FP&A Stories - 🎚️ 1 in 4 people say non-finance colleagues care about finance. I think it’s more
Hello Reader 👋I’m writing this on my way to Switzerland to see Holcim again. They were my first big client, back in 2023 with Nicolas Boucher, working only for the Algerian affiliate. Three years later, I finally get to work at the corporate level. What I still remember from that first workshop in Algeria is the stress, and the trust the CFO showed me by giving it to me. In our discussions, he told me he wanted people outside finance to be interested in finance. He saw it as a shared responsibility of finance and non-finance to understand each other, and I was there to help his finance team do their part. That conversation made me invest time in building a course for non-finance people, which I have since delivered to many Belgian companies. I don’t promote it much because I prefer the storytelling course, but I really appreciate those moments with motivated people. Not everyone sees the point, though. A private message reached me recently: “Why bother? They don’t care about finance anyway!” So this week, I share what I learned about why people outside finance seem to dislike finance, and how that changed the way I teach it. So take a coffee, sit down and read FP&A Stories just like 16k other readers This week in FP&A Stories🎚️ 1 in 4 people say non-finance colleagues care about finance
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🎚️ 1 in 4 people say non-finance colleagues care about financeWhat 97 people answeredI asked LinkedIn whether non-finance people care about the financial results of their company. A little over half of the voters answered barely or not at all, which puts them on the side of the sender of that private message. I have to admit my own view might be biased, since the people I train enrolled voluntarily. Nearly half of the voters still see colleagues who care enough or more, and that group is worth speaking to. What I believed when I was in FP&AWhen I was in FP&A, I found the whole thing a bit dumb. The way I saw it was that colleagues outside finance thought finance was hard, kept the shortcut “I’m not good at maths” ready, and met finance mostly through our presentations, which, let’s be honest, are not known to be awesome. From there, “finance is boring” became their default assumption, and I considered that assumption lazy. The data seemed to agree with me: an Oracle survey of more than 9.000 people in 14 countries found that eight in ten never learned about finances in school.* A survey of managers points to the usual human reluctance to admit not understanding what is on the slide.** With that start and that exposure, I concluded that finance would always be boring to them. *Oracle survey of 9.000+ consumers and business leaders in 14 countries, as reported in Why financial literacy is an organizational concern What I believe nowTeaching changed my mind, because I started seeing what happens when finance touches someone’s own work. At Televic this week, with two sessions delivered and a third in preparation, management received more and more requests from their teams to understand the financial results. These people are deeply involved in finance
I now believe that people outside finance appreciate finance as soon as it covers the parts they are involved in. The interest was already there, waiting for a way in. Part of the fault sits with us. When we think about teaching finance to colleagues, we picture debits and credits, balance sheets and journal entries, and that version is easy to avoid. How it came aboutStorytelling taught me that finance has a role to play in making its own topic interesting. Nobody opens a P&L for fun, and people lean in when it describes their own department. A participant from Proximus once called it a not so sexy subject that I managed to make fun. So I build the day around the places where they meet finance:
A short accounting break covers double entry, accruals and the gap between cash and P&L, and then we return to how they must intervene in the finance processes. How you can make it interesting in your companyIf your colleagues are blocked, build the day around what they already do: they receive reports, prepare budgets and write business cases. Four parts cover it, and each one works best with an exercise on your own data. 1️⃣ Reporting: start with the report they receive Take the monthly report of one department and read it line by line with the people who receive it. Show how the P&L, the cash flow and the balance sheet relate to each other, and spend your time on the question that confuses most people: which costs sit in COGS and which in OPEX. And plan a (very) long time to explain when something can be capitalised (CAPEX) because I noted it was a big frustration for them not to understand it. 2️⃣ Analysis: teach them to read it Compare actuals with budget and last year, express each line as a percentage of revenue, and show them how to spot the month on a chart that deserves a closer look. Then hand them an Excel file with volumes and average price, let groups of two or three dig in, and answer their questions as the expert. 3️⃣ Forecasting: show them where they sit Explain the difference between the strategic plan, the budget and the forecast, and the moment their input enters each of them. My advice: schedule some time to take questions but also frustrations to explain the need of both the top-down and bottom-up approaches. Then give them simple assumptions on volumes and price, and ask them to communicate the gap or the upside against budget and to propose actions. 4️⃣ Consulting: let them judge a decision Build a business case with a GO and a NO GO scenario, and introduce payback period, net present value, internal rate of return and cost of capital. Give them two customer projects and ask them to choose when capacity allows only one. Small groups, laptops and a quiz with the occasional joke answer keep adult professionals engaged for a full day. Ask each participant to bring one report they receive, because their questions will shape the exercises better than any slide. If you really want your teams to learn finance and have neither the time nor the method to build it, you can always contact me 😉. Final Thought Interest in finance follows the first good experience of it. A colleague who sat through one dense deck draws a conclusion about every deck that comes after. That makes finance the first presenter in most of these relationships, and the first impression is ours to design. The next report you send can be that first good experience: one page, one number that belongs to the reader's own team, explained in a sentence they could repeat in their next meeting. Hit reply and tell me about the colleague outside finance who surprised you with the sharpest question about a report. What did they ask, and what did you answer? I read every message and reply to all of them. 🎥 Live this Wednesday: how to move your team from reporting to influencingOf the 1.235 finance professionals who answered my maturity questionnaire so far, 50% describe a team that reports what happened, 44% a team that explains why it happened, and only 6% a team that influences what the business decides next. On Wednesday 28 October, I host a free one-hour live session with Oracle NetSuite on how to move a team from one level to the next. We cover how to recognise whether your presentations report, explain or influence, how to build them around a storyline, how to keep only the data that matters, and how to turn an analysis into a recommendation leaders can decide on. The session starts at 11:00 PDT, which is 14:00 in New York, 18:00 in London and 19:00 in Brussels and Paris. Register on Oracle NetSuite’s page (https://go.netsuite.com/LP=31737?leadsource=Webinar_Horiz_FinF_FinStory_athr_1026) and reply to this email if you have a question you want me to answer live. That's a wrap for this week See you next week! P.S. After 17 years in FP&A, Consulting and Leadership, I’ve coached and trained finance teams across industries, from consulting and manufacturing to tech, media, and global logistics. If you want to sharpen your own storytelling skills or bring this work into your team, here are a 3 ways can work together:
If you're unsure which option fits best, reply to this email. I’ll point you in the right direction. |