On July 27th, I sat down (virtually in a webinar) with Fred Studer, the Chief Marketing Office (CMO) of FinancialForce to answer a series of questions on the service economy and its impact on finance. Fred is not your typical CMO. After initially starting his career in accounting, he saw the potential of marketing and eventually accepted…
Your firm just completed a multi-million dollar Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) project to consolidate the information system resources of two business entities. The project is seven months late with cost overruns of $800,000. Fingers are pointing everywhere as to who is to blame for the delay and extra costs. Management would now like to…
Fresh out after getting my MBA, I went to work for a large management consulting firm doing forensic and litigation consulting work. With the office located in downtown Washington D.C. many of the senior leaders were former Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) employees who had moved to representing various clients in regarding SEC filings. I had…
Were All Financial Analysts Once Mild Mannered Accountants? What professional careers led us to become financial analysts? Did we enter the field of financial analysis right out of college, or did we take some segues, before discovering that we were well suited (pinstripes optional) for intense financial scrutiny, coaxing stories out of numbers? Perhaps…
It seems like Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) is the jack-of-all-trades and the master of most others. FP&A answers strategic questions, forecasts for the future, ensures a timely accounting close, prepares board reporting packages, preps the executive team, divests a division, analyzes product line profitability, performs due diligence on an acquisitions and oh yeah does…
In a September 10, 2008 investor conference call, Ian Lowitt, Lehman Brother’s CFO, set forth a strategy to investors that he, along with other Lehman executives, believed would save the firm. During that call, Mr. Lowitt stated among the detail of the plan the following statement: “And even under the scenario of limited debt-issuing capacity in 2009,…