FP&A Stories

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...

Hello Reader 👋 Last week, I was almost at the end of a workshop with a finance team when something completely changed in the atmosphere. It became a discussion table about a fear they all had. A very specific, very physical fear of walking into the ExCo and presenting results to a group of executives who would, almost inevitably, push back. I've seen this before. But this time it was particularly intense. Almost the entire group described the same feeling: the one that, no matter how prepared...

Hello Reader 👋 Last weekend, I went to see an old friend. He has been in FP&A for over a decade, made it to Head of FP&A, and lately has been feeling like he has learned everything there is to learn in his field. His conclusion: time for a full career change. I have nothing against that. I completely changed my own career four and a half years ago, and I would do it again. But I wanted to understand whether he had actually explored everything his role could be, before deciding he had seen it...

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...