The experts in financial, commercial and finance business partnering learning

Financial course specialists, a safe pair of hands

Launched in 2003 and with over a century’s experience in developing people between us, Complete Financial Training is well-placed to support you.

Our proven success in collaborating with people to develop both their commercial skills and confidence in making the best financial decisions speaks for itself. Our extensive experience in quickly understanding your team’s learning needs and developing tailored course content will always result in them gaining the relevant tools and techniques that they need to succeed in their roles.

All our team have worked in senior financial roles in industry which allows us to truly understand what the right solution looks like.

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Making financial and commercial learning effective and fun

For some people, learning about finance and commerciality can feel intimidating, whilst others expect it to be dull.

This doesn’t need to be the case – The Complete Financial Training team have a vast amount of energy for creating and facilitating memorable, impactful, tailor-made solutions that make a real difference to your people and your business.

Case Studies

What makes us different?

Our clients have described us as refreshingly vibrant in a world of grey and technical financial courses and commented on how seamlessly we blend into their business.

Ongoing inclusion of our financial courses, commercial acumen and finance business partnering programmes on a vast number of annual people development plans is a clear testament. Contact us to discuss how we can have the same impact on your organisation.

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We live and breathe our five core values:

Collaborative

We listen to you, care about what you need and will find you the best impactful solutions

Ingenious

We are full of inspiring ideas and love to think up innovative ways to help even the most figure-fearing person understand the world of finance and commerciality

Straightforward

We speak and act in a clear, direct way and always avoid jargon

Energising

We bring positivity and enjoyment to all our clients through every service we provide

Value-adding

We are honest, accessible and great value for money, a shrewd learning & development investment

Our Team

Specialist trainers and industry experts with first-hand experience

Our collaborative approach allows us to tailor each course, combining our expertise and knowledge with practical examples based on your business needs.

Find out more about our team.

Helen Howard

A passion for all things financial led to Helen founding Complete Financial Training over 20 years ago. An Accountant and Certified Learning Practitioner with a background in senior financial roles in leading UK and global businesses and experienced in working with people outside of the finance team, Helen finds it easy to relate to the challenges facing people in business today.

Outside of work, when not being a taxi service for her busy children, Helen’s enthusiasm for running and remaining fit has led to the occasional marathon. She enjoys active holidays, typically involving hill walking, kayaking and sailing.

Elizabeth Britton

Elizabeth Britton is an accountant (ACMA and CGMA) and trained facilitator. In her life before developing and facilitating top level financial courses in the UK and globally, she held several senior financial roles within a large energy company. This gave her a wealth of experience that has been invaluable to her since moving into the learning environment.

Elizabeth is an aspirational skier, opting for slow and stylish over speed. She enjoys the gym, which allows her to indulge in another of her favourite pastimes: working her way around her local restaurants.

Steve Berry

Steve keeps trying to retire but we are constantly dragging him back to work as his experience and skills are second to none. He is a former banker, CFO and international MBA lecturer in business strategy. An author of three books, he has spoken at business conferences on four continents.

His spare time pursuits are multifarious, from enjoying good wines to training youth workers and vicars whilst generally trying to keep track of what his 3 children are doing.

Ian Glenister

Ian Glenister holds an MBA and a vast amount of project management and British Psychological Society qualifications too numerous to list. Ian started out in the pensions industry before moving to a construction services business, where he was a director for a few years. He then turned to training and coaching as a career.

Ian has a passion for travel and has scuba dived all over the world. When at home in the UK, he is a keen squash player and runner.

Phil Renshaw

Phil Renshaw PhD is an ACC accredited coach with the ICF and holds the professional treasury and banking qualifications. Phil worked in investment banking as well as in Corporate Finance and also as a Finance Director in the IT services sector. He is widely published including his most recent book, Coaching On the Go.

When he isn’t busy working, Phil can be spotted travelling around the country in a VW campervan.

How we can help

Browse examples of our most popular courses or talk to one of our Trainers.

Course expectations

We travel all over the UK and Europe as well as further afield for our clients. We can deliver our training programmes either at your offices or at a conference venue that suits your needs. We are happy to arrange a venue if you would like us to do so. As well as facilitating our courses in person, we can also do so remotely, meaning no costly travel expenses.

There is no minimum group size for our training services, as we charge on a day basis, rather than for a number of participants. We even offer one-to-one coaching! You can find out more about this and the other training methods that we are experienced in offering on our Bespoke Solutions page.

Given the bespoke nature of our training services, this greatly depends on our early conversations as to what your learning objectives are and the content that is required to achieve these. Following a brief conversation, we will be able to give you our suggested course timings that are appropriate to meet your specific needs. Typically, our training courses are run over one to two days. If preferred, we can break these down into bite-sized chunks which can either be facilitated face-to-face or on a trainer-led virtual course.

