Nicolas Boucher has a simple message to anyone who wants to move from audit to FP&A.
The Head of Finance and Controlling at Thales says: “You can do it. I am an example of that.”
He says many skills are transferable from audit to FP&A. “Looking at financial statements from different companies in different situations and different industries” is one. Another is understanding “the figures compared to the past or compared to trends to give assurance to the figures. This is actually what you are doing as FP&A when you are analyzing the actuals against the budget or against last year.”
After seven years in audit at PwC which took him around the world and saw him get “battlefield promotions” Nicolas didn’t want to remain in audit forever and wanted “something more operationally close to the business.”
In this week’s podcast he explains how he made the move from audit to FP&A and the skills he has learnt in his 15 years as a finance leader.
Whether it is his past as a DJ (“When you have control of the microphone from 500 people, you need to know what you have to say and to have the confidence to do it”) or board reports and his daily content as a global finance thought leader with over 600,000 followers on LinkedIn he explains the importance of stopping people from being “ bored” or losing attention.
He also reveals the inside scoop on a new course “giving everything that I learned the last 15 years” – that he wishes he had been given when starting out.
In this episode Nicolas reveals:
- How to shape your audit skills to to get a role in FP&A
- His key learnings in a finance career that has taken him all over the world including France, the US, and Singapore, and across audit, controlling and FP&A roles.
- The secrets to hitting 600,000 followers on LinkedIn as one of the leading FP&A (and general finance) influencers
- His lessons from a large-scale finance transformation at Thales
- The importance of communicating “bad surprises” early
- His early DJ Career and the lessons for a career in finance
- His new course, Become a High Performing Finance Professional
- His favorite Excel function
Paul Barnhurst:
Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Today, I am your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka the FP&A Guy. And you are listening to FP&A Today. FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails, the financial planning and analysis platform for Excel users. Every week we welcome a leader from the world of financial planning and analysis and discuss some of the biggest stories and challenges in the world of FP&A. We’ll provide you with actionable advice about financial planning and analysis. This is going to be your go-to resource for all things FP&A. Today I am thrilled to welcome our guest, Nicolas Boucher to the show. Nicolas, welcome to the show.
Nicolas Boucher:
Thank you Paul. Good morning.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yes, good, good afternoon to you. Nicholas comes to us from Germany, so the time’s a little bit different for him, but Nicolas Boucher a few things about him. He’s very active sharing best practice on LinkedIn. As of this recording he has a following of around 90,000 followers. He currently works as a senior manager, FP&A, controlling at Thales. And also prior to that he spent time working as an auditor at PwC in both Luxembourg and Singapore. So we’re really thrilled to have him on the show today. And maybe we could start off by just having you tell our audience a little bit about your background and a little bit about yourself.
Nicolas Boucher:
Yeah, thank you Paul. So yes, I live in Germany but I’m actually French as you could hear. Half French , half Belgian and we live now in Germany. I have a German wife, I have kids that are raised with both languages, French and German. And I lived in five different countries so now Germany. But before I was in Luxembourg working for PwC, I was at PwC also work in Singapore. I went two years to Singapore, one of my greatest personal and professional experiences. And prior to that, so I started my career at PwC at Luxembourg and I studied in France and I met my wife in the US where I spent one year today. So that’s a bit my background and now happy actually to share also to all of the world, all of my knowledge on LinkedIn because there is no frontier, no border. With LinkedIn you can access to anybody and I will say I’m a citizen of the world happy to share with everybody what we learn every day.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. Now we’re really excited to have you on the show. Just a couple follow up questions from that introduction there. So you spent a year in the US. Where did you study in the US or what did you study when you were in the US?
Nicolas Boucher:
Yes, I was in an MBA program at East, east Carolina University in the city of Greenville in North Carolina. Yeah. Was also one of the best life experiences having been an international student going to also to the football game of the university. Also live the visit all of the east coast. At the end we finished by three weeks travel in on the west coast to discover it felt like another country actually the west coast.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yes, there feels like there’s more than one country in the US depending on what region and where you go. It’s very different in different locations for sure. So cool. Now that sounds like a great experience. Second is Singapore. You mentioned you ended up in Singapore. How did that happen? You talked about that being a great both professional and personal experience for you. So maybe talk just a little bit more about that?
