Company: DM Financial (DM)
Industry: Professional Services | Accountancy | B2B
Objective: Create and deliver a growth-focused marketing strategy and infrastructure, with international capabilities.
Challenge: Marketing was a secondary process and needed to prove the case for commercialisation, aligning itself clearly with value creation.
Solution: A Fractional CMO to audit current capabilities, establish strategic pillars to drive the business forward (including brand development), and support alignment of marketing and sales to ensure best practice in BD.
Background
DM Financial is a financial services provider, backed by the Private Equity firm Synova. They specialise in reporting, accounting and compliance services for the financial services sector, with an emphasis on alternative investment funds. Their mission is to help every client “Do More”.
DM Financial had grown consistently and mostly organically. The power of relationship and in-house skills development had fueled their reputation and organic referrals, without a significant investment in marketing. In 2024, given their ambitious growth plans, DM Financial and Synova decided to focus on their marketing strategy and capabilities. The aim was to complement and build upon their direct client relationships, natural referrals and class-leading service standards to catalyse additional growth opportunities.
The Challenge
With a highly entrepreneurial culture, where significant growth had been driven organically through the depth of DM’s expertise and the power of their client relationships, the DM Board recognised that the business case for Marketing needed to be carefully planned and then proven to DM leaders. Building viability for marketing as a value-added business process, needed to occur before any major investment in go-to-market strategies or in building in-house marketing capabilities.
There was also a need to demonstrate that marketing, channeled through the expertise of a Fractional CMO, could work within a unique expert-first culture, operating at pace across time-zones and a broad mix of team structures and acquisitions. DM was also developing a wider portfolio of services that they wanted to cross-sell to existing and new audiences.
We were tasked with delivering a fleet-of-foot solution that packed a strategic punch at the board level. Working closely with senior leadership, we rapidly established a viable marketing roadmap. The solution demanded highly-collaborative execution and demonstrable impact, all within a few weeks to embed the plan and before an intensely busy quarter.
The Solution
Growth Partners introduced Tom Christie-Miller as DM Financial’s first Fractional Chief Marketing Officer, working with the business for two days a week, over an initial 6 month period, which was then extended to a year. This scalable and flexible solution enabled DM to continue accessing Tom’s board-level expertise in a way that suited them.
Tom’s work covered the following aspects:
Establishing Strategic Pillars
Value Creation
- Tom accelerated value creation including significantly rewriting and redesigning their tender response and proposal templates. Tom worked with Financial Reporting Leaders and the Board on a key proposal which resulted in DM converting their biggest client to date, based in the USA. This win enabled the business to onboard hundreds of Financial Reporting processes in early 2025 and played a key role in accelerating their scale up strategy in North America.
- Key BD assets were developed for business units, to ensure best practice in proposal writing and heighten attraction from new clients.
Brand Reputation
- Tom reset the expression, platforms and communication of DM and its subsidiaries, without going through a costly rebrand. This lean, iterative process matched the way that the Board approached marketing, and took into account their in-house capabilities. It increased confidence levels for teams in communicating DM more assertively and more appropriately to their audiences.
- Furthermore, it helped build the case for marketing, asset by asset, team by team, resulting in making a case for a wholesale redesign and redevelopment of the DM website and a permanent marketing hire.
Operational Efficiencies
- Having understood the client’s evident desire to match their real world operation needs to deliver at pace, without significant investment, Growth Partners provided a flexible, highly qualified design and social media freelancer. Her strengths in social media, content marketing and collateral redesign enabled a full reset on their social media and on the design of their global portfolio of 80 service sale sheets.
- Tom built their marketing capability in house, including writing the job specification for their first Marketing Manager and helping to onboard and mentor the Marketing Manager on key projects.
Results
Leveraging a strategic and multifaceted approach, Tom significantly contributed to new business growth, notably securing the firm’s largest client to date in the USA through refined proposals, engaging social media content, and impactful thought-leadership initiatives.
Concurrently, Tom drove the successful launch of an entirely new Audit brand, Valaston, an ‘agency in a box’ solution. The positive reception and increased confidence in Valaston as a standalone entity were instrumental in the firm’s pivotal 2025 decision not to join a global audit network.
Tom’s further efforts focused on improving stakeholder engagement by successfully converting marketing sceptics into true supporters of the department’s vision. Finally, Tom ensured effective cost management and rapid responsiveness by utilising a carefully selected network of agency partners and approved freelancers.
“We started out with some scepticism about what marketing could achieve. The ‘Eureka moment’ came when Tom took us through his Marketing review and strategic plan. He gave us the confidence we needed; shaping the business case for marketing and persuading our Board we needed to commit and invest. He clearly understood the practical challenges we have and focused us on the key opportunities we had to make our marketing and brand perform better across our global network of experts.
As Fractional CMO, Tom didn’t just set a strategy, he worked alongside our leadership, at our pace (which is pretty fast!), to reset key business development processes. His work on redesigning the structure and content of proposals directly contributed to us converting what is now our biggest client. That’s how you convert long-term marketing sceptics into real believers.”
Paul Elliott, Non-Executive Chair and Helen Philpott, Managing Director, Singapore and Head of International Operations at DM Financial
About Growth Partners
Growth Partners connect the very best marketing consultants with world-leading organisations. We specialise in marketing, sales, RevOps and commercial, offering a full range of flexible resourcing leadership solutions.
