Anyone here work in transportation (trucking, rail, maritime) FP&A?

I was offered an entry level FP&A role for a trucking company. My previous background is in Equity Research but I haven't done any finance work for the last 5 years - I haven't modeled since then. I do, however, have experience in maritime transportation analyzing crude oil tankers (7 months total). I found it to be interesting but I really hated having to cover 8 different companies and working 75 hrs/wk. 


This job is 5 miles or 10 mins from my house. The people seem nice and direct, at least for now; you can never tell until you start getting to know people better but so far they've been professional and courteous. I had good conversations with both FP&A and Operations. They could tell that I was genuinely interested in trucking. 


So, what's the problem? 

  1. I haven't modeled in 5 years and you know the saying, "use it or loose it." I'm going t have to spend some time re-learning this. Since I'm not superhuman, it means some of what I learned coding-wise will be lost because I will not applying it on the job. Is FP&A modeling different than IB or ER? I don't know how to "balance accounts" or have deep accounting knowledge. I'm worried that I will not be able to perform well because of this. 

  1. They boasted about how their revenue keeps growing and now they're at $500MM from $100MM just a few years ago. Their goal is to get acquired but they told me that's about 4-5 years from now. Besides this bit of potential volatility, how volatile is trucking? Did anyone work in trucking between 2007-2009? Did you have firings at your firm? 

  1. I also got offered a job as a Data Analyst and I would largely be working in SQL. I'm not as good with SQL as I am with Python. The hours here would be more. Any thoughts from someone who works in FP&A and does some coding (SQL or Python) - would you rather work in Analytics or stay where you are? 

  1. I want a job that is a max (really) 50 hours per week, repetitive in nature, and safer than average from the ebbs and flows of the economy. Will FP&A for a trucking co. give me this? 

Edit: The region tags say US-West and France but that is a bug. This is for the US only. I've already reached out to the mods. 

 

Have done some work in Transpo, less in trucking but have looked at a few businesses in the space (no deals though). Also an investment professional, but have worked with very closely with FP&A teams at our portcos. Can take what I say with grain of salt.

1) FP&A modeling is slightly different than what you do M&A/PE, although a lot of overlap. With modeling in general, you should probably be able to pick it up quickly again by just going through a few templates online. FP&A models tend to be "simpler" (e.g. less fancy bells and whistles, crazy financing structures, sensitivities, etc.) but typically a bit more detailed than investment models, as you will know every line item of the company inside and out and will project accordingly. Accounting knowledge is important, so if yours isn't good, then that may make your job challenging. But it's something you should be able to pick up with some reading and practice, and the basics should be pretty easy. Many trucking businesses are also very simple, so likely a good understanding of fundamentals will be ok. You should be able to balance a balance sheet, but honestly I have seen plenty of corporate models (more in the LMM than in the $500mm revenue range) with balance sheet plugs and things like that. From an FP&A perspective, it's less important to have everything perfect there than to have a model that gives you a good directional sense of what you think KPIs will be, what costs will look like, when you'll need to raise debt or equity, etc. Like it doesn't really matter if you BS is off by $10, as long as the projections are actually helpful to use when thinking about / running the business (although optically it does look pretty bad)

2) Trucking is a highly cyclical industry and yes can be pretty volatile, although it's hard for me to say without knowing where exactly in "trucking" this company is. Is it leasing, 3PL, factoring, actually moving cargo, etc? But in general, last few years have been pretty good for the industry - the rates you get for moving cargo per mile have been very high, but I believe they've come down recently. Some headwinds due to labor shortages and lack of qualified drivers as well.

3) Can't help you here unfortunately.

4) Again hard to say, but finance people are often easy to cut, and trucking can be volatile. But there's always demand for good financial professionals somewhere, so even if something bad were to happen, you'd likely have a pretty marketable skillset. Typically a pretty stable gig otherwise from a WLB perspective.

 

Thanks so much for the detailed answers.

The company operates in LTL and works with major retailers. 

