The most important FP&A trait

If I had to distill my FP&A career success into a single thing…

It would be my resourcefulness (aka being scrappy).

I spend a lot of time thinking about what drove my success because I have a team of 15 people who report to me and another 10,000 who read this newsletter. And I always want my insights to be as sharp as possible.

And resourcefulness is the 1 character trait I believe all FP&A professionals should have if they want to be wildly successful.

When I talk about being scrappy, it’s all about making something amazing out of nothing.

• The BI team is too busy so you have to learn enough SQL to pull your own data?

• Your boss is too busy to check your report before it goes to the CFO so you learned auto error checking?

• You don’t have the perfect data to do the analysis so you have to build your own temporary data model?

Let’s explore what it looks like in our day-to-day:

How to become scrappy

Years ago, I lived through a broad FP&A transformation effort.

Meaning everything was questioned and reimagined:

• People were upskilled

• Processes were rebuilt

• Technology was implemented

I recommend everyone experience something like it in their career.

And while the organization made a lot of ground in a short period of time during this effort - it came at a big cost.

But years before that (and since then) I’ve spent a lot of energy on process improvement within my role or team.

I call that grassroots finance transformation - and it’s an effort that comes from the bottom up.

Grassroots finance transformation is centered on process improvement for the sake of gaining efficiency to reinvest in value-added work.

These are processes that me or my team do/own that we have full authority to improve.

As you look to grow in your resourcefulness, always begin your effort by looking inward…

Don’t blame others

The opposite of being scrappy (or resourceful) is someone who:

• Is unimaginative

• Doesn’t try new things

• Waits for permission

• Is okay with okay

And a common trait I see in people who aren’t scrappy is that they blame others for “how bad everything is”.

Sometimes this can look like waiting for others to initiate change, or to see how bad it is and feel sorry for them, or even waiting for others for approval to make any changes.

If you identify as someone who is not resourceful, consider the following steps:

1. Identify your pain points (write them down)

2. Set a vision for what they’ll look like when they are fixed

3. Map out as much of the steps on how to fix it

4. Show your boss what you’re going to do (don’t ask your boss for permission)

Like I mentioned before, I truly believe my resourcefulness is the top reason my FP&A career was so successful.

Remember, FP&A is not a revenue-generating function so our budget for improvement efforts will always be much smaller. Which means we need to be more resourceful than other teams around us.

How to get respect

Another thing I spend a lot of time doing is thinking about the future of FP&A (something I’ll write more about in the new year).

Over the next 5 years, a lot of what we do is able to be automated by AI agents (google it).

But CFOs will still need scrappy FP&A professionals like us to figure out how to do what needs to be done.

When you are the one who knows how to take a team from point A to point B, you will become the go-to FP&A professional. It’s what happened to me early in my career and I continue to see the fruit of that to this day.

In fact, if you are interested in AI at all, I highly recommend you spend a lot of energy researching AI agents and figuring out how you can use them to solve problems on your team.

What happens next

When you prove to everyone around you that you can make something beautiful out of the chaos, you get a few things:

1. More responsibility

2. A bigger team

3. More trust from execs

4. A budget to do cool stuff

If these things seem like things you want 5-10 years into your career, then I recommend you prove how much you can do with what you have today.

In summary:

Being scrappy is the single trait I look for when hiring or building a team.

It means you know how to take something ugly and make it great - with no budget.

And at the end of the day, that’s one of the skills that AI can’t replace.

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