The Scottish Event Campus (SEC), formerly the SECC, is one of the UK’s leading event and entertainment venues, based in Glasgow. Established in 1985 on the site of the former Queen’s Dock, it forms a key part of the regeneration of the River Clyde waterfront and has become central to Scotland’s cultural and commercial landscape.
Today, the SEC comprises three main venues: the SEC Centre, SEC Armadillo, and OVO Hydro. Together, they offer flexible space for exhibitions, conferences, and live entertainment, from small meetings to events exceeding 10,000 attendees. With over 22,000 square metres of exhibition space and a 13,000-capacity arena, it is one of the UK’s largest and most versatile event destinations.
The SEC plays a significant role in Scotland’s economy, attracting international conferences, exhibitions, and major entertainment acts. It supports key sectors such as energy, manufacturing, public services, and food and drink, while connecting organisations with both domestic and international audiences.
Beyond its commercial impact, the SEC is an iconic part of Glasgow’s identity and a major driver of tourism and regeneration. Over four decades, it has hosted global events and helped establish Glasgow as a leading destination for business and events.
The newly created Commercial Finance Manager role reflects the growing scale and complexity of the SEC’s operations. The position focuses on strengthening financial oversight, cost control, and commercial performance across a variable and event-driven cost base.
With significant operational costs in areas such as security, catering, production, and temporary staffing, the role provides central financial governance to ensure costs are planned, controlled, and aligned with budgets. It also drives efficiency and value through improved cost management.
This is a strong opportunity for a commercially focused finance professional to influence strategy within a high-profile organisation that plays a key role in the West of Scotland’s economy.
This role has been established at a point where the SEC’s scale, operational complexity, and pace demand a more financially driven approach to managing cost, margin, and commercial performance. As a large, multi-venue events campus hosting everything from global conferences to major live entertainment, the organisation operates in an environment defined by fixed delivery timelines, fluctuating revenue streams, and tight margin control.
At its core, the position reflects the need for stronger financial governance, visibility, and control over a cost base that is both material and highly variable, driven by the events calendar. There are multiple cost categories such as security, catering, technical production, and temporary labour represent significant operational costs, often incurred under compressed delivery timelines. The role therefore acts as a central point of financial oversight, ensuring that these costs are planned, benchmarked, and managed in line with budget expectations while identifying opportunities to leverage scale and improve cost efficiency.
The hybrid nature of the role, combining commercial finance insight with oversight of third‑party spend, highlights a broader shift toward value-based decision making rather than transactional control. By embedding robust spend analytics, supplier performance metrics, and forecasting discipline, the role will provide clearer visibility of cost drivers and margin performance across events. This will enable more informed decision-making, ensuring commercial trade-offs are well understood and aligned to financial targets.
Ultimately, the role is designed to operate as a key business partner to both operational and finance leadership, linking external spend directly to budgeting, forecasting, and longer-term financial planning. By bringing greater predictability, transparency, and discipline to a highly variable cost base, the position will support improved margin optimisation, stronger financial control, and more consistent delivery of commercial outcomes across the SEC’s diverse events portfolio.
For more information on this opportunity, please view the position profile below or contact Jonathan Donnelly at Rutherford Cross: [email protected].
SEC – Commercial Finance Manager – click to open
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