FP&A Today: Recent Episodes
Paul Barnhurst
FP&A Today is the podcast for Financial Planning and Analysis. The weekly show dives into the challenges and opportunities within the world of FP&A, interviewing FP&A leaders, CFOs and other finance pros in order to give you the freshest insights and takeaways. Each week our top guests provide actionable advice about financial planning and analysis – from career goals to navigating challenges, and powerful Excel tips.
Our weekly show provides unrivalled insights for navigating FP&A.
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models. Get in touch at www.datarails.com
After two years in the host's chair, Glenn Hopper passes FP&A Today to its new host, Sarah Schlott: a 20-year FP&A leader. The two swap stories on their unlikely paths into finance (including Glenn's forgotten 2006 indie film ), then dig into what's next for the show: more curiosity, more challenging of FP&A's "sacred cows".
Glenn's new book: The AI-Ready CFO: A Strategic Guide to Evaluating and Implementing AI, Automation, and Analytics https://www.amazon.com/AI-Ready-CFO-Evaluating-Implementing-Automation/dp/1394415885
Two recommended follows for AI content
https://www.youtube.com/@AIDailyBrief
https://www.youtube.com/ @matthew_berman
Colin Moss worked for more than 10 years at Mars, which produces some of the world's best-loved brands including Royal Canin, M&M’s and Snickers. In this role, he partnered with the global Finance leadership team to design to stand up the new FinTech function, strengthening the connection between Finance and IT and leading a portfolio of 40+ initiatives, establishing resource and financial management disciplines (before that he was at famed confectionary maker Cadbury). In 2025 he took the leap to set up his own business, CM Strategies working with organisations navigating growth and complexity, helping them redesign how the finance department partners with the business and builds capability .
His message about the function of FP&A is resonant and powerful:
“One of the ways that I've seen it described is that your business, and leadership team is, is the “head”, and FP&A is the “neck” because FP&A is showing that team where to look. In this context, FP&A is helping what's the context we're operating in? What's the strategy that we're executing against? And what does that mean for where we focus? What do we put our attention on? And that can be showing up in what KPIs we look at, but also what processes we need to improve.?”
In this episode
- Path to creation of my own business (in a “hard to leave” business)
- Early audit roles as the foundation of my career
- My early lessons about business partnership at Cadbury and Mars
- Lessons from global finance transformation at Mars including KPI design and management reporting
- Power of judgement in FP&A
Find out more about CM Strategies at www.cmstrategies.co.uk
We take a deep dive into the finances behind the agricultural and food beverage sector with Brad Mooney, Director of FP&A at California Dairies. FP&A drives success at California Dairies which produces 40 percent of California’s milk (300 family-owned and operated members ship 17billion pounds of high quality milk annually) and is a manufacturer of quality butter, fluid milk products, and milk powders (including Challenge and Danish Creamery and milk powder brand, DairyAmerica). In this episode former Marine Corps turned FP&A leader Brad Mooney talks:
- Building the plane as we flew it building FP&A
- The metrics of “Timing yield and supply” at California Dairies
- The Four Ps in finance building
- Effectiveness of planning and forecasting in a supply-driven business
- My view of FP&A Development
- FP&A as therapist
In our first FP&A Today episode to cover the shipping, ports and haulage sector, we look at the FP&A powering Peel Ports Group, the second largest port operator in the UK, which manages the vital gateways powering the UK. Alex Roche has built the FP&A team at Peels Ports, based in Liverpool, England, which generates £800M spread across 10 divisions. The group has invested over £1.5 billion over the past decade in advanced logistics, cranes, warehouses, and terminal upgrades. Highlights of his nearly decade time at Peel Ports include Co-building the Group's FP&A function for a £400m-EBITDA multi-site, and developing formal evaluation models for two major commercial deals totalling £100m+, enabling better-informed investment decisions and a £7.5m increase in realised deal value
In this episode:
- The importance of volume in ports and how KPIs revolve around the metric
- M&A at Peels Port and setting up the FP&A team and building models
- FP&A recommendations around vertical integration with a new haulage business
- The power of teaching others coming up in finance and accounting
- Why Simon Sinek was right and FP&A should start with why
- Board on Peace Brigades International UK as a finance trustee
- Two favorite Excel functions
Dan Newman
heads FP&A at RingCentral, a $2.5B public SaaS company (a platform for business phone, SMS, contact center, workforce engagement management, video collaboration, and messaging) , where he has overseen a period of 10X growth. Discussing a career comprising consulting, being a financial analyst at Salesforce, private-equity-backed startups, Dan discusses building financial models towards a sale, navigating the shift from 30% growth to efficiency, and AI processes.
In this episode
- Building the FP&A team at SchoolMessenger and pivoting to a sale
- Joining RingCentral at a $250m run rate and a six-person FP&A team towards $2.5billion
- Why revenue is rarely as simple as it looks
- Business partnering in an age of efficiency in SaaS
Caroline McAuliffe is Senior Vice President, Head of Corporate Finance (FP&A and Procurement) at Fannie Mae. In its Q1 2026 results, the government-owned mortgage giant boasted 33 consecutive quarters of profitability and $3.7B in net income in the quarter—delivered by a team of 7,000 employees. In this episode Caroline reveals the FP&A mindset and processes behind this success.
- The career progression from audit to controllership, and FP&A
- Combining procurement and FP&A
- Shifting from an annual budget cycle to a 2-year rolling forecast
- How AI is transforming repetitive low value work including AI “flash reports needed supporting 50 officers at Fannie Mae
- Secrets to being a CTA (Challenging Trusted Advisor) at Fannie Mae
In the third in our series on finance business partnering we are joined by David Manela, who has had the role of CRO and CMO at Fiverr, Ideei, and Vivre. As managing partner and co-founder of Violet Growth he is in high-demand at some of the hottest scaling companies, designing a growth operating system that “speaks the CFO’s language from day one”. It is tailored to companies spending more than $10m annually on marketing and sales - with digital as the main growth channel.
“Spending a dollar in marketing is no different than spending a dollar in infrastructure, on say a forklift that you might need for your warehouse. You need a return on a specific schedule, and you need a percentage of returns on that schedule. Don't start with a campaign, start with a financial goal.”
In this episode on the highlights and lowlights of the FP&A relationship with marketing, David talks:
- His background from audit to marketing and P&L responsibility at companies
- Marketing as an “investment” not a “cost”
- The power of getting a marketing forecast based on cohort behavior
- Payback period and capital constraints at Fiverr
- Disconnected and expensive mistakes in business partnering
- The power of AI in marketing and finance
Swati Bagri, head of FP&A for a major global FMCG company was told early in her career: “Either you are sales or you are helping sales”. In this second in our series of finance business partnership Swati, representing finance, is joined by Stephanie Troy, VP of Sales at Datarails, for a candid conversation with host Glenn Hopper about what sales leaders actually need from FP&A, and what great revenue-producing partnerships look like.
In this special episode:
- The dynamics of sales vs finance needs
- Pipeline communication challenges
- The problems with forecasting
- Where lack of communication hurts sales and finance
- What finance needs from sales leaders in budget season
- Dealing with the Office of No
Today on the show, we're launching a special series on finance business partnering - exploring different facets of modern finance business partnering. Today’s special guest is Tunc Tezel VP group FP&A, Ontax, bringing 30-years of lessons from Ontex, Pladis, British American Tobacco, Procter & Gamble, and Gillette - business partnering with marketing, sales, and operations to reach common goals and bringing some of the most popular CPG products to market.
- From “spy” to “strategist” in business partnering
- Secrets to storytelling
- Embedded vs. centralised FP&A business partnering
- Working capital as a partnering tool
- Breaking bad news in business partnering
- When business partnering breaks down
Tom Hinkle, senior leader in data and analytics at TIAA, has built his career at the intersection of finance, technology, and strategy. He also has a budding YouTube channel (Tom's Data World, which includes instructional videos on Excel, SQL, and AI). He's worked extensively with Excel (is a Microsoft MVP) and SQL, as well as Tableau and Power BI, and has worked with major financial institutions, including Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and TIAA.
"Nobody really gets excited about spending money on data governance. They get excited about machine learning, about AI, about data storytelling — everybody wants seminars on that. But data governance? At the end of the day, you're coming up with something you thought was right anyway, and then you're asking someone to spend more money just to make sure it's right."
- Why data governance is the foundation of AI
- Trust but verify challenges
- The two sides of data governance: master data management vs. data quality and controls
- How FP&A teams should think about their role as downstream consumers of data
- Why domain expertise is still non-negotiable in the age of vibe coding
- Tom's Minesweeper-in-Excel story, and what it taught him about prompting
What does it actually take to move FP&A activities into a shared service organization at Coca-Cola— and then transform how a global marketing giant manages billions in spend? Sébastien Privel, Senior Director Financial Services FP&A, has done both.
Sébastien Privel career spans pharma controllership in late-'90s Beijing to country CFO for France, being involved in the implementation Coca-Cola's global FP&A shared services from scratch, before leading a multi-year marketing finance transformation
In this episode
Building finance infrastructure from scratch in 1990s China — from rice paper ledgers to SAP, with floppy disks in between.
Business partnering and being the finance voice in multi functions projects (including Coca-Cola buying Tropico an iconic French brand)
Driving transformation in the FP&A area standardizing processes and moving key activities to a shared service organisation
Experimenting with AI including baseline forecasting and the real impact
Cindy Vindasius is the founder and CEO of Vindasius Advisory, and former Corporate Controller, and has spent more than 30 years helping high growth and enterprise companies build scalable finance systems. She's led more than a dozen ERP implementations across platforms like NetSuite, SAP, and Oracle, and has supported multiple IPOs, M&A transactions, and global compliance efforts. Her interview provides a wealth of information for FP&A professionals
- Why FP&A need to be involved in ERP implementation for enhanced reporting
- New wave of AI-driven ERPs: what I really think
- The ROI of an ERP Implementation
ERP Mastery Program 6 video course: https://www.vindasius.com/mastery-program
Mykola is Finance Business Partner at Merlin Entertainments – offering some of the most popular attractions in the world including LEGOLAND Resorts, Thorpe Park and Alton Towers. Merlin welcomes more than 62 million guests annually to its diverse global estate in over 20 countries. Before Merlin, Mykola spent several years as a finance director at a fast-growing law firm, where the business tripled in size in just a few years.
In this episode:
- Finance in a law firm - getting from technical finance to business partnering
- Reducing risk as the Ukraine war started
- The business of Merlin Entertainment - from forecasting to cost control
- Working with procurement on validation of costs
- key metrics including attendance, guest spends and promotion
- The power of business partnering: consistency, curiosity and understanding your business
Adam Hibbs has pretty non-linear paths into finance:New Zealand telecom regulator, OfCom, Vodafone, Cable & Wireless, UK Ministry of Defense, and now Global Director of Commercial Strategy at AICPA & CIMA. Financial modeling, commercial contracts, cloud infrastructure, and leadership across blue-chip organizations was preparation for building Josie, that is AICPA & CIMA's generative AI tool for accounting and auditing.
In this episode:
- What makes Josie genuinely different from ChatGPT or Claude for technical accounting work
- Curated dataset of 40,000 pieces of proprietary IP, real-time updates to FASB, PCAOB, and auditing standards
- Josie ($550 per subscriber) named after Josiah Wedgwood and a new form of cost accounting
- CGMA vs CPA
- Where AI and finance intersect in the next 12-24 months
Emily Feinstone is an accounting manager at Eventus Advisory Group and unusually tech-forward in how she works. Emily spends her days building better processes, automating repetitive finance workflows, and making high volume operational data usable. And instead of opting for a traditional CPA first route after 20 years of experience, she is pursuing a degree in data science: “ I want to be the one that teaches the AI and not the one that is replaced by AI. I want to be the one that knows how to use it the best to my advantage.”
Emily also talks about accounting vs FP&A: You don't even see overhead. It's allocated…but you don't know that it took me two, two and a half hours to prepare that entry and another two hours to key it in.”
In this episode:
- Blurring of lines between data analysts and accountants
- The future of the accounting profession in an AI era
- Transforming an Excel based invoice and commission process
- Keeping raceability and controls + automation
- Why I wont trust AI to do my accounting journal entries
The history-making USA Hockey won golds (and millions of fans in the process) at Milan’s Olympic Games. But behind the on-ice glory is a $75 million organization with a finance function as disciplined as its players. Kelly Mahncke , CFO of USA Hockey, joins Glenn Hopper and FP&A Today to pull back the curtain on what it takes to fund the gold-winning national hockey program — with business interests from memberships and sponsorships to restaurants and insurance. Kelly traces her own journey from center ice to chasing the bottom line, explaining how a hockey career shaped her instincts as a finance leader. She walks us through four-year "quad budgets" and the typical annual cycle, and what it took to weather COVID's financial shock, from cash management to the logistical nightmare of paused travel programs. She also gets into the digital transformation underway at USA Hockey. And why she believes curiosity is the defining trait of great FP&A professionals. Catch this fascinating look at finance leadership — at the peak of Hockey USA's Olympic moment.
Sahil Kamani, is a Berlin-based senior finance leader and FP&A professional at Ellie (Volkswagen Group), Starting at a credit rating agency in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis — inspired, fittingly, by a fascination with the documentary Inside Job — Sahil moved through regulation, capital markets, and an MBA before pivoting into operational finance
In this episode:
- Being the person handing out credit ratings
- Cash burn and the KPIs that matter most in a turnaround
- What bankers and regulators instinctively look for
- How the CFO you work influences your storytelling
- Being CFO of Berlin's fastest-growing pickleball club.
