Mike Giles – Group Marketing Director

Having started his career as a food retail area manager Mike moved into franchising where he became the Sales and Marketing Director for the UK’s fastest ever growing franchise, thebestof, under the umbrella of the N5 Group.

Over a 3 year period we grew networks of over 1500 franchisees and Mike travelled regularly to the US to collaborate with internet marketers Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer who helped us to design the marketing strategy for our UK business.

Mike joined the FD Centre in late 2010 to help redesign the marketing infrastructure to assist our FD Team throughout the UK with client acquisition.

Sara Daw is Group CEO of The Liberti Group and The CFO Centre Group, is included in the E2E Female 100 Track in association with The Independent. 

Operating in 17 countries Liberti is the global number one provider of fractional and part-time C-suite portfolio professionals to entrepreneurial, owner-managed, mid-tier businesses, and larger organisations. 

Sara is passionate about designing the future of work for C-suite professionals and the organisations they serve. She has helped thousands worldwide build successful team-based portfolio careers in the access economy. Sara has developed the “Strategy and Leadership as Service” framework which provides the roadmap for experienced C-level talent to live and work differently.

Sara’s first book, Executive Freedom, which she co-authored with Colin Mills, shares how top-level C-suite talent can gain freedom, flexibility, and control over their lives by becoming self-employed and building a portfolio of clients to work with.

In her latest book Strategy and Leadership as Service: How the Access Economy Meets the C-Suite, Sara takes her work further and describes how this way of living and working changes the lives of business leaders and C-suite professionals forever.

Sara is a graduate in Chemistry from Oxford University, a Chartered Accountant, holds an MBA from The London Business School, and a Mastère Spécialisé® in Consulting and Coaching for Change, run jointly by Oxford University (Saïd Business School) and HEC Business School in Paris. Within industry, Sara’s commercial experience includes retail, banking, professional services, pharmaceuticals, and not-for-profit.

Colin Mills is the Founder and Chairman of Liberti, and has over 20 years of financial director experience in UK, USA and European businesses with turnovers of £2 million to £500 million. A member of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants and Institute Prize Winner, Colin also has an MBA from Henley. His industry experience covers construction, FMCG, retail, food, IT, contracting services, building products, paper, printing and property development. Before setting up the FD Centre in 2001, Colin worked for major organisations like the Mars Group (Global US owned), Benders (UK privately owned FMCG/ paper products group), The Scholes Group plc (now part of Hanson Industries), Clifford Foods plc (now part of Unigate), and The Bradley Group (now part of Aggregate Industries), in both FD and CEO roles.