Paul Koumi

FCMA, Prince 2

Paul has been actively involved in delivering the financial message to non finance people for over twenty five years in his international career as senior finance manager for large companies and as a consultant / trainer to a variety of international organisations. Paul regularly works across The Middle East, UK and Europe.

Having studied Economics and Financial control at Lancaster University, Paul's early career took him into hard edge accounting in the manufacturing industry. The pull of the rapidly growing IT sector saw him taking a greater role in both the science and art of Management Accounting with a strong realisation that all the fine efforts of a finance team were wasted if no one understood how to use their end product. Breaking out of the traditional finance role, he embarked on a mission to educate those he dealt with and instituted a very welcome programme of training for the managerial classes at the UK's largest computer bureau and computer manufacturer.

Paul then realised his international career with a move to the Middle East as a financial controller for Saudi Catering. Following on from this he moved to Greece and held a high profile position as finance director of Digital, followed by Cyprus and a role as financial controller to Carlsberg and advisor to the islands most innovative entrepreneur. During this period Paul saw the challenges of presenting programmes where the common language was English, but at different levels of competence and used this as an opportunity to develop the non verbal skills in getting a message across to a varied audience. At a time when the use of NLP was infrequent it was refreshing for him to see the major benefits of his NLP background and that the application of even simple techniques could bring amazing results.

Paul then returned to the UK, to the City of London, his specialty then in implementing financial systems and consolidating processes. This would not have succeeded without effective communication to those affected and he designed and delivered many seminars and workshops to 'break into' the fixed mindsets of large city institutions steeped in history and tradition and already reeling from whirlwinds of change in their operating environment.

Paul then moved into outsourcing, working with one of the worlds largest outsourcing companies: CSC. Paul was engaged as a consultant in smoothing the potentially turbulent transition of the UK's largest outsourcing deal and it was necessary to engage the transitioned employees and the other parties in regular and trusted contact to enable this. Paul implemented a series of low key workshops to diffuse tensions and enable the resolution process.

The outsourcing world occupied most of Paul's time until 1998 when from reputation, he was called back to systems work again in the city of London and then the; to him; unchartered waters of investment banking in Frankfurt. The principal hurdle he saw there was the German work culture to which he had little exposure and the language barrier where it was a struggle to maintain even the basic politeness required to be accepted. With some perseverance Paul suppressed his tendency to lapse into incomprehensible English humour and set about developing and delivering training programmes for the bank's staff on comparative accounting principles across cultures and in utilising the features that his team had developed to improve the bank's financial systems.

Paul now runs a Midlands based accountancy and training practice with a varied client base. The focus of the practice is on Management Accountancy being a tool for business owners to use with appropriate assistance rather than on the purely compliance nature of some practices. He undertakes consultancy projects on business performance improvement and is a qualified Prince 2 practitioner in project management.

He regularly delivers talks to qualified accountants on developing their careers and on the pitfalls of buying businesses and is a member of CIMA's Speakers Academy.

Specialist areas:

• Finance for non finance managers
• Buying and selling businesses
• Due diligence process
• Systems implementation
• Stand up accounting
• Business structures
• Business performance
• Business development
• Credit control
• Tax compliance
• Financial modelling

A small sample of Paul's clients include:

Twyfords - Manufacturing , Baric (ICL & Barclays Bank) - IT, ICL (Now Fujitsu) - IT, Saudi Catering (Abela group) - Industrial catering, Cyprus Carlsberg - Brewery and distribution, Photos Photiades Group - Tourism, development, distribution, Minet (Aon) - Insurance Focus DIY - Retail, CSC - Outsourcing, Vertex - Outsourcing, Northgate Systems - Outsourcing Swiss Re - Insurance Commerzbank - Investment Banking,CIMA Courses and Conferences,Abtek (Eur) - Middle Eastern consultancy.