Portfolio Picture

Latest blog post

When numbers speak volumes to you: The joy of profit and loss spreadsheets

Author: Flavia

 

While I was driving today, special moments came back to me and they were almost moving.

Picture the scene: It’s night and and I am sitting at my desk in Athens, a couple of days before an important review with a big boss.
I am drawing little circles around numbers. Columns are years, rows are revenues, margins, costs, and finally profits.

YTD means year to date, how much we made so far, and BTG means balance to go, how much do we have to achieve if we want to earn our slice of bread (ie: reach our targets).
All periods are compared with the same periods of year ago.

I am preparing the questions I expect from the boss: Why is this increasing? Why is this decreasing?
I make notes of the answers and, for those I don’t recall, I ask the first of my 10 Product Managers: can you tell me why the gross revenues increased so disproportionally vs. the net revenues?

Because we gave more discounts to customers, he says.
Thank you, but why SO MUCH more?
[...]

Read More

Flavia Rubino

Name: Flavia Rubino

Nationality: Italian

Career: Worked for Reckitt Benckiser between 1997 and 2006.

She started her RB career in Italy, moved to Greece as a marketing director in 2001 and became a Global Category Director at the UK headquarters in 2005.

She left to join a competitor, back in Italy, in 2006 but then left to start her own business as, in her own words, “nothing could match the adrenaline of working with RB”.

Flavia now runs her own coaching for mums site: www.veremamme.it and has recently launched a new site, The Talking Village to develop conversational marketing projects between big brands and web users.

Read my blog

Be Sociable, Share!