Commercial Finance Leader EMEA

Are you someone who is passionate, motivated, and driven to make a difference?  If so, MSA Safety is the perfect fit for your career. 

At MSA, SAFETY is who we are AND it is what we do.  We are a purpose-driven company committed to deploying innovation and technology to deliver on our Mission to help protect people and assets all around the world.  We continue to be relentless in our pursuit of solving our customers greatest problems so they can go home safe each and every day. 

Are you in?  Read on for more details about this particular role.

If you're a senior commercial business partner focused on driving profitable growth, come join our EMEA finance team This role reports directly to Finance Director, International and forms part of EMEA Leadership Team.

The candidate will lead a team of Finance Business Partners and build strong relationships with key commercial stakeholders.  This role will focus on guiding the organization through near term and long term strategic planning activities to ensure delivery of profitable growth targets, providing commercial insights based on data and analysis while considering resources, market drivers, organizational values, and emerging economic conditions. 

The successful candidate should exercise an understanding of commercial strategies to effectively partner with key business stakeholders and provide outlook and insights regarding the health of the EMEA business, current progress vs established targets, and opportunities to optimize business performance and growth.

Key to this role is the ability to build cross-functional relationships, communicate financial concepts to non-financial audiences, apply critical thinking skills, and obtain results through changing conditions while improving the way we analyze our commercial strategy. 

If you are an experienced finance professional looking for an exciting role at a mission-driven company, this may be the role for you

Proactive Business Partnering - commercial business relationship management

• Building strong relationship with the members of EMEA leadership team, including but not limited to sales, marketing, channels and pricing.
• Build strong collaboration with MissionOps team (supply chain and manufacturing) to help deliver sales targets.
• Guide EMEA commercial leaders to drive profitable growth by providing real time support and insights into business performance.
• Providing decision support for commercial deals, programs and investment opportunities (lead all aspects of financial modeling, scenario building, risk/opportunity assessment, impacts to margin performance (pricing/discounts).
• Communicate financial performance effectively.

Analytics - providing quality business insights

• Provide insights to business results and quality commentaries for monthly/quarterly/annual reporting requirements.
• Lead the business support for annual plans and monthly forecasting working closely with commercial leadership team.
• Focus on sales, incoming orders, gross margin, customer and channel analytics.

Continuous improvement

• Continuously improve tools and processes to get valuable business insights. Enhance standardized processes for demand (incoming orders) and revenue forecasting (e.g. leveraging CRM)

Leadership

• Build a strong team of finance business partners (2 direct reports). Provide coaching and feedback to support team's development and ensure succession.
• Prioritize competing demands and stakeholder expectations.

Experience required:

• 8+ years of proven experience analyzing complex financial information, historical financial results, and market data insights including emerging trends, changing economic and geopolitical conditions, and key market drivers.
• 4+ years of leadership experience. Proven ability to manage people, lead teams and major workstreams, influence colleagues, and generate broad consensus across functions and geographies.
• Advanced presentation skills, and ability to synthesize complex financial data into actionable, clear, and engaging messages. Experience presenting to senior leadership and cross-functional audiences.
• Strong track record of leading financial modeling & decision support workstreams on critical commercial investments and providing recommendations to appropriate stakeholders to optimize business performance and respond timely to changing conditions.
• Experience defining and developing standardize processes that drive accountability, communication and collaboration effectively and efficiently to all stakeholders.
• Expert PowerPoint skills – experience preparing executive level deliverables and polished communications.
• Excellent business acumen and executive presence to work seamlessly with senior leadership as well as present to CEO, CFO, and other senior leaders.
• Effectively managing time to meet tight deadlines and thrive in a fast-paced environment.
• Demonstrated problem solving abilities with proven track record of generating high quality innovative solutions
• Proactive individual looking to continuously take on additional responsibility and improve processes and procedures.

Experience preferred:

• Experience collaborating with operations teams including demand and supply planning.
• Familiar with a variety of data systems to create financial reports, dashboards, and analyze business trends – knowledge of Oracle EPBCS and EPM Suite, SAP ERP, Microsoft PowerBI, and Salesforce CRM.

Education:

• Degree in accounting, business, economics or finance.

Travel: estimated time spent traveling 10%