FP&A as Business Intelligence – Len McFall

FP&A professionals are the original business intelligence (BI) experts, says Len Mcfall, senior consultant, finance at Windstream Holdings, a $1billion US telecoms company.

“FP&A itself is synonymous with business intelligence,” he says. “And honestly, weren’t, weren’t we the first business intelligence? We’ve always been working with data. We’ve always been trying to simplify and present data in a  meaningful way to people who might not,otherwise be literate.”

In this frank and honest interview McFall, whose background is heavily influenced by BI, gives insights from a 20 year career including HCT Investments, Sitel, Crossroads Treatment Center and a minefield of data at Windstream. 

 “I’m not a bullet point guy. I’m a paragraph guy” says Len– warning he’s not one for short, snappy answers, but a storyteller who loves to dive deep,  as he reveals:

• Why 40% of my job is touching base with people to curate all the data we use across the organization
• Putting sales on blast:  how often do you catch a forecast from a sales organization that’s even 50%, right?
• Coming into a company to save them after they were delivering finance reporting 30 days after close (from 30 days to day 8)
• the role of data analysis and bi  in finance and in the decision making process.
• How business runs on “hunches” and why it is FP&A to prove that hunch 
• Why if you cannot communicate to the business you are useless 
• The vast amount of data we have access to in telecoms and how we separate the signal from the noise 
• How finance rubs against IT and why it’s not pretty 
• Why AI in finance is like a “very smart but green intern” and prompt engineers are ridiculous
• Killing for food in winters during his childhood

Connect with Len on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/len-mcfall-6274857b/