From surviving Amazon’s brutal due diligence to scaling Funding Circle from 100 to 1,500 employees, Alysha Randall has built a career out of successfully navigating chaos. Now a fractional CFO, she helps startups transform disorder into growth. Here, she spills her hard-earned career secrets.

Helping a company to scale at hyper speed is not for the faint of heart. It requires huge amounts of resilience, creativity, and a willingness to embrace what Alysha fondly terms “controlled chaos”. While she now runs her own advisory business, Alysha is no stranger to being in the thick of it.

Her passion for steering companies through messy times began in 2006, when she moved to the UK (from her native Australia) and joined LoveFilm as Director of Finance & Reporting. Back then, the company was on the brink of being acquired by Amazon, a process that would prove to be a crash course in financial due diligence.

“It was absolutely savage,” she admits. “I mean, you’d expect nothing less from such a corporate giant, but Amazon scrutinised everything with a fine-tooth comb. And I spent days locked in a hotel room, being grilled on every inch of the finances. To the point that hotels still give me flashbacks!”

Despite the baptism by fire, “it was also a great learning opportunity,” she admits. “That experience taught me how critical it is to have a clean balance sheet and robust financial processes. Regardless of everything else that is going on, those things should be your baseline, especially when preparing for major milestones like acquisitions, IPOs, or fundraising rounds.”  

Being prepared in advance is always going to be time well spent, she believes. “As FD or CFO, you don’t want to be the one holding up a deal, or worse, the reason it falls through.”

Keeping your cool

Thankfully, the LoveFilm acquisition went smoothly, so Alysha started looking for her next challenge, and joined Funding Circle in 2013 – when the startup was on the cusp of explosive growth. 

“When I started, there wasn’t a proper finance function,” she explains. “I had to build everything from scratch while the business was growing at an insane pace, going from 100 employees to 1,500 in just five years.”

The growth might have been extraordinary, but it came with more than its fair share of issues. “It was such a fast-paced environment, and there was no CFO to guide me,” Alysha recalls. “I was figuring out leadership on the job, while setting up systems and processes to support the rapid expansion – and simultaneously trying to keep operations efficient and transparent.” 

It was quite the juggling act, she admits. “And when you’re building as you go, there’s absolutely no room to lose focus. You have to be on the ball 24/7.”

This was especially true when it came to getting Funding Circle regulated by the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). “We had no FCA experience, and it felt like we were out of our depth,” she says. 

The process required Alysha’s team to implement controls and systems that satisfied regulatory standards, often at odds with the company’s drive to prioritise customers and growth. “It’s hard to convince a fast-moving business to slow down and focus on compliance, but it had to be done,” she explains.

“At times it felt like trying to get a teenager to do something they don’t want to do,” she jokes. But Alysha credits key hires, like Gerard Hurley – now Compliance Director and MLRO at Bound – for helping the company navigate the roadblocks. 

“He was one of the first compliance experts we brought in. His work was instrumental in getting us across the line,” she says. And despite the steep learning curve, the company successfully achieved FCA regulation, laying the groundwork for its future success.

Getting IPO-ready

As Funding Circle continued to expand, Alysha took on the enormous task of preparing it for an IPO. This involved streamlining financial processes and data across teams and regions, ensuring the business could present a clear and consistent story to investors.

“The biggest challenge was aligning our KPIs,” she explains. “Every team and region had its own definitions, and it took nine months to get everyone on the same page. But if we hadn’t made the effort, it would have severely undermined investor confidence.”

For many, this mammoth task, combined with the company’s rapid growth journey, would have been overwhelming. But it fired Alysha up: “I’ve always been drawn to the messy, chaotic stages of businesses,” she admits. “That’s where I can make the biggest impact.”

Making a quantum leap 

No surprise, then, that Alysha launched her own advisory business – Fast Growth Consulting – in 2019, offering fractional CFO services to startups at the seed and Series A stages. The move was about three things: independence, impact, and variety.

“Fractional work is perfect for me,” she says. “I get to work with so many different founders and businesses. It’s incredibly rewarding to go into a company where the finances are in disarray, clean things up, and set them on a path to success.”

Her clients often come to her at their most vulnerable point, with financial systems that are barely holding together. “At that early stage, most companies have only had an external bookkeeper or a founder trying to manage everything themselves,” she explains. “It’s usually a state of disorder, but that’s where I thrive!”

One of her first tasks with any client looking to scale rapidly is aligning the company’s financials with its commercial narrative. “A lot of P&Ls are just lists of expenses in alphabetical order,” she says. “That doesn’t tell you, or investors, anything about the business.”

By restructuring the P&L to mirror the founder’s pitch deck, Alysha ensures that the numbers reinforce the company’s narrative. “If your financials align with your pitch, it’s much easier to build trust with investors,” she says. “It’s about creating a cohesive story that shows where the business is going and why it’s worth investing in.”

Survival of the fittest

Having a strong narrative, backed up by numbers, is more important than ever, she believes. “The days of massive fundraises are gone. It’s also a lot harder than it used to be for businesses, given the tough macro environment,” she notes. “Now it’s more about top-up rounds, convertible loans, and sometimes even debt just to keep going.”

As a result, accurate cash flow forecasting has become a lifeline for many of the startups she works with. “Someone recently said their mantra for the rest of 2024 is to, ‘stay alive until 2025,’ and that really resonated,” she says. 

“Balancing short-term survival with long-term growth goals is tricky, but it’s doable with the right planning. And that’s where a fractional CFO can add a lot of value. We’re not just here to balance the books, we’re here to help founders see what’s possible – and actually get there.”

Taking the driving seat

As more high-growth companies lean into fractional roles, Alysha sees an opportunity for finance leaders to redefine their value. Not by being the loudest voice in the room or ticking boxes for investors, but by asking the uncomfortable questions that lead to better decisions.

“I’m not interested in being a passenger,” she says. “I want to leave every business I work with fundamentally better than when I found it. That’s not just about ensuring survival – it’s about delivering sustainable growth. I do that by embracing the chaos and using it as a driver of transformation.”

And in a world where the rules of the game are constantly shifting, the ability to cut through the noise and successfully adapt is exactly what startups need.

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