Director of FP&A

Public School is a creative studio that helps brands find their way through new audiences and culture. We operate as part of the Czarnowski Collective — a full-service brand experience agency whose homegrown studios include:

• Czarnowski, Event and Exhibit Studio
• Public School, Creative Studio
• Assembly, Temporary Structures Studio

We offer Brand Strategy & Planning, Creative Design & Production, and Talent & Influencer Management. We do all this to create Branding, Integrated Campaigns, Experiential Engagements & Sponsorship Activities.

The Director of FP&A – Public School is the senior finance leader embedded in the Public School studio and the primary financial partner to its leadership team. Reporting to the Head of FP&A, this role owns the studio's forecast, annual operating plan, and long-range outlook, and is accountable for the analytical rigor behind how Public School prices work, staffs it, delivers it, and makes money on it.

This is a business-partnering role first and a reporting role second. You are expected to be in the room for pitch pricing, resourcing debates, and client profitability conversations — not just to publish the variance report afterward.

• Own the division P&L forecast. Lead the annual operating plan, quarterly reforecasts, and rolling monthly outlook for Public School, consolidating agency services and production revenue into a single, defensible view.
• Build the revenue bridge. Model booked, contracted, pipeline-weighted, and at-risk revenue; translate the new-business pipeline into a resourced, deliverable forecast rather than a wish list.
• Drive the long-range plan. Develop multi-year scenarios that reflect client concentration, category mix, headcount investment, and capability expansion.
• Manage cost and headcount planning. Own the studio's labor model, contractor and freelance spend, overhead allocations, and capital requests.
• Run scenario and sensitivity analysis. Quantify the financial impact of a lost account, a delayed activation, a rate change, or a step-up in headcount before leadership has to commit.
• Own utilization and realization reporting. Track billable versus non-billable hours, target versus actual utilization by discipline and by person, and realization against rate card.
• Support pricing and rate card strategy. Partner with studio and account leadership on rate card construction, blended-rate pricing, retainer sizing, and scope-to-fee alignment.
• Analyze client and account profitability. Produce recurring client-level P&Ls covering fee revenue, pass-throughs, direct labor, and allocated overhead; surface accounts that are structurally unprofitable and recommend remedies.
• Evaluate new business. Model the margin and resourcing implications of major pitches and RFPs, and provide a clear go/no-go financial point of view.
• Monitor staffing efficiency. Connect resourcing decisions to financial outcomes — freelance versus full-time, seniority mix, and capacity against the forward pipeline.

• Own job costing discipline. Ensure estimates, budgets, and actuals reconcile at the job level across creative, fabrication, logistics, and on-site execution.
• Manage work-in-process and revenue recognition. Partner with Accounting on percentage-of-completion, WIP schedules, accrual accuracy, and revenue timing across multi-period activations.
• Enforce change-order and scope-creep controls. Build the reporting and cadence that catches unbilled scope before the job closes, not after.
• Lead post-project reviews. Run structured estimate-versus-actual reviews on major projects, identify the root causes of margin erosion, and feed those findings back into future estimating.
• Track…