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Senior Management Team >

Alyson Howard FCCA CF

Corporate Services Director

Alyson is a Chartered Certified Accountant and also holds the Advanced Diploma in Corporate Finance and has been with Williams Giles as Corporate Services Director since January 2010. She heads up the firm’s specialist Academies team. Identifying the particular needs of schools embarking on the Academy conversion process in a very fast moving environment, Williams Giles were appointed as auditors to the first new Academy in Kent in 2010 and many more have followed across Kent, Middlesex and Bedfordshire. Alyson now acts for more than twenty schools across the South East, and is advising others currently considering or undergoing the process of converting.

She also looks after the firm’s corporate finance activity and has been involved in many company sales, acquisitions, MBOS and finance raising exercises both equity and debt as well as in pre and post transaction support. She has worked closely in a number of companies over many years, often at board level, and has helped to develop the business, improve profitability, address problems and plan for growth and succession.

Alyson qualified in 1989 following early experience in corporate recovery. On qualifying, she joined a firm of Chartered Accountants in Tunbridge Wells, where she became a partner in 1994. She was an Equity director in a boutique Corporate Finance firm from the end of 2001 where she specialised in corporate finance in the small and mid-market until 2009.

Working with the International Group of Accounting Firms (IGAF), and a past Chairman of the Institute of Directors in Kent, Alyson has lectured widely in USA, France, Brussels and UK on subjects including, professional practice management, marketing, leadership, strategic planning, business planning and more recently Academy structure and finance.

Outside work Alyson is married to Jo with whom she has three grown up children, two out at work and one still at University. Having paid for their degrees, she is now enjoying studying for an English Literature degree through the Open University and at weekends can usually be found with her nose in a good book.

alyson.howard@williamsgiles.co.uk