Would You Rather Be Lucky or Good? Building FP&A From Absolute Zero, with Katelyn Stienen

Summary

About this episode

Building FP&A from scratch isn't primarily a spreadsheet problem. It's a people, process, and alignment problem.Katelyn Stienen, Director of FP&A at Good Day Farms and a top-16 finisher at the Excel World Championship, joins FP&A Today to share what happens when you walk into a five-year-old business with more than 170 legal entities, around 10,000 budget lines, no dedicated planning system, and department heads who have never worked with a structured P&L. After experiencing established finance processes at much older organizations, Katelyn is now building the FP&A function from the ground up.One of her biggest lessons was that introducing FP&A is not as simple as sending out a budget template. Katelyn had to establish what a budget actually means, connect operational budgets with the numbers being communicated to leadership and investors, and create a common financial playbook across the business. She explains why bottom-up planning creates better accountability, why finance should approach variance conversations as investigators rather than enforcers, and how seemingly small misses across individual entities can become material when consolidated.The conversation also explores planning inside the highly regulated cannabis industry, when a growing company is ready for dedicated FP&A software, and how better systems can shift finance away from simply collecting numbers and toward understanding what is driving them. For Katelyn, the real job of FP&A is turning the stories coming from the business into numbers - and being able to explain why reality ultimately differed from the forecast.Key Moments● Building FP&A from zero starts with financial understanding, not templates. Before introducing a detailed budget, finance needs to understand how department leaders currently think about spending, forecasting, and accountability.● The business needs one financial playbook. Operational teams cannot manage against one version of the numbers while leadership and investors work from another. FP&A has to connect the two. ● Bottom-up budgeting creates better conversations. Greater line-item detail gives finance something concrete to challenge, explain, and manage with department leaders rather than simply holding them to a top-down target.● FP&A should investigate, not assign blame. Katelyn shares her Director of Finance's description of finance as "reporters" trying to understand what happened rather than punish teams for missing a number. ● Small variances can become significant at scale. An expense miss that looked insignificant at individual stores became a roughly $50,000 variance once Katelyn consolidated it across the organization. ● Complex businesses require scenario thinking. Different regulations, tax treatments, markets, and operating models across states mean FP&A has to combine financial modeling with knowledge from legal, operational, and commercial teams.● Technology should move FP&A from gathering numbers to asking better questions. With stronger reporting and consolidation in place, finance can spend less time finding the numbers and more time understanding what is driving them.● Forecast accuracy is not the whole story. Katelyn would rather miss a forecast and be able to explain exactly why than hit the number without understanding what drove the result.Timestamps09:51 - What established companies taught Katelyn about what good finance processes look like16:44 - "I'm starting at absolute zero": building a budgeting process where none existed19:13 - Getting operations and leadership onto the same financial playbook24:25 - Why FP&A should be "reporters," not a function that assigns blame29:56 - Managing reporting and planning complexity across more than 170 entities39:37 - Turning business stories and market knowledge into numbers and forecasts42:09 - When is a company ready for dedicated FP&A planning software?53:09 - Would you rather be lucky or good?

Key Insights

• Stienen argues that large mature companies develop rigorous processes not because they prefer bureaucracy, but because someone previously failed to follow proper procedures, making those processes organizational memory of past failures.
• She claims that allowing operations teams to conduct preliminary financial analysis without early finance involvement results in incomplete assessments because they lack visibility into full cost allocation and overhead implications.
• Stienen found that in her current role, operational teams had developed entirely separate budgeting processes from leadership's state-level models, creating two competing playbooks that neither side knew were misaligned.
• She argues that when presenting new structured budgets to teams unfamiliar with formal planning, they often interpret the budget as a final decision rather than a proposal, creating resistance that stems from miscommunication rather than substantive disagreement.
• Stienen contends that bottoms-up budgeting enables accountability in ways top-down budgeting cannot, because line-level detail allows finance to identify specific misses and have data-driven conversations about root causes.
• She claims that personnel building financial systems often overlook foundational questions—such as "what does a budget actually mean?"—assuming shared understanding that doesn't exist across organizations.
• Stienen discovered that when finance positions itself as neutral reporters investigating variances rather than enforcers judging performance, defensive responses from operational teams shift to collaborative problem-solving.
• She argues that planning software becomes necessary once organizations have ERP systems in place and multiple complex entities, because manual spreadsheet consolidation across 170+ entities introduces calculation drift and prevents rapid ad-hoc analysis.

Topics

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