Please note that we often follow up our training courses with digital resources and other materials to help course participants consolidate their learning or to refresh their memory at a later date. Take a look at our case studies to give you some ideas of how we approach the many different requirements that our clients have.

Due to the bespoke nature of our services, we would need to get a sense of your team’s training requirements before we can provide you with an accurate quote. Please contact us and we can discuss the options available to you along with the associated costs.

Absolutely! We always enjoy working with charities and not-for-profit organisations. We can easily tailor any of our course content, case studies and resources to be relevant for any of our clients, regardless of sector.

Check out our case study on our work with the National Trust, or get in touch today with any questions you may have.

Training Expectations

We are experienced in curating content for your own e-learning design team to turn into interactive and engaging digital learning experiences for your people. We work with them throughout the whole process. In addition to e-learning content creation, we can offer a range of training methods that we can draw upon to best meet your needs:

  • In-house, face-to-face workshops
  • Trainer-led remote learning
  • Business simulations and games
  • Case studies
  • Group work
  • Hybrid learning experiences
  • E-learning content curation
  • Comprehensive workbooks
  • Work based application tasks
  • Coaching
  • Pre- and/or post-course reading
  • Guided practical action planning
  • Audio and visual learning resources
  • Email follow-ups
  • Mentoring

Take a look at our bespoke learning solutions page to find out how we create a solution that is best for your people

Yes – we can work with individuals at all levels of the organisation, helping them overcome whatever financial and commercial obstacles are preventing them or their business from reaching its full potential. For more information contact us today.

Select your training

Not to worry – we’ve devised a helpful and free simple financial Learning Needs Analysis – a questionnaire for you to share with your team that will help you determine which training areas need the most attention. It might be that your team needs to improve across a number of different financial and commercial areas – we can design a bespoke in-house programme that does just that.

Alternatively, you can contact us for a no-obligation conversation to discuss the financial and commercial learning that your team would benefit from. Our expert trainers will be happy to guide and assist you in identifying your team’s specific learning requirements and to then develop a solution that exceeds your expectations.

Our courses can be as advanced or as basic as your team requires. Whether your requirement is at board level, entry level, or anywhere in between, we focus on conveying the relevant information in an innovative, effective way – one that fits both the objectives of the group that we are working with as well as your organisation’s culture.

Although our trainers steer clear of inaccessible jargon or technical language regardless of the level that we are working at, we can cater for a range of abilities within the same workshops so that your employees can all participate in the same training programme together. This is great for helping your people to work well as a team on financial and commercial goals and we are always conscientious in ensuring that everyone benefits from the learning activities.

As part of our training services, we recommend that a Learning Needs Analysis is undertaken for your team so that we can gauge the starting positions of each course participant. This way, we can design a course that meets the varied needs of your team members and therefore delivers maximum value for your organisation.

Yes – in fact, we know that by creating bespoke programmes and materials, the outcomes of the learning are vastly improved when compared to the use of generic materials and open courses. We can work with you to understand your team’s level of financial and commercial understanding and pinpoint topics and tools which will greatly benefit them. From this analysis, we can design and deliver a bespoke programme designed to build up their understanding to the level your organisation requires.

The programmes we design aren’t limited to a classroom-style format – we can build a bespoke learning pathway for your team using a variety of training methods and materials:

  • In-house, face-to-face workshops
  • Trainer-led remote learning
  • Business simulations and games
  • Case studies
  • Group work
  • Hybrid learning experiences
  • E-learning content curation
  • Comprehensive workbooks
  • Work based application tasks
  • Coaching
  • Pre- and/or post-course reading
  • Guided practical action planning
  • Audio and visual learning resources
  • Email follow-ups
  • Mentoring

From one-off business simulations to longer-term bespoke learning programmes, by partnering together we can design the most effective pathway for your people.

Next steps

If you’re not quite sure what learning your team requires, a good place to start might be by downloading our learning needs analysis on our Resources page. This is a free tool that you can share with your team to quickly identify their skills gaps when it comes to understanding financial and commercial concepts. If you like, you can share the results with us so that we can recommend a learning programme outline for your team on a no-obligation basis.

If you know what training is required for your team but need to know details such as course duration and costs, please get in touch with us and we will provide you with all of the information that you need.

If you need to get approval for this investment, why not have a read of our business case guide on our Resources page? We’ve compiled some free, best-practice advice for compiling your business case for outsourcing your financial and commercial training to an external specialist business.

For anything else, please do get in touch. We would love to help you.