Sahil R Kamani on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/sahilrkamani/
John Glasgow, is the founder, CEO and CFO of Campfire AI native ERP with more than $100m in funding, built to help high growth companies close faster, get richer visibility from their accounting data, and scale. John brings his insights as an operator who has spent time in FP&A and strategic finance, including at Adobe and an executive at Invoice To Go, leading that finance company to a $625 million sale to bill.com. Campfire came out of firsthand frustration with legacy ERPs and a need to rebuild the general ledger for the AI era.
In this episode:
- My years in FP&A and strategic finance at Adobe before becoming a founder
- CFA Certification
- Invoice to Go acquisition what I learned
- The frustration and origin story of frustration and why Campfire was set up
- Why building our own AI model makes sense
Key quote: “If you slap AI on top of an ERP with summarized revenue data, then you’re essentially gonna get no insights that are of any value.”
Marko Horvat has been a public accountant, Controller, head of FP&A and CFO, as well as VP in Gartner's research and advisory practice, specializing in topics most relevant to CFOs and finance transformation.
In this episode he talks:
- Interplay IT and CISO and organizational politics (“if it runs on electricity, it’s ours”)
CFO skillsets gap - Real change in CFO’s Office with AI (audit pattern recognition to forecasting)
- Last mile transformation in finance
- Mindset, skillset, toolset transformation
- Treating forecast as in perpetual beta
- The power of the subtotal function
Recommended books:
There's Got to Be a Better Way: How to Deliver Results and Get Rid of the Stuff That Gets in the Way of Real Work
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Troy Anderson is CFO of Kelly Services, a staffing solutions provider to various industries, who has spent his career driving transformation across some of the most complex business environments. Before joining Kelly, he served as CFO at Universal Technical Institute, where he helped double revenue over five years through a mix of organic growth and strategic acquisitions. Earlier in his career, he held senior finance leadership roles at Conduent, a $6billion player (bought by Xerox).
- Conduent life cycle a $6b public company acquired by Xerox
- Investor relations at Xerox as a game-changer for my career
- Making finance a partner across the value chain
- Business Process Outsourcing vs AI
- The need for a deep understanding of your business
Catch the full transcript below
Stephen Hedlund is head of finance at Rillet, an AI-native ERP which has raised over $100million from Sequoia and Andreessen Horowitz. In Steven’s words Rillet is “building the modern NetSuite.”
In this episode:
- How Isaac Asimov’s Foundation helped me discover finance
- Experience from enterprise at Walmart to building startups
- Go-to-market (marketing) to Head of Finance Gillet
- The moat for leading ERPs and our strategy
- Being the ICP and marketing voice for Rillet
“To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
Eddie Reynolds, CEO of UnionSquare Consulting, opens up about the often-fraught relationship between CFOs and CROs. Eddie shares insights from his unique journey—from banking and private equity to being an account executive at Salesforce which forecast within 5% accuracy despite 30%+ growth.
The conversation tackles the critical disconnect between finance and go-to-market teams: Why do CFOs struggle to trust CRM pipelines? What breaks when companies hit $50-100M in revenue?
In this episode:
- How Salesforce was able to forecast with 5% accuracy,
- The role of FP&A and CROs in go to market strategy and efficiency
- The issues with LTV to CAC ratio in SaaS
- Biggest challenges of the CFO/CRO relationship
- Bottoms up annual planning working with finance
Bobby Bray brings his perspective from more than 20 years in banking and consulting with Capital One, Oliver Wyman, and Regions Bank. The retired Navy Captain with four commands talks about strategic decision-making under pressure, working with Fortune 150 C-Suite executives, and the rigor required in FP&A.
He says: “To use an aviation term you need to be able to follow the drop of gas through the engine and understand the different cogs in the engine that turns a drop of gas into thrust, but it also is what turns raw data into usable analytics on the back end.”
In this episode
- A Truly Non-Traditional Path to Finance
- Commercial banking as the most educational finance job
- Discipline and rigor in FP&A
- Cloud infrastructure changes in the past 7 years
- The rigor of a capital market stress test
- Explainability of AI in finance
Five-time CFO Rick Smith has led finance at companies including inVentiv Health Communications, Exos, Parchment, Solera Health before founding Bonfire advisory. He is also the author o fDemystifying the Role of the CFO in Venture and Growth Stage Companies, a no-nonsense approach to the topic. Reviews for the book include: “This book is a must-read if you want to understand how to scale a company as a CFO” and “Should be required reading for CEOs and PE people along with CFOs.”
In this episode Smith provides his take on being a CFO and his long background in FP&A, providing insights on:
- The path from FP&A to CFO (without a CPA)
- Why I like being CFO at SMBs (sub $50m)
- Being a dreamer, artist and buildingFP&A
- Audits vs QOEs
- The unspoken challenges working with PE firms
- FP&A and M&A – what you need to know
Link to the book: Demystifying the Role of the CFO in Venture and Growth Stage Companies
Preston Naegle started his career in private equity at Leavitt Equity Partners (founded by Michael Leavitt, the former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. Negale then moved into the operating world and for more than 2 years has led strategic finance and FP&A at a PE-backed Midway Mechanical Services in the HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) industry at the company which has completed 15 acquisitions (3 in 2025 alone) within the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing sector across the Western US region.
In this episode
- An origin story in Private Equity
- Learning from a “firehose” of business models
- Bringing PE thinking to a head of finance role at Midway Mechanical
- Bringing people with you as you create FP&A, budget and forecasting processes
- Choosing an FP&A solution
- Enhancing time to insights that bring long-term business partnering and profit growth
Glenn reconnects with Adam Shilton—who reveals the highs and lows of more than a decade selling to finance teams and what 134 deals in 36 months taught him about CFO challenges. The founder, writer, and speaker has now launched his own venture focused on helping entrepreneurs and solo business owners.
- My Experience selling finance software including SAP
- Bridging the Sales-Finance Divide: Why pipeline forecasts are inherently “fluffy”
- The Deposit Game-Changer: Why commission should only be paid on receipt of deposit, not just signature
- Finance coaching sales on overdue invoices
AI and AR automation - AI Agents workflows
What does it take to be the finance leader behind Hollywood stories? Diya Sagar, CFO of AWA Studios, which produces critically acclaimed, original stories for comics, TV, and movies, joins Glenn Hopper to reveal how she manages the money behind the magic—from funding graphic novels that may not pay off for years to navigating the unpredictable world of graphic novels, film and TV deals.
- How a “creator-first” approach shows up in budgets
- Building a Hits-Driven Portfolio
- The Ultimate Model: From Page to Screen Economics
- The 2-4 year timeline
- What Boards Really Want in a creative industry
With more than 20 years of experience helping startups scale from seed to series B, Maria Azatyan has built architectures for companies across ai, robotics and the new space economy, translating complex technologies into numbers. This is coupled with her frank perspective as a single mother balancing finance leadership and advising startups.
- Sci-fi Dreams Made Real: sharing experiences with Waymo
- Setting up ArmGate, empowering entrepreneurs
- One month to “two minutes” using AI to work with data
- Case study: AI to Automate ERA Filings for Venture Funds
- Role as ex-CFO at DocDoc.ru whose exit was ranked one of Russia’s top five IT & Digital M&A deals.
- Problems with cash flow to 45% year-over-year revenue growth
- Biggest startup challenges for finance teams
Joyce Li, CEO, and chief AI strategist at Averanda Partners, brings a rare combination: CFA charter holder, computer science graduate, MBA from Wharton, Board advisor on AI. She advises on multi-billion dollar investment strategies and works with boards and C-suites on AI strategy, governance, and adoption.
- The power of Excel in an AI age
- The ROI of AI and what boards want to see
- 15% as the magic AI productivity number
- Agents and the future of finance
Rohini Jain leads finance strategy at BILL, which delivers strategic finance capabilities in one integrated platform including AP, AR, expenses and procurement. She has more than 20 years of experience shaping and leading finance, product, and operations teams at global fintech, payments, and e-commerce companies including at PayPal, eBay, Walmart and General Electric.
She spoke to us ahead of the earnings release for Bill.com (November 5) which revealed total revenue at $395.7 million, an increase of 10% year-over-year, and core revenue, (subscription and transaction fees) of $358.0 million, an increase of 14% year-over-year. Bill now serves 498,100 businesses as of the end of the first quarter.
In this episode:
- Deciding to choose finance (and disappointing my mother)
- The GE “magic” building the next gen of finance leaders
- Building a diverse skill set in my finance team
- Love for engaging small and medium-sized business
- Challenges and stress of public CFO role
- Building agentic capabilities and finance’s future
- A surprising Excel revelation
The opening voice on a Lyft earnings call is that of Aurelien Nolf, VP, FP&A and Investor Relations at the ride-hailing firm. He holds a dual role managing the 60-person FP&A, finance analysts, and investor team with access to billions of data points looking at the mode, price,drivers, frequency and demand for current offerings– and much-anticipated future services – such as robotaxis. In August 2025, the company saw an 11% increase in revenue to $1.59 billion for the quarter ended June 30. Its profit climbed to $40.3 million from $5 million a year earlier, driven by a rise in ridership and bookings. In this episode Nolf opens the hood into the FP&A processes and opportunities at the San-Francisco-based iconic brand.
In this episode:
- The metrics that matter with billions of data points
- The logic of combining FP&A and investor relations
- Finance hackathons, curiosity and the culture of Lyft
- Operational vs financial metrics driving Lyft’s success
- Using ML in our forecasting, variance analysis, and IR reports
- The challenge of hiring for FP&A in the Bay Area
Chikako Tyler is the Chief Operating Officer at California Bank & Trust (CB&T). She began her career at the leading California bank in 2010, starting as risk manager, progressing tos trategic planning and analysis (spanning seven revenue divisions and 150 units), before serving seven years as Chief Financial Officer revealing . Here she reveals the strategic leadership as the bank grew, from $9 billion to $15 billion in assets, and overcoming challenges from the post global financial crisis to COVID.
In this episode:
- Math academic to commercial real estate
- California Bank and Trust’s stress testing
- Efficiency ratios and operating leverage
- Differences in the path CFO to COO
- Inclusion and leadership in banking
- The most company specific fave Excel function answer
As a fractional CFO and financial advisor, Carl Seidman, a returning guest, has worked with finance teams at some of the world’s most recognized companies, helping them strengthen forecasting, cash flow management, and strategic decision-making. He also teaches several top-rated online courses including the FP&A Mastery Signature Program.
- My first fire-drill, creating a cash flow in one week
- The under $50m revenue opportunity for fractional CFOs
- The power of an advanced (live) FP&A course
- Expectations and reality for AI in your finance career
- The catastrophe if AI gets something wrong
- What I learned about Copilot in Excel developing a LinkedIn course
- The Power of LET
Peter Lynch is the founder of ASimpleModel.com and serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Stephen Gould. He has worked in private equity for most of his professional career at Rabobank, JP Morgan, Argenta Partners and Hilltop Holdings. But he’s perhaps best known for turning complex financial concepts into clear accessible lessons through ASimpleModel.com.
- JP Morgan in Buenos Aires
- Crazy models during the financial crisis
- Capital allocation strategy at Stephen Gould
- How a Simple Model took off
- Most common mistake in building a financial model
- Clarifying private equity
- Incorporating AI into everything I do
Andrew Polito is VP, Controller at Go HQ which provides a suite of back office services, including recruiting to delivery companies. The Fort Worth-based company provides back office support for transportation and logistics, seeing 500% growth in five years, earning a spot on the Inc 5,000 list of fastest- growing private companies in America.
In this episode:
- From audit to shifting to a private company finance team
- Building FP&A from the ground up
- Power of the 13 week cash forecast
- How I introduced automation in an initial two-person finance team
- How our finance tech stack delivers the data and insights to succeed
Mariya Guttoh is Director of FP&A and Treasury at PayJoy, a global FinTech company expanding credit access through smartphones to underserved customers in emerging markets. Celebrating 10 years this year , the company has served over 15 million customers and is on track to reach $650 million in revenue and $110 million in profit by the end of 2025.
In this episode Mariya traces her steps from cosmetic marketing in Ukraine to arriving in the US with $300 and working three jobs while earning her MBA to becoming a finance leader.
- My finance journey working three jobs to pay for my MBA
- Becoming an advocate for AI in finance
Two finance camps– “excited but clueless” and “cautious but clueless” - Using AI to automate vendor reporting across 10 countries
- Identifying high impact AI wins (forecasting)
- My ideal magic FP&A solution
- How I turned myself into a self-created extrovert
- Offset in Excel
Akhil Khunger, VP Quantitative Analytics, Barclays, has more than ten years of experience in the field. Akhil develops statistical models to forecast balance sheets, revenue and probability of default. He has experience with time series modeling, statistical modeling, machine learning and building implementation frameworks using Python and other programming languages. Akhil, who has a master’s in Financial Engineering from UC Berkeley and London School of Economics, has worked in CCAR and Bank of England stress testing and know the Basel III/IV framework, SR 11/7, SR 15-18, and SR 15-19. He also has experience managing junior model developers.
In this episode:
- The worst year for modeling?
