Evolution of FP&A and Insights on Wharton Online Program
Show Notes
Welcome to FP&A Tomorrow, where we discuss financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects, with your host Paul Barnhurst.
The title sponsor for this week’s episode of FP&A Tomorrow is Wharton Online, one of the world's leading business schools. The gateway to mastering financial planning and analysis through a rigorous, comprehensive curriculum crafted by industry experts is only a click away- https://wallstreetprep.wharton.upenn.edu
In today’s episode, Paul Barnhurst engages Christian Wattig on the journey into the evolving world of financial planning and analysis.
Christian Wattig, a seasoned FP&A professional and educator. As the program director for the Wharton Online and Wall Street Prep FP&A Certificate, Christian brings a wealth of experience and innovative strategies to the table. He shares how AI and technology are transforming the field.
Key takeaways from this week's episode include: :
Here is a concise summary of the key points from the discussion:
How excellent FP&A practice hinges on making solid business recommendations from detailed analysis and storytelling, emphasizing the importance of implementing and monitoring these recommendations for impactful outcomes.
The discussion is on how AI and new planning tools are revolutionizing FP&A by streamlining data collection and reporting, thus allowing analysts to concentrate more on strategic analysis and business partnerships.
Insights into a career that transitioned from major corporations to spearheading an FP&A education venture, sharing valuable lessons from varied professional experiences.
Introduction to a new certificate program that merges technical FP&A skills with interpersonal development, designed to equip professionals with comprehensive financial planning and analysis expertise.
The discussion highlights the importance of digging beyond the surface of financial data to find actionable insights and the art of crafting these insights into stories that drive strategic business decisions.
The reflection on the personal gratification from teaching and mentoring in FP&A, and anticipation of the future developments in the field as technology and analytical methods advance.
Discover the prestigious Wharton Online & Wall Street Prep FP&A Certificate Program at UPenn, and accelerate your finance career! Use code THEFPAGUY300 to save $300 on enrolment.
Quotes:
Here are a few relevant quotes from the episode about FP&A skills and making concrete, impactful business recommendations:
"FP&A is at its best when you make a concrete recommendation that helps the business move forward."
"With AI and not just with AI, but also with FP&A and planning tools and software, it will be possible that you don't have to pull data from lots of different sources."
"When you're just taking people and walking them step by step through how I build a financial model from scratch, it's a different way of teaching."
“Give them those metrics, those insights, or you can get them something that gets them at least halfway there. By doing that, you can demonstrate that you want to do more than just cutting budgets and updating forecasts.”
Follow Christian:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-wattig
Website - https://wallstreetprep.wharton.upenn.edu
Follow Paul:
Website - https://www.thefpandaguy.com
LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguy
For CPE credit please go to earmarkcpe.com, listen to the episode, download the app, and answer a few questions. For AFP FPAC certification answer the questions and contact Paul Barnhurst for further details.
In today's episode:
[01:03] Introduction.
[01:50] Guest’s background.
[02:40] Modern FP&A Practices.
[04:10] The Role of Technology in FP&A.
[07:38] Guest’s Career Journey and Educational Initiatives.
[15:54] FP&A Education.
[30:10] Importance of Financial Storytelling.
[36:10] Rapid-fire session.
[42:44] Guest’s Reflections and Motivations.
[45:10] Advice for FP&A Professionals.
