SHERPA
Pauline Vargas
Pauline is supporting the Gravita management team as they look to become the UK’s leading tech-enabled tax, audit, and advisory provider to entrepreneurs and SMEs.
Gravita is a challenger firm that aims to transform how the UK’s small and medium businesses experience accounting services.
Led by CEO Caroline Plumb, Gravita has long-term ambitions to become the South of England’s leading tech-enabled SME accountancy firm. But first, Caroline is growing the business by finding and partnering with other high-quality professional services firms that want to join Gravita and build the future together.
Backed by Tenzing, Gravita will invest in building a new kind of consolidator that will provide the end-to-end accountancy services ambitious SME leaders need to drive growth.
Having built and sold two companies in the digital and professional services space, Caroline brings deep experience and an entrepreneurial edge to her role of CEO.
“The convergence of digital transformation and accountancy services is a rare moment in time in an industry that’s consolidating,” says Caroline. “This has led to an existing opportunity for Gravita to make the most of their period of change.”
With its mission of making the world a better place through its tech-enabled mission-critical business services, Gravita’s aspirations and potential were enormously attractive to Tenzing. Resulting in a partnership that gives Gravita the financial power needed to achieve its goals.
“We think there will be 10 to 15 technology-enabled accountancy providers with one leader in the SME space,” says Caroline. “And we intend that leader to be us.” To achieve this goal, Gravita needed financial backing to build the strong foundations that would enable the business to succeed over the mid to long term.
Having known Tenzing and its Founders since the beginning of Tenzing’s journey, Caroline felt comfortable about leading a firm partnered with Tenzing: “A lot of private equity firms only really care about what you want to do with less focus on how you want to get there. Tenzing isn’t like that. Like me, the firm believes how you operate is as important as what you want to do.”
Underpinned by this alignment of values and goals, Tenzing’s growth capital has empowered Caroline to explore wider timeframes. And consider how to make a return measured in enterprise value as well as cash.
“I’m really passionate about SMEs,” says Caroline. “It’s a bit of an unknown, unloved segment. Smaller businesses face the same complexities as larger businesses – including regulation, compliance, financial requirements, reporting and people issues. Which means they need the same quality advice and services as bigger companies.”
To do this, Caroline is focused on ensuring Gravita can deliver the same high-quality services as the larger professional services firms. By drawing on a mix of digitally enabled services and high-quality advice to provide an end-to-end service covering every element of finance and accounting.
Tenzing’s capital has given Gravita the opportunity to achieve this by investing in its people’s development and systems, including sales and marketing. Then locking this investment in to build a strong base for future growth.
Caroline Plumb OBE
CEO of Gravita
With a defined timeline to work towards, Caroline is confident of Gravita’s success: “We plan to become a notable player in the South of England by actively seeking firms who want to join forces and build something different in the accounting space.”
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