Paul Trowbridge

FP&A & Finance Transformation Leader
Stow, Ohio • 330.819.3826 • paul.hptrow@gmail.com • hptrow.me• PDF

Summary

FP&A leader with 19 years in manufacturing finance, across publicly traded and private-equity-owned businesses. Owns the full planning cycle — annual operating plans, rolling forecasts, integrated three-statement forecasts, and the business partnering that turns numbers into decisions — and builds the data infrastructure beneath it. Has stood up pricing functions, automated consolidation across ERP systems, and analytics platforms from scratch, and developed internal talent to sustain them — using AI coding tools to deliver capability that would otherwise require a BI team, a cloud platform, and outside consultants.

Key Results

• 65% price-based revenue growth over three years — built the pricing function, governance, and analytics that let the business convert market-wide supply scarcity into realized margin (under Wingate Partners ownership).
• ~10-point lift in quote-to-order conversion — deployed an algorithmic pricing module in the CPQ process; post-rollout conversion ran ~48% versus ~29–30% in comparable prior-year periods.
• ~1 day faster reporting after close — automated consolidation across two ERP systems and 13 trial balances, with financials and variance analysis ready the day the ledger closes.
• Enterprise FP&A for a $250M manufacturer — lead annual planning, rolling forecasting, three-statement forecasts, business-case evaluation, and the lender MD&A for executive management and the PE sponsor.

Core Competencies

Annual Operating Planning • Rolling Forecasts • Integrated 3-Statement Forecasting • Pricing Strategy • Lender MD&A • PE / Sponsor Reporting • Financial Consolidation • Variance & Margin Analysis • Business Partnering • Data Infrastructure (SQL, dbt, Power BI)

Professional Experience

Growscape

Twinsburg, OH | ~$250M manufacturer of horticultural containers | Platinum Equity portfolio company

Progressed through five roles across multiple ownership transitions: Myers Lawn & Garden (a division of publicly traded Myers Industries), acquisition by Wingate Partners in 2015, and acquisition by Platinum Equity in 2023.

Director of Financial Planning & Analysis — Dec 2025 – Present

• Led a full annual operating plan cycle end to end — SKU-level sales plan and account-level P&L through a complete three-statement forecast, with balance sheet and cash flow tied to projected revolver balance and availability.
• Built an automated consolidation platform spanning two ERP systems and 13 trial balances — mapping statement hierarchies, an off-line add-back ledger, and account-level forecasts into a single refreshable model delivering prior / plan / actual and variance views on demand; financials are ready the day the ledger closes, cutting roughly a day from each close cycle, and the platform is the precursor to in-sourcing a consultant-run reporting package. (Java data connector, dbt modeling, Dagster orchestration.)
• Developed a self-service forecasting tool that lets the commercial team build volume and standard-margin forecasts with pre-built bridges; produced the company’s current 3+9 forecast on it.
• Built a consolidated net-working-capital roll-forward across ERP systems to forecast and track cash and NWC initiatives; now rebuilding the forecast so it reconciles to treasury’s 13-week cash flow.
• Developed segment-level P&L reporting through database modeling to isolate performance by business segment.
• Authored OpCo performance narrative and board / sponsor presentation content, and the MD&A for lender reporting.
• Built new-business pro-forma models to evaluate commercial opportunities and help leadership accept, reject, or renegotiate proposals.
• Runs variance reporting and analysis with AI agents (Claude Code) working directly against the governed warehouse, so commentary uses the same metric definitions as the reports.
• Developed two team members from non-finance backgrounds into capable pricing and finance support roles, so the systems don’t depend on one person.

Director of Special Projects & Pricing — Sep 2024 – Dec 2025

• Developed pricing strategy balancing profitability, competitor positioning, volume opportunities, and product features.
• Programmed and deployed a pricing module inside custom CPQ software, operationalizing strategy for fast, accurate field execution; quote-to-order conversion ran ~48% post-rollout versus ~29–30% in comparable prior-year periods — roughly a 10-point improvement in win rate.
• Built a Power BI quotes-and-orders dashboard used daily by the sales team.
• Directed two pricing analysts across large customer programs, quote reviews, and price-list management.

Corporate Pricing Manager — Apr 2019 – Aug 2024

• Built and led the company’s first dedicated pricing function — strategy, processes, and governance from inception.
• Established the pricing infrastructure and discipline behind 65% price-based revenue growth over three years, converting supply-constrained conditions into realized margin through consistent, data-backed execution.
• Pioneered Power BI adoption company-wide; built a sales data store and analytics hub with rolling forecasts synchronized to live financial statements.
• Contributed to a web-based quoting tool enabling real-time pricing-scenario modeling for the sales team.
• Built an enhanced production dataset and MRP environment to analyze cost and price changes against multi-year history.

Cost Manager — Aug 2015 – Apr 2019

• Led a full accounting-system conversion: designed the chart of accounts, configured functionality, set balances, and managed cutover.
• Managed accounting for a complex business combination (mixed share and asset sale), including the opening balance sheet and historical balance preservation.
• Implemented transfer pricing and intercompany accounting; built an automated financial consolidation across USD and CAD entities.
• Developed real-time financial-statement logic that became the primary finance data source company-wide.
• Owned reconciliation of all key balance-sheet accounts; built forecasting tools translating income-statement forecasts into full balance-sheet and cash-flow projections.

Cost Analyst — Aug 2012 – Aug 2015

• Maintained standard costs and period-end standard-cost processing; supported the accounting-system conversion and standard-cost implementation.
• Provided inventory and account accuracy through reconciliations and physical inventories; built ad-hoc reporting and analytics across departments.

PPG Industries

Barberton, OH | $1.5B optical & specialty chemicals division (NYSE: PPG)

Cost Analyst — May 2010 – Aug 2012

• Maintained standard costs and period-end processing; coordinated and consolidated the annual operating plan at plant level.
• Supported conversion from a legacy COBOL system to SAP; built streamlined reporting via mainframe data extraction and custom product-structure explosion tools.

Masco Cabinetry

Waverly, OH | $1B division of Masco Corp. (NYSE: MAS)

Cost Analyst — Apr 2007 – May 2010

• Compiled annual budgets and monthly forecasts for a $250M manufacturing site; developed standard labor and overhead burden rates and explained variances.
• Designed a customized BOM-explosion program and cost environment; built efficient reporting from ultra-large databases (billions of records).

Education

Bachelor of Science in Accounting — The University of Akron, 2006

Technical & Infrastructure

• Finance data warehouse: PostgreSQL, layered dbt models (staging → core → marts) consolidating two ERPs (Epicor CMS and Microsoft Dynamics GP), with automated tests that tie sales, GL and EBITDA across layers; Dagster orchestration and a custom Java connector.
• AI-ready query layer: governed metric catalog and read-only DuckDB export of the warehouse, so agents answer from the same definitions as the reports; the warehouse itself was built with Claude Code.
• Applications: self-service forecasting web app (Node, React) with versioned scenarios and audit trail; dynamic pricing engine (PostgreSQL, SQL Server) behind the CPQ quoting tool.
• Reporting: Power BI end to end, including data models; VBA tooling for chart-of-accounts maintenance.
• Databases: PostgreSQL, SQL Server, Db2 | ERPs: Epicor CMS, Microsoft Dynamics GP, SAP.