FP&A Today

Forget Founder Mode. In FP&A, it's Owner Mode. “In rugby, if you observe, a player often clings on to the ball, not letting it go out of his hands until the goal is scored. That’s how we need to handle things. Own it — cling onto it — achieve the goal,” says former IBM India CFO Ravikumar Ramanan, author of the brilliant book: The CFO Lens, how to Thrive in the Fast Changing World of Finance He tells Glenn Hopper: “The expectation of a finance partner is not to stop at the sign off and say, okay, I have now committed $10m in company money. You then need to get involved in the execution of the strategy. "I changed my role from just being the person who signed off and asked for periodic reports to actually going out into the field and starting to talk and feel like an owner.” In this masterclass episode Ravikumar reveals The Bigger business context we are living through that finance cannot ignore ❌ The failures when strategy projects are not being tracked by finance 🎯 How to feel really that the results are yours 🗣️ Storytelling and influencing secrets from the finance seat 💰 Good and bad costs ⚖️ Balancing short term and long term in your finance role 🚀 My biggest advice for people to succeed in a finance role at any stage of their career 📊 My favorite Excel Function (even corporate legends get asked)

Unlocking the Secrets of Lost Sales Opportunities (via FP&A) In this week's episode Herman Kastroll (Skip Kastroll), Senior Director, Insights and Analytics at AmPhil. He gives the inside story on creating and selling a report in conversation with host Glenn Hopper. It is a practical example of effective FP&A leading to revenue-grabbing opportunities. Skip says: "I took all of our closed loss opportunities over a period of time, and I wanted to know what is it telling us? What is it telling us about the organization? About the person who made the sale? And what does it say about all the information that is typically cataloged when you have an opportunity in your pipeline." Structuring the report: 1. Start with a Catchy Title Skip's example: "Unlocking the Secrets of Lost Sales Opportunities" 2. Add a Memorable Quote Skip's choice: "Data is the new oil, but we keep losing the map to the oil field." 3. Provide an Executive Summary Skip says: "I gave a summary right away. The report was nine or 10 pages long, and I gave a summary at the front. Some people want to read the whole report and some people are gonna stop on page two." 4. Distill Key Findings into Main Takeaways In Skip's words: "I then took the distilled key findings into three main takeaways. So instead of just presenting the data, I provided what my best (3-5 main) interpretation of the data was." 5. Make each takeaway actionable Link data to potential strategies. "In particular when people are pressed with time, they will al almost always fill their open time with what is practical over what is ideal." 6. Deep Dive with Detailed Analysis "I then had a bunch of detailed analysis below for each finding. I give context and implications." 7. Tailor Content for Different Audiences "I tried to tailor different sections to different types of people. So this report went to the CEO, but it also went to individual directors who lead a team. So, I broke out some of the numbers by teams, by groups so that they would have something relevant that they could look at." "Find the genuine human impact that the data is letting you guide the narrative, that can make it memorable. 8. Create memorable charts and graphs I recommend Dona Wong, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics("whenever I make a chart, I’ll always flip through a couple of pages") Ensure visuals support your narrative 9. Encourage Discussion Some of my insights were way off base. But it sparked some thinking. Some executives said we probably couldn’t do exactly what Skip suggested, but we could maybe do something like it." Also in this episode:  🧳My multidisciplinary journey – studying math, economics, educational leadership and religion (and how it applies to my data insights)  🎓FP&A business partnering at a University Finance team 📈Leading vs lagging indicators  😻My favorite Excel function 🖇Please connect and with Skip and and feel free to ask him questions.

We are calling for grizzled Senior Analysts who aren’t afraid to call it like it is! If this is you (or you know of one) please comment or suggest future guests in the comments. Thank you to the Reddit community for the feedback and keeping us honest. We always want new interesting and diverse guests from the trenches of FP&A. Let us know 👇

2️⃣ great bits of career advice from Laura Bloom, MBA (this week's guest) who has been a senior FP&A leader at companies including Dotmatics, Salesforce, Comcast, and Icertis. However she reveals that she pivoted to accounting and finance from an early career as a contracts manager for an air cargo company. Speaking with host Glenn Hopper she says: 1. Keep an open mind about what role you take and then learn to craft your story. So for example, with contracts management, you wouldn't think that would translate over into finance and accounting. However, as part of that role I was working with sales to build the sales bids for new business. So that was was obviously finance related. Then also working very closely with accounting to give them the revenue expectations for commercial contracts and OPEX expenses for all our commercial properties. 2. In Interviews for a finance role send over your “Portfolio” in advance Though normally associated with a Creative position it gives you an edge in finance interviews. In a finance interview you can tell them your story and then you can say, look I've built up this portfolio of models of financial models, maybe a three statement model or a revenue model, or even just a basic opex forecasting model. I'd love to send my work over so you can see the quality of, of my work. And I, that's something I've actually used to great effect. 99% of the time finance companies are not expecting that, and it absolutely blows their mind. They get very excited to be able to see your work product ahead of time. So it's definitely something I tell people to, you know, to consider and keep in mind. In this episode: 📊 My passion for bringing order from chaos in finance 💼 Examples from my FP&A career including calculating the obsolescence reserve for almost a billion dollars worth of inventory on a biannual basis 🔄 Building a new model and updating assumptions (transforming the process from 6 months to 60 days and releasing $5m back to the balance sheet) 📉 The importance of data minimalism 🎲 Monte Carlo analysis giving you a wider range of possible outcomes 📈 Tableau as a data visualization tool and digging into commissions 🔄 Importance of flexibility in finance and FP&A 🔑 Most important FP&A Skill? 🪜 The ladder of abstraction 🚀 The most vital go-to-market finance metrics

