Karen Torbitt is the founder and Managing Director of Virtual Financial Solutions.  Karen is a Chartered Accountant who commenced her career in public practice, gaining a strong technical accounting background before moving into the business world.   With over 20 years’ experience as a senior commercial finance leader, Karen has unique experience in both large corporate, multinational companies to small to medium enterprises.  Karen is also highly experienced in franchising with over 10 years in the franchise industry.

 

The concept for Virtual Financial Solutions developed over the years Karen worked in senior finance management roles at Bakers Delight and Luxottica (owner of OPSM/Sunglass Hut) which are both large corporate entities that operate retail stores under a franchise model.  Her roles at both organisations involved providing commercial financial insight and analysis to the internal company executive leadership teams to drive sales, profit and strategy but in addition, and quite uniquely, saw her working directly with the franchisee store owners themselves to provide them with the same financial insights and analysis regarding their own stores. 

 

In working directly with these small business operators, Karen became passionate about helping them achieve their financial goals.  This passion was driven through seeing first-hand that often these businesses did not have access to regular commercial financial expertise to help drive their business forward and/or that they were more interested in getting on with the operational side of the business (their passion!) and wanted to outsource the financial part of the business to someone with this expertise but had limited options, resorting often to utilising their bookkeepers or their tax accountant, neither of which provided the services they really needed.  As a result, these businesses are often not getting the financial insights or support they need to grow their revenue and profit, leading to missed opportunities and often avoidable financial pressures, cash flow concerns as well as lost focus on the core business operations.  This led to Karen to found Virtual Financial Solutions to provide this financial expertise to small to medium sized businesses.