FP&A Stories

Hello Reader 👋 Autumn is here, and at this time of year I often feel nostalgic about my old life in finance: planning, budgets, long-term plans. Sometimes, I miss a lot of it, but then I remember that I had to send pre-reads, and suddenly, I'm OK. Honestly, I have never been a big fan of them. They take time to prepare, and most of the time nobody reads them. I also know the culture battle is lost before it starts, because people want to be in control and a document in their inbox gives them...

Hello Reader 👋 Last week I delivered my usual "Finance for non-finance" course for one of my clients. It's a day I really enjoy, because I get to hear what the business thinks about us when their own finance team isn't listening. 😄 Everything went smoothly until we arrived at the budget chapter: the usual negativity came, but this time with something stronger behind it. "We never get what we ask for," said one manager, and another added that it's normal to spend the full budget, otherwise...

Hello Reader 👋 I must admit: I'm not as regular as I wish I were with this newsletter. It has been a busy month. Since the beginning of the month I have been on the road quite a bit, with trainings, client sessions and very little time at my desk. One of those stops was London, where I gave a training. My friend Nicolas Boucher happened to be giving a training in the same place, and neither of us had planned it. So we did the obvious thing and spent a great dinner together. In my session, as...

Hello Reader 👋 I am back from holidays, and I will be honest, I am glad to be back at work. If you have kids, you know a holiday is not really a rest. It takes energy, coordination, and a level of patience you did not know you still had. I am not complaining, I know that things that are "worth it" require self-investment. One of the first things I did back at my desk was a remote training for Ferrero's finance teams and one of the highlights came up when we talked about engagement, and...

Hello Reader 👋 I still haven't taken any real time off this summer. Client sessions kept landing on the calendar, and somehow we're already in August. Here's what surprised me: I expected to slow down in this period. Instead, I've been working harder than usual, because summer weeks are exactly when there's space to think about the things that get buried during the busy period. When I was in FP&A, that longer-term thinking almost always came back to my team. How to develop them, how to give...

Hello Reader 👋 This week has been quieter than usual, and I've used it well. A bit of time for myself, some longer-term thinking, and prepping for my busy season the same way I'd tell you to prepare a budget: early, deliberately, before the pressure hits. Because budget season is coming, and with it comes something every FP&A leader knows too well. Meetings. Dozens of them, stacked back to back, most starting with good intentions and ending up being inefficient. I know them, you know them,...

Hello Reader 👋 Last week I was back in Amsterdam, running a workshop for the Netherlands teams of Roche. Honestly, at this point I should just get an apartment there 😄. There was a point that came in the discussion that I've heard since I started working in FP&A (actually, even before that): how far do we actually go in taking a position? The "classic" finance doctrine says we present the data and let the business find its own root cause and next step. And in a way, that's not entirely wrong...

Hello Reader 👋 I took the Eurostar to London this Monday. In the queue at the boarding platform, a man tried to sneak past the line. Just as if he had somewhere more important to be. Which is already a mystery to me, because we all have assigned seats on the train so nobody gains anything by pushing to the front except the mild irritation of everyone around them. A woman stopped him, politely, firmly, without raising her voice. The logic was so obvious, the tone so calm, that the man turned...

Hello Reader 👋 Twenty years ago, I was sitting next to Vincent in an amphitheatre at ICHEC Brussels. We were presenting a joint paper on corporate law. Two students doing their best to look like they knew what they were talking about. Last week, Vincent invited me to his cybersecurity firm, and I taught storytelling to his team of experts. I expected it to feel completely lost, me the expert for finance. But within the first hour, I recognised something I have seen in every finance team I...