About
Brian Shaw
Founder, Goal Line Finance Consulting
10+ years in FP&A, built inside a large retail telecom business. That work was forecasting, budgeting and the ongoing job of telling operators what a decision would do to the numbers before they made it.
Telecom runs on subscriptions. Tiered plans, monthly churn, revenue that arrives over time rather than at the point of sale. The vocabulary differs from SaaS but the underlying mechanics are the same, which is why the move across felt less like a career change than it sounds.
Connect on LinkedIn ↗Why this work
Large companies have a whole function whose job is to answer the question before the money gets spent. Somebody builds the model and somebody else argues with the assumptions. By the time it reaches the person deciding, the uncertainty has already been mapped out. That's the work I did for a decade.
Smaller companies make decisions of the same consequence, relative to their size, with nothing like that support. The founder is doing it in a spreadsheet at eleven at night, alone. The gap isn't in their judgment. It's that nobody has done the work that makes the judgment easier.
Most of the founders I work with are bootstrapped, and that's the profile I know best. The work applies either way though. Raising money doesn't make the next hire or the next price change any more obvious, it just changes whose money is at stake.
Background
- 10+ years in FP&A
- CFA charterholder
- CMA, Certified Management Accountant
- Retail telecom, a subscription business with recurring revenue, churn and tiered pricing
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