On 11 June 2022, I had a very interesting and engaging discussion with Nicolas Boucher. We talked about his journey from Audit to FP&A.
Nicolas Boucher may be known to many of you through his writing about finance and FP&A on LinkedIn. And his popular online course on “Become a High Performing Finance Professional”.
Key Message to young Finance professionals
“Anybody who wants to move from audit or accounting to controlling and FP&A, they should trust that their base is really strong. Because what you need to be a good controller and good FP&A analyst is to have a good understanding of the figures. And as an audit person or an accountant you have this really strong base,” he explains.
We wanted to know more about Nicolas’s journey and the key lessons that he learned along the way.
Nicolas was born in France, studied in the US and now lives in Germany. He is married to a German wife and a happy father of two young daughters. His credentials include an MBA and Master’s degree in Finance.
He is presently senior manager of controlling at Thales (a multinational company that designs and builds electrical systems and provides services for the aerospace, defense, transportation and security markets).
After business school. “I joined PwC (in audit) because it was a way to continue growing my skills in audit. I got a lot of different assignments, a lot of different clients. I also learned a lot about managing teams and got exposed to the CFO’s and C suite.”
“I also got an opportunity to work in Singapore for two years, where I learned about a different culture and a different way of working.” he mentioned.
Nicolas spent around seven years in audit, but eventually wanted to face new challenges by switching to a multinational company.
On returning to Europe,“ I was seeing what the senior manager and the directors were doing, it was for me less of a change in compared to the junior auditor and manager. I always thought anyway that I don’t want to become a partner at a Big4. And that’s why I decided I wanted to go outside audit and consulting” Hence he took on a new role at Thales in Germany.
“What I do is called controlling in Germany or France, but in English-speaking countries it’s called FP&A. But when I hear what people do in FP&A is exactly what I do”
On Content Creation and Online Teaching
Next we talked about our favorite topic (and a common passion) which was content creation and teaching.
Nicolas mentioned, “I think the more we are posting (on LinkedIn), the more we help people. If I imagine for 30 years or 40 years when there was no internet, no email, maybe not everybody had a cell phone or phone available to them, then you could just learn from your colleague next to you. LinkedIn breaks that because now you have access to the best people in each of the topics”
We asked him about his online course Become a High Performing Finance Professional, and what motivated him to create it?
“I got a lot of feedback from people following me. Asking me how can they learn what I was doing? And once I saw the technology to create an online course, I went for it. If tomorrow we have a new hire in our finance team. I will give him or her these 5 modules and 8 hours of content” (in around 80 chapters)”