Full Show Transcript:
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: This week's episode of FP&A Tomorrow is brought to you by the Financial Planning and Analysis Certificate Program from Wharton Online and Wall Street Prep. Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Tomorrow, where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, guiding you through the evolving landscape of FP&A. Each week, we are joined by thought leaders, industry experts, and practitioners who share their insights and experiences, helping us navigate today's complexities and tomorrow's uncertainties. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your journey in FP&A. This show has something for everyone. This week, I'm thrilled to welcome to the show Christian Wattig. Christian, welcome to the show.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Thank you, Paul, for having me today.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I'm excited to have you. Let me just give a little bit of background about Christian. Then we'll jump into the first question we ask everybody. So Christian's coming to us from New York City. He's currently serving as program director for the Wharton Online FP&A Certificate, which we'll talk more about later. He's also the founder and managing director of FP&A Prep. He has a BS in finance and an MBA in Strategy and Change Management, and he's worked for fast-growing companies such as Data Rails and Squarespace, and global multinational companies such as Procter and Gamble and Unilever. He has a great background and we're thrilled to have him. So the first question we like to ask is, what does great FP&A look like today? To you, what is great FP&A?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: That's a great question, Paul. To me, FP&A is at its best when you make a concrete recommendation that helps the business move forward. That's where your variance analysis, your financial model, or your storytelling pays off because you can say, hey, I did this analysis. This is the insight I have, and this is what I think is where real opportunity lies. if you then have a chance to implement, if that then gets implemented and you have a chance to track that opportunity, that can be super rewarding. I think that's what makes FP&A fun. That's also where FP&A professionals can have the biggest impact by making these concrete recommendations. It's not easy. It doesn't happen every time you do a variance analysis because the FP&A skills need to be top-notch to get there, but I think it's FP&A at its best.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I like the way you explain that. I've heard a number of different ways people explain it. I like the fact of being able to give concrete recommendations that help move the business forward because that involves so much more than just the analysis. So I appreciate that answer. So I'm curious, we've talked about what great FP&A looks like today. How do you maybe see that changing in the next 5 to 10 years with AI, with the fact that FP&A has changed a lot over the last few years, look at COVID and everything else, it's become more to the forefront. How do you see it changing or morphing going forward?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: A typical month in the life of an FP&A analyst could look like this. At the beginning of the month, you spend a few days and getting the data for the actuals, understanding the data, reconciling it. Maybe you also have to clean it up a bit to make it easy to process. Then you spend a few days working with your business partners, getting their forecast inputs and making sense of them, pulling them together from different emails and Slack messages and different sources. Then if you have to bring all of that into your financial model, you have to update that, you have to crunch the numbers and when you're done with that, you spend a few days updating PowerPoint slides, creating charts and visualizations in Excel, bringing all of that into a presentation that then gets shared with the leaders of the business. Then you might already be two weeks into the month, then you finally have time to do business partnering to talk to the heads of the other departments and see how can you help them, how can you move the needle, how can you do deep analysis. I think over the course of the next five years, that time period of creating the reports and making sense of the numbers will be compressed by a lot.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: I think that with AI and not just with AI, but also with FP&A and planning tools and software, it will be possible, you don't have to pull data from lots of different sources. It's just all right there for you in the cloud or the data lake, in an easy-to-use database. Then you can update all your reports, everything at the click of a button. Probably, AI will even be able to do some basic variance analysis, some basic, hey, why do we have a difference here? What's behind those numbers? It won't get to a point where you don't have to do any analysis anymore, because there's a lot that goes into connecting the dots, but it will compress the time where you can spend the vast majority of the month with business partnering, with going out and challenging people, holding people accountable, helping them reach their goals and doing deep analysis.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I agree with you that it won't do everything for us. As I've said, I think it will get a lot of the kind of what happened. You'll just be missed by this much but that, now what to so what, that requires that judgment and you might get a little bit of that, but I don't think at least in the near future it's going to be doing all that for us. I agree with you. It definitely should compress the time frame with all the technology we have coming. AI, FP&A tools, and data sources are being integrated better so that you're not pulling ten different files and trying to figure out why Delta Airlines is spelled 12 different ways which we've all done. So good point there. I tend to agree with you. The next question I have is, can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your background? Then we're going to jump into some of the things you've been up to over the last year as you've started your own business.