FP&A Today

For the Love of FP&A: Christian Wattig

Only our second ever returning guest, Christian Wattig, a veteran former leader of FP&A at P&G, Unilever, and Squarespace, 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 and Glenn
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
8-WEEK ONLINE COURSE Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) Certificate Program https://wallstreetprep.wharton.upenn.edu/financial-planning-and-analysis-certificate/
Sign up to Christian’s weekly (free) newsletter with tips and practical FP&A advice: fpa prep.com/newsletter
Connect with Christian on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-wattig/

The Art of Finance: Joe Knight on Demystifying Numbers to Empower Businesses

When any finance business partner–a CFO or an FP&A professional–wants their counterpart across the table in marketing, sales or HR, to understand the essentials of numbers, they hand them the business classic, Financial Intelligence, A Manager's Guide to Knowing what the Numbers Really Mean.
First published in 2006, the book has been named in the Top 100 Business Books of all time and remains a word of mouth sensation and continues to sell rapidly nearly two decades on. The classic was authored by former CFO, Joe Knight and Karen Berman. Until her untimely death 10 years ago, Karen, was also a force in engaging all employees in improving a company’s finances
Based on the principles of the book, Joe Knight, Partner and Senior Consultant with the Business Literacy Institute,  trains execs at some of the biggest companies in the world including NBCUniversal, Electronic Arts, and McKesson on business partnering and the importance of getting a business to understand and embrace their numbers and works. He has also been a guest on Bob Brinker’s Money Talk show on KABC ratio and CNBC’s Morning Call program.
In addition his engaging keynote addresses, include "The Love affair with EBITDA" and "The Secrets of Finance Revealed". As CFO of Setpoint Companies, he spearheaded the financial education of engineers in this automation and roller coaster company and tells us some of his adventures from this journey and secrets to finance business partnering at the highest level.
In this episode 
The origins of the 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 
The metric of Financial literacy has stayed at 38% in companies for large companies nearly 20 years on
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
Not being a “numbers” person but a accretive person with numbers 
Business Literacy institute: https://www.business-literacy.com/
Contact: mail@business-literacy.com

When AI Outperformed Financial Analysts – Alex Kim

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 a 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 a 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 ground breaking 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).
Read the full paper here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4835311
Check out the analyzer for yourself here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-9P3sIn487-financial-statement-analyzer
Follow Alex Kim on Linkedin Ph.D. Student at the University of Chicago: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgunwookim

How to get on CFO headhunters’ radars and win your next role

We received a flood of FP&A and CFO questions from our audience (and FP&A Reddit). These and more are put to this this week’s finance headhunter special guests: Nick Gribbon,Senior Partner, Financial Officers Practice at Essenta, and Laura Streather, Consultant, Private Equity at Essenta, who run the finance headhunting section at the global executive search firm. Hear all the behind the scenes anecdotes and secrets to getting your next big FP&A or CFO job.
Connect with Nick Gribbon, Senior Partner, Financial Officers Practice at Essentahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-gribbon-37349b1/Connect with Laura Streather, Consultant, Private Equity at Essentahttps://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-streather-451966137/
Shortage of Exit Private Equity CFOs 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” to pass the first screening 
Getting exposure to the right industry – how important is it?
Getting to understand 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 is designed to accomplish for you and the recruitment firm?
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?

Fortune 500 to Startups: Multi-industry FP&A Leader Geetha Ramachandran

Geetha Ramachandran is an FP&A change agent. She helped transform FP&A operations at 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).”
Geetha 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 reveals:
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 
Follow Geetha Ramachandran https://www.linkedin.com/in/geetharamachandran201/

Getting to a Winning FP&A Story

A compelling FP&A story is essential. In this second (and final) session from FP&ACon 2024, Glenn hosts Soufyan Hamid, FP&A leader for 16 years who runs the Financial Storytelling Program, and Matthew Herbert, Chewy Director of Finance. 
First poll: How confident are you in your ability to craft a compelling FP&A Story:?
The move  from numbers to storytelling
Soufyan on why the finance director was always frustrated by my business presentations (when I was even invited to meetings)
By contrast Matthew was forced to get to grips with storytelling early in investment banking (but faced a different challenge as an FP&A business partner at Walmart)
The gap between perception and reality in our storytelling 
When information becomes insights 
The connection between business partnering and storytelling 
What (selfishly) do FP&A pros get by developing storytelling skills?
Remember you are not giving a TED Talk 
The 5 Points that FP&A Pros Most Struggle with in their Storytelling
Actionable tips in your presentation 
Follow and connect with Soufyan Hamid: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soufyanhamid/
Follow and connect with Matthew Herbert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-herbert-6a56637/
Matthew’s training course at https://biztrix.us/
Soufyan (The Finance Circle) training www.thefinancecircle.com

AI and FP&A: Hype vs Reality

In this special episode (part of Datarails’ FP&A Con 2024) Glenn hosts an all-star panel to debate AI and FP&A: Hype vs reality.
 
Join Nicolas Boucher, Christian Martinez, and Gabriela Gutierrez, alongside CFO Glenn Hopper, host of FP&A Today, and an AI thought leader and author. Delve into real-world applications, separating fact from fiction, and gain valuable practical insights into the present and future of AI in financial planning and analysis. 
 
