Stuart Walsh

Stuart started his career as an accountant and company secretary before moving into the Asset Finance industry. Initially he specialised in the financing of hi-tech medical equipment before joining GE (General Electric) to manage their customer finance business in Europe for the medical systems division. He then moved to GE Capital where he set up and managed several European vendor leasing programs for worldwide suppliers of equipment such as large Printing Presses, Access Platform equipment and Digital TV and Film Editing equipment. He then moved into financing IT for Sun Microsystems, firstly looking after their top global customers and then as Director of the UK financing program. His final role at GE was Director of their equipment leasing business in the UK before leaving to join Franchise Finance.

Chris Roberts

Chris started his career with NatWest and after completing his professional qualifications became an Associate of the Institute of Bankers in 1980. He had a successful and varied career which at managerial level saw him as a Corporate Lender, an Underwriter, also heading up the Bank’s Lending courses in London and then taking on various consultancy roles working with seconded accountants from the major UK accountancy firms.

He left the Bank in 2000 to set up his own business consultancy with the aim of helping banks to better understand businesses and businesses to better understand banks. Since then, and acting as a ‘middle-man’, broker and consultant, he has successfully helped many hundreds of people start up or grow their businesses. He has specialised in the franchise market since 2004 and is now co-owner of Franchise Finance Limited, with his colleague Stuart Walsh.

Nick Potter

Nick is the founder of Franchise Finance and he started his career in finance back in 1965. He worked for Ford Motor Credit before moving to the then newly formed Lombard North Central (now one of the country’s largest finance companies) in 1971. Nick specialised in the print finance industry and in 1979 he set up his own business, Printing Equipment Finance which was the first dedicated finance business in the industry. In 1980, Nick started to work with Prontaprint which was his first franchise client at a time when none of the banks even had franchise departments.

The Prontaprint connection led to relationships with all the print franchisors and having built up a sound knowledge and skill base of the franchising industry, he broadened the business into other areas of franchising and changed the name of the business to Franchise Finance. Today, Nick utilises his extensive knowledge of franchising to talk to new clients about how we can help them.

Caroline Cope

Caroline is based at our offices in Chinnor and heads up our operations. This is primarily around the production of business plans where Caroline takes the data received from clients and prepares the base documents ready for Chris and Stuart to work on.

Katie Austin

Katie is also based at our Chinnor office and provides invaluable administration support to the team. If you visit us at Chinnor you will be met by Katie and if you call us you are most likely to be speaking to her on the phone.