Advisory Director — Capital and Performance at Scale

An adviser who has made forecasts belong to operators

Some finance leaders have spent their careers producing better forecasts. The person this brief calls for has spent theirs making other people own them. The organisations you have worked in should have been no smaller than $625 million in revenue, 4,300 people and seven countries, and your record will include digital transformation, succession and professionalisation, each of which reshapes who in a business is expected to know the numbers. Capital allocation at level 4 anchors the brief, with FP&A forecasting, controls reporting and risk judgement all expected at level 3.

Working from partial numbers, you have made a call that could be reversed and then hardened it as the data filled in. You have watched central finance give up the pen and know what it took to make the change stick. You remain answerable after a decision is taken, including for the slow work of closing finance exceptions.

The counsel the chief executive will ask for

The Advisory Director advises; the decisions remain with the chief executive and the business-unit leaders. The adviser helps the chief executive decide where forecasting responsibility sits, including the limits business-unit leaders hold, and counsels on which measures should steer investment, capacity and control. They recommend which inherited commitments should be kept, suspended or closed. They challenge proposals that would leave cost or risk with no one prepared to answer for it, and question investment cases that skip uptake, dependencies or what could go wrong. They advise on how the leadership team is arranged and how open questions rise, and help resolve conflicts between the chief executive and operating leaders.

In hospitality, a forecast is only as good as the person closest to the property's demand, cost and staffing. Ownership has to sit there, with the centre's role shifting to challenge.

Twelve months, three moments of truth

At ninety days, the adviser should have put to the Group Chief Executive Officer a recommended model of forecast ownership for each business unit, and had it agreed. Around month nine business-unit leaders should be presenting their own forecasts, with their assumptions and variance explanations challenged openly by the adviser rather than rewritten by central finance. By month 12 forecast ownership should be adopted across the business units and reviewed with the audit committee, ready for management to sustain without advisory support.

Four steps to an answer

Week 1 is a confidential conversation over video with the Group Chief Executive Officer. In week 3, with the Audit Committee Chair, you test forecast assumptions and the controls behind them. In week 5 you meet in person the executives who head each function, many of them the future forecast owners. The board as a whole has the last conversation, in week 7. Three working days after each stage, at most, you will have our feedback in writing.