About
Using the name of his family and that of a much loved department in France, Richard Francis founded Francis Vienne in late 2011. He qualified with Deloitte & Touche as an ACA in 1996 and moved to a client, Duracell. From there he quickly rose to increasingly senior levels, staying with consumer products until 2000, when he left Gillette to move to Novell Inc. With increasing responsibility at Novell and then later Interwoven Inc, he reached new heights when he was appointed Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Day Software, a listed Swiss group in 2008.
Day Software CFO
As a member of a new senior management team at Day, Richard played a key part in increasing Day’s agility in enabling the company to be responsive to both internal and external customer needs. Key projects that he oversaw were re-launching Investor Relations, streamlining the reporting process, restructuring the admin functions and being the leader in a cross-departmental project. In this project, he was tasked with improving quality in Research & Development, Customer Support and Customer Implementations. Day went from strength to strength, with annual revenue growth reaching over 70 per cent in a tough economic climate.
Acquisition by Adobe
Adobe Systems Inc acquired Day Software in October 2010. Richard was a key part of the acquisition process and took a lead in the negotiations as well as co-ordinating the due diligence effort on behalf of Day. Not an easy task when the company was also growing rapidly! He agreed to stay on for a year with Adobe after Day was acquired, to lead the integration effort from the Day side. As evidenced externally, the integration of Day into Adobe has been extremely successful. Richard also got involved with an internal Adobe project to improve back-office efficiency.
Beliefs & Vision
Richard believes passionately that the finance and administration (F&A) function of a business is there to help its customer-facing representatives to be successful. After all, without customers, there would be no F&A function! Richard is seen by many as a real generalist, as shown by the fact that many colleagues will seek his advice and assistance in a whole range of areas, whether it be revenue recognition, HR matters or general management issues.
Richard is at his best when working in an entrepreneurial environment; hence the reason for founding Francis Vienne. He wants to offer the expertise of himself and others to a select number of businesses that have the ability and desire to break out from where they are today and make a real difference to the customers they serve.
Qualifications
Richard Francis is FCA qualified and is a member of the Institute of Chartered Accounts in England & Wales (ICAEW) and can offer your business expertise in all areas of strategic financial problem solving. He is particularly experienced in the Software/IT industry and has a strong background in revenue recognition, Sarbanes-Oxley, US GAAP and the SIX Swiss listing regulatory environment.
For a free discussion of how Francis Vienne could help your business, contact Richard Francis now