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Sure. Now, I'm a full-time FP&A educator. I teach through online courses, I do in-person corporate training, in-person and virtual, and I'm now I'm also the director of the FP&A Certificate Program that was put together by the Wharton School and Wall Street Prep. Before that, I was an FP&A practitioner. I started at Procter and Gamble was fantastic to start my career at a large company because there I had the chance to work and partner with different teams, I had fantastic mentors and I had the chance to work on a financial model where we evaluated whether to launch a Thai detergent in South Africa. That was cool because the whole business case only made sense when you committed to building a factory there, a $100 million investment. So I learned a lot about building flexible models there because the assumptions kept changing all the time. Then I worked at Unilever, spent years there, seven years there. That was a great experience, too.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Because every one and a half to two and a half years, I moved into a different role internally. I led the marketing, finance, and analytics teams, for example, I led the logistics finance team where I had FP&A and accounting team report to me, which was a fantastic experience to connect the dots there. Then after my MBA, I moved into tech because I loved working in consumer goods at these large companies. But I always felt that, oh, it would be interesting to see if you work at a company where decision-making is happening quickly because, at these large companies, you have the regional team, the global team, you know what I'm talking about. You also worked at large companies. In these large companies, everyone has to agree before anything happens. So that can take some time. Then I worked at Squarespace, which is a medium-sized tech company, and it was fortunate that I was there when we took the company public.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: I had a chance to work closely with the CFO on how to tell the financial story of the business as leading a team there, and there was a great learning experience because when you take a company public, you have to tick the box everywhere. You have to understand all your financials. You have to put it into context. You have to know how it compares to competitors because you'll get you'll get all these questions from from the analysts. Then I moved to Data Rails, which is a small early-stage startup. it's an FP&A software company. There I had the chance to work directly with clients. Finance teams of small and medium-sized companies to help them develop better FP&A processes and implement the software. So I had a chance to work at very large companies, very small companies. What surprised me was that the challenges that people face are very similar. The numbers are completely different, and the metrics are different but things like how do I improve forecast accuracy, how do I have more influence with my business partners, or how do I tailor the presentation to the audience? Now, these are all common challenges, and that also motivated me to build my educational company.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: It's surprising how many of the challenges are similar, as you mentioned. There are some differences and some different challenges regardless of where you work and company size and all those things. But there's, as I said, accuracy. Building those relationships, telling the story that stays the same whether it's a ten-person company or a thousand-person company, you need to be able to do it. It just becomes more complex or has different inputs and outputs that you have to consider depending on size. So I'm going to switch gears here a little bit. We'll come back to some of those questions. But I want to start here with what's it been like running your own business now. I know you did it part-time for quite a while, but you've been full-time now since the summer of last year. Is that right? Yeah. So what's the experience been like?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: I started teaching, actually, 6 or 7 years ago, when I was at Unilever because there I was leading the internal finance leadership development team, where I would create courses for my fellow finance colleagues. I was at Unilever North America, and the finance team was pretty big there with over 50 FP&A people. So I would develop those courses and when I first started, it was a pivot table course back then, developing Excel skills. I wasn't sure if would I be able to teach people something new. Then I had ten people sitting across from me in this conference room. Then I saw people's eyes light up when they got something. That was just so rewarding to see that you can have a real impact and make a real difference in people's skills. That was super motivating for me. That is when I caught the bug and I just thought about how I help more people and how can I teach FP&A more broadly. Then I partnered with Maven. That's a company that helps people launch online courses that are taught live. They sent me through a training program that taught me how to take my knowledge and turn it into an engaging and interactive live online course. From then, I was surprised at how quickly that took off and people started enrolling. I had 20 people per cohort and I had 30, and then I had 50. I've been running this live cohort every two months for the last two years. So we just finished cohort 16 in January. It was a lot of fun, every time. Now I'm excited to do even more of that with the Wharton partnership.