Julia Chan is Regional Director of Financial Planning and Analysis for Asia at Warner Music Group, where she leads strategic finance, forecasting, and performance initiatives. She brings diverse global experience across advisory, treasury, and business analysis roles, supporting growth, operational excellence, and data-driven decision-making.
This article is based on an interview between Financial Services Review APAC and Julia Chan. It explores her perspectives on financial strategy, regional growth, and data-driven decision-making in today’s dynamic business landscape.
P&L as a Strategic Compass, Not Just a Report
When we talk about Profit and loss (P&L) management, P&L statement immediately comes up in our mind. In fact, P&L management is more than a report but it supports company’s financial sustainability and profitability by overseeing, analysing, and optimizing revenue and expenses. As finance leaders, how can we leverage P&L management as a game changer?
This answer is being a great storyteller to drive what happens next. Let us navigate this idea with the circumstance that a company business strategy is defending their current leading position with increasing marketing investment while facing competitors’ new product launch.
“P&L management is more than a report. It supports a company’s financial sustainability and profitability by overseeing, analysing, and optimizing revenue and expenses.”
By linking the company recent strategy, the P&L management focus should be about how effective the business strategy is. The result from the P&L analysis shares a discouraging picture with declining sales revenue, slower sales growth rate and increasing marketing spend.
As a finance leader facing this difficult condition, storytelling skills come in place with the following tactics to drive impactful changes.
1. Share context objectively
It is about delivering the unwelcome news to the team. On top of being honest, we should share the context with facts only instead of blaming any team members. This can avoid the teams taking a defensive approach in the coming discussions and refusing to accept the reality.
2. Find out why and create the sense of urgency
Finance leaders need to help identify the potential reasons behind to drive the next step. We can include other non-financial insights such as key customer order performance, number of new customers gained, competitor market share growth which helps to support the P&L findings and spot out other hidden causes. Leveraging the prediction can also help to image the future impact. If the trend continues in the future, how the business performance will look like.
3. Call to actions with creativity
What-if scenario can be a powerful way to inspire people’s creativity when we explore new actions. We create different financial scenarios to demonstrate potential actions impact on P&L statement. For example, pricing strategy impact can be shown by the scenarios below:
- Pure price reduction with sales quantity increase
- Manufacturing cost savings which allows price reduction with the expectation of a slight sales quantity increase
The success of what-if scenario needs to link to the business reality like the customer decision factors and operational set up. If the customers are not price sensitive, pricing strategy will not help to turnaround the situation. After the new turnaround actions are executed, the next P&L management should follow up these actions.
P&L management is like a person managing his health with the support of medical check-up reports (P&L statement). It is a powerful tool to help leaders to ensure the financial health of the firm. Combining P&L management and storytelling skill creates impactful synergies to drive business performance. Let us start integrating them together.
