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“A growth business requires both an ambitious driver and a reliable rudder. I work alongside entrepreneurs to provide that strategic direction, ensuring their financial infrastructure supports their commercial ambition.”
Matthew co-leads our Commercial Performance practice. A highly experienced fractional CFO with over 25 years of corporate and SME financial expertise, Matthew specialises in helping family-owned, entrepreneurial, and mid-market businesses scale sustainably and achieve their long-term strategic goals.
Matthew’s career spans a diverse array of sectors, geographies and business structures. Having completed his early training within public accounting in South Africa, he spent several years in senior finance leadership roles for a NYSE-listed multinational, establishing new regional offices across East Africa (including Tanzania, Zambia, and Mozambique) and serving as Regional Financial Controller in Malawi.
Following this multinational experience, Matthew spent a decade as Group CFO for a fifth-generation family-owned enterprise. Under his financial stewardship, the company diversified from being a solely agricultural-focussed business into property development, insurance, veterinary pharmaceuticals and technology, successfully scaling its turnover from R250 million to R2.5 billion. This extensive experience makes him uniquely equipped to navigate the highly nuanced dynamics of multi-generational family businesses and fast-growth corporate scaling.
Complementing his technical financial expertise, Matthew brings more than 15 years of board-level experience to Libertas. Having served as a Board Chairperson, Independent Non-Executive Director, and Risk Committee Chair he understands how to align financial reporting with robust corporate governance.
Now based in Yorkshire, Matthew works with ambitious businesses across the North of England. His collaborative approach focuses on partnering with a client’s existing finance team or external accountants, acting as a trusted sounding board and commercial strategist for business owners.
Becky Shaw is the organisational heart of Libertas – the person who keeps everything running smoothly behind the scenes. As our dedicated admin lead, Becky brings structure, clarity and calm to the team, ensuring that projects stay on track and nothing is overlooked.
Based in York, Becky is passionate about helping businesses thrive by putting strong systems and processes in place. She loves bringing order to complexity and supporting busy teams so they can focus on what really matters.
A Business graduate with over 10 years’ experience in retail buying and product management, Becky has developed outstanding organisational and communication skills. Her subsequent experience in the education sector further strengthened her administration and project management expertise, giving her a broad understanding of different organisational needs.
Highly organised, deadline-driven and approachable, Becky is known for building strong working relationships and finding practical, creative solutions to challenges. Friendly, enthusiastic and endlessly reliable, she truly is the person who keeps everyone organised at Libertas
Daniel is a founding partner at Libertas and, alongside Chantelle, leads the Commercial Performance pillar. A natural problem-solver with a passion for building businesses, his career has taken him from engineering labs to fibre-optic oceans, boardrooms, and even a few celebrity encounters along the way.
Born and raised in Manchester, Daniel studied Engineering and Automotive Manufacturing before moving to London, where he entered the fast-moving world of telecoms in the mid-to-late 1990s. There, he played a role in a groundbreaking project to lay the very first transatlantic fibre-optic cable, an experience that sparked his fascination with complex, high-impact projects.
Daniel then transitioned into Corporate Finance and Mergers & Acquisitions, spending much of his time structuring deals, building financial models, and helping management teams secure the funding needed to buy, grow, or transform their businesses. During this period, he also completed an MBA at Imperial College London.
Seeking a new challenge, he left the corporate world to focus on SME growth, becoming a founding partner in a venture that would go on to become a global brand. That chapter brought plenty of entrepreneurial lessons and a few celebrity stories he’ll happily share over a coffee.
In 2010, Daniel’s wife convinced him to relocate to Yorkshire, where they’ve lived ever since. He spent the following years in various senior roles with a leading bank before being invited in 2025 to join Libertas, where he now brings together decades of commercial, financial, and operational experience to help clients unlock their full potential.
Outside of work, Daniel enjoys life with his wife, two children, a dog, and a retired racehorse, but his true escape is his motorbike, which he’s always happy to take out for a ride whenever he can.
Chantelle leads our Fractional Finance Leadership offering, partnering with board-level teams in ambitious, board-led businesses, not-for-profits and investment portfolios to drive financial visibility, strategic agility and sustainable growth. As a qualified accountant with a strong commercial lens, she brings a structured yet pragmatic approach to financial leadership, helping organisations strengthen decision-making, sharpen performance management, and embed finance as a value-creating function.
Her career foundation includes building and scaling her own accountancy practice, supporting SMEs across professional services, construction and manufacturing. She has also operated as finance manager within fast-growing UK businesses in the marketing-technology and events sectors, where she played a hands-on role in accelerating growth, managing complex cash-flow cycles, supporting investment planning and steering operational performance in dynamic environments.
