The request
"Take our 2026 operating plan and stress-test it. I want base / bear / bull on revenue, gross margin, and hiring pace. Show me the runway, the cash-out date, and the levers that actually matter. Ship a board-ready summary and the model behind it."
What the FP&A Employee needs
- The current operating plan (Sheets, Excel, or a Workday export).
- Your assumption set — growth rate, gross margin, hiring plan, fixed costs.
- Any external constraints: covenant ratios, target ending cash, board minimums.
How it builds the scenarios
The Employee doesn't pick numbers from thin air. It anchors each scenario in something real:
- Base — your current plan, recomputed cleanly.
- Bear — your worst trailing-twelve-month performance extended forward, with a margin compression matching the last downturn in your sector.
- Bull — your best two quarters extended, but capped where capacity (hiring, infra) actually limits growth.
Every assumption is labeled with the historical reference. No black-box numbers.
The output you get
- A side-by-side scenario table — revenue, GM%, OpEx, EBITDA, ending cash, by quarter.
- A runway chart with the cash-out date marked on each curve.
- A sensitivity heatmap that ranks every input by how much it moves the answer.
- A one-paragraph "what to actually worry about" summary.
- The full model in your file format — every formula traceable.
The decisions it surfaces
Sensitivity output tells you what matters. Most plans turn out to be unusually sensitive to one or two inputs — sales productivity, churn, or hiring pace. The Employee calls those out and proposes the decisions that would harden the plan against them.
Follow-up dispatches
- "Hold ending cash above $X. Find the hiring plan that gets us there in the bear case."
- "Run a Monte Carlo on revenue with the historical variance — give me the P10/P50/P90 runway."
- "If we add a $50M raise in Q3, what does the bear case look like?"
- "Draft the section of the board memo that explains the bear case in two paragraphs."
Tips
Keep the assumption file separate from the model itself. The Employee can swap assumption sets without rebuilding the model, which means you can show the board three plans in one meeting without breaking a sweat.