The Role of FP&A vis a vis Revenue Operations - with Paul Barnhurst, The FP&A Guy

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Paul Barnhurst, founder of the FP&A guy. We'll be covering three main topics with Paul today. First, what is FP&A, and why should a company care about the function? Second, how does an FP&A department and revenue operations work together? And third, technology for FP&A professionals. When will we finally move beyond Excel? Paul, please take a moment to give a brief background overview of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics It Measure Up podcast.

**Paul Barnhurst** (1:11)
Well, Ray, thanks for having me on the show. I'm really excited to be here today. And just to tell your audience a little bit about me, my journey kind of started probably about six years ago when I was looking for a job and somebody said, hey, I'll talk to you but I don't want your Starbucks gift card. I'd offer them a gift card. I want you to write an article for my website. I'm like, well, I suck at writing, but I'll write your article. And I actually found I kind of liked it. I ended up writing a couple more for him and started to get active on LinkedIn, which eventually led to some opportunities to be on webinars. And then it started leading to actually some job opportunities to work with some FP&A tools, some of these vendors, as well as a consulting opportunity. And about nine months ago, now nine, ten months ago, I looked at my wife and I go, I think I could turn this into a business. She kind of looked at me like, you're crazy. And about a month later, she goes, all right, I believe you, you can quit your day job. And that day I put in my notice.
And I've been doing this now for about six months, 100% full time for about two, three months now. I ended up staying a little longer with my job. And, you know, I do everything from training. We just trained actually the about 50 employees at a FP&A planning tool company on FP&A. They're engineers, they're product people, they're sales people, customer support, do Excel training, do a lot of content creation. I host my own podcast called the FP&A Today. It's sponsored by DataRails, and we bring in different experts from finance, particularly FP&A, but also CFOs, and talk to them. And then I also, you know, in addition to that, do some consulting and things around FP&A, financial modeling, that type of thing.

**Ray Rike** (2:42)
Well, FP&A, so first of all, we in the B2B SaaS industry, more acronyms, throw around acronyms all day long. So let's start at the very beginning, because a lot of our listening audience, SaaS founders, CEOs, maybe they haven't worked in larger corporations, they don't even know what the hell FP&A, what's this FIPA thing. So first of all, what does FP&A stand for? And what does the function do?

**Paul Barnhurst** (3:08)
So kind of funny thing I tell people stands for, because when I first start using the FP&A guy, someone came up to me and said, what's the F in Panda guy? F Panda, and I was like, no, no, it's FP&A. And so that's kind of been a running joke that I'm the Panda guy.
But obviously FP&A, it stands for financial planning and analysis. And you're right, historically, it's been something that you see in big companies. And the way to think of it, one definition I like to use when we use their training is, there's the thing everybody thinks about budgeting and planning. But there's so much more of that. An FP&A department will handle integrated financial and operational planning in many cases, trying to make sure that all of it hangs together. Often you hear the term today what's called extended planning or connected planning, which is a way to say that, look, FP&A can be the hub, not just for that financial, but making sure it all hangs together and that everybody's on the same page. In many ways, it's almost an internal consultant or advisor. They do management and performance reporting. Typically, in companies that have FP&A, they'll assist with the board deck or even own the board deck with the CFO, IEO continuous forecasting throughout the year, financial modeling for ad hoc projects. It can be anything from we're looking to launch a new product or, hey, should we hire more InsightSales people? Sometimes those analysis can be done in different departments, RevOps, SalesOps, but often that comes to FP&A. Then one of the biggest parts, and it's a term you hear a lot today, is partnering with the business. Really, what I like to think of when I sum up FP&A as one sentence, is FP&A's job is to help maximize shareholder return by helping the business best deploy a future dollar. Counting tells you about the past dollar. FP&A is helping you allocate those future dollars to achieve the company's strategic objectives. I look at them as an internal consultant that's supposed to help create value.