12 Years of Finance Leadership in UK TV Production

I'm Rob Simmonds - a finance and operations professional who spent over a decade in TV production before moving into AI transformation work.

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At Fulwell 73, I joined as the first finance hire when the company had six full-time staff. By the time I left, the business had grown into an international production group with major US operations, gone through four ERP migrations, merged with The SpringHill Company, and built a finance function capable of reporting across multiple currencies and entities.

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That growth and change required a mindset of delivering today, and thinking about tomorrow. I built systems and tools with this framework. Connected data and SQL reports that eliminated manual month-end processes. Dashboards that gave senior leadership real cash visibility. Integrated tools to streamline expense management and reconciliation.

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At KAI Consulting, I led their AI transformation initiative - implementing an AI knowledge management system, automating their support platform operations, building an AI-driven video content pipeline, and designing a customer insight framework that fed directly into product development.

 

Most AI consultants come from a technology background. They understand the tools but not the operational context - what a production company actually runs on, why the data is always fragmented, and what it takes behind the scenes to make great on-screen content.

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I come from the other direction. I understand the challenges first-hand. The technology is how we solve them.