Practitioner notes on finance, forecasting and AI.
Written from live practice, not commentary, each piece published here first, then discussed on LinkedIn.
What AI actually changes in FP&A: a practitioner's note
A working tour of the full stack: the driver tree (seasonality, lifecycle, marketing, supply side), sensitivity that is no longer a luxury, the living what-if model, and the control environment that keeps AI honest.
AI in financeThe speed-safety gap: pharma's least discussed AI problem
A candidate molecule can now be designed in months; the systems that keep patients safe still run on slower timelines. Speed without governance is risk transfer.
Pharma & AIConfidently wrong: the hard half of AI adoption
Capability was never the constraint; trust was. What actually stops AI being confidently wrong, and why the FDA landed on the same answer.
AI governanceAI in pharma: speed is the headline, economics is the story
AI raises speed, lowers cost, then removes the barriers that protected incumbents. What that does to competitors, pipeline value and moats.
Pharma & AI strategyWorking capital as survival: eleven years without a safety net
Eleven years running a self-funded consumer brand, with no credit line behind it, turned the working-capital fundamentals into survival disciplines. The five that kept the business solvent, and what a mid-market finance function can copy.
Cash & working capitalThe finance function a PE portfolio company actually needs in year one
The operating partner did not buy a month-end reporting pack. They bought decision-speed, and the finance function has one hundred days to prove it can deliver it: cash you can see, unit economics you can trust, one version of the truth.
Private equityThe merger I modelled two years early
In 2010 an MBA team I led built a full acquisition case for Britvic buying A.G. Barr from public information alone. Two years later the real merger followed the same logic, the same leadership answer, and died exactly where we had flagged the risk.
Mergers & acquisitionsThe forecast you can argue with
Patient-based modelling, and what it is really for. The cascade, where models quietly break at the patient, why gross-to-net is a different bridge in every country, and why a baseline is not yet a decision.
FP&A and forecastingPillar Two is a data problem wearing a tax costume
The 15% rate is the easy half; one clean, defensible number per entity is the hard half. The extended relief runs once out, always out, the first filing season proved the thesis in public, and the entity data model now decides reporting, deals and AI value.
Tax & reporting architectureThe £1 in every £2: how own-label quietly became half of British grocery
Own-label passed half of British grocery on both serious measures, and the margin moved to the shelf and the shopper data. Who really keeps the pound, from three seats at the same table: selling capacity, buying it for eleven years, and the generics mirror.
Brands, factories & marginBaseline, judgement, and the most misused word in forecasting
Neither the model nor the manager is "the biased one". Bias is a property of a process, established against actuals. What the evidence says about adjustments, why machine bias and human bias need different fixes, and the operating loop that decides whose changes are earning their keep.
FP&A & forecastingThe SaaS metric set is the patient funnel wearing different clothes
Cohort curves are persistence curves, and the SaaS metric set maps stage by stage onto the patient funnel. One worked cohort example shows why a blended lifetime value flatters, the breaks are named, and the skeleton runs from subscriber economics at O2 through patient models to a founder P&L.
FP&A & forecastingPrivate equity's returns now run through the finance seat
Dearer money on more debt has silenced two of the three engines of a leveraged return, and the value-creation plan now carries the case. The five levers the finance seat pulls, the monthly pack a sponsor asks for, and the value-driver tree behind both, from listed boardrooms and eleven years of founder ownership.
Private equityIf one of these questions is live on your desk, get in touch. Get in touch →