- Diving into models
- Working with big datasets
- Getting to the real reasons behind trends and data
- The power of stress testing
- What human judgement can bring to the table
- The AI component in forecasting
Esti Levy Dadon, Executive VP Finance, Fiverr ,started in public accounting at Ernst and Young, before leading the finance function at Fiverrr. Since joining the global marketplace in 2016 she steered the company to a successful IPO in 2019. In her words: “In almost 10 years at Fiverr I’m still waiting for things to be boring and repeatable, but it never happens because things change all the time”
In this episode:
- Building finance from the ground up at Fiverr
- The path to IPO and the financial work required
- Challenge of building a robust forecasting model for a public company
- Creating a finance team to last
- Business partnering process at Fiverr
- Traits for hiring in FP&A at Fiverr
- Mindset FP&A perspective shift to connect you to the business
What do FP&A professionals need to understand about data work and BI and the work that BI is doing? Marcos Bento, Director BI, at Wasabi Technologies: “They need to translate business requests in English in a way that the BI folks can translate that into codes.
That’s where the magic happens.”
In part two of our deep dive with Marcos Bento (BI) and David Suter (FP&A) from Wasabi Technologies, we explore the execution side of their successful data partnership. In this episode:
- Our 130-Iteration Journey: Net retention metric evolution
- Cost per dollar of new ARR (and how settled on it)
- Storytelling across technical and executive audiences
- Lean team compositions (4-person FP&A, 5-person BI)
- Power of the problem solving skillset in our hiring
Wasabi Technologies (a Boston-based cloud storage company with over $530M in funding, a decade of hypergrowth, 450+ team members, and multiple exabytes of storage deployed) sets high standards for its finance and analytics teams. Both teams are under pressure to deliver fast, accurate, and actionable insights. Marcos Bento, Director Business Intelligence at Wasabi Technologies and David Suter, Director, Financial Planning And Analysis at Wasabi Technologies join us for a special two-parter. They delve deep into how their teams work together, across functions to turn raw data into real-time financial intelligence.
In this episode:
- Building and gaining trust between BI and FP&A
- Getting from “10% out” to within a couple percentage points for forecasting
- KPIs such as dollars per terabyte
- BI and FP&A as investigative reporters
- Predictive analytics: forecast in the 6 or 12 months working with sales
- The manifesto for AI at Wasabi
Daniel Gardner is operational finance business partner at FirstGroup Plc, a leading UK-based provider of public transport. Daniel brings a unique perspective shaped by a diverse finance career across iconic consumer brands like L’Oreal, the Body Shop and Hunter Boots, where he led major forecasting overhauls and drove commercial transformation. Now at First Group, he is leading the development of a cloud-based forecasting system for a billion pound division, working with more than 50 stakeholders to deliver scalable real-time insights.
In this episode he talks about the power of “systems thinking” in the CFO’s Office as a way of understanding how different parts of an organization (or any complex system) interconnect and influence each other.”If there’s an area, I’d say that FP&A could do with its systems thinking. Structure makes behavior and behavior makes structure. So it travels in a loop, which means that to make changes in an organization, you either have to hire people who do not exhibit the behaviors naturally or you’ve got to change the structure and alter the incentives that are producing the problems.”
In this episode:
- Bringing my philosophy-training to finance
- Six week finance transformation at Hunter Boots
- Getting from lagging to leading indicators
- 99% of People Problems Are Really System Problems
- Python+ Excel (practical examples)
Sarah Schlott, Senior Director of Finance at Tray, a leading point of sale system in entertainment, joins Glenn Hopper to tear down the sacred rituals of corporate finance. Rising from billing temp to strategic finance leader, Schlott who has been in corporate finance for 18 years, delivers brutal honesty about what’s broken in FP&A and how to fix it. She challenges everything from annual budgets to variance analysis (“forensic accounting in disguise”) while advocating for a bottoms-up, operator-first approach that actually works.
In this episode:
- The power of aggressive curiosity in finance
- My most accurate forecast was also the one that failed
- My views on variance analysis
- Running a $100M forecast in Excel
- Why we shouldn’t treat the annual budget as a “golden idol”
- Moving away from a “spreadsheet guilt trip” every month
- From Singer-Songwriter to Finance Leader
Connect with Sarah Schlott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahschlott/
Connagh Hopkins is Head of Business Planning and Reporting at Western Power, one of Australia’s largest electricity network operators. Connagh shares her fascinating and unconventional journey from working on the global licensing for “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to navigating Australia’s energy transformation.
In this episode:
- Who Wants To be a Millionaire success (powered by Lotus123)
- The Consolidated 10 year plan at Western Power
- Scenario planning and Inflation challenges in utilities
- How we are stacked: 65 person finance team at Western Power
- The power and challenge of AI in finance
Connect with Connagh Hopkins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connagh-hopkins-a9b3871/
Connagh Hopkins is Head of Business Planning and Reporting at Western Power, where she oversees the FP&A function for one of Australia’s largest electricity network operators. With more than two decades of experience across utilities, property development, not-for-profit, retail, fuel, and media sectors in both the UK and Australia, she’s known for her focus on commercial strategy, cross-functional collaboration, and building high-performance finance teams.
Matt Hudson became CFO of Grammarly – the popular writing assistant tool – after the company acquired Coda (a productivity tool)- of which he was a founding member. Now as CFO at Grammarly he is overseeing rapid change at the company which has over 40 million daily active users and $700m in revenue (and a 50 person finance team). Finance is helping pioneer a company vision of AI redefining every business application and workflow, “reinventing productivity”. To this end, in May 2025, Grammarly raised $1 billion in non-dilutive financing from General Catalyst to fund sales and marketing costs and strategic acquisitions. Since then, Grammarly acquired email startup Superhuman (July 2025). You sense more is coming.
In this episode
- Grammarly $1billion non-diluted growth investment explained
- Being a founding member of Coda (acquired by Grammarly)
- How my product expertise plugs into finance
- Joining YouTube when it was around $140million in revenue to $3billion by the time I left ( $36 billion today)
- Will CFOs see an explosion of costs because of AI
- FP&A set up at Grammarly and biggest KPIs
- Bonding over a love of Chili’s
Lauren Pearl is a Business Strategist and CFO Advisor who helps startup teams build data-driven businesses. The 3x founder with over 13 years of startup leadership experience now serves as CFO, advisor, and instructor for over 300 growing companies. She also runs the podcast “Growth Minded CFO” and offers a free course on financial modeling.
In this episode:
- Financial models at startups
- Sniffing out BS at startups
- Storytelling as a pitchdeck
- Getting startups to engage with finance
- Free financial modeling course
- Being a punk band roadie
- Functionality of Excel
Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenepearl/
Daily CFO newsletter: https://www.laurenpearlconsulting.com/newsletter
Today’s guest barely needs an introduction. Purna Duggirala (aka, “Chandoo”) is a celebrity in Excel circles. Since 2004, Chandoo has been regularly sharing everything he learns working with Excel training hundreds of finance teams, and had roles including as Data Lead, Remuneration Modeling & Analytics for the New Zealand government.
The 16-time Microsoft MVP runs Chandoo.org , which aims to “make you awesome in Excel and Power BI” getting 250,000 visitors per month from all over the world and his YouTube channel has 750,000 subscribers. His stated goal is “to make you awesome at Excel and Power BI”, and produces the go-to Excel resources from blog posts and videos to full online courses.
- My Excel Journey and Community building
- Skill gaps in FP&A Teams
- Power BI vs Excel vs Python
- Copilot – advantages and limits
- My favorite Excel function
Check out https://chandoo.org
Chandoo’s Free Data analyst course: https://chandoo.org/wp/free-data-analyst-course/
Connect with Chandoo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/purnaduggirala/
In this special episode Glenn is joined by Nate Saperia to answer the 10 most burning questions in FP&A. Nate brings nearly 20 years of finance experience including at Accordion, Spruce Finance, Hess Corporation and GE. At Saperia Consulting Nate specializes in real-time dashboards, financial planning, and interim CFO/FP&A leadership.
The questions:
Q1: How can I use AI in FP&A?
Q2: What do you think of FP&A solutions?
Q3: How can you get to driver based decision making
Q4: Fastest levers FP&A teams can pull with margin pressures rising?
Q5: How can an FP&A function trust the financial data it’s using when it doesn’t control the data?
Q6: Should the CTO or CFO own the data?
Q7. Skills to get from M&A Financial due diligence to FP&A?
Q8. FP&A Internship, what advice?
Q9. Things I wish I had known earlier in FP&A?
Q10. What’s the future of Excel in FP&A?
Australian-born Luke Mulcahy started in FP&A at larger businesses including Coates Group (internet leader in Sydney) and manufacturing company Sherwin-Williams. But for nearly 4 years he has loved having “wow” moments of finance insights with smaller companies. closer to the $5-10million range, where powerful insights are taken straight from finance to the CFO. In his words: “You can have those moments a lot more frequently with small business owners and just tell them what they’re, what they’re missing, what they haven’t got eyes on.”
In this episode:
- Forecasting energy consumption for a utility company in Australia
- The fear and strategy of becoming a fractional CFO
- The ideal set up for FP&A in small businesses
- Why big companies often have big data problems (and cleaning that data)
- Big FP&A wins in small business
- Solving the date problem in Excel
This special episode formed part of FP&A Con 2025 which saw a record-breaking 1500 registrants.
The guests:
Nathan Bell, Managing Partner, VAi Consulting, is among the most in-demand experts. Bell has unique experience– having started in computer science, before leading finance teams at Native American Bank, Digital Media Trends and Gartner– where he advised hundreds of FP&A teams facing chaotic data situations).
Anna Tioma former CFO of Sandoz and Softeq. Most recently she has pivoted to become a fractional CFO at Blend2Balance.
Anna Yamashita, Solutions Consulting at Data Rails who has worked across SAS finance throughout her career where she helps FP&A teams implement modern performance management solutions.
In this session:
- How AI is being applied in real FP&A workflows today
- Predictive analytics as the gold standard
- Getting to a single version of truth with AI
- ROI in AI
- Mastering Data Management
- Misconceptions about AI in finance and security
- Co-pilot, prompts
- Bonus: Security and AI
This episode is 53 minutes packed with practical Excel insights for an FP&A practitioner and Excel advocate at the top of his game.
Jeff Gudim is a senior financial analyst, Excel evangelist and hardcore financial model architect at Strategic Education, listed on the NASDAQ and which owns for-profit, online Capella University and Strayer University, Jeff made the leap from private wealth management to corporate FP&A, leveraging his financial planning skills and Excel skills rising up as a data-driven problem solver. Jeff leads forecasting and analysis for a hundred million dollars IT function.
In this episode
- Getting from private wealth management to FP&A
- How Excel jumpstarted my career
- My favorite ever Excel model
- Monte Carlo simulations
- 3 time saving tips every FP&A professional needs
- Dynamic arrays and Lambda functions and “fundamental” Excel change
How to convince your team to use advanced Excel
Completely new favorite Excel function or feature
Connect with Jeff Gudim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-gudim-7a994546/
In this masterclass Shifra Isaacs, developer Relations Advocate at Ascend.io, delves into her experience as data scientist, technical writer, and support lead providing fresh insights for FP&A and finance professionals.
In this episode:
- Data science vs business analytics
- Pulling data not yet able to be modeled
- Python for Excel
- The right models for risk scoring, variance analysis and forecasting
- Replicating a process with a new tool using AI
- How can we survive in an AI first world
Connect with Shifra Isaacs on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shifra-isaacs/
Taylor Otstot, Vice President Finance, Dashlane joined GoDaddy (now a $30billion valued) domain registry, domain registrar and web hosting company before their IP. In 8 years he climbed to senior Director of Finance running an FP&A team of 14. From this experience and as VP Finance at DashLane he says he hires for 3 things: curiosity, ambition, and finance leaders who are service-oriented. “If you bring those three things to the table, you're able to wade through a lot of the ambiguity that comes with those decision making processes.”
Also in this episode:
- Finance and FP&A as antidote to the machine of Big 4
- 3- 4 years in audit as the “perfect amount”
- Getting to strategy in FP&A
- Partnership vs accountability as a false choice for FP&A
- Improv comedy having its moment in finance
- The Tarantino approach to finance presentations
Connect with Taylor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorotstot/
Subscribe to CFO Frameworks newsletter on Substack: https://www.cfoframeworks.com/
Dave Sackett is Co-Founder and CFO of ecommerce company, AIOne, and former CFO of semiconductor company, ULVAC Technologies. He is a vocal advocate for blockchain and AI and finance, bringing a blend of tech savvy, operational rigor, and a focus on “servant leadership" - that is putting the needs of the employees first and helping people develop and perform as highly as possible. He's a frequent keynote speaker, a Forbes contributor, and an active member of Financial Executives International.
- Cost accountant to CFO and AI leader
- How I practice servant leadership mindset as a CFO
- Being an introvert CFO leader and overcoming the challenges
- Costly failures of traditional forecasting in FP&A
- Where FP&A Software is going to be in 5 years
- Finance AI use cases
- FP&A as custodians of financial truth in AI age
Connect with Dave Sackett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davesackett/
Derek Paulson is Director of Finance and Performing Marketing at Rad Power Bikes, a Seattle-based e-bike company changing transportation. In this episode he talks about his approach to navigating tariffs (“There no, no word in the English language more scary to a finance professional than the word uncertainty” says Paulson as he discusses required “efficiency” and “flexibility” in their supply chains). He also reveals his approach to the finance transformation required to shift Rad Power from a direct-to-consumer to an e-commerce and retail focused model, that is “starting with a blank Excel sheet to do the modeling for Rad Power Bikes”.
In this episode:
- How Honeywell and PepsiCo are top training grounds for finance leaders
- Efficiency vs flexibility in supply chains
- Is an MBA worth it in finance?