I spoke to the FP&A manager and got more clarification on the role. It's actually a Reporting Analyst or Business Analyst role. A recruiter had actually reached out to me with a generic FP&A ad so I assumed it would be FP&A. But this job would entail creating dashboards with KPIs in PowerBI. I wouldn't be doing much/any modeling. Hours are 9-5, which I was pleasantly surprised by. 

I'm not really familiar with Reporting Analyst as a career, as in how close to mgmt I would be and whether it's actually better than FP&A. I would be looking at the biz from the top down but not sure how valuable the role is (meaning, immune from recession layoffs). 

The other job would be actual coding in SQL and Python. 

 
Most Helpful

I am not in trucking but I am in FP&A and also code and use statistical models on the job so maybe I can share some wisdom on the following topics:

1) Is modelling in FP&A different than in IB or ER?

The answer here is yes, and by a lot. The core difference is that here you have endless insider information to build into your model. To give you a simple example, when modelling opex growth as an outsider, there are some tricks you can use but it will boil down to you choosing some variables in the financial statement and then making them grow at the average they have grown in the past few years. As an insider you can do this too, but also you have the detailed financial plan of everything you are going to buy, everyone you are going to hire, everything you are going to depreciate, etc. so you just build your growth as a function of those things. It gets really detailed and your model has to directly account for everything that is known (as an insider) to be in the pipeline for future expenses. However, the ‘big picture’ does not change. You’ll be forecasting opex, cogs, net sales, etc. If you know the theory right, it won’t matter how complicated the specifics get. You just grind it out. As a reference, when I was getting prepared to start this job I read ‘Financial Forecasting, Analysis, and Modelling’ from Michael Samonas. Great introduction to everything I now do.

2) I don’t know anything about accounting/balancing accounts/etc.

Neither did I. Fun fact: before this job I did not fully understand how the ‘credit’ and ‘debit’ accounting system worked. I reverse engineered it from my job. And yes, I never took an accounting or even a finance class before this job. I started at almost 0 and I’ve done well so far. The above book helped a lot.

3) Would you rather be a data analyst

As someone who used to be a data analyst, I can give you a strong no. Being a data analyst sucks. Now I get paid more as a financial analyst, and still I use python and stats in my job. The problem with data analyst positions is that you may be tasked with non-finance problems that are a lot of the time not fun at all. Doing data analytics for operations (what I used to do) sucked. It is just not an interesting job. Doing analytics on financial indicators is the fun part and as a data analyst you may sometimes work on this (sometimes I was this lucky), but as a financial analyst you will always work on finance problems so it is the best choice. Of course, if for some reason you like non-finance problems then yeah, avoid finance and go the pure analytics route.

 

Thanks for sharing your experience as a Data Analyst - that's very helpful. The Data Analyst job does seem to be just creating the SQL queries and automating reports using Airflow. I don't think it's really analytics but more data engineering. I've never had a Data Analyst job before so I don't really know what to expect. 

Do you know if the Reporting Analyst role is similar to your job? Where would it fall in the value chain? Because I don't actually see a need for this particular role. Getting paid over $80K for setting up PowerBI dashboards seems a bit excessive as in if the company wants to cut costs during a downturn, I can see this job vanishing and someone in FP&A taking over. Because it seems like that's what you're doing in your FP&A role.

In my opinion, no one knows more about a firm than people who work in FP&A and Accounting. So, in tough times, if the company already has reports setup, they can easily get someone in FP&A to take over and handle reporting as well. No offense to anyone in Reporting - I'm just trying to think through this as an outsider because I strongly prefer my next job to be quite long term. 

 

The Reporting Analyst position as you described it does fit a team we have in my company. They are dedicated to building dashboards and reports for us (FP&A) and I assume other departments as well.

Your assessment is correct. See, at least in FP&A, we all hate these reporting analysts. Because they do not actually do our job, the solutions they come up with are usually shit and we end up fixing or amending their mistakes. It has already happened that because our team has grown and have redundancies, we are now building dashboards and reporting solutions for ourselves instead of relying on this other team. This means that eventually we won’t need them at all. So if an organization has already grown to have redundancies, they are the biggest redundancy of all and thus I would imagine would be first in the chopping block.

 

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