Senior Director, Financial Planning & Analysis

Our mission is to improve the performance of athletes and teams, which we do by engineering the premier technology platform for sport. We've been at the forefront of sports technology and science since 2006 - we don't just work in the sporting industry, we are actively changing its future.  Our solutions are designed to help athletes and coaches “play smart” in a world where 1% can literally mean the difference between winning and losing.

We work with over 3,000 teams around the world, empowering coaches, managers and trainers in premier teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, EPL, AFL, NRL, NCAA and more. We provide the information they need to optimise athletes’ health, game-day readiness, and performance, as well as in-game tactics.  Our solutions include wearable technology, video analytics, and athlete monitoring solutions, and we are passionate about helping sports organizations at all levels to better scout, recruit, teach, and win.

The Senior Director, Financial Planning & Analysis leads the FP&A team and provides all of Catapult’s internal financial analytics. This includes measuring, monitoring and distilling insights from the Company’s business and financial performance, as well as identifying internal improvements and efficiencies that will improve management’s ability to make sound business decisions. 

WHAT YOU’LL DO 

You will know the Company’s numbers better than anyone else, avidly awaiting the latest figures, eagerly seeking new insights to communicate, and animated when expectations are met or not. You will understand thematics and the story that numbers can tell.

This role will suit a confident, commercially astute, dedicated, and highly motivated senior finance leader who can operate as part of a global team. The role will work both independently and collaboratively with various stakeholders to drive these business-critical resources and functions to the world's best practice for a SaaS business.

You will have extensive experience in financial analysis, budgeting, forecasting, and reporting, know what “great” looks like, be a self-starter, be proficient in stakeholder management at all levels, provide critical insights, debate opinions, execute processes on time, and autonomously drive outcomes. A key focus area will be driving continuous improvement in the end-to-end systems, processes, and tools that underlie the Company’s core FP&A and data functions. Your efficient process management and analysis skills will significantly impact our global business and the decisions we make in support of our customers.

• Work closely with the executive team to provide strategic, financial, and operational analysis to frame and drive key business and investment decisions, and test various scenarios and hypotheses.
• Identify and illustrate key business trends and drivers through effective data interpretation, and communicate these with impact through logical and compelling presentations and visualizations.
• Implement systems and processes to ensure that internal analyses, reporting, and decision-making are relevant, timely, and accurate. This includes building out additional functionality in core systems, adopting common modeling standards for all financial analyses, initiating business cases and monitoring their ROI, ensuring analyses are conducted consistently and in accordance with appropriate definitions, etc.
• Lead the development of KPIs, scorecards, and reports to track the performance of projects, initiatives, and strategies, focusing on results, execution, speed, and learning. 
• Be responsible for preparing the annual budget (including a multi-year operational plan and departmental budgets), rolling monthly financial and cash forecasts, and providing insights and commentary on the Company’s performance against key metrics.
• Work with key stakeholders on specific projects and initiatives (e.g., employee incentives and sales commissions) to ensure analyses are conducted appropriately and within the Company’s overall objectives.
• Support proposed M&A transactions with valuation modeling and due diligence.
• Drive continuous improvement in the Company’s new financial planning system (Workday Adaptive Planning) and ERP (NetSuite).
• Work closely with the commercial teams to improve reporting, perform predictive analytics, and provide high-value insights to better understand our users, and the impact of our R&D, and sales and marketing investments (including attribution, churn prediction, lifetime value modeling, etc).
• Build and lead a global team across Boston and Melbourne Australia: attract, hire, retain and engage top talent to support the company’s FP&A and data needs and growth.

DECISION-MAKING / SUPERVISION

• This person will operate with much autonomy and will not be expected to receive daily instruction.  The CFO will provide primary guidance, but this person will also receive input and direction from the CEO and other members of the executive team.  
• A critical component of this role will be the leadership, mentorship and development of the FP&A team. There are high performers with high potential on the FP&A team - experience in people initiatives such as talent mapping, organizational design, and succession planning is a must. 
• Given this person's role in guiding strategic business decisions across the organization, their judgment, prioritization, and effective decision-making will be critical to success.  