- Data privacy, AI, and finance
- Making the case for SUMIFs
Connect with Derek Paulson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekpaulson/
“The Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) is a non-for-profit with a really simple mission, which makes it really easy for me to wake up and know what I’m doing every day,” says Bryan Lapidus, Director, FP&A Practice at the Association for Financial Professionals. “We exist for the success of the corporate finance and treasury professionals. FPAC, our certified corporate FP&A certification has been in the market for about 11 years now and 5,000 people have earned it in more than 80 countries.”
Returning guest Lapidus joins Glenn Hopper as they discuss the climate for FP&A including:
- Evolution of FP&A and AI
- Certificates vs Certification
- Why business school doesn’t prepare you for FP&A roles
- The impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on changing the CFO role
- Why you need different CFOs at various stages of a company lifecycle
- Why FP&A professionals are so hirable and promotable
- How to become CFO from an FP&A role
Annette DeYoung, Principal Solutions Consultant at Datarails, is an accountant-turned FP&A manufacturing leader. She has deep experience in leading finance teams at manufacturing companies including Berner Food and Beverage, Rockford Products, Fairbanks Morse Engine, and JL Clark. It was at JL Clark, as Director of FP&A, that Annette implemented FP&A Solution, Datarails to mop up inefficiencies and end drain all-late night sessions at the finance department— she liked the product so much she ended up joining the company and has since spoken to more than 1000 FP&A professionals seeking to love FP&A again by removing tedious repetitive processes.
In this episode
- Why I fell in love with manufacturing and finance over my career
- How creativity drew me from accounting to FP&A
- Why a hard-coded accountant attitude was difficult to reconcile with more creative FP&A
- How to create finance business partnerships on the manufacturing floor
- Why I brought Datarails into my finance team at JL Clarke
- The future of Excel in FP&A
- Is finance (finally) making a move with AI?
- The power of getting out of your comfort zone in finance
Connect with Annette on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahdeyoung/
Craig Barry has held senior finance roles at some of the most iconic companies in tech and entertainment, including LinkedIn, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Electronic Arts. At LinkedIn, he led central forecasting, supported more than 10 acquisitions, and played a key role in the company’s integration with Microsoft before becoming Head of FP&A at BioRender- building FP&A from the ground up helping the company scale ARR from $18 million to $50 million. Now Barry is principal consultant at ClearSightIQ.
In this episode
- My winding road to strategic finance
- Junior FP&A Analyst position at Electronic Arts as my first break
- Cost center focus in creative industries at EA with $3b sales
- LucasFilm (pre-Disney) run as a sole proprietorship by George Lucas
- Pixar head of finance for their Canadian operations and production planning
- LinkedIn and focus on “revenue, revenue, revenue”
- FP&A focus on modeling for acquisitions at LinkedIn and “virtual” P&Ls
- Strategy for building out FP&A from scratch at BioRender
- My fractional CFO life
Mike Dion works at a Fortune 100 company. He has previously worked as a finance leader at Verizon-as well as startups and as a mentor to enterprise giants to scrappy startups—unlocking tens of millions of dollars in value across industries like Entertainment and Telecom. He does this through Mike’s F9 Finance: a no nonsense website and newsletter (with 20k subscribers) passing on the skills that have accelerated his career, providing a guide to new tools (based on his experience automating 100,000 hours of labour) and secrets to promotion. He tells Glenn Hopper: “Three things, increasing revenue, decreasing expenses, and making your leaders look good. Those are the three things that move your career, not the reports, not the forecast tools to get to that.”
In this episode
- Passion in media and entertainment
- putting in our first consolidated planning system
- At Verizon starting a center of Excellence (after facing a situation where 40 VPs wanted 30 decks based on Excel files
- Lack of approachable finance content: introducing Mike’s F9 Finanance
- Secrets to dynamic modeling and scenario planning
- 3 Ways teams are getting overwhelmed with forecasts
- Better prompting and my relationship with AI
- A completely new answer for Fave Excel Function
F9 Finance: https://www.f9finance.com/
F9 Finance YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance
FP&A Today goes on the road!. Our host city is Boston and the historic Harvard Club with an audience of Boston CFOs and FP&A leaders. Our first live recording sees an all-star panel of Jack McCullough, CFO Leadership Council, Michael Bayer, CFO of Wasabi Technologies, Cathy Yang, CFO Trexon.
By way of background, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, talked of “remarkably high” levels of economic uncertainty. “I don’t know anyone who has a lot of confidence in their forecast,” he said. FactSet, a financial-data firm, found that over half of the companies in America’s S&P 500 index cited tariffs in their earnings calls—more than in any other time over the past decade.
In this episode we probe how finance executives can navigate today’s complex geopolitical and technological landscape including:
- The ROI of a CFO AI Strategy
- How to navigate as a financial leader with tariffs and trade tensions
- Trexon’s Experience navigating tariffs affecting 12 business units and 16 sites
- Tech and AI’s role in enhancing supply chain visibility
- Pricing increases for customers due to tariffs and navigating that from the CFO’s Office
- Back to work or not for finance teams?
- The future of accounting
Shannon Nash is a chief financial officer, board director, investor, attorney, filmmaker, and CPA. She sits on the boards of Net Scout systems, Lazy Dog restaurants, and Sofi Bank, and most recently was CFO at Wing, the Alphabet-owned drone delivery company, and one of the hottest companies in the US. Here, she reveals the secrets FP&A professionals need to know about presenting to the Board and how to turn numbers into a narrative to advance to CFO and beyond
- Explaining the power of the Board to shape a company’s strategy
- The finance of film-making and my experience making a major new documentary
- The power of FP&A in securing $150 million in funding at Reputation.com
- Presenting to boards -what drives us crazy
- How improv training unexpectedly revolutionized her executive communication style
Connect with Shannon on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonknash
Watch On Board documentary: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/onboardthefilm
CEO and Principal Analyst at Amalgam Insights, Hyoun Park helps CIOs & CFOs create the ROI and strategic business cases for better AI and IT FinOps. He is also host of the weekly podcast, This Week in Enterprise Tech.
In this episode Hyoun discusses some of the quick AI wins for finance departments.
- My journey Starting as a CRM administrator to analyst
- Cloud spend getting out of control (unexpected cloud bills for $20m!)
- AI use cases: invoices, contracts, billing and spending contracts (dealing with 1000 software contracts) and reconciliations
- Agentic AI and uses in Finance
- Zero based budgeting and Forecasting in the AI age
- ROI for AI investment
- People who will lose their jobs in AI in finance vs those who will survive
- My futurist prediction
Connect with Hyoun on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hyounpark/
Host of weekly podcast, This week in Enterprise Tech: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034
http://www.amalgaminsights.com/
With nearly 300k subscribers on YouTube, Bill Hanna’s weekly videos on The Financial Controller Channels provide his audience with lessons over a 15-year career in Auditing & Corporate Accounting. He provides inspiration and practices in accounting and finance through his videos and courses “Designed To Save You Years of Learning” (as one reviewer wrote “I have learnt more with you than 3 years studying accounting and finance”).
In this episode:
- How I stumbled into accounting
- Lessons in accounting leadership
- The power of mentoring teams about mistakes I make
- FP&A vs controller
- The accounting crisis affecting the CFO’s Office
- My accidental influencer journey
- Bringing practical explanation of concepts through one company followed across the course
- The accounting concepts needed to get to CFO
- Having a wife who is also an accountant
- Being a Mac user using Excel
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-hanna-cpa-7653a851/
YouTube channel (Financial Controller) https://www.youtube.com/@TheFinancialController
Courses: https://controller-academy.com/
Today’s guest is perhaps the leading CFO name in data and analytics, the ex-CFO of Tableau and DataRobot. Now as Founder & CEO at Caliper, Fletcher draws on over a decade of executive experience at the intersection of finance and analytics. At Caliper, his mission is transform cloud cost and usage data into actionable insights
In this episode Fletcher discusses
- The relationship between analytics and the CFO
- Subscription, net dollar retention, customer retention, and annual recurring revenue as key metrics
- Getting from CFO to CEO and the learning curve
- How we rely on AI and predictive ML and seasonal patterns to find anomalies
- Getting to base analytics and starting in AI
- Challenges and waste with cloud and holding engineers accountable
- The opportunity to save 30% on cloud spend
- Moving from Excel to Google Sheets
Connect with Damon LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/damon-fletcher-bb8a6614/
https://calipersoftware.ai
Walmart, Kraft Heinz, Blue Rock Therapeutics, and the Four Seasons hotels are just some of companies that regularly invite Ron Monteiro to coach their finance teams in storytelling. But Ron’s success followed decades of fear in presenting and public speaking in FP&A settings. Starting in accounting at Hitachi (“Ron Monteiro: “it was actually the only job I could get”) the CPA and CMA was inspired by a manager who gave him direction and mentorship doing FP&A as Kraft, as well as work over a decade in daily overcoming his debilitating fears. Now he delivers a playbook to teams across the world where finance is “expected to be at the table, not just tactically, but strategically.”Ron is also the author of a new book: Love Mondays which draws on his experience and interviews with finance leaders.
In this episode
- Fear of public speaking I’ve carried through my life
- Kraft Foods and a leap of faith from my manager
- 15 years at Kraft with 7 jobs and five promotions including FP&A manager, analyst and director
- Transforming Kraft FP&A into strategic value: Kraft Singles and “Getting Our Shit Together” meetings
- Brendan Flynn’s leadership of finance at Kraft developing future finance leaders
- The downward trend of FP&A post 3G Capital’s buyout
- CPG and the essential metrics
- Learning what you can do to grow – listening tour as business partnering and putting your hand up
Love Mondays! A Proven Process to Bring Joy Back Into Your Work Week and Life Paperback by Ron Monteiro https://www.amazon.ca/Love-Mondays-Proven-Process-Bring/dp/B0DPMTVYY3
“Consolidation. A lot of people don’t know exactly what it is. They think that it’s just an aggregation of numbers. Like you just add numbers, but it’s more technical than that. Most of the time when we are talking about consolidation, it’s international big groups that have subsidiaries around the world. Consolidation is the process of converting those financial statements normally built locally, because they have to be compliant with the local requirements and be compliant with the GAAP of the group.”
Charaf Bourhalla has been Head of Consolidation at Nestle Skin Health, Vimian Group and Edify Investment Partner. He holds several key certifications, including the FMVA from CFI, ACCA with a focus on IFRS, and the PMP from PMI. His posts on LinkedIn reach millions of people explaining complex topics simply such as IFRS 10 – Consolidated Financial Statements, AS 16 – Property, Plant and Equipment and AS 1 – Presentation of Financial Statements.
In this episode:
- From years of struggle, to Kimberly Clarke as a reporting analyst to entering a pharma company as business controller
- 13-year tenure as a consultant developing a deep understanding of IFRS, USGAAP, French GAAP, and IPSAS,
- 3 Jobs as Head of Consolidation including Nestle Skin Health with 70 subsidiaries around the world
- Simplifying complexities of financial consolidation and non financial KPIs
- Secrets to working with FP&A for consolidation and forecasting and building a mid-term plan
- Continual training for teams in subsidiaries
- Technology and complexity changing the consolidation game
- How Charaf called in when a company found itself consolidating more than 70 legal entities using Excel
- Not to pick consultants with partnerships with only one provider
Connect with Charaf on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charaf-bourhalla-04760a1b/
Grab a beer and listen to this special episode. We are joined by Pavels Cvetkovs FP&A director at Carlsberg Group who reveals the formula of FP&A at the famous brand. Carlsberg was founded in 1847, has 140 brands, and 30,000 employees – and FP&A is core to their success, says Cvetkovs.
In this episode:
- How my career in the Big Four (and audit) served as “finance military school”
- Moving from business controller to FP&A
- The essence of Carlsberg – innovation in brewing and sustainability
- Distinct shareholder structure at Carlsberg run by Carlsberg foundation
- What’s so special about the beer and beverage industry and our FP&A practices
- Power of inventory management, sales seasonality, and supply chain and cost planning in brewing
- Forecasting and planning and achieving highest levels of collaboration
- FP&A set up and management of 10-20 KPIs at Carlsberg
- Business partnering as a mindset at Carlsberg
- Visiting sites in operations at Carlsberg
- Biggest challenges overcome in budget season
- Refining my financial modeling skills
Follow and connect with Pavels on Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavels-cvetkovs-471b231a
Alex Edmans is a professor of Finance, non-executive director, author, and TED speaker. He is regularly interviewed and writes for WSJ, Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and Sky Sports. He was previously a tenured professor at Wharton and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.
In this episode we talk to Alex about his new book “May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About. He is also a co-author of the classic text book, “Principles of Corporate Finance” and top business book (his first book) Grow the Pie, How Great Companies Deliver both purpose and Profit. His Ted Talk on what to trust in a post truth world has alone been viewed nearly 2m time.
So many thought-provoking takeaways for anyone in FP&A!
- Leaving Morgan Stanley to become a professor of finance
- Why I give Ted Talks rather than just publishing research
- How CFOs and FP&A leaders can think about purpose
- Is ESG a tick-box exercise for finance?
- How FP&A and finance leaders can check their biases
- How you can control your addiction to bias
- Silicon Valley Bank and why financial models were affected by bias
Follow Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aedmans/
Links to Alex’s new book:
May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about
TED: What to trust in a “post-truth” world
Over the last 12 years, Jason Hershman led financial planning & analysis at successful, hyper-growth companies in the sports arena.
But his career started as a ballboy at the Philadelphia Eagles. It was a job he spent months pursuing at 14 years old. This experience taught Jason a key lesson. He says: “things that seem out of touch, out of reach are not, it just takes a little hustle, a little effort.”