Nicolas Boucher:
Yeah, so after three years at PwC working in audit for me I had seen what is it to be a junior, what is to be a senior. I had seen also my industry because I was auditing mainly financial services. And what is good is in those big four they have a program where you can go and work one or two years to another office and typically you do that after three to five years and when you’re not married yet, when you don’t have kids yet. I thought it was a great opportunity to do that and a lot of people were going to New York but now Singapore was starting to have more and more requests because they were growing. So actually I went there and discovered a great place. Southeast Asia is amazing. The people there are so open, so friendly, so humble as well. And really what was good professionally is the opportunity to be exposed to big companies and to be, I was really quickly the manager of all of my audit jobs even though I was not professionally a manager but all of my managers left, so I was pushed in front as manager.
So I work with partners, our work with CFOs and CEOs of insurance companies and yet you have to imagine Singapore is more than 6 million people and I was directly with CFO and CEOs of insurance companies. Really big. They had to ensure a home for 3 million autos or cars. So that was for me a great experience and also to teach everything I learned in Europe to the Singaporean colleagues who were already eager to learn and open to yet to change a bit. So you have to learn the culture first because you have to adapt, not them. But after, once you have break broken this barrier and you have shown an understanding for how they work, then you can discuss and how to use the best of each culture, of each. Also knowledge because we learn differently in Europe, maybe more practical and they are more academical there. So we use that to create a great teamwork.
Paul Barnhurst:
It sounds like it was a great experience and you know had that opportunity to mention kind of running the thing I call those battlefield promotions when everybody leaves and you’re the one who gets the responsibility because nobody’s left, so to speak. And those are great learning experiences. I’ve had a few of those. So sounds like a fabulous experience. So kind of switching gears here a little bit, I know you started your career as an auditor and then you moved over into FP&A, controlling area. Can you talk a little bit about that process? What led to the switch and how did that happen?
Nicolas Boucher:
So I never thought that I will stay in audit all of my career. I stayed thanks to this experience in Singapore. The fact that I broke my audit in three phases I stayed a bit longer than I thought, but still I was always targeting to leave the audit to go to something more operational closer to the business. And it was actually more, I would say a personal decision with my wife that triggered this change when we thought, okay, now we want to create a family, we need a better work-life balance. And she got actually a job here in Germany and as I was the one before who already left to Singapore. So she was like, it was her turn to decide where we go. And then what I did is I got the opportunity to work for French company Thales, because I did an internship 10 years ago there or now, 15 years ago there.
And so what happened to me is that I had to change first job I went from audit to FP&A controlling, I had to change languages. I went from working in French and English to working in German, then I had to change industry. I was working for financial services companies, now I’m working for industrial and engineering company. I had to change also the location. I went from Luxembourg to Germany and I will say the last change, the last big change is the culture. Because at PwC or all of this Big 4, you have a certain culture for hard work hungry people. And when you work for a bigger group working as a contractor for government bodies, for big organization, it’s more people stay more long term. And I will say the work-life balance is also better. So was big change but I wanted this change
Paul Barnhurst:
That is definitely a lot to change at once. And I will agree with you having worked in defense, engineering, aerospace, some of that industry definitely a very different industry than some of your fast-paced industries, audit small companies. I started my career in that space, not in finance but in that space. So I can talk a little bit about that culture as well. And it’s definitely different
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What would you say to someone who’s working in audit today and wants to make that switch to FP&A, what advice would you offer to them?
Nicolas Boucher:
So first I want to tell to anybody who wants to do it, you can do it. I am an example of that. Because in audit you build so much basics to work in any type of other organization then this is one of your first skills. You have a really great working culture and I will say methods. So that you can use in any type of work in pattern if you want to move from audit to FP&A. If we look now more specifically at FP&A what you learn in audit is the finance and accounting background that you need in any type of finance jobs. So by looking at financial statements from different companies in different situation and different industries, you have built such a strong basics for other finance jobs that you can use that in FP&A or if you work as in accounting for example for another company.
Now if we look at FP&A, what you need in FP&A is how to understand the financial really quickly. And in audit we have a part that was my favorite part is the analytics. So how do you understand the figures compared to the past or compared to some trends to give assurance to the figures. And this work is actually what you are doing as FP&A when you are analyzing the actuals against the budget or against last year. So a part that you do in audit you will also do in FP&A and you can showcase that when you go to interview or when you work that you already did this type of exercise. What you need to learn is the budgeting and forecasting because that’s not something you do in audits because you are not in charge of planning the future of the company you audit because you look at the past.