KEY CHALLENGES

• An initial priority for this role will be to establish a vision for the team aligned with the long-term company strategy, then connect and build development plans and career paths for the team members to match. 
• The FP&A function needs the systems and processes to support the business effectively. Completing the initial Adaptive Insights implementation will be essential to addressing this gap.  Then further process and system improvements will be necessary to establish the FP&A function as indispensable for the business.  
• Due to the system and workflow challenges, the business lacks confidence in the FP&A team’s ability to plan and forecast accurately.  Building confidence and the FP&A brand across the business will be a critical first step in the team's evolution.  

KEY RELATIONSHIPS / INTERACTIONS

This person will interact with various key stakeholders throughout the company, including the executive team members, all senior leaders and the senior members of the P&C team. The FP&A and P&C team can achieve many efficiencies with systems and workflows that overlap the functions to support the business. Every leader in the business will be aligned with an FP&A team member for financial business partnering; this contact will have a significant role in managing and fostering those relationships, as well as building on and representing the finance team brand. 

Manager

This role reports to the CFO.

Direct Reports

The FP&A team will report to this person.  This 4-person team includes 2 Directors and an Associate Analyst located in Boston, as well as a Senior Analyst located in Melbourne.   

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

• 10+ years of FP&A experience with a minimum of 5+ years in a leadership capacity.
• Strong leadership, data visualization, and verbal and written communication skills, including an ability to tell a story through data, and to make the complex simple.
• Proven ability to add significant value by devising insights from data, including an ability to isolate anomalies and identify relevant trends and thematics.
• A keen desire to immerse yourself in understanding end-to-end business functions and practices, and customer journeys, coupled with the commercial acumen to identify opportunities from them.
• Excellent attention to detail, and a passion to be immersed in numbers.
• An obsession for extracting efficiencies and driving continuous improvement.
• Experience working with data-obsessed senior leaders (C-level) to support and influence their decision-making, and the ability to anticipate, prepare for, and rigorously debate their difficult questions under tough pressure and tight deadlines.
• Demonstrated ability to form, lead and develop high-performing teams.
• A passion and talent for working collaboratively and servicing internal customers, including operating a team under a business partnering model
• Experience in running complex annual and ad-hoc planning processes.
• Experience in overseeing the implementation of business systems and processes that scale in unison with the company’s growth
• Experience in high growth, complex, global, and ideally SaaS businesses, including running projects with diverse stakeholder groups in multiple timezones.
• Experience with an enterprise financial planning software tool, ideally Adaptive Planning, as well as spreadsheet modeling standards such as FAST
• Proficiency in all MS Office programs, NetSuite, and Salesforce is desirable. 

WHY CATAPULT? 

• We have amazing people. We can promise you will work with some of the most ambitious and intelligent people in an exciting industry, and you will do some of the best work of your life.
• We encourage our people to have constructive, open and honest communication in order to make Catapult extraordinary; innovate and create smart solutions; establish a collaborative, yet challenging, environment to develop our performance and the performance of our customers.
• Our workforce spans more than 20 countries, you'll have the opportunity to work across multiple nationalities and cultures, and build your global awareness and capability 
• We value improvement and development. We are challenging ourselves to continuously grow and become a high-performance company. That means we maintain a growth mindset in everything we do, and our people are always looking for ways to do things better.  There is unlimited opportunity to grow, do more, and do better.

Whether you’re interested in sports or not, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing your work is supporting some of the most successful teams and athletes on the planet! 

Research shows that while men apply for jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised groups tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't meet every single point in our job ad, please still get in touch! We would love to have a chat and see if you could be a great addition to our team. We are building the future of sports performance, our priority is to find the brightest talent that can add to our team culture, those who actively contribute and who are excited about what they do.