Corp Dev & Strategy vs. FP&A
Currently burned out from PE and looking for a better WLB, so I decided to take a pay cut to the corporate world. I have two offers on hand, but hard to decide on which one would give me the most flexibility and career progression in the corporate world while keeping the door open to potentially moving back to the buyside. Any insights? Anyone have made the move and can comment if any regret / want to go back to PE / IB?
-
FP&A Associate role (growing public company):
- Comp: $150-160k
- Hours: Typical 9-6 with heavier loads during busy periods
- Pros: Team visibility, senior leadership exposure, team is being built out so there’s a lot of infrastructure and model-building opportunities
-
Corp Dev & Strategy Senior Analyst role (PE backed port-co):
- Comp: $20k lower than the fp&a role
- Hours: Around 50 hours a week, can hit 60 during busy periods, some ad-hoc weekends
- Pros: Hands-on M&A deals and strategy, promotion to manager level in 2 years with a 60-70% pay bump
- Cons: Feeling underpaid for the role
Considerations:
- Corp Dev & Strategy: Probably less boring, more dynamic with M&A deals and strategy, but compensation feels a bit low.
- FP&A: Better pay and work-life balance, but might be less exciting and more routine.
How is the corp dev salary so low
The title is senior analyst vs. associate in FP&A, but not sure how easy is to transition from FP&A to Corp Dev…say in a year or two
have a friend who is in fp&a and says its mad borin. i personally like corp dev better as it better aligns with the skillset acquired from thinking strategically in pe
I started my career off in FP&A and can confirm it is boring. OP, I'd do some more research into the FP&A role to see if it falls more in line with financial reporting or strategic finance. If it's more focused on financial reporting, you'll be working pretty closely with accounting to close the books at month- and quarter-end as well as reporting on financial performance over the last quarter/month/FY and performing variance analysis (which sounds more interesting than it is...). If it's strategic finance oriented, you'll probably work with other business units (e.g. sales, marketing, etc.) to perform bottoms-up analysis for them (e.g. marketing wants to launch a new product and they'll reach out to you to perform modeling to determine which product will be most profitable).
As another note, it is probably pretty easy to go from Corp Dev --> FP&A, but not so much the other way around.
How did you find these roles? FP&A opportunities I see on LinkedIn don't pay anywhere near that, especially for associate level. Even manager titles seem to be ~$130K-$150K.
When the world's political and economic situation is unstable, especially when war or economic crisis occurs, various common investment tools such as stocks, funds, etc. will be severely impacted. At this time, gold has a good hedging property. Even in the face of an economic crisis, the price of gold can remain unchanged or even rise steadily, maintaining the value of assets. With the continuous mining of gold deposits and the continuous increase in demand, gold has become more scarce, enhancing its own hedging properties.
A few thoughts.
(1) What work do you like to do? Do you like deal/strategy work? Do you live for modeling? These are both finance jobs, but they are very different types of finance jobs.
(2) You shouldn’t be concerned about the lower pay. There are only at most 3 cities in America where that difference could actually matter. So I guess if you live there, then yeah. That may matter. Otherwise, don’t fret about it IF that’s the work you like to do.
(3) It is generally fairly easy to move internally from FP&A to a corp dev team. If you are trying to move from FP&A to another company’s corp dev team, that will be much harder.
(4) The difference in WLB won’t really be noticeable
Thanks! OP here.
1. I don't mind a "boring" job like FP&A—I still enjoy working with data in Excel. I like strategy work but don’t really enjoy deals due to the lack of visibility. That's exactly why I'm taking a pay cut to jump from PE to corporate roles.
2. Yeah, unfortunately, I live in one of the most expensive cities. I figured I could take the FP&A job, then move to a corp strategy/dev manager role in 2 years, given my PE experience.
3. Appreciate it. How does the move from a corp dev team to FP&A compare when done externally?
4. That's surprising. I've heard FP&A generally has a more predictable schedule, whereas corp dev can have banking hours during deals. From a high-level perspective, would you mind providing insights into how the work-life balance in FP&A typically compares to that in strategy/corp dev, especially in terms of overall hours and predictability?
Any insights into which career has highest ceiling (albeit would be lower than high finance)?