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: Thank you for sharing that and the back story, kind of how you fell in love with training. I'm curious. Since you started your own business, what's been your most memorable or favorite experience you can share with us?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Working for yourself, I find it very motivating, but also stressful at times because there's no paycheck coming at the end of the month. It's a big difference there. But one of the most memorable experiences was when I just was walking through downtown Manhattan at about 5 p.m. in the evening. I saw people coming. If you haven't been to Manhattan yet, especially Midtown Manhattan at the end of the day, they're just tons of people, tons and tons of people coming out of the offices and walking home. I was like, "Huh? I don't have an office anymore. I don't have a boss anymore. I don't have someone who tells me, the day is over, go home or there's an emergency, you have to stay until eight." That was eye-opening to see all these people. They're like, oh, you know what I'm doing? It's very different.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I bet I think everybody has that moment with their own business when you realize in certain ways how different it is from what you were doing beforehand because it's very different than when you're working for somebody else. So with running your own business, one of the things you recently did is you accepted the opportunity to be the program director for the Wharton Online FP&A Certificate. You've mentioned that a little bit earlier. I know that kicks off, I believe, in May the 1st cohort. Tell me about that, tell us about that program.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: The program is jointly founded by Wharton. That's a large US business school and Wall Street Prep, that's finance training provider that's been around for over 20 years and who are teaching finance professionals both online and in person. The program is unique because it combines the technical skills you need for FP&A, modeling, forecasting, etc. With interpersonal skills, that's business partnering, building relationships, holding people accountable, challenging people, and also storytelling and presenting. That hasn't existed in the market before, especially not in collaboration with a well-known university where then people at the end of the program, you get a certificate. So how it works is it's a six-week program. Each week has a different focus. So for example, in the first week, we lay the foundations, and talk about the FP&A as a career. Different roles, different different career paths. Then in the second week, it's all about budgeting, planning, and how to develop an annual budget that even when the numbers get outdated a few months later, is still relevant and still gives you a way to use as a yardstick and learn something about the business by comparing it to it. Next week is all about forecasting, different forecasting techniques driver-based planning, scenario-based forecasting, time series analysis, and lots of forecasting techniques. Also, how do you get the bias out of your forecasts, which when you're working with a bigger team, can often happen? That's something that pulls through the entire program, it's not just about what you do at your desk. It's also how you collaborate with the cross-functional team and how you bring their input in. The third week is about analysis. How you get the data, how you get clean data, and then how you analyze it. I heard rumors that there's an FP&A expert contributing to it whose name also starts with Paul.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I have no idea what you're talking about.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: I'm very excited to work with you on that as well. The analysis is about how you get from raw data to insights. Then in the next week, we talk about financial modeling, what are best practices, modeling standards, and not just how you do the model in Excel, but also how you challenge the inputs, how you make sure that your data is right, and how you check and review your financial model. Then we talk about business partnering. How do you build professional relationships, how do you hold people accountable, that's an entire week as well. Then we look into financial storytelling, presenting how you tie everything together. Does it always have to be a presentation? Can it maybe also be a one-pager? How do these one-pagers work, and how do you set up your performance management calendar? When do you do your management reporting deck? What should go into that reporting deck? How do you manage that? The last week, I'm excited about it because it's about the future of finance. We have some speakers coming who talk about AI, generative AI, and how you use that in finance and data science. Then we also talk about how you navigate the recruiting process. Which questions are getting asked in FP&A interviews, what are some case studies, and what are some possible ways to navigate that and to answer those questions, so it's a comprehensive program? As you can hear, we cover a lot of ground and it's in-depth. So every week is about ten hours of content, which is a combination of videos and exercises and also office hours. We even have in-person meetups all over the world. So I'm very excited to do this.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: Looking to level up your career and build skills that make you stand out for hiring managers? How about earning a certificate from a world-renowned business school? Wharton Online and Wall Street Prep have partnered to create an eight-week online financial planning and analysis certificate program. You'll learn the art of forecasting, analysis, business partnering, and financial storytelling from Wharton Online's world-class faculty coupled with first-hand exposure to technical and interpersonal skills with real-world applications as practiced in top corporations. Space is limited. So level up your career today, enroll by May 30th, and use the discount code theFPAGuy300 to receive $300 off tuition. That is theFPAGuy300 to receive $300 off tuition. Learn more by going to wallstreetprepwharton.upenn.edu. Sounds like an amazing program. Excited for that to come out. I know you've been working hard on that. Speaking of working hard, I'm curious what's been the hardest part of coordinating and putting that program together as a program director? What's been the most challenging part of that?