotiations
• Providing challenge and playing a role as custodian of the group’s assets and resources
• Leading the regional and country finance teams, managing and coaching team members in their growth and performance as well as ensuring a visible and measurable contribution to the profitability of the portfolio of contracts
• Supporting the Global SVP of Finance in implementing key global initiatives at regional and country level to ensure execution and delivery of segment performance objectives
• Ensuring financial discipline in investment decisions, application of key right terms and group delegation of authorities (DOA); building business cases for segment OPEX and CAPEX commercial investments; using ROI and financial monitoring of mobilisations and new contracts to drive learnings
• Ensuring all group, regional and country finance policies, processes and procedures are known, understood and consistently applied in the segment to support the achievement of the group’s financial objectives; supporting the delivery of the group finance’s mission
• Contributing to the development and delivery of each region and country’s segment strategy as a member of the region/country segment executive committees; including, forecasts and financial trajectories and consequent priorities
• Partnering with regional/country FP&A teams to provide relevant analytics forecasts variance analyses
• Undertaking supplementary financial analyses to develop region and country segment strategy, ambition and performance

The Ideal Candidate

• Strong financial and commercial acumen, as well as contractual/risk management discipline
• Global mindset with international experience and/or exposure advantageous
• Results driven and willing to challenge as part of the leadership team and not just finance leader
• Ability to work with commercial and operational teams in building solutions
• Excellent organizational skills and ability to respect deadlines
• Flexible and pragmatic, able to deal with complexity
• Strong interpersonal, communication and presentation skills, strong partnering capabilities with senior management
• Good listening, negotiation and influencing skills
• Strong culture of team support/teamwork and business advancement (in areas of, solution finding, or development-oriented risk management), and experience in managing a team
• Experience in change management
• Fluency in English required, any other language is an advantage

Package Description

Highly competitive compensation plan including:

• attractive base salary
• bonus
• car allowance
• pension
• flexible benefit fund

About the Company

In the UK and Ireland, Sodexo employs some 36,000 employees to deliver integrated facilities management services to clients at over 2,000 locations in the energy, corporate, healthcare, education, leisure, defence and justice sectors. With an annual turnover of over £1bn, we provide everything from catering, cleaning and reception to security, laboratory and grounds maintenance services, enabling our clients to focus on their core business.

At Sodexo we are committed to a leading role in promoting equality opportunities and valuing diversity and inclusion. We seek to create a work environment based on mutual respect for all individuals, building a culture that appreciates and values the experiences and skills brought by each person to benefit our organisation and work hard to ensure that all people, whatever their race, colour, sex, gender identity  disability, nationality, national or ethnic origin, religion or belief, marital/partnership or family status, sexual orientation, age, social class, educational background, employment status, working pattern, are welcome to and included within our organisation.

We’re a Disability Confident Leader employer. We’re committed to changing attitudes towards disability, and making sure disabled people have the chance to fulfil their aspirations.

We are building on our support to the Armed Forces community through the development of specific pathways within our recruitment process to  support ex-forces personnel and reservists, those applying for jobs with us who meet the ideal candidate criteria for the role advertised are guaranteed to progress to the selection process.