So now it’s more mindset to change how can I plan figures, which method I can use for sales, how can I plan headcounts, how do I set up also a budget process with all of the different stakeholders from the company? But as you learn in audit, how to make people work in the objective of finishing the audit, getting the input from your clients and from different departments, working with your own team doing the different type of audits. And also within your big 4 you have the IT team to use, you have the tax team to use so you also know how to learn with people, use that and bring that to FP&A.
Paul Barnhurst:
Good advice there. That all makes sense to me. I really like the point you said where right, you got to be able to quickly analyze the P&L and understand things and trends. So you’re looking for patterns to see if there’s areas you need to dig into and audit. And I think that obviously very much applies to FP&A of when you’re doing your variance commentary, when you’re looking at trends, building your budget, so much of it is about understanding where the variances are, why and if they’re bad variances, how do you prevent them from continuing and if they’re good, how do you replicate that? How do you make sure that that goes forward? So I could totally see how that audit background could really help with that. So thank you for sharing. That makes sense. And I love the point you said where you can do it. Just letting people know that you got to be confident. You may have to work hard, it may take time, but if you’re committed you’ll find a way.
Nicolas Boucher:
And I mean if you on top knows the industry, so when you stay within your industry and on top, usually the level of excel or automation and I would say work methods is much higher in audit trend because the pressure is so high that when you move to the company you will also have an advantage in comparison with the rest of your colleagues.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great point there. I know audit can be a pretty intense field, that’s why you don’t see most people do it for a few years, get that background and then go on to do something else. Not a lot of you know get some but not a lot of people spend their whole career doing audit. It’s very much a common start for people who do an accounting degree. So earlier in your career you led a finance transformation project. Can you maybe talk a little bit about that experience? What was the project and what you learned from that?
Nicolas Boucher:
So at Thales at the beginning I was in charge of finance automation and the goal because we had different units that were now consolidated in one big entity. So I have to imagine different type of business were purchased over the past and the goal was to centralize some functions and to harmonize also the way we work.
Paul Barnhurst:
Sure.
Nicolas Boucher:
And of course we have a pressure from the group shareholders to make sure that the finance function as a percentage of sales that the cost is set up or target threshold. Having that in mind, we had two projects within finance. First was a rare organization of the teams. So I work with the CFO and the finance directors to reorganize the organization chart and to look how can we save because the main cost of finances is salaries. So if somebody is going to retirement or if somebody wants to move outside, how can we change the organization that we don’t have to replace them and still deliver the same value or even more value. That was the point 1. And the second point was how can we use better tools and harmonize tools like a common ERP. So we had a SAP project like a lot of big companies have when they purchase new entities and how can we use also a new planning and BI tool to centralize information and basically stop that everybody has their own excel file for planning or for reporting.
So those were the two areas and for me a great learning phase. And that’s also the time where I turned myself in the direction of LinkedIn because I needed help from people who already went through this process and I found great people to learn from and I was able to bring that in our organization, this best practices and the finance submission project is now the project from one year we are still in transformation. So after the project lasted longer and I had the opportunity to take more operational responsibilities. And what is interesting is when you are on the other side. So when you come from the central team and now you go to the local team or the operational team, well you see how the project is perceived and the great value of it but also the drawbacks and having the two aspects right now I will have done maybe the project differently at the beginning.
Paul Barnhurst:
What would you say is the key, if you were to say there’s one or two key things to make a transformation successful, what would you say from your experience are those one to two things that you really need to focus on?
First you need to have everybody on board. And it’s a bit cliche but change management is not about which tool you are going to use is about having everybody on board that they feel that they are part of the change, that they can act in the change and that basically the new processes and the new tools become theirs. And that’s something hard if yourself, you are convinced from the day one that you need to change and that the solution is the best one. It’s hard to understand why others don’t think that way. So you need basically to set up processes and framework that take you out of your own conviction and face you to these people to the conviction of other people and make that true communication. You both come to the same point that what is the expectation on the project, how it should be that everybody at the end has a common understanding and acceptance on the transformation project. So that will be I think the top priority of any project. And the second one is what I said at the beginning is make sure you don’t think only of the central and the top priorities but that you bring value to the local and operational units. And for that you need to bring also operational people into your project team.
