Cars.com is a leading online destination that helps car shoppers and owners navigate every turn of car ownership. A pioneer in automotive classifieds, the company has evolved into one of the largest digital automotive platforms, guiding over 15 million consumers a month. It is an important and exciting time in our history as became an independent, publicly-traded company last year. And although we have grown to one of the largest and most established tech companies in Chicago, our culture still remains very entrepreneurial, with a focus on innovation, creativity, and being an incubator for strong talent. We are looking for a passionate, collaborative, forward thinking VP, Financial Planning & Analysis to join us as we grow and thrive in the next stage of our evolution.

The Vice President, Financial Planning & Analysis is accountable for partnering with business and functional to positively influencing business outcomes. This role will collaborate with senior leadership to develop financial strategies and drive the execution of strategies into actionable/measurable business plans. The position is responsible for providing overall finance leadership and P&L accountability for Cars.com. This position requires strong partnership with comprehensive business management, strategy, communication, and business acumen along with attributes of high energy, integrity, accountability, change agility and professionalism.

Responsibilities include:

Business Partnership

• Partner across all functional areas to develop and execute appropriate initiatives to achieve revenue and profit goals and to identify opportunities and mitigation strategies to achieve and/or exceed objectives.
• Provide decision support and develop business cases for business partners, including product profitability, marketing initiatives, margin analytics and others.
• Partner with accounting team to ensure consistency of communications and reporting in actual and projected financial results and metrics.

Financial Acumen, Goal Development, Execution

• Analyze risks and opportunities to drive actions and decisions to meet plan goals.
• Provide financial leadership, training and guidance to build financial acumen to improve business results and business decision making skills.
• Own the forecasting process and use it as a means to drive business decisions that deliver on our financial commitments.
• Effectively present business results and plan performance to leadership and others, providing insights and analysis of performance drivers.
• Lead development and implementation of appropriate analytical tools and data to drive improved growth and margin improvement. Highly analytic.
• Partner to develop, analyze, prioritize and execute upon capital deployment plans in support of the annual and strategic plans.
• Post-implementation business case tracking and reporting to ensure associated benefits are recognized as a result of the investment.
• Analyze key performance metrics to maximize operating income, revenue growth, cash flow and ROIC.

Leadership and Talent

• Provide strategic direction and personal leadership, management and oversight of the finance team.
• Manage and develop staff, build bench strength and promote talent across the organization. Deliver exceptional coaching and mentoring, to assure talent development and engagement.
• Develop and lead an effective finance organization that enables new process development and on-going support.
• Compliance
• Maintain and support a robust and effective internal control environment.
• Provide the controller function support and improve upon the quality and effectiveness of internal controls through implementation of policies and procedures and development of the business culture and processes. Effectively manage / eliminate control deficiencies.
• Maintain financial policies, practices and procedures, including provision of effective controls and audit capabilities to ensure conformance to generally accepted accounting principles and Sarbanes Oxley.

Required Skills

• Ability to serve as a senior business partner and advisor, influence across the organization on business issues and drive change to make business more effective. Demonstrated capability in linking business strategy to financial performance.
• Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills. Ability to translate data and financial information into strategies to drive business results.
• Proven experience in managing teams including providing direction, understanding resource capability and successfully driving results through direct reports and other business partners.

Required Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Accounting or Finance.
• Extensive experience (at least 15+ years) in the financial analysis, business planning and/or analytics function. Experience in digital business model preferred.