After nearly two decades in Mexico, I’m making my experience available beyond my own companies
Why I am opening an independent advisory practice, and who it is for.
I started my career at Ernst & Young, auditing banks, technology firms and multinationals across Finland, the United States, the United Kingdom and France. I worked on SOX compliance for Silicon Valley technology companies. I helped one of the world’s largest paper manufacturers build internal controls across four continents. I passed the Finnish KHT examination in 2005 — Finland’s equivalent of a CPA qualification — and thought I had a reasonably solid handle on how business worked.
Then I moved to Mexico.
What the textbook doesn’t cover
What followed was nearly two decades of learning that financial theory and operational reality are two very different things, and that the gap between them is widest precisely where the stakes are highest.
I have directed construction projects. I have run mining and retail operations. I have dealt with SAT compliance, import logistics, supplier disputes and the particular arithmetic of keeping a holding company solvent through peso devaluations, a pandemic, and the ordinary turbulence of doing business in an emerging market.
None of that is in the textbook. What the textbook gives you is the discipline to know when your numbers are telling you the truth. What Mexico gives you is the judgement to know what to do about it when they aren’t.
I have come to think the combination is rarer than it should be. There are excellent auditors who have never had to make a payroll. There are outstanding operators who have never had their assumptions tested by someone with a mandate to disagree. Very few people have spent serious time on both sides of that line, in this country, in four languages.
What the practice does
I work with SMEs and international clients in four areas.
Fractional CFO and financial advisory. Senior financial leadership for companies that need it without needing it full-time. Cost structure, cash discipline, reporting that management can actually use, and the uncomfortable questions that don’t get asked when everyone in the room reports to the same person.
The Nordic–Mexico bridge. Helping Finnish and Swedish companies enter and operate in Mexico. I speak your language, literally and figuratively — and I have spent long enough here to know which of your assumptions will survive contact with the ground and which will not.
Financial due diligence and M&A advisory. Big 4 methodology applied to real transactions, project by project. What the numbers say, what they omit, and what the omission tells you.
Import business advisory. Cost structure, customs compliance and supplier vetting, in a market where the distance between what people expect and what actually happens can be expensive.
Why now
Two reasons, and I’d rather be direct about both.
The first is that the environment has changed in ways that reward exactly this kind of work. USMCA was not renewed at its 2026 review and now faces annual scrutiny running to 2036. The European Union and Mexico signed a modernised trade framework in May 2026 that has not yet entered into force. Nordic companies are investing here at scale. Every one of those developments raises the same question for a business with cross-border exposure: are your numbers good enough to make a decision on?
The second is simpler. I have been doing this inside my own companies for nearly twenty years, and the work is more interesting when the problems are not all mine.
Who it is for
If you are running a business in Mexico and suspect your financial reporting is describing a company you no longer recognise, we should talk.
If you are a Finnish or Swedish company assessing Mexico and you would rather hear the difficult parts before you commit than after, we should talk.
If you are looking at an acquisition and want someone to test the numbers who has actually operated a business of that kind, we should talk.
The first conversation is free, in English, Spanish, Swedish or Finnish, and carries no obligation.
Christian Nyman is KHT-qualified in Finland (state examination 2005; membership currently inactive after more than twenty years abroad) and holds an M.Sc. in Economics from Hanken School of Economics. He spent 2000–2007 with Ernst & Young in Helsinki, San Jose, London and Paris, and has worked in executive operating roles in Mexico since 2007. The practice is based in Mexico City and works remotely worldwide.
A shorter version of this piece was first published on LinkedIn.
Let’s have a conversation
The first conversation is free and without obligation.