I think you hit the nail on the head with both those obviously change management, you know need leadership, you need everybody from the top down to support it. And then as I’ve heard it say communicate, communicate and then communicate some more. And then I love the point you made of make sure you’re involving the people down at the bottom that are often doing the work and often feel left out on these projects and they’re critical because if you don’t get them on board you’re going to have problems. Doesn’t matter, the senior leadership likes it. If the end user doesn’t want to use it and is pushing back, you’re not going to get as good results or you’re going to end up killing the project at some point. So I think you highlighted some really key things there and I totally agree from my experiences. So I want to transition here a little bit. I know over the last year you’ve become much more active on LinkedIn, you’ve really grown your following quite a bit. Could you maybe just start talking a little bit about that experience, what it’s been like to be so active on LinkedIn and share your knowledge that way?
Nicolas Boucher:
Yes so for me, we are at the time now that we have this LinkedIn tool for available for everybody. But I think few years ago or 30 years ago or 50 years ago when our grandparents were working, how could they learn? They could go to the university or they could go to a colleague and they could also read books. That’s basically the access of knowledge they have then came up that you could travel internationally because we have to think that the globalization is new. So now you started to learn from other countries, from other teams, from other countries, they came internet where you could exchange with emails with sometimes call best practices within the company and that you could do globally without having to travel.
And now with LinkedIn you have access actually to the word independent of where you are, who you are and in which company you work for. Meaning that today if somebody in the Philippines wants access to the CFO of Google, I’m sure within first we can look at video of him and learn from him and within I one or two months if he tries hard enough he can talk to this guy or to this girl and that’s what is changing right now. And if this guy in Philippines has also great knowledge to share about how to forecast cash and he puts it out there and he communicate hard enough and sure enough then this guy can teach everybody in the world. And so that’s a big change of concept. And I went through this I was set through this lane of first being a consumer of LinkedIn, then a networker within LinkedIn where I wanted to learn from people and the right people.
So exchange offline in the end to now the state where I see that I have also something to share and to bring to people. And I also see there is a huge demand from young people or people who don’t have access to mentorship, who needs the help of people like us who have already 15 years experience and can share. And basically what I’m sharing every day with my team and my colleagues, it’s with within five to 20 people now I can do that to 100,000 people and for me my impact then is much bigger if I can do that at the top. And that’s why I’m doing that, I’m doing that every day.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you for sharing and I really like how you kind of laid out how it’s changed over time and how the internet and LinkedIn has made things global. You can reach out to anyone. I mean just an example this week yesterday I was talking to somebody in India last week I was in Canada I think I’ve been on calls with someone from the UK, from Denmark, yourself from Germany and multiple states in the US I’ve talked to people all over the globe, had emails with people in Australia this week. And so it’s amazing how the world has just become smaller because of the internet. You can pretty much talk to and communicate and work with and share knowledge with just about anyone if you want to. So I think that’s a great point. It really is amazing to watch. So next question here, I’ve noticed this and others have noticed someone had commented about this, you have a real knack for explaining complex financial concepts to non-finance people and in a simple matter in a simple manner, how do you do that? What think is the key of making sure you’re explaining something in a simple way?
Nicolas Boucher:
I think every day now, and that’s if you study a bit the human psychology, we are bombarded with a lot of information. So if the goal that I was explaining before, if I want to make an impact and I want that 100,000 people or 10,000 people see my message, I need to show something that is simple enough but can still bring value and that I can use all of the tools that the brain can understand to make my impact. So what do I do is first I make sure that anybody outside of finance and independent, if they had the background and the knowledge and the academic experience that I had could understand what I write. And so I always have that in mind. Do I write simple enough that my mother could understand? And so I think the first step, the second step is how can you also make sure that you don’t make people bored with your content?
Cause if you make them bored, then also you are not going to make an impact and people are going to stop after two three sentence. And so that’s why I bring visualization and colors and icons because that also gives a message without having anything written. And so it’s never that you can use and I mean we see that every day that there is, or not only words but emotion there are pictures, colors that speak more than words. And that’s why also that’s a technique I used when I have a board presentation and I have a PowerPoint to do. I don’t only write a sentence, I try to use some visual cues to make sure that my message goes through. And so what I learned doing that for boards, I’m doing that also now on LinkedIn.
