Karen Sands ACA CTA

Karen Sands is a private-equity-experienced Group Chief Financial Officer with more than 25 years of post-qualification experience, trusted by boards, investors and tier-one sponsors to step into complex situations, professionalise finance functions and deliver value creation at pace.

Her career spans large-cap and mid-market private equity, venture-backed and listed environments, in both permanent and interim CFO roles. She has been repeatedly engaged by sponsors including Bain Capital, Montagu, Triton Partners, Core Equity, Hg and Charlesbank to support acquisition, integration, refinancing, turnaround and exit-driven mandates, and most recently by Inflexion to lead a buy-and-build finance function.

Karen is ACA and CTA qualified, PRINCE2 certified, and holds a PhD in IFRS accounting. She has operated at scale, including in businesses with revenues above £1 billion, and has supported four IPOs across the NYSE, NASDAQ and FTSE. She combines technical rigour with commercial judgement, translating complexity into clear, decision-ready insight for boards and investment committees.

Career

Most recently, Karen served as Group Chief Financial Officer of Terradace Holdings, a privately owned fresh-produce group with a portfolio of complementary investments and operating companies. During her tenure, group revenue grew from £556 million to £767 million. She restructured £45 million of senior debt with HSBC, led a finance function of more than fifty people through its transformation into a data-driven business-partnering function, and negotiated the lease that doubled the group's packing and production capacity.

Before Terradace she was Group Chief Financial Officer of Hegenberger Medical, a privately owned medical technology business, and Chief Financial Officer of Bowers & Wilkins and UK CFO within Charlesbank-backed Sound United — a newly created role spanning a brand of approximately $250 million in revenue, a UK manufacturing plant and R&D facility with close to 1,000 employees, and the group's eventual transition to Masimo.

Her transaction and transformation record is extensive. For Triton Partners she supported the buy-and-build at Chevron Traffic Management, integrating two acquisitions and completing a refinancing of approximately £100 million of senior debt. For Bain Capital she led accounting projects on the Kantar carve-out from WPP. For Montagu she worked on the Janes carve-out from IHS Markit and on M&A at Capita Education Software Solutions. For Core Equity she served as IFRS specialist at Portman Dental Care through a period of two to three acquisitions per week, and for Inflexion she acted as interim CFO of the AIH Group buy-and-build.

Following the acquisition of SABMiller, she held the No. 1 UK finance role at Anheuser-Busch InBev on an interim basis, overseeing restructuring step plans required by the Competition and Markets Authority. Her listing and IPO experience includes Endava on the NYSE, Avon's NYSE listing on its merger with Natura, post-IPO professionalisation and M&A at FTSE 100 Just Eat, and IPO preparation at Vista-backed Misys. She also served as European Financial Controller at Hg-backed Achilles.

Earlier in her career Karen spent nine years at BPP as Head of CPD Tax Courses and IFRS specialist, delivering bespoke IFRS training to around 80 per cent of the FTSE 350, followed by two years as a senior manager in ICAEW's consultancy practice. She trained and qualified at Critchleys, a firm of chartered accountants in Oxfordshire.

She was named Adviser of the Year at both the FM Global Awards and the FM Taxation Awards.

At Dreamers

At Dreamers Investment Consortium, Karen is responsible for financial governance, acquisition financial analysis, capital structure assessment, group reporting, financial controls and the development of scalable finance infrastructure. Her remit is to ensure that every acquisition the consortium considers is underwritten to institutional standards — quality of maintainable earnings, cash conversion, working-capital discipline and a capital structure the business can carry — and that acquired businesses are integrated into a finance function capable of supporting the group's long-term development.

Core expertise

Biography drawn from Ms Sands' published professional record; figures relate to prior employers and are not Dreamers results.