CHARLIE FARMER

Sectors/Support

Start-Ups & Scale-Ups. Technology & SaaS. DeepTech. Commerce & Retail. VC & PE-Backed Businesses. Business Development.

A Week Built Around Relationships

My week is built around new business sales calls, sharing our fractional finance offering and how we’d support a company as an extension of their team. I also meet with our clients quarterly to ensure they’re getting the support they need and prepare for these by speaking with our internal client team to make sure I’m across everything. I run our events calendar, making sure we’re putting on engaging dinners and workshops every month for our clients to attend. Ultimately, I’m spending my time building relationships with the wider start-up ecosystem, so I can point our clients in the right direction should they need support.

From Start-Ups to Sales

Time spent with a YC-backed start-up in San Francisco shaped my career early on; it gave me a real taste for high-growth businesses with lean teams. Running my own creative agency in my early twenties reinforced that further, and I’ve built my career in commercial roles ever since, where my strengths really flourish.

Steering an Agency Through Covid

The biggest challenge I’ve overcome in my career was managing a creative agency through Covid, whose core customer base was hospitality and tourism clients. We quickly introduced a retainer model with the clients where we held the strongest relationships and leaned into more hyper-local business to stay afloat. That experience taught me how important it is to move quickly and stay close to your strongest relationships when circumstances change fast.

Building Relationships Beyond the Deal

I try to meet clients in person wherever I can. We host monthly dinners on different topics, such as AI transformation or global expansion, and always make sure to invite clients. It’s a much easier setting to build a relationship in, and clients get to build their own network with like-minded peers at the same time. Where it’s useful, I’ll also make relevant introductions across the wider start-up ecosystem, whether that’s an investor, an adjacent service provider or a founder further along a similar journey, so clients get value from the network beyond the finance support itself.

Taking a Plate Off Their Hands

The most satisfying part of working with clients is genuinely solving their challenges. Busy founders are spinning numerous plates, and I enjoy taking one of those plates, finance, off their hands so they can focus on what they’re building. I also value building relationships that go beyond the purely professional, and learning about a founder’s vision first-hand, seeing the commitment behind it. What stands out most about being part of both my team and the wider AAB organisation is that the team is genuinely invested in our clients’ success; it doesn’t feel like a transactional relationship, on either side.

Consultative, Not Transactional

One of the greatest challenges in my area is overcoming reservations about our model; the traditional route is hiring, so working with an external team is still relatively new for a lot of founders. It comes down to acknowledging that trusting an external team to take over a sensitive function like finance is a highly considered decision and being upfront about where the model works well, and even where it may not be the best fit. I listen for the real root cause behind an objection and work through it consultatively, to figure out whether we’re genuinely the right fit, and stay highly communicative throughout the process so a prospective client can reach that conclusion for themselves. A common misconception about my profession is that business development in a service business is transactional; in reality, it’s consultative, and relationships are what everything is built on.

My top strengths are relationship-building and operating by a ‘givers gain’ mentality, which has served me well throughout my career. Looking ahead, I’m particularly keen to develop my commercial leadership and my fluency in AI and automation, so I can bring even more value to both our clients and the wider team.