Paul Barnhurst:
That makes a lot of sense and I agree with you when you think of a presentation, visuals color, if you use things strategically, highlighting certain things, bringing attribution to it, people are going to notice it a lot quicker and it makes it easier to understand. So mixing words like you said, keeping ’em simple, I loved your example of would my mother understand it right? Because if you could write for mom or grandma so to speak, you can write for anyone many times. So I appreciate that example. And that sounds like you’ve done a very good job. I’ve noticed a lot of your content and I can attest to the fact that it is very easy to understand. Your graphics are very well laid out, you do a fabulous job and it shows in your following. So speaking to that, what advice would you offer to someone who’s interested in building a following, sharing their knowledge, whether it’s on LinkedIn or just social media in general, what would be your advice if there’s maybe somebody listening, a finance person that wants to start doing some of that?
Nicolas Boucher:
Let’s take three points to be simple. The first point, you need to know what you want to write about and for which people. And if you know that, then write it down. Make it in several clusters. So if we take my example of one day I want to talk about accounting. One day I want to talk about career in finance. Another day I want to talk about financial analysis and then another day about budgeting. So if you lay this clusters out, then it’s really much simpler for you to know what you’re going to write about. And this problem of the blank page paralysis goes away. So that’s the first point. The second point to come back to what I say, you need to make sure that your message goes through. So don’t write like you will write in a book, write something that you would like to see and think like when you are on social media and you don’t write the same way than in email when you’re on social media, you don’t write the same way, same way than in a newspaper because basically people are going to scroll and either stop on your content or they continue.
So if you write a great piece of content and you have a great value and you work hard but they don’t stop and they don’t see your content, then all of your efforts is for nothing. And that brings me to the third one is use not only the text but the visual cues to stop people and bring them to your content and also to bring messages that are maybe hard to explain with words but could be more simple to bring with visual or graphics or infographics. So those three points, one, know what you want to write and for whom. Second, make it really simple in your writing. And third, use visual cues.
Paul Barnhurst:
So I forgot that. One, know your audience. Focus on making your writing simple and use visual cues that that’s great advice, especially social media. You got a second to catch someone’s eye. It’s not like someone picked up your book and is planning on reading it and you got a chapter or two before they’ll decide, hey I want to keep reading. Very few people shut down a book at the first word, but when we’re scrolling social media, you often skip over something in less than a second. You just kind of keeps scrolling. You know have very little time to catch somebody’s attention. So that’s really good advice. So next question here, we’re going to get to the part where we have a few standard questions we like to ask people. And so the first is as you look back over your career the last 15 years or so, what’s the accomplishment you’re most proud of? So if I add you in a job interview and I asked you that question, I said tell me the professional accomplishment you’re most proud of from your career, what are you going to tell me and why?
Nicolas Boucher:
For me there are two main accomplishments. One is over my world career is how I could help more junior colleagues to grow within their job. How could I basically teach them and give them everything I learn but also allow them to think by them, by themself, allow them in their career to take the right decisions. So how I brought mentorship and coaching all along my career because that you cannot I will say is not financial, you are not going to earn money with that. But for my values as a human and also my family values, I think helping others be better is one of the most important things. And so that’s something I’m the most proud and I want to continue to do that and now I have the chance also to do that more. And the second one is actually was one of my last experiences where we were in a phase of change within finance.
So I was the head of finance and controlling for a manufacturing location. And so we had changes within finance but also we had changes within the manufacturing side. And so with the management team and also me within my finance team, I had to deal with this changes and we brought really both the finance team but also the side in a better state than it was when we took over with my other colleagues from management and I had the chance to work with really exceptional people. I learned a lot from them and that’s one of my biggest accomplishment. I had to make some concession personally because I had to travel one half hour every day to go there and come back. But that was a great experience and I brought something to the company but I also learned a lot from it.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you for sharing both those. I really love the first one of just helping junior people making a difference. I do a lot of training nowadays and I love when you see the light bulb go on so to speak, you see their eyes get excited and like, oh wow, this will save me so much time. I didn’t know you could do that. It’s really rewarding when you know helped someone develop. And I know I get people on LinkedIn that have thanked me for my content or people for the podcast and I know it always feels really good. So I can imagine we’ve had those same experiences, it’s so rewarding when somebody’s like, Hey you know what you shared today really helped me. I really appreciate it. So just great things there that you mentioned. So next question, kind of flipping it from accomplishment to failures. We all dealt with them, I’m a big believer of the statement failure kind of leads to success or you don’t have failures, you have learning experiences. But if you look back over your career, can you think of in a failure where maybe an analysis went wrong, something went wrong with the budget implementation project, what was that and what did you learn from that failure? What was the takeaway?
