Jacobs: FP&A should calibrate manager forecasts against their historical accuracy
Brad Jacobs · The Mindset Behind Building a Great Little Business | Brad Jacobs · Aug 4, 2026 · at 1:18:59
Serial entrepreneur Brad Jacobs explains how FP&A teams filter out executive sandbagging and overconfidence when building realistic corporate forecasts.
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“The FP&A people are really good at figuring out who's sandbagging, and who's exaggerated? By that, what I mean by that is you have some managers who just do their personalities or for whatever reason, or maybe they're playing games with their bonus. They want to lower expectations. So they come out looking like heroes. Well, that's not good because we want to know the real likely outcome so we can plan around that. On the other hand, you have some people who are overly self-confident, and they think this is definitely going to happen, and I'm going to grow this, but if you look at their history, if you look over the last three years, they've missed their predictions by three to five percent, like, pretty much every year, so they're going to discount them based on the past predicting their future likelihood of succeeding”
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