The fastest way to promotion

A mentee recently told me:

“I want my boss’ job”

“Cool, how are you going to become the next obvious choice?” I asked.

… silence.

So we spent 45 minutes creating a gameplan for how to become the next obvious choice for the job.

And we kept coming back to 1 thing that has helped me earn promotions throughout my career:

Bring 1 ‘juicy analysis’ every month.

When I say ‘juicy analysis’ think about those resume lines that jump off the page:

• Drove $30M of EBITDA by ___

• Saved $10M in duplicate vendor expenses by ___

It’s these kinds of analysis that write your performance review for you and differentiate you from your peers.

And they don’t have to happen by accident if you build them into your monthly process.

Here is how I coach people to do it on auto-pilot:

1. Create your monthly cadence

In every FP&A or finance role, there is a regular monthly cadence of predictable events.

You may need to look hard to find it, but I promise it’s there.

I call the cadence The FP&A Flywheel - and it goes from books closing to executive reporting.

• Books close - this is where accounting will close the books for the month and you can begin pulling financial data into your models, reports, and analysis

• Variance analysis - this step is where you look at how results compare to your expectations and highlight out of pattern trends that you’ll prioritize for a deeper look

• Root cause analysis - once you have a few results that you want to investigate deeper, you’ll work with the business and key stakeholders to find out what’s really driving that trend and if you expect it to continue and worth updating your forecast

• Executive reporting - this is where you take everything you’ve discovered about your results for the month and highlight the most critical items for senior leadership, including any risks to achieving your forecast

Can you spot your monthly cadence in this structure?

Once you learn to see it, you now can plan for creating your monthly root cause analysis.

Pro tip: Translate this flywheel into a calendar so you can see exactly what days books close and executive reporting is due. That’ll help you know how much time you have for everything else.

2. Queue up 10 potential analysis ideas

While it’s important to be responsive to monthly business trends when it comes to your analysis, some of the best analysis is pre-planned.

What does this look like?

Every few months, I make sure to block a few hours and ask myself:

“what are the biggest issues the business is facing today?”

These hardly ever show up in monthly forecasts or budget variance analysis tools.

They typically look at longer-term trends, comparisons to industry results or standards, etc.

And by having a list of heavy-hitting analysis ideas, you ensure you’re producing the most valuable analysis possible.

You should always have a fresh list of potential analysis you can complete to drive the business forward.

3. Space them out if needed

Now that you have a calendar laid out of exactly when you’ll complete the analysis and you have a list of analysis that you could complete at any time, it’s go-time!

But the biggest trap you’ll quickly fall into is not having enough time to complete your analysis within the month.

You’ll start an analysis on Jan 8th when the books close.

Then you’ll get busy and finally complete it on Feb 14th.

You’ll highlight your awesome analysis in the executive reporting on Feb 20th.

Then you’ll kick off your next analysis on Mar 7th.

Which means you brought nothing to the Jan executive reporting meeting and you are on pace to bring 1 analysis every 2 months.

Not bad, but not ideal.

Try this instead:

Instead of trying to cram your analysis into 1 month (and failing), plan on each analysis spanning 2 months.

The table above shows you what that could look like using the results months in the rows and the calendar months in the columns.

Kick off your analysis in Mar, with the intent of presenting it in the Apr executive results meeting.

Then kick off another analysis in Apr with the intent of presenting it in the May executive results meeting.

So every month you are kicking a new analysis off even though you haven’t quite completed the other one yet. You’ll always be kicking off an analysis while you’re wrapping up another.

And if you are worried that your analysis will be old by the time you get to next month, make sure you build it in a way where you can quickly refresh for new data when you roll into the next month.

In Summary:

If you want to add immense value to your team/company/business in 2024, think about systematizing your analysis.

Start with mapping out each month’s calendar.

Then look for the places where you can get some good work done.

Have a list of analysis ideas you can pull from every month.

And plan on each one taking 2 months to complete.

You’ll quickly become known as the person who always brings value.

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