Nicolas Boucher:
I think in any experience I had and I learned a lot from it is when you wait too long to communicate bad surprises. And so now, I mean I have no problem to escalate it to anybody. I can talk and call anybody. I’m not afraid of management above me or I’m not afraid of another colleague or whatever. But at the beginning of your career when you are junior, first you have a hard time to know what is important and not important. Yeah, that’s the first one. But second, if you make a mistake yourself, you are afraid to be caught and to show that you were working bad. But what was good is I got people and I was lucky with that because you can get unlucky. I was with people who basically explained me that it was more important to communicate early on the problem and your failures then to keep it for yourself that if you keep it for yourself it is going to be a bigger problem.
After that you are not going to get rid of and you’ll be rewarded if you communicate early rather than be punished. And so now I try also to teach that to other people to explain, okay mistakes happen. Most important is that you come up with the problem and that we find a solution rather than finger pointing, and trying to find who is the guilty person who make made a mistake because it’s not going to change anything and it’s not forward thinking. So I think that I learned a lot and it saved me in the now and in the past a lot of troubles by taking my phone or writing the right email when I knew there was a big problem.
Paul Barnhurst:
I love that. Just own the mistakes. In addition to that, when you see a problem, escalate it, don’t be afraid. And two examples I love for my career really about owning mistakes. There was a CEO at IBM, one of the VPs had made a big mistake and it ended up costing the company $10 million and he got called to the CEO’s office and the CEO said something, he look at him goes, I’ll pack my bags. And the CEO goes, why would you pack your bags? Well I just cost the company $10 million, you’re going to fire me. He goes, why would I fire you? I just paid $10 million for you to learn a lesson, I’m not going to fire you now. And I just love that mentality. Not to say there aren’t times when someone makes a mistake that that may have to be the option, but if you always focus on if they’re willing to learn and willing to help, there’s so much value that can come from those type of mistakes, that guy isn’t going to make that mistake again.
He’s going to be a better employee. And so that’s the first one. The second one, I was sitting in a meeting one time and we had a new CFO and someone had built a forecast and they had made a mistake in the forecast and they didn’t want to own to own up to it. And so they were coming up with all these different things explaining it and the CFO was just totally confused and I didn’t know what was going on. I got talking to the guy and he told me, we don’t want to mention what it really is and this is why I’m just own it and let’s move on. This is silly, we’re just wasting everybody’s time. And finally he came forward and the CFO wasn’t that mad. He was more frustrated of why didn’t you just tell me that upfront? What don’t play games with me? And so there’s just so much value in learning to communicate bad news upfront and just owning mistakes. Just admit it, say what you’re going to do to correct it and move on. If you have good leadership, they’ll always understand
Nicolas Boucher:
And actually owning your mistake, I found the best way to also for you mentally to get rid of this pressure and this guiltiness, once you go and say I own it, I will find a solution or I will find a solution with you and need your help, the best way that you turn yourself from the negativity to the positivity and people will be first impressed that you have the humility and the courage to own it and to say it so it’s recognized and really appreciated. And second, they need that. Everybody need it to be fixed. So if you volunteer to fix it, then they are so happy because they know, okay, the mistake could have happened also to anybody else, but at least now I have a solution or somebody who is taking care of it. And so basically if you always like this this mindset, you are going to go further in your career because people want to work with this kind of person.
Paul Barnhurst:
Agree. A hundred percent agree that that’s some really good points you made. There is one, it helps with that negativity. Two people want to work with somebody who owns it and they’re not going to throw others under the bus, they’re not going to hide things. You’re just going to get the truth from, there’s a lot of value in that. So I appreciate that. So next question I want to ask here, this is one we like to ask everybody a little bit more of a personal question. What is something unique about you? Something we wouldn’t find online that you can tell our audience?
