🫵 The trouble with "business partners"

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I have a big problem with “business partners.”

Well, not with the people. More with the definition of the role... and especially the title.

Finance Business Partner is one of the most sought-after titles for ambitious early-career finance pros.

It’s set up to sound like the sexy version of finance.

But let’s get deeper…

A typical definition of finance business partnering in corporate life would be something like this: Finance business partnering is the practice of finance working closely with business leaders to improve decisions, behavior, and performance.

Sounds good. And to be clear, that is a real thing…

The best business partners are translators, challengers, spreadsheet savants, coaches, bullshit detectors, and financial conscience all at once.

But also… shouldn’t the whole finance function be ‘working with business leaders to improve decisions, behavior, and performance’?

If you tell one part of your team they are Finance “Business Partners,” it also sends a subconscious message to the rest of the finance team that they are not.

And no, this isn’t just semantics.

Words are important. Eighty percent of the job description comes from the job title. A title tells people what game they are playing. But it also tells the business what to expect. It tells the person in the role what behavior will be rewarded.

And “Business Partner” is a dangerously vague title.

“Partner” is one of those spectacularly vague corporate words that I hate. It means too much and too little all at once.

It’s like the word “meat.” If I offered you a meat curry, you’d reasonably say: “OK… but what meat?” Chicken? Lamb? Goat? Something that had a difficult childhood?

‘Partner’ is the same.

In fact, there is only one other overused corporate word I can think of even more vague than “partner.”

Know what it is? That’s right… BUSINESS.

So when you put them together, you have the ‘meat curry’ of finance job titles.

Great business partnering from the FP&A function is difficult. It means driving the business to perform better. Sometimes that means support and service. Sometimes it means putting out fires. But other times it means starting fires.

In practice, Finance Business Partners often end up in one of two extremes.

The first is not close enough to the function they are supposed to support. And end up being a glorified finance admin resource and information servant to their partner function.

The second failure mode is worse… they get too close. They “go native”. I have caught this many times. Finance Business Partners who have forgotten their first loyalty is to the financial performance of the business, and end up just being manipulated by the exec they support.

The “business partner” label didn’t really come from finance. It wandered in from HR in the late 1990s, got adopted by management accounting and finance transformation types, then got laminated into finance job titles by the consulting industrial complex.

Sometimes business partners are brilliant at what they do. But plenty of operators hear “business partner” and think: policy translator, ticket router, spy in the camp, process police, soft touch, or just the guy that unmutes at the end of the meeting to say ‘nothing from my end, thanks’.

And like so many things forcefed in by the consulting profession, it sounds great in a boardroom, looks even better on a slide, and becomes much less fucking useful when real humans have to operate within  it.

‘Business partner’ roles are long overdue a rethink.

In week one we explored the true purpose of FP&A, and how its value comes only from its impact on the business.

Last week we dug into the seven different activity buckets of FP&A and how to know what you need and when.

This week, we are getting into building and organizing the FP&A team itself.

Quick note: This post is only about the design of the FP&A structure, not the people within it. Identifying, hiring, and retaining outstanding talent is a whole series in its own right, and one we’ll be tackling soon.

This isn’t FP&A-specific. It isn’t even finance-specific.

But it still amazes me how often C-suite leaders get this wrong when designing their teams.

They start with boxes. Head of FP&A. Senior FP&A Manager. Analyst. Commercial Finance Lead. Strategic Finance Director. Even Finance Business Partner 🤮. Then they try to cram the work into those boxes.

That is upside down. The org chart is the output of function design, not the starting point. You have to start with the operating model. Unbounded by current structures, reporting lines, or conventional job titles.

What is the work? How should it be performed? Where should it sit? Who should be involved? Who owns the decision? What needs to be central? What needs to sit close to the business?

Only after you answer those questions should you start drawing boxes. So, today we’re walking through a simple model for designing FP&A properly.

And it might just change how you think about those business partner roles…

We are going to build up your FP&A Operating Model in 5 steps:

Last week, I shared 35 potential FP&A activities under seven headings, and showed how to figure out which ones matter to your business. I won’t repeat that here. If you haven’t already, go figure it out and come back.

The only thing to add is this: you are not just designing for what the business needs today. You are designing for what it is likely to need soon. But be careful… “Fit for the future” is how finance teams justify all sorts of nonsense.

You are not designing the FP&A function for the business you wish you had. But you are not designing it for a static business either.

Once you know the work, you need to decide how deep each activity needs to go… how mature it needs to be.

A simple five-level scale works:

That gives you a way to map each of the seven FP&A activity buckets:

The goal is not Level 5 everywhere.

In fact, for most businesses, Level 5 everywhere would be a disaster. Expensive, distracting, and full of finance work the business cannot absorb.

This comes back to push and pull.

The current maturity is what finance is ‘pushing’ today: the processes, reports, models, meetings, tools, and support already in place.

The required maturity is what the business is ‘pulling’ for npw over the next 12-18 months: the level of FP&A capability needed given the company’s complexity, volatility, constraints, decisions, and management capability.

You can map both…

Where current maturity is below required maturity, you are underbuilt. You need to invest, deepen, hire, automate, or improve the process.

Where current maturity is above required maturity, you are overbuilt. You need to simplify, reduce cadence, stop producing things, or move work out of the way. Here is an example of how you might assess your FP&A maturity:

And don’t drive for improvement just for its own sake. Time spent working on the FP&A processes is time not spent supporting the business. And remember, FP&A is measured on impact, not elegance.

There may be a time in the future for that specific transformation project.

Building maturity creates work. It consumes people, time, tools, leadership attention, and change capacity. It also distracts from execution.

Don’t waste time sharpening the saw if the saw is already sharp enough for the job. But also, don’t hesitate to invest time sharpening if the saw is blunt.