(1) What lack of visibility are you talking about with deals?
(3) Moving from corp dev to FP&A is generally “relatively” straightforward / easy to do both internally and externally. If you are moving from FP&A to an external corp dev role, you’ll just have more explaining to do. Whether fair or not, it is generally easier to move internally at a company than to get a new role somewhere else, especially if you are changing teams.
(4) There are definitely differences. This is true. I am not saying there aren’t differences. But if you take a step back, the differences aren’t really material. Like yes. A corp dev team is more likely to have to do some type of real weekend work (ie - beyond just responding to emails after a 3 martini lunch). A corp dev team is more likely to have to work until 10pm. Yes. The nature of the job means there are going to be times you work more.
But how often does that truly happen? Not as often as you’d think.
A few questions on the corp dev role to help decide, corp dev can vary greatly in my experience-
What’s their average deal size?
How well capitalized are they?
How many deals did they close last year?
How do they finance their deals?
How much of the deal process do you touch from beginning to end?
hi, not op but curious as to what the 'good' answers to these would be for someone to choose this role over the other
FP&A can sometimes feel a bit like a routine job, however depending on the company your title might not 100% represent what you would do on a daily basis. The FP&A titles are very broad, and even in the same company you will have people doing completely different jobs, even though they have the same title.
From my experience, FP&A can be very interesting with diversity of tasks. This can for sure be routine FP&A work, but also various projects such as acquisitions or new ERP implementations will take place and you will have to develop various skills which are not 100% the ones you would expect in a normal FP&A role.
For sure the pay won't be as rewarding as in PE/IB, however coming from this field you will usually have a better compensation than the rest of the team, and management might give you more challenges to see how you perform in certain situations/projects, which could lead to good internal promotion to strategic roles.
The hours won't be as difficult as in IB, however certain companies expect you to work 12/14h during reporting/budgeting period or with project deadlines, and if the team you work in is short staffed then 80h a week can be your norm. (The grass is not greener on the other side, sorry to disappoint.)
I worked in FP&A and yeah… don’t do that, you’ll be updating reporting packs every month/quarter with little intellectual stimulation for the little analysis work you’re doing.
Can’t you counter the offer in corp dev to meet somewhere in the middle? If I were you, I’d still take that over FP&A, it’s that boring.
I’m okay with the FP&A tasks, but it seems the team here is relatively new, and their internal processes are still manual. They're working on automating these, which could take a year or two. They're also short on headcount and still hiring managers, which suggests a demanding environment compared to a more established FP&A team. I'm curious about your insights on how working in a less established FP&A team might impact the experience for someone in a more junior role.
Funnily enough I went through the same experience - we only had a small team (1 manager, 2 associates, and 1 analyst) with very manual processes (lots of Excel). I think most of us thought we could automate it with some VBA, Power BI, etc but the reality is that month end was such a shitshow (due to limited headcount) that we had very limited time to improve processes. As a reference, when I left after 1y because it was such a mess, over 90% of our processes were unchanged and the whole team was burnt out.
Not to mention FP&A isn’t that lucrative when you consider the hours. The appeal of FP&A is to have a relatively cushy job with decent pay, you remove the the cushy part and you’re not left with much imho.
Ut aperiam veritatis eos placeat quia inventore ratione. Numquam ad architecto est rerum ipsum nisi recusandae. Sint quam commodi et et dolorem perspiciatis sed. Veritatis ea excepturi est est ut.
Magnam quisquam labore ut eum omnis facilis quod. Officia vitae voluptatum ut officia. Est debitis voluptas architecto blanditiis incidunt. Aperiam quos ut quos sit molestiae quia ipsa. Voluptate et saepe et sit optio non aliquam quia. Aut magnam et doloribus alias. Perferendis dignissimos omnis praesentium esse assumenda.
Ea fuga labore quia consequatur dolorem. Dicta nisi nisi aut sed doloremque rem nemo. Natus aut ipsam totam omnis.
Vel quasi occaecati quia ea. Velit officiis maiores facere voluptatem distinctio quae dolorum qui.
See All Comments - 100% Free
WSO depends on everyone being able to pitch in when they know something. Unlock with your email and get bonus: 6 financial modeling lessons free ($199 value)
or Unlock with your social account...