72% of all data is not used in any form of analysis. And, and it begs the question why? One of the questions posed by this week's guest Brandon Wilson Co-founder and CEO of Steady Dynamic Continuing our “Masters of FP&A Data” series,Brandon works with clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies giving expertise to those who lack experience building digital solutions. He encourages big ideation, assuming technology can solve any problem, and works to prioritize and constrain scope relative to business objectives. He talks with Glenn Hopper about: 🤖 AI's transformation of finance and financial modeling 📈 Predictive analytics to prescriptive analytics 💰 Moving from cost center to "value add" in finance through the data 🔄 How best to deliver and integrate your data to enhance financial functions 💬 Studying sentiment analysis in your CRM to investigate pipeline 🧮 Complex models in FP&A including clustering and Naive Bayes 💾 SQL vs no SQL and FP&A 📄 The Panama papers 🔮 What the data environment looks like for FP&A in the next two years 🎯 Zero shot prompts and chain of thought prompting 🔍 Reverse engineering to get the best AI finance results

Returning guest Christian Wattig (ex FP&A leader at P&G and Unilever) reveals fascinating new FP&A insights this week. 💥 The evolution of FP&A: FP&A is moving from being seen as a publisher of reports and forecasts, to being seen as a strategic partner to the business help leaders make better decisions." 🤝 On the importance of business partnering: " The relationship aspect is super important, showing people that we do more than just cut budgets and update forecasts. Finance can actually be a strategic partner and help the business reach their goals." Christian Wattig, a veteran former leader of FP&A at P&G, Unilever, and Squarespace, also reveals new skills he has learnt as he created the recently-launched 8 week Wharton Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) Certificate Program, one of the most comprehensive FP&A training courses on the market. He describes highlights from his career, new strategy, and analysis, and how he sees the future of the profession. In this episode: 🤝 The common bond between FP&A educators such as Christian and former host Paul Barnhurst, The FPandA Guy and Glenn Hopper 🏢 FP&A at multinational consumer goods companies P&G and Unilever 🚀 Startup FP&A vs Big FP&A 📚 Creating FP&A Prep to the new Wharton (University of Pennsylvania FP&A) 8 week Online Course 📖 Two great books I recommend The CFO Lens, Ravi Kumar, and Future Ready by Steve Morlidge and Steve Player 🧠 Two Fascinating FP&A Things I hadn't come across in 14 years previously: Business Driver Tree Analysis + Differences-in-Differences Analysis 📊 BI, financial analysis and data science vs FP&A 🏗️ Building an FP&A Team through four phases explained-data focus, story focus, and proactive value creation 🛠️ The importance of FP&A tools and choosing the right one 🔮 Key insights and trends for finance we will see this year 🤖 Practical uses of AI in FP&A

38%! Joe Knight, a former CFO-turned consultant and bestselling author, has been giving a series of questions to nonfinancial managers for 20 years (developed with Harvard Business Review) In the test they are asked about basic finance concepts. The average score is 38% for nonfinancial business partners who are often holding millions of dollars of budgets. (Oh and this is at the biggest Fortune 500 companies) The majority are unable to distinguish profit from cash. Don't know the difference between an income statement and a balance sheet. 70 percent couldn’t pick the correct definition of free cash flow Joe Knight and his bestselling book, Financial Intelligence, has closed this gap. It is often the first book finance leaders share with those on the other side of the table- in marketing, HR, IT or sales. In this week's episode Joe shares with Glenn Hopper his philosophy around finance business partnering, FP&A and Storytelling, based on training executives at companies including NBCUniversal, GE Electronic Arts, and McKesson. Just some of the great snippets: "I always say accounting is adding and subtracting, and when we get sophisticated, we divide, and finance isn't that much harder. " "I also have a big discussion about how we all know that accounting call it actuals, but they're not actuals. It's their best guess at what they made last month. They don't know. It's all a guess. We're all just guessing here. And I've, I've had a lot of exchanges with that, a lot of people arguing with me about that." In this episode 📚 The origins of writing one of the most famous business books 💼 Why I hated my time in finance at Ford Motor Company and how it shaped my thinking and journey 🤫 Busting the fallacy you shouldn't share your numbers with your business 🧮 Why actuals are not actual but just a guess (accountants close your ears) 🙉 🤝 How business partnering has changed 💸 Why it hurts operators if they don't understand the numbers 🎯 Focusing on three to five numbers 🏢 My experience with GE and NBC 🔍 The art of using limited data in finance 🎢 Harry Potter roller coasters and what it taught me about the ridiculous focus on EBITDA 👨👩👧👦 Having seven Kids

