Business Controller

About the role

The Business Controller serves as a strategic partner to business leadership and focuses on driving profitability through performance analysis, financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting across North America (US, Canada, Mexico).

Responsibilities

• Track results against targets, isolate root cause, identify trends, and recommend actions to improve profitability and efficiency.
• Engage directly with operational teams to understand the business events, decisions, and market dynamics driving performance gaps.
• Prepare timely, accurate business and financial reports and ensure adherence to standards.
• Translate variance findings into clear, forward-thinking narratives that inform management decisions and shape the next planning cycle.
• Design and deliver management reporting that goes beyond status updates - focused on insight, implication, and recommend action.
• Analyze gross margins, product profitability, and operational costs to identify improvement opportunities.
• Design, track, and monitor KPIs across business units; question whether the metrics being tracked are the correct metrics.
• Proactively investigate anomalies, trends, and outliers in financial data and bring findings to relevant stakeholders with context and recommendations.
• Collaborate with executives and functional leaders to support strategic initiatives, evaluate risks/opportunities, and guide business decisions.
• Participate actively in business reviews, strategy sessions, and investment decisions, contributing financial analysis and a critical perspective.
• Identify and mitigate financial risks to support organizational stability.
• Direct budgeting, forecasting, and financial modeling to support strategic initiatives and investment decisions.
• Identify recurring patterns in plan-vs.-actual deviations and challenge the planning assumptions or processes that produce them.
• Maintain a continuous feedback loop between actuals and plans, ensuring that what the business learns from results is systemically reflected in future forecasts and budgets.

Qualifications & Skills

• Bachelor’s degree in Accounting, Finance, Economics, or Business; MBA or CPA preferred.
• 5+ years’ experience in FP&A, modeling, planning, budgeting, and forecasting in a business/manufacturing context.
• Ability to interpret complex data and translate insights into actionable recommendations.
• Demonstrated ability to independently investigate financial results, identify root causes, and communicate findings persuasively to senior stakeholders.
• Strong financial modeling skills and advanced Excel proficiency; experience with BI and reporting tools (e.g., Power BI, Tableau, Cognos, or similar).
• Strong knowledge of accounting principles and ERP systems.
• Proven ability to communicate clearly and collaborate effectively with senior leaders and promote financial discipline across teams.
• Strong analytical thinking, business acumen, and influence skills.
• Willingness to travel within the U.S., Canada, and Mexico as required.

Key Competencies

• Intellectual Curiosity — instinctively digs below the surface; not satisfied until the real story behind the numbers is understood.
• Self-Driven & Proactive — sets their own agenda, anticipates what needs to be done, and follows through without needing to be prompted.
• Analytical Rigor — structured, hypothesis-driven approach to problem-solving; comfortable with ambiguity and able to build logic from incomplete information.
• Bridge-Builder — able to connect financial outcomes to operational realities, and translate between the language of finance and the language of the business.
• Communication & Storytelling — turns complex analysis into a clear, compelling narrative that drives decisions.
• Stakeholder Confidence — earns trust with senior leadership through consistency, candor, and depth of understanding.
• Continuous Improvement Mindset — always looking for a better way, whether in analysis techniques, tools, or processes.

How to Apply

Visit our Career Center at http://www.formica.com/en/careers. Formica Corporation is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer (M/F/Disability/Veterans).