Safe Hands at Crunch Time for Exeter Students’ Guild
How Whitegate gave Exeter Students’ Guild the finance leadership it needed through a system migration, a landmark pension exit and a five-year funding plan.
“Tony felt like a member of the senior leadership team from day one, like a member of the senior leadership team that I’d worked with for ten years.” – Ali Chambers, CEO. Exeter Students’ Guild
The Client
Exeter Students’ Guild is a vibrant, purpose-driven non-profit that strives to make students love their experience at the University of Exeter. The Guild is one of the UK’s Top 50 Best Mid-Sized Companies to Work For, ranked 43rd, and a Top 10 Best Education and Training Organisation, ranked 9th. (Best Companies 2025).
The Challenge
In June 2022, everything landed at once for Ali Chambers, CEO of Exeter Students’ Guild. Her head of finance was leaving and the interim firm Ali had lined up pulled out at the last minute. The timing couldn’t have been worse:
Ali needed urgent financial counsel from someone who understood how a students’ union operates. A colleague from another students’ union put her in touch with Tony Reissner at Whitegate.
“Few people understand students’ unions and the complexities of societies. I didn’t think I would be able to find anyone to help us. And then Tony happened.” – Ali Chambers, CEO. Exeter Students’ Guild.
A safe pair of hands
Tony joined as interim head of finance and was up to speed within days: reviewing how the finance function was structured; project managing each workstream; and reporting back regularly to keep Ali fully informed.
The day-to-day transactions were in good order but the team lacked strategic confidence. Finance Manager, Dem, had stepped up to a new role as Finance Partner only months before and hadn’t fully found her feet.
“Day-to-day, I was on top of things. But at the strategic level… management accounts, papers, presenting… I didn’t know how to prepare any of that. Tony trained me up and gave me the encouragement to present to the trustee board.” – Dem Salsbury, Finance Partner
Finance everyone can understand
Ali calls Tony “a finance communicator”. The Guild’s trustee board is mostly students, and it changes every year. The old approach to keeping them informed involved dense spreadsheets with training on how to read them. Tony scrapped both.
“He just said, the Excel sheets are hard to read. So instead of using them and doing the training, let’s do presentations and pie charts and show them graphs.
It changed our meetings; students were starting to ask really mature questions about our finances.
Tony’s dashboards are like gold dust in an organisation like ours.” – Ali Chambers, CEO
At the senior leadership table, Tony’s role went beyond the numbers. The Guild had been through redundancies, and anxiety about finances ran deep. Tony gave leaders across the organisation the confidence to talk about the Guild’s financial position, so their teams could feel safe and stable.
The board became, in Ali’s words, “fluent in Tony”. That baseline understanding proved priceless when the trustees later faced one of the biggest decisions in the Guild’s history.
Exiting the pension scheme
The Guild was a member of SUSS, the Students’ Union Superannuation Scheme. It’s a closed, last-man-standing scheme in which any member’s failure would spread its liabilities across the rest. The risk was real, and the deficit was not only taking the Guild’s balance sheet into the red, but rising deficit-repair contributions were threatening the delivery of student services amid sector-wide financial pressure.
Ali led the project. An actuary ran an options appraisal, and the strongest business case was to pay up and walk away: an exit settlement of just under £5 million, delivering over £2m in long term savings and eliminating the biggest strategic risk facing the Guild.
Tony’s role was to keep the numbers true. He modelled the long-term cost of staying versus the real cost of buying out, sense-checked each decision and translated the complexity for trustees.
“It’s been one of the biggest de-risking exercises the Guild has ever undertaken.” – Ali Chambers, CEO
With the liability resolved, the Guild’s balance sheet moved from £3.8 million negative to £1.5 million positive.
The five-year plan that held up to scrutiny
The university had agreed the block grant growth plan in principle over five years but the Finance and Risk committee needed a robust financial model to back it up.
Tony built the detailed plan that included role-by-role salaries forecast and cash flow projections year by year. Tony’s work helped Ali secure funding with half the following year’s grant paid upfront.
The plan got the grant committed in writing for five years which is rare in a sector where grants are usually negotiated annually.
“It’s taken the annual pressure and workload away. We send an impact report every year; it’s not a block grant negotiation. It just makes us much more secure.” – Ali Chambers, CEO
After an initial interim leadership stint, Ali again called on Tony’s system expertise when it was time to lead the software migration.
A new finance system in three months
When Tony returned to the team the following May, waiting for him was a signed contract to migrate from Exchequer to Access, with a go-live deadline of early August. The board had approved the system before Tony was involved and, lacking system expertise, the finance team was worried.
“It was very stressful. We didn’t think we’d make the deadline, and we didn’t know how it would all work.
Having somebody with the financial background and also that IT expertise is really rare. And you know, Tony’s excellent at both. To have it together is amazing.” – Dem Salsbury, Finance Partner.
With a good working knowledge of the finance function from his previous interim work, Tony led the design around the people who would use it, their processes and the reporting requirements of the board.
Did it go live on time?
“Of course it did. Tony was doing it.” – Dem Salsbury, Finance Partner
During the project, Tony reduced the migration spend by £10,000. Instead of buying the Access expenses add-on, he worked with the Guild’s existing student expenses app to develop an integration.
Coaching the team to run without him
Tony’s approach was to coach as he led. He shared his screen in one-to-ones with Ali to walk her through complex issues. He trained Dem to build the management accounts, write papers and present to the board. He also helped recruit and hand over to the Guild’s permanent head of finance.
Dem now leads the reforecast, the budgets and the management accounts, and her role has changed from finance manager to finance partner to reflect this.
“The biggest transformation I’ve ever seen in a manager, from where Dem was before to where Dem is now. Absolutely massive.” – Ali Chambers, CEO
