I've worked with Aisha for a good while now and she is, genuinely, one of the strongest group-level finance operators I have in my network. With 13 years in hospitality finance and her current seat as Group Financial Controller at citizenM, she has built her career entirely within the lifestyle and independent hotel space, which means she understands the commercial tempo and guest-first culture of that world as well as any FC I know. She is not a corporate transplant finding her feet; this is her native environment.

What stands out to me above everything else is the piece of work she led on automated month-end reporting at citizenM. She told me the process when she joined was largely manual and time-consuming, and she drove the full redesign from the ground up, embedding automation that materially cut close times and freed the finance team to focus on analysis rather than data entry. That kind of initiative, taking a broken process and rebuilding it with technology at the centre, is exactly the capability that separates a strong controller from an exceptional one, and it tells you a great deal about how she thinks.

Aisha is London-based and on an eight-week notice period, which is straightforward for a role of this seniority. She is calm, commercially minded and genuinely easy to brief, which matters when you are introducing a candidate to a leadership team. I would have no hesitation putting her in front of your senior stakeholders and I am confident she would represent both herself and the opportunity well from the very first conversation.