Manager Financial Performance & Value Creation (m/w/d)

Role Summary

Tax consultancies calculate backwards. They know exactly what happened last year and surprisingly little about which mandate, which performance and which employee will earn money tomorrow.

Vogel is one of the most successful medium-sized consulting companies in Germany - several thousand medium-sized companies entrust us with their tax, commercial and strategic issues. Established clients, long experience, strong basis for growth. We grow organically and through acquisitions of additional units. Both generate the same question in two forms: What do our mandates, services and teams actually deserve - and what will follow from this for the next twelve months.

You come from strategy consulting or transaction services — Bain, McKinsey, BCG, Roland Berger, Oliver Wyman or one of the Big Four deal advisory units. You have calculated due diligences, carried out pricing projects or set up result programs. What bothers you: Your longest project ran for a few months and you never saw what happened to your recommendations. You want to redirect when something doesn't work and know what to do differently next time. At Vogel you will find the opposite of this timing - structures that support and a task that does not end when the report is submitted.

You are responsible for financial management from the earnings side: what our mandates, services and teams produce, what the acquired portfolios really earn, and what follows from this for the coming quarters. You don't rebuild the processes yourself - you look at the numbers, see where the profit is, and then go to the people who can change it. Until the effect is reflected in the numbers. You report directly to management; Vogel is owner-managed, Joachim and Moritz Vogel make personal decisions.

What you delivered after 6 months

• You have completely calculated the first inventory - the contribution margin per mandate and per type of service is reliable.
• You have set up the data basis and the evaluation logic on which the interviews are conducted, and the first evaluation is automated.
• You conducted the first fee discussions yourself and drew up the value increase plan for the first takeover.

What you delivered after 12 months

• You have carried out the first wave of adjustments across the portfolio and proven the fee level achieved.
• The contribution margin calculation for service types and teams is running and is actually used in management decisions.
• You present a sales and earnings forecast, the deviations of which you can explain - and from which measures follow.

What you delivered after 24 months

• You oversaw several takeovers, and the later ones demonstrably went better than the first.
• The control is largely automated; your part has shifted from preparation to interpretation and conversation.
• You are the contact person in the company when it comes to the question of what a mandate, a service or a team really deserves.

Where the position is developing

The next step is to manage this function with your own team (management career) - this requires that the management is in place and the results are proven over several portfolios, not just additional years of work. If you prefer technical depth, the path to a senior expert role remains open (IC career).

Responsibilities

YOUR RESPONSIBILITY

Increase in value through acquisition

1. Develop the value enhancement plan on the financial side for each takeover: fee level, service level, responsibilities and employee structure - which levers, in what order, with what expected result and at what point in time it must be visible. The process and automation side of day-to-day business lies with Operations, not you.
2. Follow this plan over years, not over a hundred days - and deliver the actual figures that show what has been achieved from the assessment assumptions. Your benchmark: The third takeover goes better than the first because you did both.
3. Work in several integrations at the same time that are of different levels - while the first one is still in the middle of implementation, the next one comes with a different client structure and different people.

Profitability and productivity

1. Examine the stocks based on the real data from ongoing accounting - mandate size, service receipt, fee level, contribution margin - and make visible what is being tacitly provided today and not billed.
2. Record and evaluate productivity on both sides: for each type of service, which contributes its contribution margin and which is cross-subsidized, and for each employee, where value is created per hour worked and where not.
3. Recognize from the same data where clients need services that they do not currently receive - define the signals for this and make them discoverable automatically instead of waiting for the feeling of the individual consultant.
4. Derive immediate measures from each finding - fee level, service specification, task distribution, automation. Your benchmark: no analysis without a named measure, named person responsible and named date.

Enforcement and action control

1. Conduct the fee discussions yourself - with the professional at your side or alone. Those who count also speak. And also say the unpleasant cases: Not every mandate has a path to profitability.
2. Go directly to the people responsible at the locations with your numbers - what their mandates and their teams are producing, where earnings are remaining, what specifically needs to change.
3. Develop action plans for each client and employee and track them: with those responsible, dates and a result that can be found in the numbers. You persevere, even when it becomes uncomfortable.
4. Maintain ongoing communication with management and management - what works, what doesn't, and where the applicable price or productivity rule fails in each individual case.

Predictive control

1. Responsible for sales and earnings forecasting, budgets, scenarios and variance analysis across all locations, including newly added units.
2. Automate what you build.

Your benchmark: no evaluation that someone puts together by hand every month, and no number that only looks backwards - every key figure must carry a decision over the next twelve months.

1. Make performance visible without turning it into a control instrument. Vogel is hierarchical in decision-making, flat in communication, autonomous in execution. Achievement is celebrated, not hidden — your numbers serve this culture, not replace it.
2. If the function grows beyond one person, you build the team yourself - hiring, guidance, professional standards.

WHAT YOU WON'T FIND WITH US

1. No reporting job documenting the past. There is no month-end commentary without consequence here. Every number you build must carry a decision.
2. No corporate strategy department producing slides for others. You write analyzes that will be spoken to the next day - by you.
3. No investment team where you sit in Excel for two years. You calculate, but you don't give the result. If this roll became the Excel roll, it would be cut incorrectly.
4. No authority to direct the people whose productivity you increase. The professionals and teams you work with do not report to you. Anyone who solves resistance through hierarchy will not get very far here.
5. No exit from consulting into a 45-hour week. The intensity remains high. Directed differently, with significantly more ownership — but not less.