This attitude has stayed with him as he has led multiple finance teams and embarked on everything from redesigning the chart of accounts, owning the month-end close, building financial models from scratch, raising millions in equity, renegotiated debt, to IPOs.
Finance highlights included leading the $400 million sale of Appetize, a B2B SaaS business in the sports industry (Appetize is the software provider for all of the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL stadiums as well as theme parks such as Six Flags, Disney, and SeaWorld). After this, Jason launched his own fractional CFO business, Point FP&A, providing FP&A to some of the most exciting companies in the sports industry. He has the luxury of turning down clients who are not in the sports world.
In this episode:
- The Philadelphia Eagles as a ballboy for 5 years – things that are out of touch are not
- Learning accounting and FP&A on the job in my first online retail startup in New York – which eventually became public
- Getting hired at sports startup Appetize (B2B SaaS)- combining my passions for sports and finance + getting to exits
- The power of rebuilding a financial model as central to my career
- Going to market as a sports FP&A fractional CFO at Point The ideal balance and differences between accountancy and FP&A
- Secrets to rebuilding the financial model
- Being honest on my journey with AI and FP&A
Connect with Jason on LinkedIn
Check out Point at www.pointfpa.com
Evgenia Elezova, Head of Regional Finance, Lindström joins us to talk about FP&A and finance transformation at the 175-year old textile giant. Helsinki-based Lindström is one of Europe’s leading textile service companies employing over 5000 people in Europe and in Asia with turnover of 496€ million in 2022. Elezova herself has transformed the finance function during 14 years, during which time she’s driven M&A initiatives, to leading finance projects. Highlights include a two year development program for business controllers at Lindström, designed to move finance from back office roles to strategic co-pilots for management.
In this episode:
- Being responsible for M&A Due diligence and integration
- Experience in successful M&A
- Business Partnering at Lindstrom
- Focusing on future scenarios
- HowControl assists strategy at Lindstrom
- Our two-year long finance training Lindstrom Finance Business Development Program
- Moving from back office in finance to having impact on business
- Lindstrom’s approach to budgeting/target setting
- Core KPIs in a global textile company
- Seeing change in controller work
- Coaching finance leaders
Connect with Evgenia at https://www.linkedin.com/in/evgenia-elezova-513ba12/
Jarad Backlund is VP of FP&A at JFrog, a DevOps platform streamlining software development and delivery. In this episode Jarad provides frank insights and lessons from over 18 years of experience in FP&A spanning Apple, Google, and Facebook (as well as at bootstrapped startups). From overseeing multi-billion dollar capital projects to leading finance at cutting edge startups, he reveals his secrets to building top quality FP&A teams, bringing strategic insights and creating a builder mentality.
In this episode:
- My journey from failing as an architectural major to FANG FP&A
- Canned reports vs the ability to create new processes and systems
- Facing an “impossible” project at Facebook/Meta
- The skill needed to win an interview for FP&A at a FANG company
- From Bootstrapped FP&A to billion dollar companies
- Raising the cap on Apple Care Products helping it become a $2billion+ business
- Clean data and analytics
- LLMs contextual awareness and FP&A
- Skills and education in the age of AI
- Becoming a builder in finance
- How VLookUp almost cost me a job
Connect with Jarad Backlund: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaradbacklund/
I speak with Anna Talerico, the CEO of CFI, a powerhouse provider of training and productivity tools for finance and banking professionals (serving 2m finance professionals, offering 5,000 on-demand lessons and 200 courses) including the famous – including the famous Certified Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst (FMVA®) accreditation. She is also CEO of Macabacus, a top enterprise productivity add-in on for finance teams.
In this episode:
- why anyone can be a world class financial analyst
- leveraging technology to democratize education at CFI.
- Giving finance leaders “Desk Ready Skills” from financial modelling to AI cryptocurrency and risk management (and what’s hot right now)
- CFI acquiring Macabacus and the opportunities and challenges of being a dual CEO over 2 companie
- How Excel remains the backbone of finance
- Are you losing sleep over the AI revolution in finance?
- Basics of coding in finance
- Best courses to stay relevant in finance and ride the wave of AI
“I transitioned into FP&A when I realized that it wasn’t just about crunching the numbers, it was more about telling a story and trying to influence the future. Working with Fortune 100 companies has given me the fantastic platform to leave transformative projects in finance, procurement, and supply chain. I saw firsthand how FP&A acts as the strategic backbone of any type of organization”
– Enrique Rodriguez, Finance Director, Walgreens Boots Alliance
Enrique Rodriguez is a multilingual finance director and business leader. With more than 15 years of experience in Fortune 100 companies, he has worked collaboratively with global functions directing FP&A, accounting and treasury teams. He’s headed finance departments overseeing $7 billion in annual spend and managing operational budgets of up to $750 million in billion dollar business units and is a passionate believer in Zero Based Budgeting revealing how he implemented this – despite challenges.
- My background in Guatemala
- When I realized it is not just about crunching the numbers
- FP&A as the backbone of the institution
- Main financial metrics bio biopharmaceutical companies, medical devices, and healthcare companies
- How FP&A departments are set up at the companies you worked for – and the philosophy and the outputs expected from FP&A
- producing outputs like dynamic scenario planning and specific KPI dashboards guiding decisions at the highest level.
- Zero based budgeting – the why and how of our experience
- Biggest challenges I have seen in budgeting in my career – managing budgets during a turnaround
- How finance business partnering has changed in my career
- The problem solving aspect of FP&A
- The opportunities and challenges of fast-growing technology
- Saving $8million on inventory write-off in a country on a health product
- Financial Executives International (Chicago)
- The power of a great mentor and books: Hit Refresh Satya Nadella (Microsoft) and Shoe Dog (Joe Knight)
- supporting a procurement organization in, in an early level of maturity – my toughest challenge
- Index Match – more flexible and scalable for complex analysis
Connect with Enrique Rodriguez on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enrique-a-rodriguez/
Lindsey Martens, VP Finance at fintech company, Valera (Formerly PSCU/Co-op Solutions) talks about her transition from accounting to finance- and how she manages a remote FP&A team that has business partnering and storytelling at its heart. “Business partnering is my favorite thing about FP&A” Martens says, “I love being the translator. I think of myself as taking all this data, accounting data, and then all these other sources that come into it, and I’m packaging it up in a way that is very digestible by the rest of the organization, especially the leaders who are making decisions.”
In this episode:
- Making the pivot to FP&A – why and how
- Starting off in coding and the link to FP&A
- My career at Valera (ex Co-Op solutions)- a fintech leader with clients that are credit unions
- Opps and Challenges of managing a remote FP&A Team
- Small talk at the beginning of meetings (not so small)
- Using rolling forecasts at Valera
- Challenging budget experiences
- Why business partnering is my favorite part of FP&A
- My biggest FP&A success: rooting out the source of at “rise” in profits
- Storytelling in finance
- My biggest mentors and what they taught me about management
- My biggest mistake and how it still leaves me shaking
- Favorite Excel Function
Connect with Lindsey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindseymartens/
In more than 12 years at PepsiCo Tariq Munir, has held roles including FP&A Manager, Head of Integrated Business Planning, Head of Finance Supply Chain, and more recently APAC Finance Transformation Lead (based in Australia) delivering Financial Planning process simplification. This included founding the first-ever APAC Finance Digital Academy to build a digital mindset and culture. Tariq is sought out as an international keynote speaker and is a regular columnist for CFO Magazine ANZ, sharing insights on digital trends, strategies for digital resilience.
In this episode:
• Running digital transformation at large companies
• The opportunities and challenges in your data
• Core problems faced by finance teams including transactions
• The big headache AI is causing for finance teams
• M&A and AI Transformation
• retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and plugging into external data source for your organization
• Framework and governance for digital transformation
Laurynas Zabulis, CFO at Nord Security, is playing a starring role at one of Lithuania’s most famous success stories. Cybersecurity unicorn, Nord Security, went from being bootstrapped to a $3billion valuation in 12 years. Laurynas became CFO after a stint at Surfshark (which merged with NordVPN in 2022). His achievements at NordSecurity include leading the first funding round for $100m – technically a “seed” round he says (unusually the bootstrapped enjoyed revenues of over $100m when it approached investors). Laurynas is also building a purpose-driven finance team of 90 talented people across the department to deliver a “forward looking finance function” that propels growth at the leading startup. Laurynas has set out a powerful mission for FP&A whose vision to “earn respect from stakeholders at the company”, “have a seat at the decision-making table”, and use data and detailed knowledge of growth drivers to “make strategic decisions that drive our business”.
In this episode:
- Moving back to my home country of Lithuania, from London. after success in investment banking (and not listening to those who tried to talk him out of it)
- Battling the “negative connotations” of VPNs when talking to investors and and building conviction around the management and culture of the company
- Bringing finance to strategic decision-making at the company including a CFO tech stack focused on “availability of data and of analytics in a more timely fashion”
- Investing in building finance relations with stakeholders in the company (from engineers to product development)
- Building a finance team of 90 people based on data, tech, and stakeholder engagement
- FP&A analysis powering painful decisions to sunset certain products
- Our FP&A team structure at Nord Security and the results we expect
- Benefit of working with founders and the culture this provides
- The Lithuanian tech ecosystem and finance opportunities
Connect with Laurynas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurynas-zabulis-0206333/
Nate Kaemingk is Chief Forecaster for BetterForecasting.com, where he has built a financial forecasting AI for mid-market finance teams. Previously he has been a Fractional CFO for two Montana based companies. Nate started his career as a mechanical engineer using inferential statistics to model chemical reactions in Diesel engines! Later, during his MBA, he applied an inferential statistics background to forecasting and scenario analysis. Nate has had the opportunity to apply these methods in roles with multiple Fortune 500 companies, including Cummins, and subsequently as CFO and Chief Forecaster at Better Forecasting.
Episode links: www.BetterForecasting.com
Connect with Nate (LinkedIn) https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathankaemingk/
On this episode:
- Probabilistic Forecasting, small (not big data) and inferential statistics
- Rolling Forecasts vs Annual Budgets explained
- Importance of not skipping out on the fact you need to update your plan
- Why are we resistant to changing the budget?
- The advantages of a rolling forecast
- Using Leading Market Indicators
- DSO (Day Sales Outstanding) as a powerful forecasting example
- How long range forecasting reveals structural issues in a business
- Building a driver-based model – and why it’s hard
- Renting an RV and touring the country for 3 years
- Favorite Excel function
In this episode we are joined by Brent Dykes, the bestselling author of Effective Data Storytelling (Wiley, 2020), founder of Analytics Hero, and Forbes contributor. He has helped thousands of finance leaders at companies including Microsoft, IKEA, Nike, Sony, and Pfizer, enhance their data storytelling, visualization, and interpretation skills. “I strive to ensure analytics is always aligned with business priorities and maximizing business value.“
In this episode Brent Dykes says: “One of the things that I saw quickly was that a lot of people struggled to communicate their findings and, and their insights, uh, around data. And I would go to conferences and I’d see people present data, and I’d be horrified by what I’d see. It’s just overwhelming,data dumps. And that really flagged for me in my mind that there’s a real opportunity here to do better.”
- Early college days choosing between marketing vs accounting as my focus
- The aspects of humans that AI and machines can’t replicate
- Business consultant at Adobe for 12 years and Domo
- Effective Data Storytelling
- The evolution of data
- Evolving perspective of finance and analytics
- Value AI vs Humans
- Lessons from coaching and mentoring companies on their story
- Challenges of data storytelling in large and small companies
- The biggest challenges in data storytelling
- What do you do when your story is contradictory to what their bosses want to hear
- Recommendations for tools and systems to up your data maturity
- Why Excel’s a great starting point
https://www.effectivedatastorytelling.com/contact
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentdykes
Effective Data Storytelling (Wiley, 2020)
Anna Tiomina has faced multiple FP&A challenges in a 15-year finance career. This has included budget nightmares, all-nighters, and the stark realization that “politics” is central to any FP&A or finance role.
The former CFO of Sandoz, a huge pharmaceutical company, describes her move to finance chief at Softeq, a smaller IT and consulting firm. Most recently she has pivoted to become a fractional CFO with a passion to help finance professionals bridge the gap between “curiosity and confident AI adoption”. In this honest and frank interview, Anna describes
- The challenges for anyone in a full time finance role when you don’t have enough time to look at new things
- Structuring FP&A in a big company vs a smaller one
- Comparing and contrasting FP&A at a large and big companies
- Budget war stories
- When your key accounting person… is not an accountant
- Ensuring a higher level of agility in budgeting
- Using AI in a safe way in FP&A
Connect with Anna at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-tiomina/
https://blend2balance.com/
Subscribe to her insights at: https://balancedai-newsletter.beehiiv.com/subscribe
Saaya Nath is a partner of Jump Capital, a VC firm specializing in investments in software and infrastructure (their portfolio includes treasury software to products helping companies visualize and understand their cloud bills).
In this episode talks to Glenn about:
- How the CFO’s Office can automate workflows around finance and AI
- The most common complaint talking to finance teams
- Main focus of AI for finance teams we are seeing and rates of adoption
- Spend management, finOps, cloud cost management, and cash flow management opportunities
- How well are SMBs served by the proliferation of CFO Tech stack tools?
