This is a YouTube video titled "FP&A Skills Finance Professionals Need to Lead Strategic Growth with Bryan Lapidus" containing an English podcast-style discussion recorded in early 2025. The conversation features Bryan Lapidus and Stu Klug discussing the evolving role, specialization, and core skills required in Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) within finance, highlighting challenges and changes in the profession over time. The content focuses on strategic growth, team dynamics, and the definition of FP&A in modern organizations.
So, speaking of FP and A, how would you define great FP and A? What does that look like? I'll give you more than a sentence here.
Well, here, this is where I would go with Stu's definition, right? Better decisions, faster. It's creating value through decision support, capital allocation, and performance management. And I think that the way that FP&A does that, it's the why, the what and the how, Right? So that's the why. The why is put the next dollar of capital to its best use. The what is, what do we deliver? We deliver it through our financial processes of planning and budgeting, through management reporting and metrics and decision support, financial analysis. Right? So that's the what we do and then the how we do that through having good technology on the back end, right? You have to be able to be good backstage in order to be good on stage. And then the other how is our people, right? You have to have people who have the psychological safety to question, to search and to seek out, who have the growth mindset to experiment and try different things, who have the training to be good at their job. And yeah, I think that's it. That's the why, the what and the how of. Of FP&A.
And I think I just won bingo. We had capital allocation, psychological safety, growth mindset. I think there's a couple others. I agree with all of them. But yeah, I just was joking that I won my bingo card.
But that's. But that's why it's so hard to find a great FP and a person, right? It's a little bit of you got to know a little accounting and you got to know finance and you got to know economics and you got to know how to communicate and business partner, you've got to have the right. It's hard to find all of that. I've had members of my advisory council tell me that it's a little bit like an apprenticeship in order to get good at the different areas, or you build a team and the team has that expertise and you can pull the team together to tap into that.
I agree. I mean, it's hard enough to be really good technically and soft. And what we're seeing is we're seeing FP and A being asked more and more, right. More strategic. You're seeing more kind of data science stuff being asked sometimes be more commercial. And, you know, it's tough. How do you find one person that does all that? And if they do all that and they're really good, what's the odds that they're not going to move up really quickly and be in some other type of role. And so it becomes tough. So there's the trying to find the right team with the skills and also trying to find those individuals that are really good in certain areas or holistic enough to really move the business forward.
I think you put your finger on the change certainly in my career. Right. So I was 20 years in the office of the CFO and now at AFP, I've had this time to really study FPA as it's changed over time. And it used to be that you would look for all of that in one person. Right. Before the job was really well defined, you had to have that all in one person and kind of the Swiss army knife. Right. Everyone's got a tool for everything. What I really see over the last decade is that maturation has led to specialization and that especially. And you see it really in the larger companies where they'll have a reporting team and they'll have an analytics team. And so as the field has become more defined, through conferences and certifications and classes and training and people like you being a great voice to talk about what we do, as the field develops its own identity, it is gaining specialization in those areas and really just getting better and better at it.
Yeah, I mean, you're definitely seeing more and more of the specialization. You know, you have the corporate reporting side, you have those people that are more business partnering in the sense that they sit in the business, support the general manager. Sometimes you have the data science person. You're starting to see FP and A sometimes have the. Strictly that finance transformation or. I mean, I had a role and the title of it. I kind of have to laugh because I had nobody report to me, but boy, was it a title. I was the director of fpa, Sales, Operations and analytics.
All of that. All of that.
And what it was is it was the coordination role because the business was trying to switch to be SaaS. It was trying to coordinate with sales and analytics and FP&A to get the data and the reporting right. It's really just the coordination. It was very special. I didn't do a single budget in that year. I had the role. I mean, I helped the business with it, but I wasn't doing budgeting. And I reported to the VP of FP and A. And so it just kind of shows how specialized sometimes you can be. Even though I was in the FP and A department, it was an FP and A role. It wasn't traditional at all. It was specialized.
I had one CFO explain. He said, I know what FP and A is. It's. It's everyone who reports to me who's not in treasury, tax or account. Right? But that's because, you know, at that time, FP&A wasn't defined, right. It was all. It was the business analyst, the expense analyst, the financial analyst, the partner.
Right?
All these other things that are concerned with making helping the business do better decisions faster, allocate their next dollar, whatever you want to call it, right?
It.
It's everybody else. And when you think about that, right, then you can actually say, all right, this is what FPA is. Here's the skill set that you need. Here's the network of people you want to meet in order to grow your skills. Right now we can really define how to help you be great at your job.
And I think for many years it was really difficult to define what is fpa. I think we've done a good job now defining the core, but there still go company to company. Does rev ops sit in FP&A? Well, with many smaller companies, often it does sales commissions or they calculate so many little edge cases. But I think we've at least got the core well defined at this point. Your thoughts? You would you agree with that?
