We work alongside CFOs to deliver their toughest priorities.
Crown Business Partners is an advisory practice for public sector finance teams. We're brought in when a challenge is too pressing, too political, or too specialist to wait for a standard hire — and we leave the team stronger than we found it.
Sound familiar?
Challenging audit qualifications causing reputational damage. Scaling a new department or function. A Treasury submission that needs to be credible, not just complete. A transformation programme that's stalled and everyone knows it. A finance leader who's just left, mid-crisis.
Focused advisory that delivers impact on your most pressing challenges
Each engagement is scoped around a specific outcome a finance team needs to reach — not a generic remit.
Interim leadership cover
Stepping into a CFO or senior finance void at short notice, keeping decisions, governance and stakeholder relationships moving.
Finance function scale-up
Building a finance team from the ground up — structure, hiring, controls and ways of working that hold under scrutiny.
Forecasting & spending review support
Cutting through noisy forecasts to find the genuine cost pressures, the levers available, and a credible position for HM Treasury.
Audit & assurance
Resolving qualifications and gaps identified by audit, and standing up the assurance needed to keep large programmes clean.
Transformation reset
Diagnosing why a change programme has stalled and re-aligning it with organisational priorities so it actually lands.
Commercial & capability building
Fixing costing and charging models, defining product and reporting structures, and upskilling teams in the tools they use daily.
Recent public sector engagements
A selection of the challenges we've been brought in to solve.
A finance function stood up from scratch. Stepped in when the CFO seat sat empty mid-scale-up, with governance and Treasury relationships that couldn't wait.
- Scaled the finance team from 3 to 20 people as the organisation stood up at pace
- Covered a CFO leadership void, keeping governance and delivery on track
- Removed an audit qualification
- Led funding discussions and spending review submissions with HM Treasury
- Developed the financial model and helped align organisational priorities around it
A transformation that hadn't landed, and a forecast nobody quite trusted. Brought in to work out what was real, move fast on a high-profile Treasury case, and get credible numbers back on the table.
- Reset a transformation programme that had stalled and wasn't landing
- Quickly stood up a joint working group for a high-profile business case to HM Treasury
- Fixed a forecast overspend by separating genuine cost pressures from lazy forecasting, and identifying the levers that could actually be pulled
A live assurance exercise on tens of billions in funding, and a team whose reporting needed to withstand scrutiny fast.
- Upskilled the team in Excel and PowerPoint to raise the standard of reporting and analysis
- Supported a QA audit across £44bn of energy scheme funding
A commercial model that didn't add up, an unclear product set, and a team navigating major organisational change all at once.
- Helped define the product mix and reporting capability
- Resolved costing and charging issues affecting the commercial model
- Managed the team through an organisational transition
Advisors that enable your team to deliver
Crown Business Partners is an advisory partner, engaged to solve a defined problem and build the capability for your team to carry it forward.
Scoped to an outcome
Every engagement starts with a clear problem statement and a defined result — not an open-ended remit.
Senior, hands-on delivery
The person who's done it, not a delegated associate. Firms charging premium day rates usually put a senior name on the pitch and a graduate on the delivery. We're the inverse — senior delivery throughout, without paying for a bench you're not using.
Built to hand over
The goal is a lasting fix and a stronger team — not dependency on continued support.
The alternative to a slow hire or an expensive bench.
vs. a generic interim hire
Weeks to source, brief and onboard. No guarantee the outcome gets solved — you're paying for time in the seat, not a result.
vs. a large consultancy
A senior partner on the pitch, a graduate team on delivery. Expensive, slow to mobilise, and built for billable hours, not urgency.
Built on time inside public sector finance
Founder-led advisory
Crown Business Partners is built around direct experience solving the problems public sector finance teams actually face — scaling a function from scratch, covering a leadership gap at a critical moment, defending a position to HM Treasury, or working out which parts of an overspend are real and which are just poor forecasting.
That experience spans organisations including the Infected Blood Compensation Authority, DEFRA, DESNZ and FCDO Services — each engagement different, but each one about getting a finance function to a stronger, more credible place than where it started.
Engagements are kept deliberately senior and hands-on: no bench of associates, no generic frameworks — just direct delivery on the specific problem a finance team is facing.
Have a challenge that needs solving?
Tell us the problem. We'll tell you within a day whether we can help and what it would take to fix it.