Last month I had an amazing opportunity to sit down with Anders Liu – Lindberg, who is a well-known figure in the finance world. He is the co-founder at the Business Partnering Institute, a leading finance advisor to senior finance professionals. He is also the co-author of the book “Create Value As a Finance Business Partner: Transforming the Finance Function Into a Profit Center” and he writes to 100K+ people every day on LinkedIn via his posts, and newsletter articles.
Anders has had an interesting career trajectory, from working in the corporate to eventually becoming a consultant and an entrepreneur.
Anders has worked at Maersk (a global transport company) for 13 years in various finance roles including:
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A Finance Controller (doing external accounts for the company),
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A Business Controller (working on management reporting),
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A Finance manager (the first time he got a chance to put his spin on Business Partnering),
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A Global PMO for the Finance leadership team (where he also ran one of the largest business finance training programs),
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Two Senior Finance Business Partner roles at Maersk (included working with product teams at Maersk to increase the profitability of products and was one of the biggest individual contributor finance role in the world managing $8Bn of Revenue, $3Bn of investments and $5Bn of cost).
Despite finding success in the corporate world, Anders felt something was missing and decided to make a change. Now, as a consultant and an entrepreneur, he feels more fulfilled and enjoys helping others achieve their goals.
Here are some of the questions we asked Anders:
1.How are FP&A and Finance Business Partnering related yet different?
FP&A is a group of people. Business partnering is an activity that this group of people should be doing. There are others (people outside the FP&A group) that can be doing Business Partnering. For example: Controllers teams can also do it.
There are some companies either because they are very big or just because they’re in certain parts of the world they have a specific role called “Finance Business Partner”.
FP&A is the team that supports the CFO, the CEO and the board with financial planning analysis. FBPs roles are typically not sitting in corporate. They’re typically sitting out in the front line very close to business leaders.
Very plainly speaking, FP&A is a group of people; Business Partnering is an activity.
2. What is Business Partnering according to you?
Business partnering simply is Insights X Influence = IMPACT
We have to bring insights to the table. This is information that business leaders do not know about but can use to make better decisions. And insights can come from all sorts of different places. Also, we need to have good relationships with business leaders, and communicate in a language that they understand. And finally we need to lead the way once an action has been agreed upon to ensure we get to decided results.
If we have insights and influence, notice it’s a multiplier. Insight times Influence we will have Impact. The challenge for most finance professionals is that they have very little influence.
3. One career advice wish someone would have given you when you were 22 and just starting out?
“Definitely something I learned the hard way in my career. I was focused on what’s going to happen five years from now but not necessarily focused on being at the moment. My advice is to focus on what’s right here in front of you. Knock that out of the park to get a more exciting task the next time. And on the side you can learn about the future.” Anders mentioned as a closing remark.
To follow Anders here on LinkedIn, here is the link.
Here is his popular newsletter Here’s the Future of FP&A and Business Partnering and the Finance Master Podcast
You can watch the entire conversation here on YouTube and subscribe to my YouTube Channel here.