VP, Finance (Audience Engagement)

Hybrid work: Employees work in a hybrid model, balancing collaboration in our office and remote work.

Overview

Find a job that lets your imagination run wild! WildBrain is made up of a team of innovators and creators who bring industry-leading kids’ content and brands to families globally. We inspire imagination, put creativity first, and believe in the power of storytelling. We are constantly connecting the powers of our global team, making WildBrain a collaborative, openminded and passionate environment to work in.

To work at WildBrain means you get to create stories that let imaginations run wild. Join our team today to become part of the story!

About the Role

Reporting jointly to the CFO and the EVP, Audience Engagement, the VP, Finance will plan, direct, coordinate, and oversee all finance activities in the global Audience Engagement (AE) group, delivering best in class finance partnership to AE’s commercial and marketing businesses across the world. Ranging from working side by side with business leads to drive strategy, to maximising profitability where we work for third party partners, from levelling up financial decision-making across the group, to delivering insightful and high-quality management reporting and processes, this role is pivotal to AE’s and WildBrain’s success. As a result, we are looking for an extremely strong finance leader with demonstrable commercial acumen, excellent situational analysis and top tier problem solving capability. We are looking for an all-rounder who is as comfortable with driving margin and free cash flow as they are with stakeholder reporting and revenue recognition criteria.

What You’ll Do:

Strategy and Commercial-related

• Working with management to create short- and long-range budgets and forecasts that yield high quality engagement, profit, and free cash flow for AE and the wider WildBrain business.
• Continually assessing, alongside leadership, underlying profitability in all parts of the business, be it content investment decisions, channel management relationships, or FAST channels
• Partnering management in winning new profitable business in YouTube channel management, FAST channels and Media Solutions to drive growth and margin.
• Reviewing all content investment requests coming out of AE to ensure they are consistent with our strategy.

Accounting and Reporting-related

• Create efficient, best in class financial reporting, KPIs/analytics, and communication with AE’s management team and WildBrain’s corporate teams.
• Leading and managing the month and quarter end close processes for the respective business lines (content distribution, YouTube distribution, FAST channels, Media Solutions, other distribution, marketing) and internal management and group reporting, so that AE management are always informed on performance, opportunities and threats.
• Manage all group reporting so that the WildBrain corporate team has timely, accurate information and insightful analysis of the performance of the business unit.
• Partnering with local and/or shared service teams, ensure that transactional accounting, purchase to pay and order to cash processes are working effectively to allow accurately and timely reporting and strong working capital management
• Problem solving and continually improving processes that feed our reporting and decision marking.

FP&A related

• Leading and managing all FP&A processes for AE and its business lines, ensuring that these processes are ultimately most useful in driving managed and consistent growth in the AE business unit.
• Lead all long-range planning processes, so that we can understand prospects, investment needs and returns in this area of the business.

General

• Being the primary point of contact for all finance related questions in respect of AE from within the segment and outside, in respect of performance, process improvements, cross charging, tax, opportunities and risks
• Driving a culture of curiosity and continuous improvement with the AE finance teams
• Creating bench strength and depth of talent in AE
• In partnership with finance colleagues across the group, driving finance process improvement, automation, and consistency globally, with a drive to reduce finance friction for both finance and non-finance colleagues.
• Working closely with VP, Finance roles in Content Creation and Global Licensing to ensure that the symbiose nature of our business is reflected in how we analyse and respond to financial risks and opportunities.     

What You’ll Bring:  

• The ability and desire to consistently demonstrate the value of finance business partnership and demystifying finance concepts so that decision-making across the AE group is upskilled.
• Strong analytical skills, technical accounting skills, and business understanding
• Experience in nimble, high-growth organizations.
• A high sense of urgency & the ability to build & lead strong teams to achieve new levels of performance.
• The ability to operate to zoom between 30,000ft and 3ft as and when the situation demands; the ability to quickly move from high-level conversations into detailed operational discussions to drive business execution.
• Huge curiosity about where our audiences watch and engagement with our brands, and the financial models that underpin those experiences.
• Able to engage and partner with senior stakeholders, anticipating questions and needs.
• Data driven with the ability to master complex business problems.
• Excellent project management skills with a proven ability to design and implement a strategy that drives business results.
• Experience in content distribution is desirable.

What We Offer

Working at WildBrain is more than a job — it’s the opportunity to join forces with extraordinary, insightful, and imaginative people who will recognize your talents and encourage your professional growth and development in a work environment that promotes creativity and individuality. We offer competitive benefits, and we invest in our people and their future.

Our Commitment

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion are in our DNA. As a global leader in kids and family entertainment, we strive to reflect and honour the diversity of our audiences around the world. We believe that creating diverse and inclusive content & brands begins with fostering a culture of belonging at WildBrain. To us, a culture of belonging is one where we celebrate and welcome the diversity of all employees, stakeholders, and external partners and strive to create an environment where every individual feels valued, respected, and brings their authentic self to work.

We demonstrate our commitment to this by striving to provide a supportive work environment and a corporate culture that welcomes and encourages equal opportunities for all employees. We recognize that people bring experience and talent that goes beyond the technical skills and requirements of a job. If you possess similar experience that is close to what we’ve listed here, we encourage you to please still consider applying. We strongly believe that diverse experience, transferable skills, and passion are key! WildBrain accommodates people with disabilities throughout the recruitment and selection process. Applicants are encouraged to make their needs known in advance if accommodation is required.

About WildBrain 

At WildBrain we inspire imaginations through the wonder of storytelling. A leader in 360° franchise management—spanning Content Creation, Audience Engagement and Global Licensing—our mission is to cultivate and grow love for our own and partner brands through exceptional entertainment experiences. Home to such franchises as Peanuts, Teletubbies, Strawberry Shortcake, Yo Gabba Gabba!, Inspector Gadget and Degrassi, we produce such acclaimed series as The Snoopy Show, Snoopy in Space, Camp Snoopy, Teletubbies Let’s Go!, Yo Gabba GabbaLand!, Sonic Prime and Strawberry Shortcake: Berry in the Big City. With a library of approximately 14,000 half-hours, our shows reach kids and families everywhere, including on our YouTube network, which has generated more than 1.7 trillion minutes of watch time. Our consumer products licensing arm, WildBrain CPLG, represents our own and partner brands in every major territory worldwide.

Headquartered in Toronto, WildBrain trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX: WILD). Visit us at wildbrain.com.