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Fortunately, the program is fairly comprehensive. It's eight weeks. Each week is about ten hours. So 80 hours in total of self-paced videos and exercises. Fortunately, I don't have to do that alone. As the director, one of my tasks was bringing in other experts, bringing in guest speakers. So we have other FP&A experts like yourself, like Nicola Bouchet, for example. We also have about ten CFOs of companies across different industries who come on the program and share their best practices for running finance for FP&A. But I'm contributing the majority of the content for about 35 hours. That was challenging. I also challenged myself not to use what I already have, because over the years I developed a lot of content, but I wanted to make sure to go through everything, to update everything, and to see how can I make it more hands-on with more exercises. That was quite a project to create those 35 hours of content and do it well. But I had great support from the people at Wall Street Prep. They review everything. What people share, share their insights from what they've learned over the last 20 years. It was a very good experience.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: Great, I appreciate that. What's one thing you've learned from this whole experience that would make you a better FP&A professional? If you were working in FP&A, or even as an instructor, teaching people FP&A, what are maybe 1 or 2 key takeaways?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: From an instructor's point of view, what was a great reminder is, first of all, how much fun it is to teach through exercises. As you can probably tell, I love talking about FP&A but when you're just taking people and walking them step-by-step through how I build a financial model from scratch, it's just a different way of teaching. I found that I enjoyed doing that. So I tried to do as much as possible. As far as FP&A goes, it's just interesting to see that I mentioned how every week focuses on a different topic modeling, forecasting, etc, but the common thread is that all of these topics, to be good at them, to be truly good at them, you have to bring the cross-functional team or interact with them in some shape or form and do that well as well, because, for example, the best financial model is useless if the quality of the inputs you're getting from different teams isn't there. So you need to manage that. Or the best financial presentation doesn't get you anywhere if people just nod and move on. You have to get them to take action. That was eye-opening again to see how important that interpersonal element is in FP&A.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: That's something I've learned a lot with the teaching and bringing things together. Having run my own business, I would focus much more on the interpersonal if I went back into FP&A Tomorrow in a full-time role. Not to say, I didn't know it was important before and didn't work on it, but I would put even a greater emphasis on that, particularly, on how you influence, how you tell that story, and drive the right recommendations. Much more of that thought leadership side if that makes sense versus the analysis and digging deep in Excel. As much as I love a good spreadsheet I love digging into Excel which only takes you so far. I'm with you on that. There are a lot of things I can relate to there. So I know one of your favorite things you've said before in FP&A is teaching and mentoring. What is it that you love about that? What keeps you going each day and gets you up in the morning to teach people?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: I teach through my online courses but I also teach in person. What I love about teaching in person is that you have direct feedback. I'm on Zoom or I'm standing in front of a room and just seeing those aha moments when people finally get something or they work through a particularly difficult exercise and then I show them how I did it. That's just the feedback you get there about, "Oh, I never thought about it that way or I didn't know what I don't know what I didn't know about FP&A." That's just rewarding because my hope is that people take that, go back into their teams, and that it doesn't just help them have a better forecast accuracy or more accurate models, etc. But my hope is that it also makes FP&A a bit more fun for them and a bit more rewarding because then also the other people in the team feel that. I feel like if you know what you're doing and if you know that the challenges you're facing are similar to the ones that people in other companies face and that the approaches while not always straightforward, but the solutions to the problems you have, other people have already figured out how to solve them. My hope is that will make people feel a little bit less stressed and a little bit more upbeat about going to the office to work, and that is, in the end, the ultimate goal because that's infectious. Enjoying the work you're doing is infectious. Then everyone's performance and the feeling that you're achieving something goes up.