Mike Helde
Verified Expert in Finance
Finance Expert
Jakarta, Indonesia
Toptal member since December 25, 2018
Mike has worked 16 years in Asia in senior finance positions, including helping Metro Group (a major European retailer) expand its Japanese business from two to nine stores and assisting Imerys (a leading industrial company) to establish a profitable JV. He later became an entrepreneur in ERP and outsourced accounting fields in southeast Asia. Mike enjoys freelancing to help clients with complex financial modeling and corporate finance projects.
Career Highlights
Education Highlights
Case Studies
Data Center Financial Model
Great Groceries eCommerce
HR Engagement Startup Financial Model
Industry Expertise
- Manufacturing
- Retail
- Financial Modeling
- Startups
- Information Technology
Software Expertise
- Odoo
Other Expertise
- Business Strategy
- CFO
- Compliance
- Financial Modeling
- SAP
Work Experience
Founding Owner
Exacta Consulting
- Built a financial model, created the pitch deck, and performed fundraising for a startup in the HR field.
- Served as a fractional CFO for a health-tech startup.
- Developed a financial model, business strategy, and fundraising support for a greenfield data center project.
- Implemented an ERP as a functional project manager for an AI startup with a presence in seven countries.
- Setup local operations and partnerships for a big data company focusing on retail data analytics.
Group CFO
BlueFox
- Implemented Odoo, an ERP system, across business units covering eight countries with a team of 15 internal resources and two external consultants.
- Built a new financial planning model to assess the profitability of new markets and forecast existing markets with more accuracy and efficiency, reducing the time required for a forecast from one week to half a day.
- Rebuilt the Vietnamese finance team, hiring a local CFO and three staff in less than three weeks.
- Implemented a new set of internal controls to ensure organizational compliance.
CFO
PT Indoporlen
- Reduced receivables by $3 million, reviewing the entire collection flow and processes to decrease payment terms down from 20+ days to 5 days; defining customer segmentation based on business size and payment behavior; establishing a collection approach based on customer risk profile; creating strict credit limits; implementing rigorous and comprehensive terms and conditions.
- Coordinated a comprehensive restructuring plan to reduce from 600 employees in 2013 to 350 employees in 2018.
- Implemented shared accounting and IT services for the three group companies, reducing the finance and IT staff from 27 employees in 2013 to nine employees in 2018.
- Led an SAP implementation that covered multiple functions including sales, procurement, manufacturing, warehousing, and quality control with eight internal users and five external consultants, successfully delivering within a $500,000 budget in less than one year.
- Developed manufactured goods cost models to ensure the accuracy of product-level margins leading to gross margin increases from 18% to 22%.
VP of Controlling and Planning
Metro Cash&Carry
- Developed a Japanese market expansion financial plan for the opening of five new stores with required capital expenditures of €120 million. As a result of this expansion, the company grew from €120 million in revenue to more than €300 million.
- Optimized business reporting and decreased the number of reports from 50+ to less than 20, helping to ensure that business users have faster access to relevant information to manage their areas of responsibility.
- Implemented a staff scheduling system to optimize the utilization of resources, helping to decrease the per store employee count by ten individuals and simultaneously improve customer service satisfaction levels from 92% to 97%.
- Led a turnaround plan to improve the company's performance with 50+ actions covering critical areas including sales, margins, inventory management, employee optimization, general and administrative cost reductions, helping to double operating income in two years.
- Managed the functional implementation of MicroStrategy, a big data software tool, for the Japanese business.
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA) Degree in International Management
Louis Pasteur University - Strasbourg, France
Master's Degree in Economics
Louis Pasteur University - Strasbourg, France
Skills
Finance
Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), Financial Modeling, Financial Model Auditing, Return Analysis, CFO, Budgeting, Management Accounting, Financial Reporting, Cost Reduction & Optimization (Cost-down), Profitability Optimization, Financial System Implementation, Control Audits, Accounting Consolidation, Capital Expenditure Planning, Working Capital Management, Fundraising, Three-statement Modeling
Output Software
Excel 2016, Microsoft PowerPoint, SAP R/3, Microsoft Word, Odoo, Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Microsoft Dynamics
Industry Expertise
Retail & Wholesale, FS Planning, Industrial & Manufacturing
Data & Analysis Software
SQL
Geographic Expertise
Indonesia, Japan, France, Germany, Singapore
Other
Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Consolidated Reporting, Reports, Reporting, Excel Reporting, Financial Closing, Period-end Closings, Modeling, Business Analysis, IRR, Business Planning, Budget Modeling, Manufacturing, SAP, SAP Business Warehouse (BW), Excel VBA, Excel Macros, Business Strategy, CAPEX, MicroStrategy, Compliance, Change Management, Business Partnerships, SAP ERP, Big Data, Startups, Startup Consulting, Pitch Decks, IT
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