Stuart Donaldson
Profit Improvement Educator | Financial Expert | Persuasive Communicator
“To inspire people to believe in the possibility of greater success and help them make it happen is the vision that keeps me going every day.”
– Stuart Donaldson
Stuart Donaldson is able to succeed where many others have failed, by awakening franchisees to the power of their financials. By eliminating the mystery, stripping away complexity and bringing a ‘real to life’ dimension to the numbers, he is able to get the cut through needed to deliver life-changing results.
As an engaging and entertaining presenter, Stuart transforms financial concepts from confusing and complicated to simple and intuitive. As a facilitator, Stuart has a reputation for making it real and engaging his audience with his energy, humor, and passion.
Stuart Donaldson Speaker Reel
Empowering Franchisees to greater success by unlocking the mystery of financials, and making them real and relevant.
Stuart Donaldson is an experienced educator, business coach, facilitator and financial advocate for business owners.
As a facilitator, Stuart has crafted his style from two decades of experience working with Small to Medium Enterprises – observing and defining the causes of failure and the drivers of success.
Stuart has conducted hundreds of seminars, workshops, and keynote addresses across Australia, New Zealand, The Pacific Region, Singapore, and USA. Scores of business owners, franchise groups, industry associations, and professionals describe his work as engaging, motivating, enlightening and informative, earning him an enviable reputation with clients and audiences.
Stuart is driven by his ability to transform his audiences’ view of financial concepts from confusing and complex to simple and intuitive, and he has a talent for transforming the language of finance into a storyline everyone understands.
As someone who has a great passion for surfing Stuart appreciates that wipeouts can occur in business too. With structure and discipline, these can be avoided and businesses can thrive.
Stuart has a Bachelor of Business (Accounting) degree and Advanced Diploma in Financial Services.

Partial Client List:
- Bakers Delight
- Commonwealth Bank of Australia
- Connective Group
- Hayes Knight Accountants
- Hone Leong Finance
- IGA Supermarkets
- McCarthy Group
- Momentum Media
- Mortgage Finance Association of Australia
- Solid Racks
- Suncorp Group
Not a numbers person? No problem. Discover the power, joy and simplicity of using customer and financial information to improve your decision-making.
This module introduces key learnings including an introduction to interpreting business ratios, measuring productivity, profit, cash, and financial strength.
Participants practice using financial statements to assess the business performance and establish plans to drive value and growth. Financial statements tell the story of your business and participants will leave with the tools and confidence to apply their knowledge to their business.
Measurement is at the heart of performance improvement.
Discover how to select the metrics that matter; that enable you to objectively communicate expectations and manage business activities to achieve more.
Make continuous improvement part of your DNA, assess your business priorities, measure those things that drive success and implement plans to improve results.
Apply this knowledge to create your own dashboard and have a daily, weekly, monthly and annual snapshot of how you are tracking to your goals and objectives.
Why not develop a profit plan that aligns with your lifestyle goals? Determine the sales targets that will yield the profits needed to achieve your goals.
In this module, we will explore topics including; understanding your cost structure, measuring the impact of changing prices and margins, investing in fixed assets (equipment, people, marketing, advertising), improving your average transaction value, and increasing your sales revenue.
Participants will leave with one of the most powerful financial tools in business; the ability to quickly assess the financial impact of any investment they seek to make.
All businesses need cash to operate. Even a profitable business can run out of cash.
- Where does the cash go?
- What are the primary drivers of cash in your business?
- What must you measure and manage to improve cash flow?
- What action can you take to make a significant improvement in your working capital, release the pressure, and create options previously not available?
Participants will leave take away a deep understanding of the drivers of cash flow and the distinct difference between cash and profit are fundamental to creating and sustaining a high achieving business, and have a clear action plan to execute.
Many have budgets for revenue and expense, but that may not be enough. Are you sure you’ll have the cash flow and other resources needed transform your plans to reality?
This module introduces franchisees to the ‘nuts and bolts’ of budgeting. The ability to create a budget and to understand its key inputs is fundamental to being able to interpret the drivers of success.
For participants, they can expect that completion of this module will help turbocharge their planning process and produce much clearer goals and objectives.
Don’t just wait for the phone to ring; set your sights on growth. Do the things that drive sales and foster a culture of proactive selling. Have a clear value proposition and brand strategy and brand strategy and establish a culture of proactive selling. The number of customers you have, how frequently they buy, and the average transaction value, all drive sales.
Participants will explore strategies for driving sales, understand how and what to communicate to sales teams, identify margin improvement options and create sales metrics specific to their business.
There is no greater loss than opportunity left uncapitalized! Predict your borrowing needs so you can be ready to take action when opportunity knocks. Predict your borrowing needs to capitalize on growth opportunities.
This session provides a model for forecasting the amount of long-term debt required to fund the growth of the business and identifies alternate strategies for managing debt and equity to align with growth. Managing debt is a significant challenge for many franchisees and few are aware of the ability to forecast and predict the need.
Participants will leave with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to apply to their business.