"We found GPT's predictions are on average better than human analyst predictions. "What has become even more important at this moment is identifying areas where humans can maintain their comparative advantage and try to reallocate and better allocate human resources to areas where they can excel." Alex Kim, University of Chicago, School of Business In this episode Glenn Hopper talks to the researcher responsible for the groundbreaking study which found that AI is better at conducting financial analysis than humans. Alex Kim, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, provides a full overview of his findings, methodology and the impact on FP&A, CFOs and finance from the attention-grabbing study “Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models”. The analysis, which made headlines across the world, found AI produces a 60% rate of accuracy in predictive financial performance. Human experts’ accuracy tends to fall between 53% and 57%. In this episode Alex Kim reveals the implications for finance professionals:   📚 Alex's finance background – from a Master's degree in Business Administration to Accounting and a dual Bachelor's degree in Economics and Business Administration- to his doctoral and PhD career 💻 How he self-taught himself coding and AI 💼 Practically how do finance pros take the insights from this paper and use them in their day-to-day? 📉 Why the model didn't do so well with loss-making or startup companies 🚀 Improving on the performance models using startup company data 🤖🧠 How can you combine AI and Human Intelligence 🔍 What humans can do better than AI in financial forecasting 🔬 Future research projects into information processing for investors 📰 How to keep up to date on the latest groundbreaking research in AI and Finance 🎖️ My military experience stationed with US soldiers in South Korea 📊 My favorite Excel feature (and why one thing about Excel still cannot be rivaled)

They have place hundreds of top FP&A Directors and CFOs. Joining us for this week's episode to answer your questions are Nick Gribbon, Senior Partner, Financial Officers Practice at Essenta; and Laura Streather, Consultant, Private Equity at Essenta. Just 2 great actionable actionable insights from answering your questions on FP&A and CFO career progression: 1️⃣ Show Me the Numbers Nick 🗨 "My biggest bug bear on a CV is when the basic facts are not included in terms of what someone's done. We talk to people who are in finance every day, they're dealing with data and they're dealing with numbers and you know, including that information to show, when I joined the business generated X revenue y EBITDA, and when I left it was X and Y. This is a very important thing to demonstrate your achievement." 2️⃣ Show your Strategic Impact Laura 💬 "We are looking to identify deals, businesses, exits in a specific space and evidence that someone has done a specific thing, and then identifying the CFOs and, and various finance leaders really that have been involved in that journey." These are among the telling answers to your questions raised. In this episode: 📊 Shortage of Exit Private Equity CFOs revealed and what you will need to fill the role 🚀 How to go from Director FP&A of a large public company to CFO of a PE-backed company 🧠 The importance of demonstrating "behavioral competencies of leadership" + pass the first screening 🏢 Getting exposure to the right industry – how important is it? 🎯 Discovering where you are going to have most impact in your next role 📜 How important is the CPA? 🔍 What is the best way to get on headhunters' radars? 🤝 What the headhunter interview looks like and what's is designed to accomplish? 👥 The importance of referrals and how to play them to your advantage ⏳ How slow is the CFO job market? 💼 Is being the CFO at a private equity-backed company right for you? 📄 What can candidates add to CVs to stand out? 💰 Salary bands and how to negotiate the most money 📈 Salary inflation and how that impacts senior role 💵 Will moving as CFO from a $100m to $1bn company automatically get you a higher salary?

“I would say that at the heart of it, FP&A is the same no matter which industry, I don't care whether you are selling drugs or  you're selling home goods." Geetha Ramachandran Head of FP&A at Triangle Home Fashions. This week's guest knows about working across multiple industries. Geetha helped transform FP&A operations at giants, GE Healthcare and Cummins (“When I walked into the FP&A at GE Healthcare, and I saw the close was eight days, my approach to things is usually I don't take things just on face value or just because someone has been doing something a particular way.”) Geetah has since swapped supersized companies for startups, most recently leading FP&A at fast-growing businesses including SimpleTire. In  her current role as Head of FP&A at New Jersey decor company, Triangle Home Fashions, she continues to propel FP&A as a “co-captain” in the business. In this episode Geetha speaks to Glenn Hopper about: 🎯Her career journey from PwC auditor to equity research to GE Healthcare   🎯The CPA in India and why the pass rate is only 10% 🎯Key FP&A achievements including shrinking number of days of closing from 8 days and spending  more time on value added activities 🎯How to better establish KPIs for departments aligned with business goals   🎯Presenting  KPIs for improving warehouse efficiency at Triangle Home Fashions (pick and pack time, average utilization, inventory turnover, SKUs meeting minimal sales threshold) 🎯The challenges at multinational manufacturer, Cummins, integrating four companies and restructuring the finance team at a time of low morale 🎯Doing FP&A at company as fast as Simple Tire vs more mature business  Her approach at Triangle Home with inventory levels purchased during COVID 🎯Lessons from two decades in business partnering