Sean from MTD Training & Skillshub tripled revenue without adding finance headcount

Growing pains in a manual Finance World

Sean McPheat built MTD Training and Skillshub from the ground up, turning it into a trusted name in UK leadership, management and sales training. When he launched Skillshub in 2018 to meet growing demand for digital learning, he had two thriving businesses on his hands and a finance setup that was struggling to keep up with either of them.

At £1.6 million in turnover, the cracks were already showing. The team was running on a legacy desktop accounting system that had barely evolved in years. Everything lived on local laptops. Reports were printed. Reconciliations were ticked off by hand. If Sean wanted to check how the business was performing, he couldn't just glance at his phone he had to wait.

The cost of standing still was becoming very real:

• Chasing unpaid invoices manually had allowed £450,000 to pile up in outstanding receivables, cash that belonged in the business, not sitting in aged debt.
• Every phase of growth required more admin, not more opportunity. Sean calculated he'd need three additional finance managers just to sustain the manual workload if turnover kept rising.
• His external accountants had to visit the office in person to access the books, an arrangement that belonged to a different era entirely.

Sean knew the answer wasn't to hire his way out of the problem. Every pound spent on administration was a pound not invested in growth. He needed a smarter solution — one that would free his team to focus on what actually moved the business forward.

Automate to accelerate

Sean's approach was clear from the outset: don't just swap one system for another. Rebuild how finance works entirely, using cloud technology to do what manual processes never could scale invisibly alongside the business.

The strategic brief had three pillars:

• Reclaim cash flow by eliminating the friction between invoice and payment.
• Reduce the time finance spent on processing so it could spend more time on insight.
• Build a platform that could support not just two businesses, but potentially three or more without proportional headcount growth.

This wasn't simply a technology decision. It was a deliberate choice to treat the finance function as a competitive advantage rather than a cost centre. Sean brought in a younger, digitally-confident finance manager who could make the most of a modern cloud ecosystem not to maintain old habits, but to leave them behind.

Building a modern finance stack with Xero

In 2018, Sean moved both MTD Training and Skillshub onto Xero and built a tightly integrated ecosystem around it.

Connected payment tools to accelerate cash collection

Stripe was integrated directly with Xero so that every invoice now includes an instant payment link. Customers can pay in seconds, with no back-and-forth. Combined with Xero's automated invoice reminders, the days of manually chasing payments were gone.

Digitised expenses across a distributed trainer network

With more than 30 freelance trainers operating across the UK, expense management had always been cumbersome. Dext was introduced so trainers could capture receipts on the go photos taken on a phone, data flowing straight into Xero. No paperwork, no chasing.

Enabled remote, real-time collaboration with accountants

External accountants now log in to Xero remotely to post journals and review performance. No more scheduled office visits, no more waiting. Everyone sees the same numbers at the same time.

Put live financial data on the office wall

Xero's visual reporting is now displayed on office wall boards, giving the whole team visibility of performance data in real time. Finance became a shared language not just a back-office function.

Growth without the growing pains

The numbers tell a story that would have been hard to believe in 2018:

• Turnover climbed from £1.6 million to over £4 million a 150% increase with zero additional finance headcount.
• Profitability tripled over the same period, growing faster than revenue.
• Outstanding receivables fell from £450,000 to around £70,000 - £80,000 an 84% reduction simply by switching on automated payment reminders.
• The finance manager reclaimed one full day per week, shifting from manual processing to strategic analysis.
• The finance function, still just 1.5 FTE, is now ready to absorb a third business, a UK Training Institute acquisition expected to complete by early 2026.

When COVID-19 hit and in-person training ground to a halt, Skillshub's online platform became a lifeline. Because the entire finance operation was already in the cloud, Sean's team kept running without missing a beat, tracking performance across both businesses in real time and modelling scenarios with confidence while competitors scrambled.

Finance as a foundation for scale

For Sean, Xero isn't just accounting software. It's the infrastructure that makes ambitious, lean growth possible. By automating the work that used to consume his finance team's time, he freed up capital both financial and human to invest where it matters most: sales, marketing, and the next acquisition.

He now runs two businesses on 1.5 finance FTEs, plans to add a third on the same team, and has a clear view of exactly where his money is at any given moment. That's not luck. That's deliberate architecture.