The Guests:
Nicolas Boucher, Keynote speaker on AI for Finance & FP&A
Christian Martinez, Finance Analytics Manager, Kraft Heinz
Gabriela Gutierrez, Financial Planning & Analysis Specialist
 
In this episode: 
How many FP&A pros are using AI in their work - how do you compare vs the results of our poll 
The main misconceptions + and what not to do in the  finance and AI era
The significance of ChatGPT 4o
The biggest barriers to AI adoptions 
Practical uses of AI to use today , including forecasting and practical ways to save time 
FP&A AI use cases that have shocked the panel 
Which FP&A processes could most use AI help?
How to get started practically
AI capabilities in existing tools  such as PowerBI
Why 2024 is about Python as the tool to learn to break the barrier of AI
Automation in finance’s relationship with other departments
Creating your own chatbot services
The importance of data maturity (before AI maturity)
How you will start to see AI inbuilt to all your finance techstackDownload financial data (balance sheets, savings) from a company on  Yahoo Finance and plug into Chat GPT 4o (Prompt: Act as a management consultant and analyze this data with an FP&A lens” (and getting volume analysis, volatility analysis, moving averages..) 
FP&ACon 2024 (on demand) https://www.datarails.com/events/fpa-con-2024/
Join the AI Finance Club: https://ai-finance.club/
 “Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models,”

FP&A as Business Intelligence – Len McFall

FP&A professionals are the original business intelligence (BI) experts, says Len Mcfall, senior consultant, finance at Windstream Holdings, a $1billion US telecoms company.
“FP&A itself is synonymous with business intelligence,” he says. “And honestly, weren’t, weren’t we the first business intelligence? We’ve always been working with data. We’ve always been trying to simplify and present data in a  meaningful way to people who might not,otherwise be literate.”
In this frank and honest interview McFall, whose background is heavily influenced by BI, gives insights from a 20 year career including HCT Investments, Sitel, Crossroads Treatment Center and a minefield of data at Windstream. 
 “I’m not a bullet point guy. I’m a paragraph guy” says Len– warning he’s not one for short, snappy answers, but a storyteller who loves to dive deep,  as he reveals:
Why 40% of my job is touching base with people to curate all the data we use across the organization
Putting sales on blast:  how often do you catch a forecast from a sales organization that’s even 50%, right?
Coming into a company to save them after they were delivering finance reporting 30 days after close (from 30 days to day 8)
the role of data analysis and bi  in finance and in the decision making process.
How business runs on “hunches” and why it is FP&A to prove that hunch 
Why if you cannot communicate to the business you are useless 
The vast amount of data we have access to in telecoms and how we separate the signal from the noise 
How finance rubs against IT and why it’s not pretty 
Why AI in finance is like a “very smart but green intern” and prompt engineers are ridiculous
Killing for food in winters during his childhood
Connect with Len on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/len-mcfall-6274857b/

My Adventures in Finance Real Estate: From Whistleblowing Fraud to Big Wins for Residents

CFO Seth Zimmerman faced a triple blow of tests in his decades-long  real estate career. Firstly, he witnessed the Lehman collapse first-hand from within a real estate division of the famed bank (“We just got a call from our New York office, a guy in New York. He’s like, well, it’s done. We’re bankrupt.”). Secondly, being forced to blow the whistle when his CEO boss pocketed $1m into his bank account–the day after a $10m raise (the startup is now defunct). Finally, being the finance person when a developer absconded with $12m. “One of the things that I’ve learned is that when it comes to money, you never know what somebody’s going to do”.
In this episode, Seth Zimmerman, CFO at Invest with Roots, explains the core metrics in finance real estate and why things are never cookie cutter (“Every deal is, is different and you have to look at them individually”)
Zimmerman talks:
Life as CFO at Invest with Roots, one of the hottest companies in Atlanta,the only real estate portfolio that creates wealth for renters.
The role of finance at a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) – a security that trades like a stock on the major exchanges and reports to the SEC. 
Blowing the whistle in finance  when a former CFO pocketed $1m
Creating $700,000 for residents at Invest with Roots
Becoming CFO and bringing in budgeting and FP&A processes
Love of modeling and how I am using  modeling skills to get into the multifamily space
How to find great finance staff +the accountant recruitment challenge 
Favorite Excel function 
My motorbike crash 
Follow Seth on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethazimmerman/

Ready FP&A One: From Assassin’s Creed to Battling Big Budget Bosses – David Fortin

As a lifelong gamer, David Fortin successfully landed  his dream job managing FP&A at Ubisoft – the $2.79 billion gaming company responsible for Assassin’s Creed, Driver, and Far Cry, For Honor. The former PwC auditor then decided to take on an even more daunting leap. He ran FP&A at  Saas Startup Polka “building the plane while we were flying” – cue  his boss leaving, learning how to fundraise, facing disinterested investors, budgets rejected by the board,  the CTO crying, before managing an eventual successful exit (in 2023 the company was acquired by Swedish enterprise software giant IFS). Now he is a full-time YouTuber teaching Excel and Microsoft Copilot – still using finance and analytics to build his business.
In this episode David talks:
PwC CPA audit coming up that way to FP&A
Quebec, loving video games and landing a role at Ubisoft
Moving from a big company to a startup and a steep finance learning curve
Building the plane while flying in FP&A
Learning the sales pitch of funding round facing questions and disinterterested investors
CTOs crying when the budget is rejected by the board
Due diligence and exit – lessons
Becoming a YouTuber making Excel fun again and grasping Microsoft Copilot 
How CoPilot and AI will transform FP&A
Scenario analysis in Copilot 
20,000 hours of gaming and my favorite Excel function
Follow David on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-fortin-cpa-816b20b5/
Follow David’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@piggybankaccountant