Lauren Burns Chief Financial Officer, Blink

Company

Founded in 2014, Blink is an all-in-one employee engagement platform for frontline organizations. They empower employees to maximize their impact by removing friction from their lives and helping them focus on what matters. They reduce staff turnover, increase engagement, and help create a better every day for every frontline worker.

Headquartered in London but with offices in New York and Sydney, Blink’s clients range from the Government and the NHS to the likes of Stagecoach and Dominos.

Search Background

At the time of the search Blink had raised a $10m series A from Partech and was entering real growth mode. Up to that point finance has been overseen by the COO and had been served by various point solutions across the jurisdictions in which they operate but the scalability of that as a solution whilst greatly effective in the short term was nearing its limits. There was a small and very capable team in place and much of the groundwork from a systems and process perspective to support rapid growth was underway, but the business needed a CFO to navigate the next fund raise, alongside exponential growth through $50m ARR and beyond.

Requirements

Blink needed an experienced CFO who would act as a right-hand person to Sean, the Founding CEO. The CFO needed to be a chartered accountant, and someone who had experienced a similar aggressive scaling journey in a European tech company. We were seeking someone with experience of dealing with investors and raising capital, with an entrepreneurial mindset who brought with them a passion for automation over manual process in keeping with the company culture. Above all, this person needed to be culturally additive, to challenge the current leadership team and drive operational and executional excellence across the organization.

Result

Blink secured Lauren Burns who was the CFO of Treatwell.

Having graduated from the University of Cambridge with a BA and MSc, Chemistry, Lauren spent the first half of her career in practice with Deloitte. She progressed through the ranks to become an Assistant Director in the Corporate Finance division, where she advised clients on transactions, investment appraisals, and re-financing ranging from £25M to £1B. In 2012, Lauren made the move in-house as she began to plot her route to CFO. Over the next few years, she broadened her horizons, proved herself in different industries, and in mid-2015, Lauren joined Treatwell, a VC-backed booking platform for beauty and wellbeing treatments. Initially serving as the No.2 in finance, Lauren built a budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting process for the business across 11 markets before being fast tracked into the CFO role overseeing growth from a 150-person to 600-person organization, growing revenues 70% year on year.