Alongside her finance leadership work, Chantelle has experience delivering internal audit programmes that help organisations strengthen their governance posture, improve controls, and embed operational resilience. Her audit mindset complements her commercial approach, ensuring clients achieve both compliance confidence and strategically aligned financial operations.
Chantelle is passionate about working with organisations that see finance as a strategic enabler rather than a back-office function. She excels at translating financial discipline into board-level narratives, establishing frameworks that support scale, opportunity capture and risk-aware growth. With a focus on clarity, practicality and impact, she ensures the finance function becomes a critical lever in organisational value creation.
Outside the workplace, Chantelle embraces an active lifestyle, from stand-up paddleboarding to cold-water swimming , carrying the same focus, resilience and forward momentum into her advisory work. She balances entrepreneurial drive with a grounded commitment to helping ambitious organisations realise more of their potential.
Ian leads our Risk Management and Resilience Practice, supporting organisations develop practical and commercially focussed approached to managing risk. His varied background also places him at the heart of our Governance and Commercial Performance offerings. He worked for 8 years at AVIVA and nearly 15 years in a risk management leadership role within EY, is chair of the Risk and Audit Committee for Inclusion Housing and has recently been appointed head of the Investment Committee at the Wilf Ward Family Trust. Ian has extensive, real-world experience in managing risk in a range of different organisations and has deep sector knowledge of financial services & advice, professional services & accounting, as well as housing, social care and charities. He also has decades of experience helping organisations of all sizes implement the right governance to meet the expectations of their market and stakeholder whilst navigating complex regulatory landscapes
Outside of work, he is a keen musician operating a small private recording studio, composing and recording blues and jazz-fusion guitar instrumentals as well as exploring mid-20th century electronic music. He also enjoys art and architecture and is a passionate supporter of the preservation of important minimalist and brutalist heritage sites throughout the UK.
Richard is a founding partner and leads our Structure, Leadership and Governance expertise at Libertas. He is an accredited and experienced executive coach with over 35 years of corporate experience in the construction sector gained working for large multinational companies such as Skanska and Balfour Beatty.
The great majority of Richard’s career was outside the UK, and he has lived and worked in Thailand, the UAE, Poland, and Romania. This international perspective enables him to support Libertas clients navigating cross-cultural leadership, organizational complexity, and change. He brings a pragmatic, globally informed lens to boardroom challenges.
At Skanska, Richard was Executive Vice President overseeing building construction operations in the CEE region, where he was based for over 20 years. He also served on supervisory boards for Skanska group companies, including commercial development operations in the United States and residential development in Central Europe. His leadership experience spans restructuring, succession planning, and building high-performing, values-driven teams.
Richard is an active promoter of ethical leadership in business and served as Chairman of Skanska’s Ethics Committee in Poland. He is a Chartered Civil Engineer and Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, reflecting his technical expertise and commitment to professional standards.
He now applies this experience to help Libertas clients clarify leadership structures, strengthen governance, and build resilient organisations capable of navigating uncertainty.
Richard lives with his wife in North Yorkshire, where they recently completed the construction of a new eco-friendly home as self-builders.
Sigita is a founding partner at Libertas and the lead for Marketing and Lead Development. She is an experienced employee engagement and organisational culture specialist with a strong background in research, organisational psychology, and in-house employee experience work.
She previously spent several years at Ipsos Karian & Box, contributing to qualitative research, organisational change projects, and employee experience programmes for major UK organisations. Her in-house experience also gave her a practical understanding of how culture, communication, and people processes work day to day. Her expertise lies in uncovering the real drivers of employee behaviour and translating complex insights into clear, practical actions that support better leadership decisions and healthier workplace cultures.
Her work is grounded in rigorous research and evidence-based practice. Sigita specialises in designing employee engagement surveys, conducting deep-dive qualitative analysis, and turning people data into meaningful insight. She has extensive experience helping leaders understand what truly influences retention, motivation, and organisational performance, ensuring decisions are informed by evidence rather than assumptions.
Sigita holds a Master’s degree in Human Resource Management from the University of York and a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology. Her academic background underpins her ability to blend behavioural insight with practical organisational understanding.
Outside of her professional work, Sigita enjoys exploring the Yorkshire countryside with her working cocker spaniel, Mili. She is also a keen fossil hunter and regularly visits the Yorkshire Jurassic Coast with her husband and son in search of ammonites and other ancient finds. Her interests in nature, history, and human behaviour continue to shape her perspective both personally and professionally.