Nicolas Boucher:
Well I was DJ for weddings and events and birthdays. I started that when I was 15. It was my first I would say first job before my career. And because my dad was also doing that since he was 18 or 20. So we had all of the setup at home and I was as a kid, he was bringing me to the weddings. I was in his truck while he was still DJing. So I saw all of that of my life, all of the events, all of the great parties. And it was a better job than working at McDonald’s. I don’t have anything for people because I also did handy jobs and all that. But sure it’s a hard job because you have to work long hours. But it’s a really real rewarding job. You participate in one of the best day of people who are getting, they’re married or people who have their 5oth birthday or 20th birthday. So working where everybody is having, when everybody is having fun and being the guy who make it happen is kind of fun. And sometimes I miss that. So now with the technology, I can do that almost just with my phone. The last New Year’s party I did that and everybody stayed up until five o’clock. Otherwise a bit exceptional. But yeah, that’s something that not a lot of people know and I learned a lot from it as well because When you have control the microphone from 500 people, you need to know what you have to say and to have the confidence to do it.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, that sounds like great experience being a DJ one. Yeah, like I said, you have to take the microphone, you get to see people in a happy moment and play a part of that. And I kind of had a laugh that you mentioned weddings because I worked as a server for a number of years, banquets for weddings, receptions, making sure the food taken care of all that. And my brother did it as well and get kind of funny story. I think you’ll laugh about the audience who’ll appreciate. So I was probably, might have been 30 at the time, my brother is late twenties, we were most single and we’re at a good friend of ours wedding. And we’re sitting there at the table and we’re critiquing the food and the place mats and the settings and kind of going through all this. And I look at them, okay, here’s two basically 30 year old single guys and we’re critique like what’s wrong with us?
But we had both worked in the industry and so it was just kind of funny how we all of a sudden kind of went back to that mode of, okay, how’s everything set up and what does it look like? So that was a great experience. Obviously different than being DJ, but those are a lot of fun events to be a part of. So I can relate to that a little bit. So thank you for sharing that. Next, I know you’ve launched some courses and some offerings on your website, you know, mentioned them on LinkedIn, aim toward finance and FP&A professionals. Could you maybe talk a little bit of who your courses are designed for and what you have learned from creating courses?
Nicolas Boucher:
Yeah, great question. Especially under learning. So like I said before, I could coach and teach to a lot of young people from my teams or people who were coming in and didn’t have the experience in FP&A and controlling . But a lot of people now are asking me that on LinkedIn, how do I move to FP&A Or I just got a job of in FP&A, where do I start? And basically instead of answering every day and just giving few words, I thought, okay, let’s package that in one course where I record myself and go through all of the methods and principles. But also what should you do after in your company? What should you say to your management? What should you do as a finance person to help your operational business partner? So I package that in videos and it’s basically, if somebody were joining my team today, I will tell him, okay, watch this.
I will save six months of learning because everything is in this eight hours. And you can always come back if you have a specific topic on budgeting, if you have a topic on reporting, you can always watch back these videos, use the templates use the PDF to basically get straight away at what are the best practices and then implement that for your work. And so that’s what I had in mind and is basically teach the younger me and give him everything that I learned the last 15 years to make sure that the first day he can work. And of course you need to make your own experience, but I figured out that a lot of things that I learned, I didn’t know where that I had to learn at the beginning. And that’s also was what is in helping the course people with is to know, okay, you have to learn all of that if you want to be comfortable as a FP&A person.
So if you want to move to FP&A and note what to talk about in interviews or if you just started in the FP&A, that’s a great course for you. And on your second question, so when did I learn? Well, it’s like every day when I have to post something on LinkedIn I think it’s one of the best way to learn something is to teach it to somebody. So first I still had to review all of the concepts to make sure that what I was talking about was strong and I could explain it in simple words. So that helped me, again, make everything that’s clear for me. Also, I created almost the strong pages of content of information that I can reuse when I want to share something. And if we forget about finance and all of that, just making the marketing, recording videos during speaking on a video, understanding what the people need, those are a lot of skills that I developed during this production of the course.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, you definitely learn a lot of skills. I can relate to that. I just in the process of finalizing a course right now. And so a lot of good advice there. And I like how you mentioned teaching what I wish would’ve known 15 years ago, all those things you’ve learned over years, trying to shorten that learning timeframe, help people take advantage of what others have already learned so they don’t have to go through all the pain we did, making it a little simpler for them. So here I’m getting to what’s probably my favorite question because I love to see the different answers. What is your favorite Excel formula function feature and why?
