The essential skills and mindset to move your team fro Calculators to Coaches
Before we start I want to be super clear on one thing: this is NOT a finance course.
Here's the thing - you probably already know how to be a great accountant. You've got reporting, budgeting and forecasting nailed.
The thing is, while those things make you a great accountant, they won't help you to become a great FBP.
Why?
Because FBP is about building relationships, turning the data into insights, bringing numbers to life, and influencing decisions.
I didn't appreciate this when I was the finance director of a £600m consumer business in the UK. I only saw it when I moved to be the sales director of that business. That was a big change for me!
I learned how to sell products and ideas, negotiate, present clearly with no slides, build relationships with even the most difficult people, and handle serious conflict.
I thought wow, I wish I'd know how to do this when I worked in finance. It was like I had uncovered the missing pieces of my jigsaw puzzle.
And for the first time in my career I had finance partnering me, and I didn't like it at all! I felt they only highlighted past issues, gave me very little help with my problems, and gave me recommendations that wouldn't work in the market. And even though I used to be the the FD, I couldn't make sense of the numbers they were presenting to me!
So I've designed this FBP Academy and perfected it over the last 7 years to show you all the tools and techniques I learned in sales & marketing.
I break them down to make them super simple and show you how commercial people use them to influence. Then I show you how to apply them directly to your day to day finance work.
See you there!
Andy Shambrook, FCA, Founder
Way more than just finance training, our programmes will show you everything we learned in sales and marketing that we wish we’d known when we worked in finance.
Imagine The Financial Times meets the Apprentice and you’ll get an idea of the stretch we’ll give your people.
FBP Ignite® development plans, on-demand video lessons, live Zoom application workshops, and INSIGHTS® psychometric profiling. You can design the programme that fits your team whether you've got 7 or 700 people.
Well it would have been a massive table of numbers comparing actual, budget and last year wouldn't it.
Probably a few graphs and charts from the analytics. A dashboard maybe.
Inspired? Me neither. He actually said:
"2 billion songs purchased and downloaded"
The best way to bring numbers to life and tell the story behind them, is to not use many numbers. We'll show you how.
On-demand video lessons, live virtual workshops, capability assessments and INSIGHTS® psychometrics. All on-line. Fully tailored to you.
Way more than just training, your FBP Academy will transform finance from number crunchers to influencers at all levels from analyst to leader.
The biggest lesson I learned when I was finance director was alienating the 80% of the finance team that didn't have FBP or commercial in their job title.
I soon learned that everyone in finance CAN be a finance business partner, and in fact needs to be for finance to flourish as a function. I quickly changed my view.
Our course is designed to shift the mindsets and behaviours of your team from an accountant focussed on what happened last month, to a commercially focussed BP helping people make better decisions that will show up in the future P&L, BS and CF.
So of course it's perfect for those you consider to be FBPs today, supporting commercial or operational functions. But the approach benefits a far wider audience, here's just some examples.
Cash is king, we know this. Influencing customers to pay is a big FBP role. Influencing sales people to chase their customers to pay and resolve disputes is an even bigger role.
Do your AR team have great relationships with customers and sales? Do they bring the numbers to life so sales understands the issues and acts on them? Or do they send out incomprehensible spreadsheets?
Budgeting, forecasting and reporting sucks up so much time in any finance function. Vast amounts of data is created and circulated, but how much is taken in and acted on?
Does your FP&A have great relationships with non-finance? Do their reports communicate the most important messages, clearly and simply? Or do they bombard non-finance with vast tables of numbers and complicated charts and graphs with a hundred different colours on them and a tiny legend no-one can read?
Wow this is a big influence job, because I've got to get people to do things they fundamentally don't want to do. More process, more admin, more sign offs.
I actually think working in internal controls is the single hardest FBP role in any company, because you need incredible relationships, be able to communicate complex things simply, and show people what's in it for them to follow the process.
Over the last 7 years we've worked with over 7,000 finance business partners across over 150 companies all over the World.
More importantly in this online World, since March 2019 we've delivered over 30 programmes to over 1,000 people across the World, so we've got the new model down!
Here are just some of our clients running our online programmes right now - most of them globally!
We've also designed and delivered bespoke finance business partner training and leadership development all over the World on behalf of ICAEW in the UK and CAANZ in Australia and New Zealand for the last 7 years and counting.
Here's just some of more than 50 programmes trusted in our hands.