FP&A Stories

Hello Reader 👋 Last week I was in France for a client session. I always enjoy going there. The food, the energy, the conversations. But this time, something unexpected happened before I even got to the workshop. I arrived at the hotel after a long drive. The parking was supposed to cover 24 hours but the ticket I got started before my arrival. I asked the receptionist to understand the situation. What followed was one of the most frustrating interactions I have had in a long time. Not because...

Hello Reader 👋, New week, new YouTube video. A while ago, I tested Copilot in PowerPoint. And to be fair, at the time it was impressive: generating slides automatically and quickly felt like a big step forward. But as we move forward with AI, the bar is rising quickly. And today, I don’t think we can really be satisfied with what Copilot delivers anymore, especially for finance presentations. So I ran a new test. This time comparing Copilot with Claude inside PowerPoint. The difference was...

Hello Reader 👋 This week marks four years since I started The Finance Circle. I sometimes think back to the very first workshop I delivered. It actually took almost one full year to get my first client. During that time, there were moments where I wondered if the idea would ever take off. Fast forward three years, and the beginning of this week looked very different. I spent the first two days almost entirely working on proposals because so many companies reached out. One conversation stuck...

Hello Reader 👋 March is about to kick in. And with it, my international season. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be in no less than three countries, including the US. Workshops, client sessions, conferences. Different cultures, different CFOs, same underlying challenges. And whenever my calendar starts filling up like this, one question always comes back: What am I still holding on to that I shouldn’t? Because if I try to do everything myself, March won’t be intense. It’ll be chaos. So this...

Hello Reader 👋 The football season is back after the winter break. And honestly, I forgot how much I missed it. There’s something about those first games: the rhythm, the noise, the small routines that come back. It also helped me blow off some steam after working hard on last week’s webinar (more on that later in this letter). It was the first time I've taken my Financial Storytelling Maturity Model to the public, and boy it was great. So this week, we talk about speaking like a CEO by...

Hello Reader 👋 January flew by faster than expected. I had one of those moments recently where you look at the calendar and realise it’s already February, and you’re not quite sure how that happened. January was packed: new experiences, new conversations, new work. So packed that I didn’t even have time to properly think about 2026. But I did spend time on my objectives for the year. And one of them was very clear: I want to be more present (live webinar coming) In these recent live...

Hello Reader 👋 This week, I stepped into a different room. I spent Saturday delivering an EMBA module on Public Speaking and Storytelling at Solvay Brussels School of Management. It was my first time teaching in a fully academic setup. What stayed with me wasn’t the theory. It was the practice: Executives (46 people, all from different backgrounds, not only finance) rehearsing in stairwells Small groups testing messages in corridors People deliberately putting themselves in uncomfortable...

Hello Reader 👋, This week is a short one. I published a new YouTube video where I walk through the 3 Filters Framework™, a new practical Excel model I built to fix one problem I keep seeing in FP&A teams. We spend days on variance analysis, and yet we can't find . In this 9-minute tutorial, I show how to go from raw data to a clear, ExCo-ready waterfall chart in minutes. Click on the image to watch the full video The model: Adapts to various industries (incl their operational drivers)...

Hello Reader 👋 I’ve been easing back into work this week after the break. Inbox is full, calendar is already wild, but I’m honestly excited. 2026 feels like one of those years where a lot will shift for finance and FP&A. I’ve been working quietly on a few things in the background over the last months, and you’ll start to see them come through in the next editions, workshops, and sessions. If you’re reading this, I want to wish you a great start to 2026. Health, energy, clarity, and the...