In smaller finance functions, FP&A tends to be centralized by default.

If the whole FP&A team is four people or fewer, there usually isn’t much choice.

The CFO needs control, priorities need to be managed tightly, and fewer people have to cover broader patches.

But as the business grows, the distance between central finance and the business grows with it. More functions. More sites. More politics. More bureaucracy. More places for performance to get lost.

So FP&A has to become more deliberate about where the work sits.

Some work needs to stay close to the CFO. Some needs to sit in a central team. Some needs to be pushed closer to the business. And some should be automated or made self-serve.

This is where “business partnering” usually enters the conversation.

You might put an analyst on the factory floor with the VP of Ops. Or build a commercial finance team that spends 90% of its time with Sales. That can be powerful. But it also raises the obvious question: where do they sit? What are the reporting lines?

A mature culture can handle matrix structures without losing the plot… but if you are already in that place, you probably don’t need this post.

For everyone else, you should go activity by activity through your FP&A workplan and map the best place to do the work. There are four options

Here’s how to think about each of them:

With those four placement options in mind, you can now go activity by activity and decide where the work should sit. Not just the headline activity, but the sub-activities inside it.

By this point, you should have three things:

Those are the design principles.

Now they need to make contact with reality. So the next step is turning the design into a structure.

So … you know what you need. But we now need to consider your constraints, and build around: Current people, budget constraints, talent pool, existing skills, budget, reporting lines, business complexity, CFO bandwidth, geography/BU structure, and existing finance politics

Frequently, this comes down to choosing from one of five operating models:

Smaller businesses are usually constrained to one of the first two. They either have CFO-only FP&A, or  one capable person trying to create rhythm from the chaos.

Larger businesses have a more deliberate choice to make: how much FP&A capability they want to build, how close it should sit to the business, and how much consistency they are willing to trade for proximity.

One important note: this is not the same as maturity level.

You can have fairly sophisticated FP&A in a CFO-only or one-person structure (especially true in the AI era). Equally, you can have an embedded FP&A function delivering only very basic support.

Yes, more resources create more potential for sophistication. But that sophistication is usually there to fight complexity. (And it does not always win.) So don’t confuse team shape with FP&A maturity.

A bigger, more embedded team is not automatically better. It might just be supporting a more expensive, more political, and harder to govern.

By this point in the process, the right structure for your business should be starting to emerge. Now comes the final step: crafting the roles inside that operating model.

By now, the broad operating model should be clear.

But an operating model is still not a working structure. The final step is turning that model into actual roles. And that means working through three sub-steps:

Start with the FP&A activities you identified earlier, then group them into sensible chunks of work. A work package is a set of FP&A activities that behave in a similar way.

You are looking for activities that share similar characteristics:

The closer the characteristics, the easier the work is to bundle. You are grouping work by how it actually behaves inside the finance function, not by topic.

Once the work packages are defined, you can start bundling them into actual roles.

This is where you need a rough view of work volume. Not fake precision. Just enough to know whether a package is 0.2 FTE, 0.8 FTE, 1.5 FTE, or “please don’t give this to one person unless you hate them.”

For example, you might bundle: Low-judgment reporting, routine forecasting, model maintenance, loading actuals, simple variance analysis

That might become a Central FP&A Analyst or Reporting & Forecasting Analyst role. The work is repeatable. It needs process discipline. It needs financial understanding. It probably does not need to sit inside the commercial team every day.

Or you might bundle: pricing support & deal economics, customer profitability, margin analysis, sales productivity, commercial forecast challenge

That starts to look like a Commercial Finance Lead role. The work needs judgment, business understanding, and great relationships with the sales team.

Now you can turn those work bundles into clearly defined role specs for your team.

How to write great job specs, hire against them, and select the right people is a whole series in its own right. But at minimum, a good FP&A role spec should include:

You can use this whole piece as this week’s homework. Steps 1-5 walk you through the process of FP&A operating model and team design.

But once you have arrived at your optimal structure, I would add one final test…

Impose an artificial constraint. What if you had one fewer person? Or two fewer people? Or 25% less headcount than the structure you just designed?

Then ask yourself: what work would we no longer be able to do?

Be specific.

Would you lose pricing support? Reduce the forecasting rhythm? Switch off some reporting?

Then ask: what would the impact on the business be?

Would losing that work seriously damage the value FP&A provides to the business? If you have done the design properly, it probably should. It should feel extremely painful.

I like the artificial constraint test because tight FP&A headcount is a useful forcing function on making sure the work FP&A do, and the work FP&A create is truly valuable.

Remember where we started this series: one hour of finance work can easily consume ten hours of valuable business time across operations, sales, HR, supply chain, and leadership.

So use this test to make sure you’ve been ruthless enough in your structure.

Getting the right FP&A operating model is a deliberate act.

Most CFOs let it evolve inside traditional parameters. They inherit a structure, add a few roles, copy a few job titles, and hope the shape is roughly right.

But hope is a bad basis for good org design.

If you start with the work, define the maturity needed, decide where the work should sit, choose the right operating model, and then carve the work into clear roles, you give yourself a much better chance of building FP&A properly.

You may also have noticed that we are 75% of the way through this series and have barely mentioned those two little letters: AI.

I wanted to start with the timeless principles. Why FP&A exists. What work it should do. How much the business actually needs. And how to build the team around that work.

But next week, for the final part of the series, we look at where FP&A is headed.

Which means, inevitably, talking about AI. Just a little, I promise…

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Disclaimer: I am not your accountant, tax advisor, lawyer, CFO, director, or friend. Well, maybe I’m your friend, but I am not any of those other things. Everything I publish represents my opinions only, not advice. Running the finances for a company is serious business, and you should take the proper advice you need.