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: If people are happy at work, performance goes up. If they're enjoying what they're doing and you're helping them solve pain points. Nobody wants to spend five hours on a task that can be done in 15 minutes. If you can help give them the tools to do something quicker or better or make a bigger impact. It makes a real difference in people's lives versus working all night or whatever the case may be. So do you have a favorite story you can share with us from teaching, maybe a favorite experience, student, or something that's just stuck with you?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Over the last few years, I've been teaching FP&A boot camp. I had over 400 students and what was always cool was when I met people in person because I teach it through Zoom and one from a student of mine, he's a fractional CFO, he lives in Manhattan as well, where I live, and we met already 4 or 5 times, and we had dinner together. We talked, that was cool. Another lady, she is based in Vietnam, but she visited New York City as a tourist and she wrote, "Hey, I'm in New York. Maybe we can meet up." I had coffee with her and we talked about how she implemented, what she did. Then I was at a conference last year, and I just happened to run into a former student of mine there. That's just cool because it can sometimes feel that you're a bit removed from people when you just always teaching over Zoom and having that personal experience in between is fun. It's also why I like doing in-person training.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: No, I agree. There's nothing better than making those connections from in-person training. You can connect with people over Zoom and virtual, but there's something different when you're face-to-face, and sitting down and having that kind of bonding experience is just it's different than virtual. So I hear you on that. So a couple more questions here. Then we're going to move to our rapid-fire section. So what I want to ask next is, financial storytelling is critical to FP&A, we've heard a ton of data storytelling and financial storytelling that we all need to be better storytellers as finance professionals, how do we become great storytellers? What are some tips or tricks you could offer our audience to be better storytellers?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: I think many finance people fall into a trap a bit when they are thinking about how they can become better storytellers. Because it's called storytelling, but it's not that much about how you tell the story. I would argue it's much more about uncovering the story and separating data from insights. Because when you have a strong insight, it's easy to tell a story around that. So what I noticed when working with clients when I do consulting, for example, is that often when I look at management reporting decks, they do the variance analysis comparing actuals to forecast to budget to the prior year. To give you an example, it may say something along the lines of, well, we missed our forecast for professional fees by 50,000 because Deloitte was more expensive than before. That's not enough. That doesn't help you tell any story. So we know why professional fees were unfavorable to forecast. We paid more for Deloitte our auditor. What does it mean? What impact does that have? What should we do there? Nobody knows. So you need to take it a step further. You need to dig deeper and you need to uncover what is the so what. In this case, in this example, maybe you've done some digging.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: You talked to the people who hired the auditor, or maybe you read the contract yourself and you realized, oh, Deloitte it's not that we had more hours with them. They increased the price quite significantly year over year. So based on that, you can make the recommendation, hey, maybe we should do a tender, maybe we should look at changing our auditor because the Deloitte price just seems to be too high. Then that's a so what. Then you can make a concrete recommendation. You get to the actual root cause and then telling the story becomes easy. The story essentially is all about, okay, what's the beginning, the middle, and the end? The beginning is when we discover that there's a variance. The middle is where we did some digging. We figured out that it was Deloitte. The end is what should we do next. Let's run a tender because they increased the price on us. So people need to recognize when they've done enough digging. I think that the other challenge with that is people don't know how often they have to peel the onion or do more digging. When people ask me this what I tell them is the rule of thumb you can use is if the inside you uncovered suggests 1 or 2 clear actions, then you've done enough digging.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: If there could be a million things, then you need to ask more questions or drill into the data. Another example is, well we missed our revenue forecast. Why? Because organic sales performed less than promo sales in the year before. Or even if you drill down a level further and say, hey, product A in this region didn't perform as well. That doesn't tell you anything. There could be a million reasons why product A in this region didn't perform as well. But if you keep digging and you figure out, for example, well, product A in this region didn't perform so well because the website didn't convert free users to paying users as well as before, then you have a real root cause, because then some very clear actions come to mind. You can talk to your marketing team and say, hey, did you change anything on the website? Maybe hire someone, hire a copywriter, and see, can we test something, can we improve something on that website? So I think the core of financial storytelling is getting to that so what to that real root cause.