- Regulatory challenges in founder pitches
- Ways to begin in a low risk way for AI in finance
- Case study from Glenn on finance automation challenges in a manufacturing finance team
- How Jump Capital chooses the companies and early stages in an era of change vs FOMO and bubbles
- Favorite Excel function
Follow Saaya Nath on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saaya-nath-12ba82a3/overlay/about-this-profile/
Christian Franz Hansen is a seasoned management consultant and finance thought leader. He’s made it his mission to bridge the gap between strategic decision making and data analysis with a background that includes roles at EY and a finance consultant helping big-names including General Motors, Lego Group, and Maersk. He’s now a member of the Business Partnering Institute, where he’s revolutionizing how finance professionals approach their roles.
In this episode:
- From Excel Wizard as a stepping stone to career growth (“ I still love the beauty of a well designed Excel model”)
- From EY to a change-oriented consulting company at Finance Business Partnering Institute
- Top ways to elevate the finance professional
- Partnering, communication, influencing stakeholders, problem solving and understanding the value drivers
- Working with 500 business professionals at Maersk to turn the finance ship around from bean counters to business partners
- Meeting Anders Liu Lindberg and starting the Business Partnering Institute
- Outcomes vs Outputs in finance
- Allocating finance hours to not drown in tasks
- Resistance against our “soft skills” training and how to overcome it in your finance team
- Top down communication
- One piece of advice to make daily finance easier
- PowerQuery in Excel
Connect with Christian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frantzhansen/
Tobias Zwingmann is an ex-Senior Data Scientist-turned managing partner of RAPYD.AI - which is empowering companies from B2B SaaS startups to leading financial institutions towards a unified AI strategy. His data insights are shared in his books including “AI-Powered Business Intelligence” (O’Reilly 2022) and “Augmented Analytics” (Co-author, O‘Reilly 2024) as well as weekly newsletter “The Augmented Advantage” read by 4,500+ business leaders from brands like Amazon, Mercedes-Benz, Gucci, and Santander.
In this episode:
- My rise in data science
- Did the latest changes to Co-Pilot actually make it good?
- What finance can learn from other departments using AI
- Consolidating reports and augmenting processes using AI
- Let’s talk forecasting and analytics and regression analysis
- Leveraging Excel and Power BI to enhance their data analysis capabilities
- Getting to “data progressive” and “data active” in your organization
- Augmented Analytics Explained
- Clean (but not tidy) data in finance
- Two ways to make data tidy in ChatGPT
Connect with Tobias Zwingmann on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tobias-zwingmann
George Mount is an Excel MVP and author of Modern Data Analytics in Excel (he describes it as a guide to becoming a data analyst in Excel). His latest book, Advancing into Analytics: From Excel to Python and R could be subtitled “becoming a data scientist in Excel. As founder and CEO of Stringfest Analytics, he provides analytics education and upskilling including works with finance departments at the top ten banks. In this episode he answers how someone in FP&A – killing it in Excel – can go further in their career while using Excel as home base.
In this episode:
- Two books and the ROI you get as a finance professional from reading it
- Using Excel as your home base for FP&A
- When to use Excel vs Python
- citizen data scientists (or citizen data analysts) in Python
- Using low code/no code tools
- Excel, copilot and Python as a new “trinity” for FP&A
- Getting your data house in order before getting to AI
- A surprising Excel favorite befitting an MVP
Connect with George Mount on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gjmount/
Further Reading
George Mount: Modern Data Analytics in Excel: Using Power Query, Power Pivot, and More for Enhanced Data Analytics
George Mount: Advancing into Analytics: From Excel to Python and R
This year Bruno Oliveira got promoted to CFO, flying up the FP&A route at Swissport, the world’s leader in airport ground services and air cargo handling, active at 286 airports in 60 countries.
In this must-listen episode:
- FP&A in the trenches from banks, to automotive, agriculture and aviation at Swissport
- How to cope without control on demand in aviation
- Financial planning three to six months ahead
- Structure of FP&A at Swissport
- Factoring in safety as the most important aviation metric, direct labor and fleet management costs
- How our FP&A Team works together with our data analytics team
- Cross functional relationships piloting Swissport success
- Walking through the business budget planning at Swissport
- Instead of dreaming of a new technology (such as AI) use the specific blade of a swiss army knife for your business
- Why PowerQuery is mandatory for FP&A
- Getting to fifth place in Latin America in the Financial Modeling World Cup
Follow and connect with Bruno on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bosilva/
Forget “Founder Mode”. For those in FP&A your CFO expects Owner Mode. “In rugby, if you observe, a player often clings on to the ball, not letting it go out of his hands until the goal is scored. That’s how we need to handle things. Own it — cling onto it — achieve the goal,” says former IBM India CFO Ravikumar Ramanan, author of the brilliant book: The CFO Lens, how to Thrive in the Fast Changing World of Finance
He tells Glenn Hopper: “The expectation of a finance partner is not to stop at the sign off and say, okay, I have now committed $10m in company money. You then need to get involved in the execution of the strategy. I changed my role from just being the person who signed off and asked for periodic reports to actually going out into the field and starting to talk and feel like an owner.”
In this masterclass episode Ravikumar reveals
- The Bigger business context we are living through that finance cannot ignore
- The failures when strategy projects are not being tracked by finance
- How to feel really that the results are yours
- Storytelling and influencing secrets from the finance seat
- Good and bad costs
- Balancing short term and long term in your finance role
- My biggest advice for people to succeed in a finance role at any stage of their career
- My favorite Excel Function (even corporate legends get asked)
Further reading
Ravikumar Ramanan: The CFO Lens: How to Thrive in the Fast-Changing World of Finance
Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath:
Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done
“Not having the answer is no longer acceptable because you are 30 seconds from having the answer. You’ve just gotta ask.” – Don Tomoff
Don Tomoff, founder of Invenio Advisors, is a finance rockstar and a trailblazer in AI adoption for finance. As a CMA his life’s mission is to make work easier for literally everyone he encounters. The CMA and finance expert has more than 30 years of experience spanning accounting, being a CFO, and consulting. Don Tomoff is not just an expert in his field including AI. He’s a passionate advocate for using technology to drive efficiency and innovation.
In this episode, Don emphasizes how AI has transformed the speed at which financial professionals can access information and solve problems. “Right now, if you’re doing AI, you have a huge advantage against those that aren’t. But I think in the next year or so, you’re going to quickly shift to, it’s a liability for you if you aren’t doing it.”
In this episode
- Streamling finance tasks as an accountant and FP&A
- Why efficiency is only a part of the finance AI revolution
- Biggest area ripe for AI FP&A Disruption?
- Democratization of data science
- Retrieval augmented generation to analyze hundreds of documents (for instance filings)
- Get the Paid Plan
- TwinzTalk Tips
- Why what hat you can do in two minutes gets done
- Distinctions between OpenAI and Claude
- Finance in five years
- Power Query and UNIQUE
Follow and connect with Don Tomoff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dontomoff/
Skip Katroll is Senior Director, Insights and Analytics at AmPhil. AmPhil helps big-name nonprofits raise more money and advance their missions. This episode is packed with practical and honest insights and takeaways you can apply to your day job. Skip gives the inside story on creating and selling a report at Amphil, "Unlocking the Secrets of Lost Sales Opportunities", and the approach that he followed. Skip also reveals how a background leading finance at top universities alongside math, economics (and a love of sci-fi) informs his FP&A.
Prior to joining AmPhil, Skip was an associate vice provost at Liberty University responsible for the institution’s strategic planning and regulatory compliance.
In this episode:
- My multidisciplinary journey (aka “confused youth”) - studying math, economics, educational leadership and religion (and how it applies to my data insights)
- FP&A business partnering at a University Finance team - navigating functions from the Dean of Arts to the Dean of Engineering
- 3 proven strategies for financial data and analysis getting management to informed decisions
- Countering “so what, and "why am I am here” approaches from business partners
- How to navigate ad hoc requests
When you don’t have enough access to data - The power of benchmarking
- Leading vs lagging indicators
- Unlocking the Secrets of Lost Sales Opportunities - a big impact report and the challenges, impact and approach
- My favorite Excel function
Connect and and ask questions to Skip over on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/skipkastroll/
Further Reading:
Skip Kastroll: Bridging the Gap: Translating Finance Insights for Effective Decision-Making
Laura Bloom started as as a contracts manager for an air cargo company. In a dramatic switch she moved to accounting, then finance and FP&A at top companies including Dotmatics, Salesforce Comcast, and is now senior finance manager at Icertis, a SaaS platform for AI-powered contract intelligence.
In 2023 she founded Impact FP&A specializing in Go-To-Market (GTM) finance strategy for companies. In this episode she reveals the importance of flexibility in her career and joining the dots in your story: “For example, with contracts management, you wouldn’t think that would translate into finance and accounting. However, as part of that role I was working with sales to build the sales bids for new business. I was also working very closely with accounting to give them revenue expectations for commercial contracts and OPEX expenses for our commercial properties.”
In this episode:
- My passion for bringing order from chaos in finance
- Examples from my FP&A including calculating the obsolescence reserve for almost a billion dollars worth of inventory on a biannual basis
- Building a new model and updating assumptions (transforming the process from 6 months to 60 days and releasing $5m back to the balance sheet)
- The importance of data minimalism
- Monte Carlo analysis giving you a wider range of possible outcomes
- Tableau as a data visualization tool and digging into commissions
- Importance of flexibility in a finance and FP&A
- Most important FP&A Skill?
- The ladder of abstraction
- The most vital go-to-market finance metrics
Connect with Laura on LinkedIn or email her at contact@impactfpna.com
Former CFO Daniel Paik, turned founder and CEO of CuroWork is at war on back office functions. He vows to “transform back-office departments from cost centers to profit centers” with FP&A in their sights. He says: “I call the back office the last frontier. We are the only ones not measuring ourselves. Therefore we get crap given to us every single day."
Here are some of the ways that Daniel Paik, a former CFO, fixed the “back office” mentality in finance teams.
- Salespeople at one company said that the hardest part of their job is the 4 hours of entering Excel sheets related to forecasts. After looking at the situation, Paik decided to hire a financial analyst (at $80,000) to take away the pain for salespeople previously diverted away from the selling - bringing in $4m in extra revenue
- Paik discovered and stopped a recurring report that hasn’t been read by the client in three years - giving back up to 5 hours a week to finance for strategic tasks
- By analyzing how a finance professional was performing next to her job description Paik found “she was 140% utilized just on her recurring work” (compared to ad hoc work or project work). “By reallocating a lot of our time to project work we can become a value center or a profit center.”
In this episode:
- ERP SOS! How an 8 month ERP implementation turned into two years
- Moving from individual finance contributor to manager: tips and tricks
- What Peter Drucker actually said about measurement (and why it matters)
- The unmeasured country of Back Office functions
- Managing finance buckets into recurring work, ad hoc work and projects
- How to balance a million finance projects
- The right metrics to measure the finance team
- Average worker only productive up to 4 hours a day and how to get the most of that time
- What is a business for?”
- The real power of a project
- The power of AI in the back office
Connect with Daniel Paik on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielpaik/
CuroWork: https://www.curowork.com/
CFO and Partner, Tyler Caskey loves hunting down and automating manual processes, installing better systems, and redesigning how information is gathered. He adds: “On average I can cut 40% of the time cost out of most finance and payroll teams within 12 months. And with the 40% saved time they can significantly reduce error rates and start to show their true value.”
In this episode Tyler talks to Glenn about some of his experiences working with teams from New Zealand, Australia, the US, UK and Europe.
This episode covers:
- Getting dropped into audit in KPMG New Zealand before discovering a “love for helping messy clients”
- Nonprofits and the finance of Movember getting up to 3000 transactions per day
- How to sell the change of system stack
- SAP vs Xero vs QuickBooks
- Tech upgrades ahead of a liquidity event
- How I have seen PE destroy the culture of the business (and some good experiences)
- Sharing scars and war stories from PE
- My finance horror at a restaurant business and why I walked out
- CFOs and sniff testing the budget
- How we are using AI in finance and budgeting
- My experience being a CFO in the wild recruitment business
- How finance can prepare themselves to make informed tech decisions
- Involving junior team members on projects
- Basketball meditation and wellness
Connect and chat with Tyler on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylercaskey/
Continuing our “Masters of FP&A Data” series, we have the privilege of hosting Brandon Wilson, Founder and CEO of Steady Dynamic. Brandon works with clients from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies giving expertise to those who lack experience building digital solutions. He encourages big ideation, assuming technology can solve any problem, and works to prioritize and constrain scope relative to business objectives. “FP&A has to some degree implemented predictive analytics” he says. “Whether that’s custom or bespoke modeling or just using tools. The next generation is unlocking prescriptive analytics. That is not just presentation or data for the purpose of extracting insights, but insights that come with recommendations and, and the ability to run multiple scenarios. “Real time data acquisition and analytics is also empowering us to do things more on a daily, if not hourly basis, and see things way sooner, uh, from, from an analytics and forecasting perspective.”
In the second week of data-nerding-out we have a treat:
- AI’s transformation of finance and financial modeling
- Predictive analytics to prescriptive analytics
- Moving from cost center to “value add” in finance through the data
- How best to deliver and integrate your data to enhance financial functions
- Studying sentiment analysis in your CRM to investigate pipeline
- Complex models in FP&A including clustering and Naive Bayes
- SQL vs no SQL and FP&A
- The Panama papers
- What the data environment looks like for FP&A in the next two years
- Zero shot prompts and chain of thought prompting
- Reverse engineering to get the best AI finance results
Connect with Brandon Wilson on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bkwilson/
Nicholas Mann, founder and CEO Stratos Consulting, has got the best out of the data for hundreds of companies. He has helped data and analytics leaders go from siloed, heterogeneous data source to a modeled data warehouse and analytics platforms. In this awesome analytics episode he shares some of his experiences:
- Getting companies on their data journey
- The importance of FP&A not just staying in their lane
- Inner workings of how data is impacting the rest of the business
- From deep finance domain expert to understanding the business
- FP&A Data Maturity Assessment
- When Business Grows – how do FP&A teams grow with them?
