Most founders hold on too long. They build something that finally works, then spend years defending it long after the business has grown past needing them personally. Letting go starts to feel like disappearing.

David B Horne is doing the opposite. At 64, after raising more than £100 million for growth and completing over 30 acquisitions and exits, he is actively searching for the person who will take his seat as CEO. He has already decided that person should be a woman.

That decision only makes sense once you understand what building this company actually cost him. It did not start with a plan. It started with a collapse.

The Accountant Who Refuses to Hide Behind the Numbers

David B Horne is the Founder of Add Then Multiply, a London firm that helps founder-led businesses scale through funding, acquisition and eventual exit rather than slow organic growth alone. He built his reputation on a stubborn belief that finance should never be a mystery for the people actually running the business. That belief was forged somewhere far messier than a boardroom.

A £100,000 Mistake and the End of the Drift

He trained as a Chartered Accountant with PwC, then became CFO of a company listed on the London Stock Exchange. In 2008, he had just finished integrating operations across 23 countries and raising £28 million. One week later, Lehman Brothers collapsed.

He absorbed that lesson, then briefly ignored it. He quit the corporate world to become a wine merchant. It did not go to plan.

He calls that stretch the drift. It ended in the summer of 2012, just after his 50th birthday, when his father fell down a flight of stairs in Vancouver and broke his neck. David flew home and was there when his father died.

His one regret from that entire period is not the £100,000, and it is not the failed business. It is the stress he put on his wife. Everything since, he says, grew out of that single collapse.

Fund, Acquire, and the Fight for the Missing 98 Percent

What grew out of it is Add Then Multiply as it exists today, built around a sequence he calls FACE: Fund, Acquire, Consolidate, Exit. Most owners he meets assume buying a competitor is something only large corporations get to do.

That single shift in thinking has compressed decades into years for his clients. One business grew from £1.1 million to £27.7 million in three years under his guidance, a 25 times increase most owners never believe is within reach.

His team operates as what he calls an insourced fractional finance team, embedded inside a client’s business rather than advising from a distance. The first thing they usually build is not a pitch deck. It is a 90-day cash flow forecast, updated every week.

That same discipline makes him blunt with founders chasing capital too casually.

David B Horne has raised over £100 million using exactly that discipline, across 30-plus completed acquisitions and exits. The same appetite for uncomfortable numbers eventually pointed him somewhere far more personal than a client balance sheet.

PitchBook data shows female-only founding teams have never received more than 2 percent of VC capital in the UK and Europe, or more than 3 percent in the US. David went looking for why, and found a study of roughly 1,500 listed UK investment funds. It showed 108 of them were run by men named David, more than the total run by women, which stood at 105.

He built Funding Focus in response, a social enterprise pushing for fairer access to capital for female and underrepresented entrepreneurs. It led to a TEDx talk “The Fight for Fairer Funding” that has passed three million views, and a second book, Funded Female Founders. In 2025, the Women’s Business Club named him Man of the Year for that work.

It is the same instruction he gives every founder chasing a raise or an acquisition. Ambition, backed by numbers someone has actually checked, tends to outperform caution dressed up as realism.

Handing Over the Keys, on His Own Terms

That instruction now applies to David B Horne himself. His father-in-law passed away recently. His grandchildren turn two and four this September. Both have sharpened how he thinks about the time he has left to spend building rather than simply running.

But he is done being the only engine in the room. He is stepping into the Chair seat at Add Then Multiply and has decided his successor should be a woman, turning two decades of campaigning for fairer funding into a decision he is now making inside his own company.

Most founders wait until they leave to find out whether their business can survive without them, but David B Horne decided to find out while he is still in the room.