The Real Job of FP&A: 40% Numbers, 60% Influence
Gauri Tambay, Head of Finance at Genesyn (a gene therapy CDMO), discusses how finance professionals must be business professionals first, requiring deep operational understanding and influence skills beyond traditional number-crunching. She emphasizes that 40% of the job is running numbers while 60% is influencing cross-functional teams, and advocates for weekly cash flow monitoring and rolling forecasts over reliance on annual budgets.
Summary
Sarah Schlatt interviews Gauri Tambay about her role leading finance and accounting at Genesyn, a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) in the gene therapy space. Tambay explains that Genesyn serves as a manufacturing partner for gene therapy companies, scaling products from concept through clinical trials to commercial production. She shares her career journey from pharmacy background through business school into biotech finance, driven by a desire to work in areas with significant human impact.
Tambay articulates a fundamental philosophy: finance professionals must be business professionals first. She describes her early career experience as a site business partner where she conducted Gemba walks, partnered closely with operations leadership, and participated in daily manufacturing huddles. This led her to conclude that only 40% of her job involves running numbers and reporting, while 60% focuses on influence—persuading R&D, operations, and supply chain teams to make decisions aligned with financial constraints and business strategy.
The conversation explores how finance must bridge communication gaps between traditionally siloed departments. Tambay provides a concrete example of misalignment where sales promised revenue that operations couldn't deliver due to capacity constraints. She emphasizes that finance must facilitate weekly meetings bringing sales and operations to the same table with shared language and aligned targets, rather than allowing each department to operate independently.
Regarding revenue planning in the CDMO business, Tambay describes how Genesyn structures contracts with protection clauses, upfront deposits for dedicated capacity, and cancellation fees that scale from 30% early in the process to 100% as execution approaches. The company forecasts a 20-30% failure threshold based on customers whose projects may not advance through development phases. For foundation-backed work on rare diseases, Genesyn provides 80-90% discounts and absorbs material costs themselves, enabling therapy development that might otherwise lack funding.
Tambay details her approach to financial reporting and forecasting, which includes annual budgets and quarterly forecasts but emphasizes weekly flash reports comparing revenue and costs against plan. Her team includes an FP&A analyst who attends daily site huddles to identify emerging risks early. The 13-week rolling cash flow forecast proves critical for understanding runway and weekly variations in collections and vendor payments.
On the question of whether annual budgets remain relevant, Tambay advocates for keeping them but not relying on them exclusively, particularly in high-uncertainty biotech environments. She stresses that cash flow management is more important than P&L management, a lesson learned from PE-backed company dynamics. Her final recommendation to listeners is to examine cash flow statements rather than relying solely on beautiful P&L presentations, as cash flow reveals whether money is actually being deployed effectively.
Tambay describes team structure with five accounting staff and one FP&A analyst reporting to her, noting the challenge of balancing day-to-day accounting needs with strategic FP&A work. She promotes cross-functional development by having junior accountants assist with cost accounting and flux analysis, and by including the full finance team in weekly staff meetings and business reviews. She advocates for junior finance professionals to develop capabilities beyond AI-automatable reporting work, particularly in business acumen, critical thinking, and cross-functional collaboration.
About this episode
The best FP&A professionals don't just explain the numbers. They understand the businesswell enough to influence it.Gauri Tambe, Head of Finance & Accounting at Genezen, joins FP&A Today to explore whatfinance looks like inside the world of cell and gene therapy. Scientific uncertainty, capital-intensiveprograms, customer funding risk, strict quality requirements, and constantly changing timelinesmean that simply consolidating the numbers is not enough. For Gauri, understanding theday-to-day operations of the business is fundamental to being an effective finance leader.Gauri estimates that only 40% of her role is running and reporting the numbers, while the other60% is influence: aligning sales with operational capacity, helping R&D and supply chain makebetter decisions, building contractual protections around uncertain programs, and keeping teamsfocused on the same business outcomes. She also shares how Genezen usesprobability-weighted pipelines, weekly flash reporting, and a 13-week cash plan to manageuncertainty.The broader lesson for FP&A is that you have to become a strong business professional beforebecoming an effective finance professional. As AI is increasingly used for reporting and analysis,understanding operations, challenging assumptions, influencing people, and knowing what ishappening behind the numbers is becoming more valuable.Key Moments● FP&A has to understand how the business actually operates. In a high-risk environment,knowing the numbers without understanding operations makes it difficult to identify the real risksand opportunities.