- Data Stewards and how they work
- Creating a finance and FP&A Center of Excellence
- Why I favor the Snowflake ecosystem
- What you should hire consultants for – and not hire them for when it comes to finance and data strategy
- People in data: change management challenges
- Using AI for variance analysis
- About me: rare eye condition achromatopsia and how I have overcome the limitations
Notes
- fpatoday.scoreapp.com (answer 15 questions to discover where you are in your data data journey)
- https://stratosconsulting.com/
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicholas-mann-80855a1a/
Maria del Dado Alonso Sanchez, an recognized and respected Board Member and Chief Financial Officer for large & mid-cap companies has been a finance leader in sectors including e-commerce, technology, gaming ad tech, and online hospitality. She says: “Each sector really presented its unique financial challenges and strategies.”
Learn invaluable lessons about FP&A from Maria who has served more than 20 years at blue chip companies:
- How I grew as a finance professional at Amazon and the launch of Amazon Prime and Amazon Europe was created
- Acquiring of Booking.com by Priceline
- Azerion growth from 200m Euros to 500m Euros in only two years to IPO and Belin’s Brand Group ended up with a leveraged buyout
- From law to finance and my finance career
- Core KPIs and metrics across diverse businesses
- Getting the “finance footprint” from a CEO before I join
- Flexibility and adaptability in fast-growth companies
- Customer obsession at Amazon vs the 80/20 principle at Booking.com
- My approach to financial modeling
- Levering analysts with historical data at C&A
- Implementing BI tools and justifying the investment
- Why AI in finance is a phenomenal opportunity and my role as Board Member for Women in AI Netherlands
- Kickboxing and karaoke
Connect with Maria del Dado Alonso Sanchez on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariadeldadoalonsosanchez/
Only our second ever returning guest, Christian Wattig, a veteran former leader of FP&A at P&G, Unilever, and Squarespace, reveals new skills he has learnt as he created the recently-launched 8 week Wharton Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) Certificate Program, one of the most comprehensive FP&A training courses on the market. He describes highlights from his career, new strategy, and analysis, and how he sees the future of the profession.
In this episode:
- The common bond between FP&A educators such as Christian and former host Paul Barnhurst and Glenn
- FP&A at multinational consumer goods companies P&G and Unilever
- Startup FP&A vs Big FP&A
- Creating FP&A Prep to the new Wharton (University of Pennsylvania FP&A) 8 week Online Course
- Two great books I recommend The CFO Lens, Ravi Kumar, and Future Ready by Steve Morlidge and Steve Player
- Two Fascinating FP&A Things I hadn’t come across in 14 years previously: Business Driver Tree Analysis + Differences-in-Differences Analysis
- BI, financial analysis and data science vs FP&A
- Building an FP&A Team through four phases explained-data focus, story focus, and proactive value creation
- The importance of FP&A tools and choosing the right one
- Key insights and trends for finance we will see this year
- Practical uses of AI in FP&A
8-WEEK ONLINE COURSE Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) Certificate Program https://wallstreetprep.wharton.upenn.edu/financial-planning-and-analysis-certificate/
Sign up to Christian’s weekly (free) newsletter with tips and practical FP&A advice: fpa prep.com/newsletter
Connect with Christian on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-wattig/
When any finance business partner–a CFO or an FP&A professional–wants their counterpart across the table in marketing, sales or HR, to understand the essentials of numbers, they hand them the business classic, Financial Intelligence, A Manager's Guide to Knowing what the Numbers Really Mean.
First published in 2006, the book has been named in the Top 100 Business Books of all time and remains a word of mouth sensation and continues to sell rapidly nearly two decades on. The classic was authored by former CFO, Joe Knight and Karen Berman. Until her untimely death 10 years ago, Karen, was also a force in engaging all employees in improving a company’s finances
Based on the principles of the book, Joe Knight, Partner and Senior Consultant with the Business Literacy Institute, trains execs at some of the biggest companies in the world including NBCUniversal, Electronic Arts, and McKesson on business partnering and the importance of getting a business to understand and embrace their numbers and works. He has also been a guest on Bob Brinker’s Money Talk show on KABC ratio and CNBC’s Morning Call program.
In addition his engaging keynote addresses, include "The Love affair with EBITDA" and "The Secrets of Finance Revealed". As CFO of Setpoint Companies, he spearheaded the financial education of engineers in this automation and roller coaster company and tells us some of his adventures from this journey and secrets to finance business partnering at the highest level.
In this episode
- The origins of the writing one of the most famous business books
- Why I hated my time in finance at Ford Motor Company and how it shaped my thinking and journey
- Busting the fallacy you shouldn’t share your numbers with your business
- Why actuals are not actual but just a guess (accountants close your ears).
- How business partnering has changed
- The metric of Financial literacy has stayed at 38% in companies for large companies nearly 20 years on
- Why it hurts operators if they don’t understand the numbers
- Focusing on three to five numbers
- My experience with GE and NBC
- The art of using limited data in finance
- Harry Potter roller coasters and what it taught me about the ridiculous focus on EBITDA
- Having seven Kids
- Not being a “numbers” person but a accretive person with numbers
Business Literacy institute: https://www.business-literacy.com/
Contact: mail@business-literacy.com
In this episode Glenn Hopper talks to the researcher responsible for the groundbreaking study which found that AI is better at conducting financial analysis than humans. Alex Kim, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, provides a full overview of his findings, methodology and the impact on FP&A, CFOs and finance from the attention-grabbing study “Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models”. The analysis, which made headlines across the world, found AI produces a 60% rate of accuracy in predictive financial performance. Human experts’ accuracy tends to fall between 53% and 57%.
In this episode Alex Kim reveals the implications for finance professionals:
- Alex’s finance background – from a Master’s degree in Business Administration to a Accounting and a dual Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Business Administration- to his doctoral and PHD career
- How he self taught himself coding and AI
- Practically how do finance pros take the insights from this paper and use them in their day to day?
- Why the model didn’t do so well with loss-making or startup companies
- Improving on the performance models using a startup company data
- How can you combine AI and Human Intelligence
- What humans can do better than AI in financial forecasting
- Future research projects into information processing for investors
- How to keep up to date on the latest ground breaking research in AI and Finance
- My military experience stationed in the US
- My favorite Excel feature ( and why one thing about Excel still cannot be rivaled).
Read the full paper here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4835311
Check out the analyzer for yourself here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-9P3sIn487-financial-statement-analyzer
Follow Alex Kim on Linkedin Ph.D. Student at the University of Chicago: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgunwookim
We received a flood of FP&A and CFO questions from our audience (and FP&A Reddit). These and more are put to this this week’s finance headhunter special guests: Nick Gribbon,Senior Partner, Financial Officers Practice at Essenta, and Laura Streather, Consultant, Private Equity at Essenta, who run the finance headhunting section at the global executive search firm. Hear all the behind the scenes anecdotes and secrets to getting your next big FP&A or CFO job.
Connect with Nick Gribbon, Senior Partner, Financial Officers Practice at Essenta
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-gribbon-37349b1/
Connect with Laura Streather, Consultant, Private Equity at Essenta
https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-streather-451966137/
- Shortage of Exit Private Equity CFOs and what you will need to fill the role
- How to go from Director FP&A of a large public company to CFO of a PE-backed company
- The importance of demonstrating “behavioral competencies of leadership” to pass the first screening
- Getting exposure to the right industry – how important is it?
- Getting to understand where you are going to have most impact in your next role
- How important is the CPA?
- What is the best way to get on headhunters’ radars?
- What the headhunter interview looks like and is designed to accomplish for you and the recruitment firm?
- The importance of referrals and how to play them to your advantage
- How slow is the CFO job market?
- Is being the CFO at a private equity-backed company right for you?
What can candidates add to CVs to stand out? - Salary bands and how to negotiate the most money
- Salary inflation and how that impacts senior role
- Will moving as CFO from a $100m to $1bn company automatically get you a higher salary?
Geetha Ramachandran is an FP&A change agent. She helped transform FP&A operations at GE Healthcare and Cummins (“When I walked into the FP&A at GE Healthcare, and I saw the close was eight days, my approach to things is usually I don’t take things just on face value or just because someone has been doing something a particular way).”
Geetha has since swapped supersized companies for startups, most recently leading FP&A at fast-growing businesses including SimpleTire. In her current role as Head of FP&A at New Jersey decor company, Triangle Home Fashions, she continues to propel FP&A as a “co-captain” in the business.
In this episode Geetha reveals:
- Her career journey from PwC auditor to equity research to GE Healthcare
- The CPA in India and why the pass rate is only 10%
- Key FP&A achievements including shrinking number of days of closing from 8 days and spending more time on value added activities
- How to better establish KPIs for departments aligned with business goals
- Presenting KPIs for improving warehouse efficiency at Triangle Home Fashions (pick and pack time, average utilization, inventory turnover, SKUS meeting minimal sales threshold)
- The challenges at multinational manufacturer, Cummins, integrating four companies and restructuring the finance team at a time of low morale
- Doing FP&A at company as fast as Simple Tire vs more mature business
- Her approach at Triangle Home with inventory levels purchased during COVID
- Lessons from two decades in business partnering
Follow Geetha Ramachandran https://www.linkedin.com/in/geetharamachandran201/
A compelling FP&A story is essential. In this second (and final) session from FP&ACon 2024, Glenn hosts Soufyan Hamid, FP&A leader for 16 years who runs the Financial Storytelling Program, and Matthew Herbert, Chewy Director of Finance.
- First poll: How confident are you in your ability to craft a compelling FP&A Story:?
- The move from numbers to storytelling
- Soufyan on why the finance director was always frustrated by my business presentations (when I was even invited to meetings)
- By contrast Matthew was forced to get to grips with storytelling early in investment banking (but faced a different challenge as an FP&A business partner at Walmart)
- The gap between perception and reality in our storytelling
- When information becomes insights
- The connection between business partnering and storytelling
- What (selfishly) do FP&A pros get by developing storytelling skills?
- Remember you are not giving a TED Talk
- The 5 Points that FP&A Pros Most Struggle with in their Storytelling
- Actionable tips in your presentation
Follow and connect with Soufyan Hamid: https://www.linkedin.com/in/soufyanhamid/
Follow and connect with Matthew Herbert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-herbert-6a56637/
Matthew’s training course at https://biztrix.us/
Soufyan (The Finance Circle) training www.thefinancecircle.com
In this special episode (part of Datarails’ FP&A Con 2024) Glenn hosts an all-star panel to debate AI and FP&A: Hype vs reality.
Join Nicolas Boucher, Christian Martinez, and Gabriela Gutierrez, alongside CFO Glenn Hopper, host of FP&A Today, and an AI thought leader and author. Delve into real-world applications, separating fact from fiction, and gain valuable practical insights into the present and future of AI in financial planning and analysis.
The Guests:
- Nicolas Boucher, Keynote speaker on AI for Finance & FP&A
- Christian Martinez, Finance Analytics Manager, Kraft Heinz
- Gabriela Gutierrez, Financial Planning & Analysis Specialist
In this episode:
How many FP&A pros are using AI in their work - how do you compare vs the results of our poll
The main misconceptions + and what not to do in the finance and AI era
The significance of ChatGPT 4o
The biggest barriers to AI adoptions
Practical uses of AI to use today , including forecasting and practical ways to save time
FP&A AI use cases that have shocked the panel
Which FP&A processes could most use AI help?
How to get started practically
AI capabilities in existing tools such as PowerBI
Why 2024 is about Python as the tool to learn to break the barrier of AI
Automation in finance’s relationship with other departments
Creating your own chatbot services
The importance of data maturity (before AI maturity)
How you will start to see AI inbuilt to all your finance techstack
Download financial data (balance sheets, savings) from a company on Yahoo Finance and plug into Chat GPT 4o (Prompt: Act as a management consultant and analyze this data with an FP&A lens” (and getting volume analysis, volatility analysis, moving averages..)
FP&ACon 2024 (on demand) https://www.datarails.com/events/fpa-con-2024/
Join the AI Finance Club: https://ai-finance.club/
“Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models,”
FP&A professionals are the original business intelligence (BI) experts, says Len Mcfall, senior consultant, finance at Windstream Holdings, a $1billion US telecoms company.
“FP&A itself is synonymous with business intelligence,” he says. “And honestly, weren’t, weren’t we the first business intelligence? We’ve always been working with data. We’ve always been trying to simplify and present data in a meaningful way to people who might not,otherwise be literate.”
In this frank and honest interview McFall, whose background is heavily influenced by BI, gives insights from a 20 year career including HCT Investments, Sitel, Crossroads Treatment Center and a minefield of data at Windstream.
“I’m not a bullet point guy. I’m a paragraph guy” says Len– warning he’s not one for short, snappy answers, but a storyteller who loves to dive deep, as he reveals:
- Why 40% of my job is touching base with people to curate all the data we use across the organization
- Putting sales on blast: how often do you catch a forecast from a sales organization that’s even 50%, right?
- Coming into a company to save them after they were delivering finance reporting 30 days after close (from 30 days to day 8)
- the role of data analysis and bi in finance and in the decision making process.
