The One Question That Changed Everything

Jennifer Garcia, RGP’s Finance Transformation Practice Leader, remembers the call clearly. A new client, a private-equity-owned insurance manager preparing for an eventual public offering, had reached out through an RGP Board connection and asked for a first meeting with RGP. What they needed seemed straightforward: they wanted to know if they should replace their general ledger. It was the kind of question that, in many firms, would have generated a scoping document and a proposal within the week.

Jen did something different. She said, “Hold on. Before you undo this massive investment and get the entire organization aligned behind it, let’s talk through why you think you need to replace it?”

The clients, a CEO and CFO, came back to Jen with answers; by digging into the root causes of their frustrations what they found, Jen recalls, was not a ledger problem at all. The real issues were broken and extensively manual processes, and a severe lack of unified data. “The GL was just a symptom,” she says. “It was representing a symptom of those challenges.”

Over the course of multiple calls and in-person meetings spanning several months, Jen helped the client reframe the problem entirely. Rather than a general ledger replacement, what they needed was a comprehensive process reengineering effort across their entire finance organization. The scope, once mapped, was huge: nearly fifty process areas touching finance, accounting, regulatory reporting, insurance, reinsurance, and data governance.

It would have been easy, Jen acknowledges, to simply take the original brief and run with it. “It would have been easy for me to say, yes, let’s do a ledger assessment and charge them for that.” But she didn’t think it was the right answer, and more importantly, she didn’t think it would serve the client. The client had a long road ahead of them. They wanted to go public in three to four years. They needed a partner who was thinking about their entire journey, not a consulting firm looking for a quick close.

This client had previously worked with another global consulting firm, and they’d grown frustrated. According to Jen, the client felt they were receiving the same playbook delivered to large, complex enterprises, applied now to a small private company that simply wasn’t there yet. “It almost felt like it was this playbook that they had produced time and time again for clients,” Jen says, “and they were now giving it to a small private-equity-owned insurance manager.”

The contrast in approach became tangible quickly. Where the other consulting firm had recommended expensive, sophisticated FP&A applications, Garcia offered to have someone on the RGP side audit the client’s existing planning workbook—a spreadsheet model that was prone to breaking—and then build them a twelve-week rolling forecast model from scratch. It was practical. It was right-sized. And it was exactly what a two-person FP&A team actually needed. “For us, we were willing to do the extra work because we didn’t feel they needed a super complicated, sophisticated system.”

Once the scope for the process of reengineering of the finance function was defined, Jen began assembling what would become a genuinely cross-functional team; a real-world demonstration of what “One RGP” can look like in practice. She worked in close partnership with Nick Joseph on the sales side to help build credibility with the client from the start. As the engagement deepened and new challenges surfaced, the team expanded organically.

When the work uncovered a need for additional project management support, RGP’s talent team provided PMOs on a flexible, temporary basis. allowing the client to scale the project team without committing to permanent headcount. When the process work revealed that the data challenges ran far upstream—there was no data governance strategy, no data dictionary, no unified nomenclature across functions—a dedicated data governance and strategy workstream was stood up. And when the work called for a controls and compliance lens, RGP’s Risk practice stepped in to assess the processes from a SOC perspective, identifying gaps the client didn’t know they had.

At its peak, the engagement involved 12 people across four distinct workstreams, all reporting ultimately into the office of the CEO and CFO. The engagement ran for nine months.

The philosophy of meeting the client where they were turned out to be the foundation of everything. Trust was built through demonstrated judgment. Through willingness to slow down and ask the harder question. Through the credibility that comes from putting the client’s interests ahead of a quick billing opportunity.