Michelle spent four years with Arthur Andersen qualifying as a chartered accountant in 1995 before moving to KPMG for almost two years specialising in successful, entrepreneur clients.
She joined Rolls-Royce plc in 1998. She spent time in Business Assurance and also as part of significant change programmes.
She led the finance function supporting the Business Process Improvement initiatives which controlled £200m annual IT spend across Rolls-Royce, in an environment when the corporate “wish list” added up to £300m, providing control of budgets, monitoring of benefits and supporting the business case approval process.
In 2002 she moved to Glasgow to join the Project Team which delivered, on programme and on budget, a new £80m facility , which included the procurement and installation of £50m of new equipment plus the transition of almost 1000 people to the new location and implementation of new ways of working. In addition to ensuring the programme spend was controlled / monitored and business benefits delivered she also negotiated grant funding from the Scottish Executive.
In 2004 she returned to HQ to deploy Process Excellence across the finance community, providing a framework for a coordinated, value added approach across the Finance community globally. She created a community of process specialists, facilitated best practice sharing and developed a workshop to deliver finance process improvement across numerous finance functions.
In 2008 she joined the group of companies that includes DHP Family and Bildurn. In that first year the group turned over £12m with an EBITDA of £1.5m. Through a number of initiatives including finance function transformation, development of corporate strategies, senior management restructuring and development of reporting and monitoring of business KPIs the group grew to a sustainable £18m turnover and £3.7m EBITDA within 4 years. At the same time she was able to secure 3 funding renewals at the height of the financial crisis.
In 2014, with former colleagues, she established Woodhouse May and became UKCP-accredited with a Masters in Person-Centred and Experiential Psychotherapy from the Sherwood Institute in 2018.
Since then her client portfolio has been varied. It includes, amongst others, business partnering to several successful entrepreneurs with particular emphasis on strategy, business planning and successful delivery of those plans, a full finance director service to a furniture design company, advisor to a college audit committee, delivery of training on the leadership programme for a blue chip company, project management coaching including for an HR transformation programme and leadership / turnaround of a struggling ERP implementation as well as extensive one-to-one coaching.
All of Michelle’s work is typified by the mobilisation and engagement of teams, transfer of skills and belief in the people she works with.