Nicolas Boucher:
So my favorite one is the VLookup because that’s the first for first function I learned in audit. And I have to tell you a small story. When I joined PwC, I thought, oh, I’m a great Excel guy. I know with Excel I will outperform, blah blah, blah. Then I sat down my first day next to a person. I think it was a girl was there just since two years or something like that. And I watch her work doing her job and I was like, okay, I’m not an expert. I have a lot to to learn. And the first thing I learned is VLookup. Because you have to think before Excel people were taking two documents and comparing them with each other. And what you we’re doing is auditing funds. So mutual funds
What you have to do, for example, one of the tests is to take the pricing they use to mm-hmm make the valuation of the portfolio and cover that against an external pricing, so Bloomberg or any other source of information. And so if you do that manually, you’re going to take ages. If you do a VLookup based on the stock, you just look what is the price and you convert. And where you have difference above 1% for people who are still doing it, then you have to ask your client why they use something else. Yeah. So it still remains my favorite one, but in between I learn SUMIF and Index Match and most of the time they are better to use than VLookup because often I start with video cap and then I’m like, I think here SUMIF will be better because I have more lines to add up or the Index Match will be maybe better. So still always challenge your own learning because it might be that what you learn one day can be false or to improve a few years after.
Paul Barnhurst:
No thank you for sharing. And VLookup, I think that’s one of many of us is kind of a favorite. Cause it’s one of the first ones we learned and it’s incredibly valuable, but there are many different ways you can solve it. Now beyond VLookup, I mean I asked chat GPT to solve it, it gave me V look up first and I said, how many different ways can I solve this? And I think it gave me like eight and then I asked it other ways. By the end I think I had 13 different ways you could solve it. And most of themI had known a few of them, I learned one that I’m like, ah, I would never thought of doing it that way. So you could always challenge yourself and find different ways to do it. I think that’s great advice. Well, we’re just about out of time here. So I have just two wrap up questions for you. The first, if someone was starting their career today in FP&A, what is the one piece advice you would give them?
Nicolas Boucher:
One piece of advice will be that everything about finance, you will learn next to your colleagues. You learn online or maybe you have learned a lot at school. What you didn’t learn and you should learn and must learn is what your operational department is doing every day. Because if every day you are going to stay in your office or within your finance team, and if you stay in your silo, the potential of value you are going to add is really limited. If you go and either spend one day or just go do visits and make network with your operational departments, that’s where you are going to get a lot of ideas of what they need. You have, you are going to connect the dots between what you see every day, the finance figures and what happens in the operational work. And so if you want to be more impactful in your company and also have a better career, make sure you get this great connection with the operational departments that you spend time there and that you have a good understanding of how they work.
Great advice, couldn’t agree more of learning operational. That’s a great one for people to do. So last question here. If people want to learn more about you, where can they go? How could they learn more about you and what’s the best way to connect with you?
Speaker 4:
So there are three ways they can learn about me. First on LinkedIn, I share everyday practical advice for finance people. The second one, I have a website where I also post more long form content. So it’s nicolasboucher.online. And the third one is my newsletter where every week I also share a for long form content on specific problems. For example, last week I sent out to my subscribers how to be audit ready. So how to prepare yourself and your company when you get audited, the how to organize your team, how to prepare the document, how to communicate with your auditors. I write, based on my experience because I was an auditor, I am now somebody being audited. And so I share that because this type of email, that’s what I would like to have had when I started working. And if anybody has also the ambition to move to FP&A or just join FP&A, well check out my course because there are a lot of practical help there and you don’t get that everywhere. Or if you want to get that at work, you have to spend a lot of time to search for that online. So contact me if you have any question about the program I have and I’ll be always happy to help all of you.
Paul Barnhurst:
Well thank you Nicholas. I appreciate that and it was great having you on the show. Enjoy the rest of your day and I’ll look forward to chatting with you again soon. Thank you Nicholas.
Nicolas Boucher:
Yeah, thank you Paul. I think it’s great that you have that for all of the finance professional. Like I said, we are really lucky now in this world, but we have access to a lot of people. So thank you for organizing that every day and make all of this great interviews.
Well thank you. I love doing, it’s a lot of fun and I appreciate you being on the show. Hopefully we’ll get to have you on again sometime soon.
