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Commercial Direction

Clear Direction, Measurable Results

We help businesses sharpen their commercial strategy and translate it into practical action that delivers real performance.

Commercial Direction

The Libertas Approach

At Libertas, we work with boards, investors, and leadership teams to help you set the commercial direction and set priorities that create growth. We translate commercial ambitions into practical steps, ensuring everyone, from senior stakeholders to those driving day-to-day delivery, understands the objectives and how to deliver them. Our approach balances vision with pragmatism, creating strategies that inspire while staying grounded in measurable outcomes.

The Benefits

  • Sharper Focus
    Clear goals and priorities that align the organisation.
  • Faster Growth
    Strategies designed for real-world execution.
  • Measurable Outcomes
    Accountability built into every stage.
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Commercial Direction

Why Commercial Direction Matters

Board led businesses often have clear ambitions but struggle to align strategy with day-to-day execution. Without clear direction, organisations risk losing focus, wasting resources, and missing opportunities. For mid-sized companies, ensuring commercial plans are both ambitious and achievable is critical to long-term success.

Strategic Insight, Practical Delivery

Our team combines board-level insight with hands-on delivery experience. We understand the pressures of ambitious, investor-backed businesses and provide strategies that work in complex, fast-changing environments. We don’t create reports that gather dust — we build plans that drive action.

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Matthew Comins

“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

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 Showman

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.

Chantelle Browne

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.

Ian Howard

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

Richard Burleigh

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.

Sigita Russell

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.