A while back, I pushed a forecast to the executive team that looked like it had been built in a sterile lab. Smooth trends. Tight margins. No funny business. It told the story we all wanted to hear: stable burn, healthy revenue growth, clean close into year-end. It was the kind of model that says, […]
The traditional budgeting process is broken. We know it, we live with it, and every December or January, we perform the same ritual — copy last year’s numbers, slap on a 3% increase, and call it strategic planning. That’s not strategy. That’s spreadsheet theater. As someone who has spent years entrenched in M&A integration, post-acquisition […]
It happened last Thursday. Around 3:47 PM. Somewhere between the third slide on “AI-powered FP&A automation” and the host’s pitch for a trial subscription, a CFO stood up from their Herman Miller chair, stared blankly out the window like a prophet seeing the void, and declared: “We’re done here. Strategic finance: mission accomplished.” No one […]
I’m not going to waste your time. You know as well as I do: finance isn’t what it used to be. The quiet back-office role of FP&A, once a sleepy corner of the corporate structure, has turned into a high-stakes battlefield where only the smartest, fastest, and most adaptable survive. The rules have changed, and […]
Let’s start with this: The CFO role isn’t what it used to be. Not even close. I remember sitting in a board meeting a few years back where the CFO proudly walked through the close process, the audit status, the budget variances, and the cash position—all buttoned up. The CEO thanked them and then immediately […]
It started, as most modern corporate absurdities do, with a single sentence in a leadership Slack thread: “Do we really need Excel for this?” Cue the floodgates. Someone (from Marketing, naturally) posted a Medium think piece on how “spreadsheets are a relic of the past.” Someone else chimed in about their nephew using Notion for […]
There’s this idea floating around that forecasting is a young company’s game. Fast, agile startups pivoting on a dime. Old companies? Too slow. Too political. Too stuck in their ways. I used to believe that too. Until a friend of mine who works at a 120-year-old manufacturing company told me how they completely transformed their […]
I’ll say it: most finance teams are built to report on the business, not to drive it. That’s the one thing I’d change. Too many functions are still structured like it’s 2003—hierarchies built to deliver variance reports and close books, not to influence what actually happens next. I’ve worked inside these teams. I’ve consulted for […]
Here’s a dirty little secret of finance: the more polished the deck, the more likely there’s duct tape holding the data pipeline together. I’ve seen it. Flashy dashboards. Perfectly aligned KPIs. Everyone nodding in the boardroom—until someone asks, “How was that calculated?” Cue the mad scramble: Slack threads, undocumented Excel formulas, a stale mapping file […]
Let me give it to you straight: most finance teams are flying their planes while building the wings. And that’s fine—until you hit turbulence. I’ve worked with scaling companies where the first $10M in revenue was built on ad hoc Excel reports, stitched together the night before the board meeting. And hey—it worked. Until it […]