Maria, what did you do before you joined Dancerace?

I previously worked for an invoice finance company, Sonovate, for seven and a half years.

I started there as credit controller; then quickly became credit control and accounts receivable manager.

More recently, I moved into operational project management where I was responsible for the technical and tactical improvements for collections within the business.

What are your career highlights to date?

I’ve really enjoyed being thrown into management!

When my predecessor left at my last company, I was tasked with building up the credit control department – one of the key business units, especially during lockdown.

I had an amazing team at Sonovate. It’s a stressful department to work in, but they were fantastic. We built up a great culture and I won manager of the year for 2020! That was a lovely way to get recognition from the leadership team there.

You joined us in June 2024. What drew you to Dancerace?

I'd been trying to move beyond credit control as I wanted to be more on the tech side of a business: working on process improvements, operations and building on my knowledge of invoice finance.

During the interview process at Dancerace, I really felt like I understood the people in the business. It’s a great culture.

I was sold from the offset, having spoken to Louisa Jayne Templeton (Dancerace’s Head of Customer Success). After meeting Elliot Avison (CEO) and Jon Watts (Head of Product), I thought that this felt like a company I would be really happy to invest my time in.

Finding the right people is very important, as is the flexibility of remote working. It’s all about that work-life balance. I live two and a bit hours away from Dancerace’s Bath HQ, in Hereford. It's a bit of a trek from the office. I'm in the middle of nowhere surrounded by cows, so remote working is ideal.

What do you enjoy most about what you do?

I enjoy learning. Being a customer & app support manager is a really interesting role for me. It’s a great team; we have some new starters joining us and we’re focused on building out the services function within Dancerace.

Right now, we’re in the middle of a big transition. The business has scaled and is growing in all departments, including Customer Success and App Support.

I’m enjoying working out how I can set the groundwork to make our services better for the long-term.

That's what I enjoy doing most: streamlining processes, putting things in place so people know what they're doing. I think there's nothing worse than when you're in a job and you're asking: what I supposed to do? Where does my responsibility lie?

It’s essential to set clear expectations for people so they can be their best, and to highlight when someone’s doing an amazing job. If you don’t give people pillars to refer to, in terms of what they need to do and achieve, then you can’t see those that are going over and above in terms of contributing to the business.

How do you approach leading your team?

There's a difference between being a leader and a manager. I want to empower my staff!

My goal here is to spread as much knowledge across my team as possible. We’ve got a great group of people, including those that are more technical and others that have come from the IF industry. It’s a balance.

What we don’t want is to create a dependency or put pressure on one person. So, I'm trying to cross-skill everyone and share knowledge across our team so that, as a department, we function at the highest level. This also allows people to see where their skills lie.

Communication is also key, for me. I like to think I'm very approachable: I'll tell people how it is and I expect the same in return. I'm not precious!

Finally: collaboration. I'm not a dictator and want to bring everyone along on the journey. If I suggest something that won’t work, tell me why not. Let’s discuss other options and make a plan. I want people to enjoy what they're doing and feel like they're contributing.

What's something you wish you knew earlier in your working life?

I wish I'd learned work-life balance earlier. In the past, I’ve burned myself out, which isn’t healthy. It’s important to learn to say ‘no’ and to say “I can’t do that right now, but will do it on this timeline.”

That's something I had a problem with earlier in my management career: taking it all on-board and feeling like I could hide the pressure so that other people would be OK. In doing so, you end up breaking yourself. Since getting into management, I’ve had to learn that sharing the load and managing expectations is a huge plus for everyone.

What excites you most about the future at Dancerace?

It's all new to me! In my last role, I worked very closely with the product and product design teams and with devs on refinement. In this role, I'm going to get more into the intricacies of how we fix system issues in the back-end – all of the stuff I haven’t previously been exposed to – while using my invoice finance knowledge to answer our users’ more generalised questions. I'm excited to understand the systems and to see how I can make everybody's lives a bit easier.

Finally, what’s a fun fact we should know about you?

I once was in the gym with the Hoff. That was a weird situation at my tiny little gym in Cardiff.

I’ve also recently started to brew mead with my partner. Recommendations for flavours welcome!

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