Operators, not advisers

Managing Partner and co-founder. Over twenty years of finance leadership in Asia, based in Bangkok throughout, and fluent in Thai in speech and in writing.

Regional CFO Asia at Scan Global Logistics from 2020 to 2025, leading finance across 14 APAC countries with a regional team of 12 finance managers and 72 finance professionals. That role covered M&A, greenfield market entry and integration across Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos and Sri Lanka, alongside ERP and TMS rollouts and a shared services implementation.

Currently holding three interim seats: Head of Finance at Tomorrowland Thailand, taking the festival from entity setup to delivery on a budget above EUR 40 million across 11 departments; Group CFO at PropertyScout, rebuilding the close and consolidated reporting across four entities and roughly 600 agents; and Regional CFO APAC at Manuport Logistics across seven Asian entities.

Earlier roles include Driessen within the Zodiac Aerospace group, UTi Worldwide, later acquired by DSV, Cobra Advanced Composites, Decathlon and Carrefour. He is also a founder twice over, having built Plizz and Wishbeer and raised USD 1.9 million between them, which is why the practice tends to speak founder rather than corporate.

MSc in Business and Management with a specialisation in Financial Control from Audencia Nantes. French native, English fluent, Thai fluent after more than twenty years of study and daily use.

Elected to the Board of Counsellors of the Franco-Thai Chamber of Commerce in 2026, and organiser of the third annual FutureCFO Conference Thailand in February 2026.

SmeCFO on LinkedIn

Co-founder of SmeCFO and CEO of Plizz. Corporate restructuring, cross-border transactions, international taxation and financial planning.

He started his career in Thailand in 2005 as Financial Controller at Lyreco, and has spent the twenty years since running finance across Asia, the Middle East and Africa. At Oriflame he was Regional Finance Controller for Asia across Indonesia, India, Iran, China, Pakistan, Vietnam, Thailand and Sri Lanka, consolidating the region's numbers monthly and leading its internal audit, before moving to Indonesia as Finance Director with a USD 100 million profit and loss, a team of 45 and responsibility for Finance, HR, Legal and Corporate Affairs across two legal entities and 500 employees. He then took the Middle East and Africa region as Regional Finance Director, covering eight countries and leading new market openings and M&A, followed by CFO for South East Asia and MENA at Unicity International.

Building finance functions from nothing is a recurring theme. He set up the new Asian subsidiary for Weinmann Medical Technology, ran finance across Australia, New Zealand, Thailand and China for the same group, recruited the local finance managers, and supervised financial control for Oriflame's entry into Kenya. An ERP specialist across SAP, IFS, Cognos and Xero, he has implemented systems rather than commissioned them.

A graduate of Audencia Nantes with a specialisation in Audit and Finance, and of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan. He works in French, English and Thai, with good Italian and German, which is occasionally decisive when the parent company is in Europe. He is also a partner at Narai Partners, which is why the legal, accounting and finance sides of a client's structure stay joined up rather than drifting apart.

Financial Controller. The embedded half of an engagement, Bangkok based and on site with client finance teams.

Master's in Finance and Management from ESG Financial Business School in Paris, a Bachelor's in Finance, Banking and Insurance from Université Paris XII, and AMF certification from the French financial regulator. Bangkok based since 2017. His background is internal audit and risk management for a French banking group across APAC, covering risk mapping, business continuity and coordination with subsidiaries through internal and external audit, and before that controller roles in aviation services and e-commerce. He has worked alongside Jérôme since 2018, at Plizz and at Wishbeer. French native, working in English.

On an engagement he owns the monthly close, bank and capex reconciliations, the payables and receivables cadence and supplier statement reconciliations, and is the day-to-day contact for your own accountants. He works alongside them rather than around them, closing the gaps in how they were trained and documenting processes as they are built, so that what a client is left with is a written way of working rather than a dependency on us.

David on LinkedIn

• Late numbers are the same as no numbers

  A perfect management pack delivered six weeks after month end has no decision value. We would rather give you a good pack on the fifth working day than a flawless one on the thirtieth.

• Cash is the only number that cannot be interpreted

  Profit involves judgement. Cash does not. Every engagement gets a rolling cash forecast early, because it is the fastest way to find out what is really happening in a business.

• The finance function should get cheaper over time

  We build processes your own people can run, hire the controller who will replace us, and expect the engagement to shrink. Practices that make themselves indispensable are selling something else.

• You should hear the uncomfortable version first

  Owners are usually surrounded by people whose interest is in agreement. The value of an external CFO is largely that they can say the thing nobody in the room wants to say, early enough for it to matter.