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: Hey, there. It's your host, the FP&A Guy. Today I'm thrilled to talk to you about Plan Buddies where professionals meet excellence. This isn't just any community. It is a community run by and for planning professionals. Our Plan Buddies were all about fostering connections, sharing knowledge, and providing mentorship among FP&A experts. Ready to elevate your career? Visit planbuddies.com and become a member today. Here's a special treat. Use the promo code TheFPandAGuy which is the FP&A guy for an exclusive 25% discount on your first-year membership. I agree 100% with you. When I teach that and teach about variance commentary or whatever it might be, you want to get to that "so what?" If you have an insight, as you mentioned, it makes it much easier to put the presentation together versus I just have a bunch of data and I'm trying to figure out how to tell it to people. leadership wants actions. They want recommendations. They want insights that can drive it forward. Then it's a matter of figuring out what the best visuals are. We could spend, I'm sure, a whole podcast just talking about that and how to think of that within the storytelling. But I think that's a good point. What you talked about, needing that ability to have some insights to help with the story and to have something you can give action for. So this next section is called Rapid Fire. So how this works is you get no more than 15 seconds for each answer. At the end, if you want to elaborate on one of the five questions, you can. So feel free to elaborate on one if you want. So the first one is what is your favorite thing about Excel?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Flexibility and ease of use.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: What's your least favorite thing about Excel?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: That even after 37 years, it's still cumbersome to use on Apple computers.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: Let me guess, you have a Mac nowadays.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: I have both, but I would love to be able to use Excel properly on the Mac, but I can't.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: You're not alone on that. I think there are a lot of people that bother. How are you using generative AI today?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: I love those chatbots because when I have an idea about a new FP&A lesson, newsletter article, or LinkedIn post, I run my idea through that and brainstorm it, and it just can help to enrich an idea, and help me think more deeply.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: So you're using it a lot to brainstorm and enrich your ideas. Is that kind of the main area you're probably using it for?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: I think it's good for that middle section of content creation. I don't think it's very good to come up with something to talk about. I think it's still pretty terrible at creating a finished product, but it's fantastic in the middle part. I have an idea. I go back and forth, brainstorm with the chatbot, and then I take those bullet points and turn them into a finished product myself. That's usually how I like to work with it.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I got it. So next one, what is the number one technical skill that FP&A professionals need to master?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Specifically, doing financial modeling so that whatever you're building is flexible and error-free.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: That would be nice, error-free. What is the number one soft or human skill for FP&A professionals to master?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Building meaningful professional relationships.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: It's a good one, I like it. All right, this next section is our Get to Know You section. before we jump into that, anything you want to add to the rapid-fire, or are there any additional thoughts you want to add to any of those questions?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: You mentioned Excel, you mentioned generative AI. I think the two go very well together as well. That's something that continues to blow my mind is that I have that rule when it takes me something more than a minute to do in Excel when I try to do something, move data around, organize data, and it takes me more than a minute, there has to be a better way. So I would use to go to Google and search or go to find YouTube videos. But now I can just go to ChatGPT and say, hey, I want to do this and this in Excel, can you help me and how to do that? Then it tells you step by step where to click and how to get to that result quickly. That's just amazing to me.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I agree, it is amazing. I have used it a number of times to help with different things. Hey, help me write this formula because I can't remember the exact syntax or I'm trying to do this, how should I do it? So I agree with you. Excel and generative AI together is a great one to work together. All right, so under the Get To Know You section, these are some more personal questions. So the first one what's your favorite hobby or passion that you have?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: That keeps changing. But I love photography. Especially, now I have a very active two-year-old at home, and I love taking photos of him because he does so many silly things all day long. and sometimes I also like to just take a walk with the camera to do some street photography, because I find it very meditative and helps me think things through and focus and be open to what's in front of me. So I enjoy street photography as well.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I like it. What is a book you can recommend to our audience? One book you'd recommend for them to read?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Actually, I'm going to recommend two. There is the CFO Lens by Ravi Kumar. I don't know if you can see that.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I can see that one.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Do you know that book?