FAQ

1. WHAT IS BIRD — AND WHERE DO YOU WORK?

Vogel is one of Germany's leading medium-sized business consultancies - a family business since 1959, based in Aalen - and is building the leading consulting platform for medium-sized businesses. We are growing at several locations: in Aalen/East Württemberg as an established headquarters and in Munich as a new hub. In both, we look across functions — from tax advice to consulting to the strategic teams that build the platform.

1. HOW TO UNDERSTAND THE SALARY BANDS?

Deliberately wide - and identified at every point. We differentiate based on track record and market value, not on degree: scarce, highly sought-after profiles at the top end, less scarce ones at the bottom. We calibrate exclusively to the market - two people with similar experience can earn different things with us.

1. HOW MUCH — AND HOW — DOES VOGEL WORK?

It's measured by what you move, not by hours. But it's also honest: If you're looking for 9-to-5, we're not the first place to go. We are looking for people who work intensively on their own initiative because the tasks are worth it. How you distribute your time is largely up to you. What we share: We work together face-to-face - culture, sparring and the best ideas arise in daily proximity. We are not a remote company and do not have major home office policies; Individual remote days are no problem.

1. HOW DOES THE APPLICATION PROCESS?

Slim, fast, transparent — and graded according to profile. For entry-level roles (internship, work study, career entry), two interviews and a short work sample are usually sufficient; experienced roles are a little more detailed. For selected senior roles, we are looking into incorporating a joint working day in the future so that both sides get to know each other better. The following always applies: scheduled deadlines, quick decisions, substantial feedback - regardless of the outcome.

1. HOW DOES VARIABLE PAY WORK?

Linked to performance on a quarterly basis and assessed qualitatively. The scale increases with the level: up to 20% Associate, 27.5% Manager, 35% Senior Manager, 42.5% Director, 50% VP. Expected value with good performance - you meet the requirements, set your own accents, pass the keeper test - is around 50% of the maximum; the maximum bonus is not the norm. The focus is on a holistic assessment by your manager: ownership, quality, learning curve, collaboration, impact.

1. HOW DO I DEVELOP MYSELF - WHAT CAREER PATHS ARE THERE?

Two active paths: Mastery (technical depth, expert career) and Pioneer (leadership, management). You choose the direction after onboarding, usually in years 1-3. Starting a career is not a special path, but rather the early part of the same route - from working student or intern to associate, for the best ones without having to reapply.

1. TEAM, CULTURE, HOLIDAY?

A shared lunch is an open daily option - not an obligation; If you like, you can join us; anyone can eat at any time. Plus dinners, social events and offsites on a regular basis - not as a mandatory program, but because a good team also shares time outside of work. Benefits: thoughtful and substantial, not symbolic. Vacation: 28 days.

1. I KNOW SOMEONE - IS THERE A REFERRAL BONUS?

Yes — EUR 2,500 for each successfully filled position (no internships). A short context is enough: who you are thinking about, for what role, why. Doesn't have to fit perfectly, but has to be substantial.

Requirements

THIS IS WHAT YOU BRING WITH YOU

Experience & track record

• You have worked in strategy consulting, transaction services or in a value creation team — commercial due diligence, pricing, improving results.
• You have calculated profitability at the customer, product or service level and presented the results to decision-makers, not just prepared them.
• You have worked on post-acquisition value creation or results programs and know how such a plan is created. The fact that you haven't completed it yourself yet isn't an exclusion - that's exactly the task here.
• You have had conversations that were about money or performance and stand your ground when contradicted.
• Profiles that do not fit into the above grid, but have an impact on income calculation and price enforcement in medium-sized businesses, are expressly invited - we evaluate on the contribution, not on the label. The range shown is not a room for negotiation, but a profile scale; the upper end represents the scope of the subject area responsible and the ability to move people without the authority to give instructions. The range shown is based on the primary profile. Anyone who brings a different background starts at a different market price and converges to the role level after twelve months of proven performance - the logic behind this is in our compensation principles https://www.vogel-beratung.com/culture/verg%C3%BCtungsgrunds%C3%A4tze.

Skills & way of working

• You master Excel beyond pivot tables - contribution margin models, scenarios, resilient data architecture on unclean source data. SQL or Python are not an addition, but the way to avoid having to build the same evaluation by hand twice.
• You read an accounting book without being a tax advisor and find the place where the service is not included in the invoice.
• You work with AI as a natural tool for data analysis, pattern recognition in inventory data and drafting. Repetitive tasks are an incentive for you to automate, not a fate.

Mindset & personality

• You move people without the authority to give instructions - over a calculation that no one can dispute and over a tone that does not generate resistance in the first place. You step on people's toes without it feeling like it.
• You have the humility to learn from practitioners. The professional with a client relationship of twenty years knows things about his client that are not included in any model.
• You have a natural aversion to inaccuracy — reliable decisions are not made on unreliable numbers.
• You aspire to set the highest standard in everything you deliver — not because someone controls it, but because mediocrity bothers you personally.