Founders who’ve built a successful business often hit a point where basic accounting and historical reporting stop being enough. They need real cash-flow visibility, forecasting, and a finance function that can scale with them, not just keep pace after the fact. Pardon builds that structure, turning finance into a strategic partner rather than a reporting exercise.

He’s a Fractional CFO based in Cape Town with 15 to 20 years of experience across South Africa, Southern Africa, the UK, Europe and the US, having worked across high-growth technology startups, non-profit and membership organisations, green building and sustainability businesses, and property and infrastructure. His core expertise spans financial strategy and commercial decision support, cash flow management and financial control, fundraising and investor readiness, finance function build and transformation, and group finance across international operations and governance.

He played a key role in a £10 million Series A fundraise for a high-growth technology startup, contributing to the financial due diligence process and working closely with external advisors, investors and the leadership team to get the business raise-ready. Alongside that, he built and strengthened the financial structures the company needed to support its growth: financial controls, group reporting, cash-flow management, budgeting and forecasting, and the financial requirements of international subsidiaries. It wasn’t a matter of managing an existing finance function. He was building it from the ground up while the business scaled internationally and raised institutional capital.

Pardon works best with founders who are ambitious but recognise that strong financial management is what makes ambition sustainable. He doesn’t need leadership to be financially sophisticated, just open to being challenged by what the numbers actually show.