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I do not, I haven't read it.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: It's a very good book. It's written by the former CFO of IBM India, and it's a good book for FP&A professionals. There aren't that many out there, but it doesn't say FP&A in the title. It says CFO Lens, but it's fairly applicable for FP&A. It talks about modeling, but it also talks about building business understanding, analysis, and cost management. It's a good book. The other book I would recommend, it's not a finance book, is, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor by Donald Robertson. This is about Marcus Aurelius. For those of you who don't know, Marcus Aurelius is just an interesting historical figure. He was the emperor of Rome about 4000 years ago, 3000 or 4000 years ago. Don't quote me on that, but it's a long time ago in ancient Rome. He is known as the most powerful man in the world, much more powerful than anyone now. But he challenged himself to be mindful of everyone around him, to be just a good person. He wrote the diary. He wrote down reminding himself not to fault people to be nice to people and to be thoughtful, logical but thoughtful. This book is a modern interpretation of that, and it summarizes the philosophy behind that. I just found that very interesting.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: Great. Well, thank you for sharing both of those. I'm sure we'll have some people going out there online and finding them. So thank you, I appreciate that. What is your favorite travel destination?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Hands-down. Germany, going back to see my family. I'm originally from Germany. I moved to the States just over ten years ago, but my family is there, my parents are there, and my brother is there. So I love going back to see them.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: FP&A Guy here. I want to personally invite you to the upcoming third-generation FP&A Tools Showcase. It is a virtual event you don't want to miss. On May 30th, join FP&A professionals and industry leaders as we delve into the latest innovations transforming financial planning, discover cutting-edge solutions from top providers, and learn through in-depth sessions including company overviews, product demos, and customer success stories. As a CFO or FP&A professional, this showcase is tailored for you. You will be able to get insights from experts such as Glenn Hopper, waterborne, and myself. Spaces are limited, so go on over to my LinkedIn page and learn more in the featured section, or check out the show notes for the link to register for this event. You will not want to miss the third-generation FP&A Tools Showcase. See you there! So family, going to see family and going back home. Always a good combination. If you could have dinner with one person in the world alive today, who are you going to pick?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Alive today. That's a tricky one because if you would say historical person, then I would love to have dinner with Marcus Aurelius because he's just such a fascinating character, or with Richard Feynman. I heard that he's a cool guy to hang out with people alive today. There's this author. His name is Yuval Noah Harari. I read a few books that maybe people know, he wrote humans, I think it's called. A few other books, and he just seemed such a small, smart guy and so interesting to talk to. I'd love to have dinner with them because I feel like you can have very deep and interesting conversations with this guy.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: I got it. That'd be a good one. Alright, we're coming up on the end of our time. The last question I have for you is what advice would you offer our audience to be a better business partner today?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: That's a great question. Look, I would encourage you to simply go walk over to your business partner who you work with most closely or if you're remote, set up a Zoom call and ask them this question. In a perfect world, what would you like to know about your business today to make better decisions tomorrow? I find that question can be eye-opening because people sometimes don't ask finance for help with getting more insights because they think they can't do it. So if you say, well, in a perfect world, what metrics would you like to have? What data would you like to have? What would you like to know? That can sometimes lead to something where either you can just give them that, give them those metrics, those insights, or you can get them something that gets them at least halfway there. By doing that, you can demonstrate that you want to do more than just cutting budgets and updating forecasts. you want to help them reach their goals, and that can make a huge difference in the relationship.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: Great advice. I would support that. Go talk to your business partners and understand what their biggest pain points are and how you can help them. So as we wrap up here, why don't you share with our audience how they can learn more about the Wharton program, connect with you, and anything you'd like to share from all the stuff you're doing?
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Thank you. So the working program launches for the first time in May, and then we run a cohort three times a year. I regularly offer my program FP&A boot camp as well. It's a two-week program, and I'm also working on launching a new FP&A course, can't say much about it yet, but the easiest way to stay in touch with me is to connect with me on LinkedIn. You can also send me a direct message on LinkedIn. My inbox is open. Anybody can send me a message there. That's probably the easiest way to get in touch because email and things can get lost, and things can land in spam. So follow me on LinkedIn. That's how you know what's going on in my universe. If you want to learn more about the Wharton program, there's a link on my LinkedIn profile. Maybe you can also put something in the show notes.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: We will.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Just say ‘hi’ on LinkedIn.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: Sounds great. Well, I know I've seen you a lot on LinkedIn, and I'm sure I'll see you around, but thank you for taking some time with us today to chat and excited to share this with our audience, and for them to get an opportunity to get to know you a little better. So thank you, Christian. I appreciate it.
Guest: Christian Wattig:: Thank you so much for having me today, Paul.
Host: Paul Barnhurst:: Thanks for listening to FP&A Tomorrow. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five-star rating and a review on your podcast platform of choice. This allows us to continue to bring you great guests from around the globe. As a reminder, you can earn CPE credit by going to earmarkcpe.com, downloading the app, taking a short quiz, and getting your CPE certificate to earn continuing education credits for the FPAC certification. Take the quiz on earmark and contact me, the show host for further details.
