On 11/3 I’ll be hosting a free LinkedIn Live event at 1pm ET for anybody interested in hearing exactly how I transform FP&A teams from the inside out.

I’ll cover the 3 frameworks that I live by:

It’s a high-level overview session intended for anybody in finance (entry level financial analyst through CFO) who is not happy with where their current finance team is performing.

This isn’t one of those upsell webinars where you get like 2 minutes of education and 88 minutes of selling you into a program. This is all killer, no filler - nothing but me teaching my guts out for your benefit.

Here’s a link to register. I’ll send out the recording to anybody registered and everyone on this email list.

Here’s a high-level preview of exactly what’ll be covered…

In case you’re new here, I’m a framework guy. That’s at least how I process the world.

And when I started writing this newsletter back in late 2022 I had some loose ideas about how to do FP&A right that came into focus as I kept writing weekly-ish newsletters for 4 years:

Each was a response to the one prior (I’ll explain this more in the webinar).

And each of them was developed on the job as I was working them out within (primarily) Fortune 100 companies but also in PE-backed SaaS and as I’ve done consulting/fractional work for startups.

As I’ve recently jumped out of the W2 world to do fractional/consulting work and teach FP&A, I’ve felt really comfortable standing in front of CEOs, business owners, and CFOs and telling them “these 3 frameworks will fix your finance department”.

No exceptions.

Many, many of you have bought my original book The FP&A OS. Thank you!

At the time, that book was the 80% of everything I knew about how to be excellent at FP&A.

I remember writing it and thinking “if I share all my best tips, what else will i have?” But I trusted the process and made the single book that I personally used when I onboarded into new roles after that point.

It’s a good book. [but I also have been contemplating updating the book - we’ll see!]

The FP&A OS (operating system) helps us in FP&A understand the core activities that drive value (reporting, analysis, forecasting, consulting) and the resources we use to do that (people, data/tools).

These 4 core value-added activities are what every finance team does naturally, but without a vision or intention they can become unbalanced.

The FP&A OS also teaches you how to take your finance team from where it is today to where you want it - through a 3-step process of Diagnose, Vision, Roadmap. It’s these 3 steps that have become my 90-day plan when I took my VP of Finance role at a Fortune 100 and a middle-market SaaS.

But as I started teaching this, many of you said “I’m working at a smaller company with no clear finance/FP&A process and I don’t know where to start - what exactly should I implement and when should I do it?”

That’s when the FP&A Flywheel was born…

I’m really grateful for my long career success at Allstate Insurance going from entry-level Financial Analyst to Senior Finance Manager.

But it’s when I left the company to work at a PE-backed SaaS ($50M ARR) when something clicked for me…

For years at Allstate I had wondered “am I good at finance or am I good at Allstate?”

When I started working as Director of FP&A for that PE-backed SaaS I quickly realized that ~90% of what I learned at Allstate was directly applicable. I was able to easily translate my expertise in FP&A/Finance into a company literally 1,000x smaller with minimal effort.

In that moment I realized the core activities of FP&A are simple, straightforward, and repeatable. I call that process The FP&A Flywheel.

The FP&A Flywheel is a bit more practical than the FP&A OS in the sense that you can put each step on a calendar, build it as an excel model or powerpoint slide, then implement it tomorrow.

As I’m stepping into consulting/fractional roles with new companies I’m heavily relying on this framework to do a lot of my assessing for big gaps in FP&A operations. If a team is missing any of these steps on a regular basis it becomes a simple start-doing that we can implement and find value immediately.

But one of the things I live by and team that I’ve gotten hostility on LinkedIn about is when I say “the North Star of FP&A is forecast accuracy”. They typical response I get from this is “but Brett, the most important part of FP&A is driving value for the business…” and while I stand by my North Star comment, I’ve realized that my 3rd and final (for now) framework was missing…

In all transparency, Finance-Led Growth is the framework where I’m still working out all the details.

In every great finance team I’ve built/seen, this framework exists - so I know there’s a ton of merit to it.

Finance-Led Growth is the idea that you can take future forecasted profit/income and reinvest it today to earn a return in the business.

It’s the only growth strategy that relies entirely on FP&A and our ability to produce an accurate forecast.

Years ago I helped to build this process at a Fortune 100 where profit margins were improving but growth was slowing. The business was struggling to figure out how to fix growth (beyond just fighting withe eachother and blaming eachother).

We were able to build a monthly framework to reforecast future profit/income for the business and facilitate the decision to reinvest it in areas of the business yielding the highest return.

This seems simple - and it’s something that happens easily in smaller companies. But for some reason this process really breaks down in larger companies or only happens at the CFO/CEO level. FP&A holds the keys to this and should be the ones facilitating it.

It doesn’t have to be fancy - 1 excel sheet. But it does require FP&A (and therefore the rest of the business) to be confident in the forecast. It gives purpose to all the work we do in FP&A and neatly ties a bow on why we exist.

That’s it - my FP&A Transformation thesis in a single post. If it’s intriguing to you, join the LinkedIn Live on 11/3 or hang around this newsletter for the recording.

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