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

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
• Infusion, Digital & Visualization Studio
• Assembly, Temporary Structures Studio

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 deliberately a two-sided role. On the agency side, you will manage the financial accountability of utilization, billable rates, staffing plans, retainer and project revenue recognition, and the economics of creative and strategy labor. On the production side, you will oversee job costing, work-in-process, project margin, change-order discipline, and post-project profitability review. Success means the studio's leaders make faster, better-informed decisions — on which pitches to chase, how to resource them, and where margin is actually created or lost.

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…