Stout was engaged by a life sciences research consulting firm (the “Company”) with revenues of over $600 million to enhance its Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) function.

The Company’s private equity owner (the “PE”) required significantly more insight into selling, general, and administrative expenses (SG&A) in total and across the Company’s lines of business. In addition, the PE required both a granular view on historical results and existing budgets and forecasts.

Stout’s team directly supported the Company’s CFO and Vice President of FP&A by:

• Reviewing and aggregating historical SG&A inputs from disparate reporting systems
• Developing cost categorization assumptions to standardize costs across service lines
• Facilitating discussions with key finance stakeholders to further understand financial data inputs
• Constructing a year-over-year comparative view of SG&A to identify key trends and cost drivers
• Applying tailored costing methodology to 2023 budget figure estimates to bolster rationale and provide better annual targets
• Preparing rolling forecasts (i.e., 3+9, 6+6, etc.) encompassing new SG&A assumptions to satisfy ad-hoc reporting requests received by the PE

The FP&A stand-up provided to our client yielded:

• Greater transparency into the Company’s operating expenses
• Deeper insight into controllable vs. non-controllable expenses
• Heightened awareness of master data management hygiene
• A significantly better ability to explain significant variances in operating results

Based on Stout’s expertise in discovering and reporting on specific operating expense costs and key drivers, the Company expanded the scope of work to include bookings, backlog, pipeline, and the overall revenue cycle.

Stout has since been engaged by another portfolio company of the PE to provide similar services.