● Influence can matter more than reporting. Gauri describes her role as roughly 40% running thenumbers and 60% influencing R&D, operations, sales, and supply chain.● Finance connects the organization. When sales forecasts demand that operations cannotdeliver, finance is uniquely positioned to bring teams together and reconcile ambition withcapacity.● Forecasting uncertainty needs more than one forecast. Pipeline probabilities, contractualprotections, bad-debt reserves, weekly flash reporting, and cash planning all work together.● Contracts are part of financial planning. Upfront payments, cancellation provisions, and stagegates can protect capacity and capital when customer programs change unexpectedly.● Cash can tell a different story from the P&L. Finance teams should challenge a strong-lookingP&L by asking whether the same strength is actually showing up in the bank.● How Genezen operates as a finance function with five people in accounting and a team of twoin FP&A.● AI raises the expectations placed on finance professionals. If reporting and basic analysis canincreasingly be automated, junior finance professionals need to develop operationalunderstanding, critical thinking, and cross-functional experience earlier in their careers.Timestamps08:18 - Why finance leaders need to understand operations, not just the numbers11:13 - Gauri's 40% numbers, 60% influence philosophy19:00 - When strategic misalignment needs a meeting, not an email28:03 - Using contracts and cancellation clauses to protect against revenue risk31:27 - How Genezen uses 50-90% probabilities to forecast its opportunity pipeline41:35 - Weekly flash reporting and managing a 13-week cash outlook50:41 - Why a good finance professional must first be a good business professional56:30 - Stop relying on your P&L and look at your cash flow statementEarn CPE CreditIf you would like to earn CPE credit for listening to the show, visit https://earmarkcpe.com/fpa.Download the app, take a short quiz, and get your CPE certificate.Further Reading/ListeningGauri Tambe & the Genezen Leadership Teamhttps://www.genezen.com/about-us/meet-the-team/Genezen - Cell & Gene Therapy CDMOhttps://www.genezen.com/Pitt Hopkins Research Foundationhttps://pitthopkins.org/Sarah discusses her daughter's Pitt Hopkins diagnosis in the episode and the rolefoundation-funded research ca
Key Insights
- Gene therapy CDMOs like Genesyn occupy a niche role in biotech, serving as manufacturing partners that scale therapies from concept through clinical trials to commercial production, operating differently from traditional pharmaceutical companies.
- Tambay argues that finance professionals must spend 60% of their time on influence and cross-functional alignment rather than number-crunching, requiring deep understanding of operations, sales, and supply chain to be effective.
- The CDMO business model carries inherent risk because customer projects may fail to advance through development phases, prompting Genesyn to forecast a 20-30% failure rate and establish strict acceptance criteria before taking on new contracts.
- Genesyn structures contracts with economic protection clauses including cancellation fees that scale from 30% early in engagement to 100% as execution approaches, protecting cash flow against customer project terminations.
- For rare disease work supported by parent-led foundations, Genesyn provides 80-90% price discounts and absorbs material costs rather than passing them through, treating this as a deliberate finance decision to enable therapy development.
- Weekly flash reporting comparing actual revenue and costs against the most recent monthly and quarterly forecasts is critical for early detection of risks, more valuable than relying solely on monthly reporting cycles.
- Finance must actively facilitate weekly alignment meetings between sales and operations teams, speaking both languages and ensuring shared understanding of capacity constraints against revenue commitments.
- A 13-week rolling cash flow forecast is essential in biotech to monitor runway, weekly variations in collections, and vendor payment exceptions, requiring closer monitoring than traditional annual planning allows.
- Tambay argues that annual budgets should be kept but not relied upon as the primary planning tool in high-uncertainty industries, with rolling forecasts and weekly updates providing more relevant guidance.
- Cash flow management reveals the true financial health of a business in ways that profit and loss statements cannot, particularly important in PE-backed companies where capital preservation is critical.
- Quality agreements and cross-departmental alignment on delivery timelines are finance responsibilities in regulated manufacturing environments, as delays in quality approvals directly impact revenue recognition and customer relationships.
- Junior finance professionals must develop business acumen and cross-functional operational knowledge to remain relevant as AI automation handles traditional reporting tasks, requiring rotational assignments and exposure to operations beyond accounting swim lanes.
Topics
Transcript
If you would like to earn CPE credit for listening to the show, visit earmarkcpe.com slash FP&A. Download the app, take a short quiz, and get your CPE certificate. And if you enjoy listening to FP&A Today, please leave a rating and review. And now, on to the show. From Data Reels, this is FP&A Today. onto the show. From Data Reels, this is FP&A Today. Welcome to FP&A Today. I'm your host, Sarah Schlatt. And as I just found out, today's episode hits extremely close to home. September 18th is right around the corner, and it is National Pitt-Hopkins Syndrome Awareness Day. For those of you who don't know, and many of you probably won't, Pitt-Hopkins syndrome is a…
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