- How business runs on “hunches” and why it is FP&A to prove that hunch
- Why if you cannot communicate to the business you are useless
- The vast amount of data we have access to in telecoms and how we separate the signal from the noise
- How finance rubs against IT and why it’s not pretty
- Why AI in finance is like a “very smart but green intern” and prompt engineers are ridiculous
- Killing for food in winters during his childhood
Connect with Len on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/len-mcfall-6274857b/
CFO Seth Zimmerman faced a triple blow of tests in his decades-long real estate career. Firstly, he witnessed the Lehman collapse first-hand from within a real estate division of the famed bank (“We just got a call from our New York office, a guy in New York. He’s like, well, it’s done. We’re bankrupt.”). Secondly, being forced to blow the whistle when his CEO boss pocketed $1m into his bank account–the day after a $10m raise (the startup is now defunct). Finally, being the finance person when a developer absconded with $12m. “One of the things that I’ve learned is that when it comes to money, you never know what somebody’s going to do”.
In this episode, Seth Zimmerman, CFO at Invest with Roots, explains the core metrics in finance real estate and why things are never cookie cutter (“Every deal is, is different and you have to look at them individually”)
Zimmerman talks:
- Life as CFO at Invest with Roots, one of the hottest companies in Atlanta,the only real estate portfolio that creates wealth for renters.
- The role of finance at a REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) – a security that trades like a stock on the major exchanges and reports to the SEC.
- Blowing the whistle in finance when a former CFO pocketed $1m
- Creating $700,000 for residents at Invest with Roots
- Becoming CFO and bringing in budgeting and FP&A processes
- Love of modeling and how I am using modeling skills to get into the multifamily space
- How to find great finance staff +the accountant recruitment challenge
- Favorite Excel function
- My motorbike crash
Follow Seth on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethazimmerman/
As a lifelong gamer, David Fortin successfully landed his dream job managing FP&A at Ubisoft – the $2.79 billion gaming company responsible for Assassin’s Creed, Driver, and Far Cry, For Honor. The former PwC auditor then decided to take on an even more daunting leap. He ran FP&A at Saas Startup Polka “building the plane while we were flying” – cue his boss leaving, learning how to fundraise, facing disinterested investors, budgets rejected by the board, the CTO crying, before managing an eventual successful exit (in 2023 the company was acquired by Swedish enterprise software giant IFS). Now he is a full-time YouTuber teaching Excel and Microsoft Copilot – still using finance and analytics to build his business.
In this episode David talks:
- PwC CPA audit coming up that way to FP&A
- Quebec, loving video games and landing a role at Ubisoft
- Moving from a big company to a startup and a steep finance learning curve
- Building the plane while flying in FP&A
- Learning the sales pitch of funding round facing questions and disinterterested investors
- CTOs crying when the budget is rejected by the board
- Due diligence and exit – lessons
- Becoming a YouTuber making Excel fun again and grasping Microsoft Copilot
- How CoPilot and AI will transform FP&A
- Scenario analysis in Copilot
- 20,000 hours of gaming and my favorite Excel function
Follow David on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-fortin-cpa-816b20b5/
Follow David’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@piggybankaccountant
From being the First kid in her family to finish high school, Swati Bagri began as a role as auditor at Deloitte (“I did what any 17-year-old smart kid would do. I just followed my friends”). At Deloitte she discovered a “love of finance” realizing it’s “what I want to do for the rest of my life”.
Swati cemented her FP&A career at some of the world’s biggest brands: Nestlé, Mars, Amazon, and Kraft Heinz. At these giants she absorbed and built a playbook to get from “good” to “great” FP&A. Behing the success of FP&A at these teams, she explains is 3 things: strategic planning and forecasting, technology and risk management.
In this episode Swati talks about:
- Finance transformation as a significant part of her role (the slippery term of “finance transformation” defined as the “effective use of technology to free up people’s time”)
- How predictive analytics was used at Nestlé from rainfall data, and the wider playbook of building financial models with consumers in mind
- Hyperinflationary markets like Turkey and Egypt and FP&A and the lessons learned
- Business partnering roles at Amazon and Nestlé and what I have learned about successful relationship building towards common objectives
- Co-founding The Strategy Story (including learning about Marriage insurance for wedding days)
- Start by Explaining the P&L and coaching non-finance folk
- War stories – annual planning cycles
- FP&A-led transformation at an ecommerce marketplace business and getting buy-in from senior management through a data story
- The power of podcasts to keep your at the top of your finance game
- Sky Jumping and my favorite Excel function
Connect with Swati Bagri on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/swatibagri/
Book a mentoring session with Swati at https://topmate.io/swatibagri
We host our first ever FP&A guest from the US casino and gambling sector with the head of FP&A at Genting Americas, a world leader in casinos and lodging with luxurious loactions in Las Vegas, Bimini, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom.
Bill Singh is VP FP&A of Genting Americas, part of the world’s largest Destination Resort operator operating as Resorts World . Genting boasting five public companies capitalized at $45 billion and employing more than 50,000 people worldwide. This episode reveals their inside FP&A game including metrics such as “win per unit per day” tacking the “hold”. Bill is strategic leader with more than a decade leading FP&A and providing insights on skills and budgeting management, to insider advice about gaming.
In this episode:
- Getting an unexpected offer of an FP&A role at a casino in Nevada
- Why FP&A at the “nexus of data and decision-making” is an “ultimate” career path
- Critical skills you must develop in FP&A
- Giving “X+1” in your FP&A answers
- Salesmanship in FP&A
- FP&A metrics: “Win per unit per day and hold”
- Lodging: occupancy, your ADR, your revenue per available room
- Odds and statistics from tables, games and FP&A modeling
- Insider advice about gaming (including “Don’t play a game right by the door”)
- The power of leading budget for the operating side and the capital budget for all divisions +lessons from 10 years of budgeting
- The impact of AI in getting answers faster for operators
- MATCH+TEMPO – My favorite Excel function and lessons from drumming
Follow and connect with Bill Singh: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billsinghprofile/
What’s the connection between FP&A and Taylor Swift? To answer we are joined by Michael Stotland, Vice President of FP&A at AEG Presents.
AEG Presents is one of the largest live music companies in the world, and most famously the concert promoter behind the $1 billion dollar revenue Eras Tour by Taylor Swift: the highest grossing tour of all time.
For good measure, Stotland’s FP&A team also supports the tours of Paul McCartney, Katy Perry Elton John, and the Rolling Stones, and 25 music festivals, including the iconic Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, along with Stagecoach, the New Orleans Jazz Fest, hangout Fest, electric Forest, and Firefly.
In this blockbuster episode, we want to teach you how FP&A feels (apologies to Swifties):
Michael Stotland VP of FP&A at AEG reveals in conversation with host Glenn Hopper:
- How growing up in Los Angeles the entertainment industry the entertainment industry was a natural choice, and starting my career at MGM
- Spreading my wings at 20th Century Fox
- Building up the FP&A function at MarVista (a TV and movie production company showcasing nearly 2,500 hours of content) and the story behind a facing a “fantastic year” during COVID FP&A leadership at AEG helping live entertainment “ return from the abyss”
- “Seeing the financials bounce” back as pent up demand was realized
- Pulling external data into daily FP&A work
- Heatmaps on beer costs and price of living as part of FP&A planning
- Managing 3 areas of FP&A at AEG: General, systems and business strategy units
- The FP&A dimension of Taylor Swift Eras Tour
- Using local macroeconomics to impact business decision-making – from the UK to Singapore and the US
- How Television revenues and licensing of big movies saves movie studios
- FP&A swiftness when Kanye West bowed out at the last minute at Coachella
- Using AI to look at past events and ticket sales and performance on a contribution margin basis
- Looking to optimize how we do FP&A and ambitions to become CFO
- Links between FP&A and my triathlon career
Connect with Michael Stotland Vice President, Financial Planning & Analysis at AEG Presents: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikestotland/
Further Reading:
Rolling Stone: Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Is the Highest-Grossing of All Time and First-Ever to Hit $1 Billion
Investopedia: Swiftonomics: The Economic Influence of Taylor Swift
Datarails Blog: How FP&A makes Huge Hollywood Hits
Antonio Reza is the Head of Finance for Google Cloud Consulting in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). In this episode he reveals the FP&A life and lessons he has learned over the past 14 years working in finance and strategy at Google, Microsoft, and GE. He brings experiences across 10 different countries leading teams across the globe spanning different industries (he also speaks four languages). In this episode he reveals:
- How Getting into GE’s finance and FP&A training was life-changing
- Why so many tech people like himself are inspired to get into finance
- Country specific differences in finance that he has learnt over his career
- Google in the midst of AI revolution and how we used AI at Microsoft for our commercial forecasting
- How AI in finance is still about automation – with insights the next frontier for FP&A
- How FP&A at Google and Microsoft FP&A teams are set up
- Why “Walking the Shop” remains core to his career in finance
- How the biggest companies in the world manage real-time data
- Despite the technological avalanche storytelling and persuasion is fundamental at the top tech companies
- Why FP&A needs to focus on snapshots vs “real-time” dashboards
- FP&A Need to Ask Why x5 Times: The Secret of great storytelling
- Why I am focused on grasping and applying the economic picture in my work
- My biggest challenges in moving from individual contributor to manager early in my career
- How a “failure” led to my team and I staying in the office for 56 hours trying to close an audit – and the people skills I learnt along the way
- Why Despite working at Google, Excel still bosses Google Sheets for finance teams
- Using your 20s to hustle and have a successful career
Follow Antonio at X (Formerly Twitter) 48k Followers https://twitter.com/theantonioreza
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/theantonioreza/
Subscribe to Antoniio’s Newsletter Money & Robots https://www.theantonioreza.com/
Further Reading
WSJ: Google Finance Head: Anything That Can Be Automated, We Strive to Automate
The Pyramid Principle:Logic in Writing and Thinking by Barbara Minto
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It; Chris Voss
The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century’s Greatest Dilemma; Michael Bhaskar and Mustafa Suleyman
Greg Lopez has served as the CFO and VP of operations at companies including Futurism, a digital media company, Wirecutter (acquired by the New York Times) and Gawker Media (acquired by Univision). Now Greg is a consultant at high-growth companies working with clients ranging from a “family owned business doing $20 million”, “SaaS businesses doing $10 million a year” to private equity-backed business doing $500 million a year.”
In this episode he provides his formula for success in FP&A and finance:
- How a career in finance suited my character traits and passions
- Learning the full aspects of finance, FP&A and business partnering
- Building to a commercial mindset as CFO
- Acting as an investigative journalist for the business
- Why finance needs to lead in defining metrics in a startup
- Moving from a bigger company to a startup - what you need to know
- Increasing the feedback loop in finance teams
- Expectations of CFO in a startup
- Favorite KPIs - from contribution margin and profit to Sales cycle velocity
- Variables and determining drivers for the business
- One of the biggest finance challenges - developing talent and cyber attacks
- Lightning round: pickup basketball and lessons for finance
- Best Excel feature: introducing Scenario planning and modeling using Watch Window
Contact Greg
@glopeztweets on X
glopez@eventusag.com
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-lopez-4b248b88/
Show Notes:
Recommended reading:
How A Hulk Hogan Lawsuit Launched A Career in M&A | Greg Lopez
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-a-hulk-hogan-lawsuit-launched-a-career-in-m-a-greg-lopez/id1642784919?i=1000606411968
Financial Intelligence, Revised Edition: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean: Berman, Karen, Knight, Joe, Case, John: 9781422144114: Amazon.com: Books
Startup CXO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Company's Critical Functions and Teams (Techstars): Blumberg, Matt, Birkeland, Peter M., Dorsey, Scott: 9781119772576: Amazon.com: Books
The Ten-Day MBA 4th Ed.: A Step-by-Step Guide to Mastering the Skills Taught In America's Top Business Schools: Silbiger, Steven A: 9780062199577: Amazon.com: Books
Amazon.com: Financial Planning & Analysis and Performance Managem
Getting FP&A teams to harness their data to reach their goals is the holy grail. Nathan Bell, Managing Partner, VAi Consulting, is among the most in-demand experts. Bell has unique experience– having started in computer science, before leading finance teams at Native American Bank, Digital Media Trends and Gartner– where he advised hundreds of FP&A teams facing chaotic data situations). In this masterclass, he shares a practical framework looking at the expectations, fear and hype surrounding data, analytics and AI for FP&A teams.
In this episode:
- From a computer degree to leading finance teams
- How Nathan discovered the power of telling stories as Chief Credit Officer at Native American Bank
- Overcoming the challenge of presenting to non- financially literate CEOs
- The challenge when finance is “last in line”
- When companies don’t have good data and what FP&A teams can do
- “Federated data governance” and avoiding turf battles
- why setting up self-service data as CFO came back to bite me
- Using a “metrics cascade” clarifying data and metrics
- Critical thinking as the new superpower for finance teams in the AI age
- Key to setting up pilot AI programs
- Dinner time when your wife is also a CFO
Key quotes: Remember PPDAC. Problem Plan, Data, Conclusion.
Your Plan, what Data you need to capture against that plan, analysis, and Conclusion.
“If you can master that in that order, I think from a skillset, you’re, you’re ready” – Nathan Bell.
Critical Thinking as the new Superpower for FP&A
“Critical thinking is gonna be more powerful than ever. I don’t think there’ll ever be a situation where we’re going to let AI make the decision without going through a human to look at the data. We need to ask what do we do? What’s the action? What’s the decision?”
Connect with Nathan Bell on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-bell-1038662/
https://vai-consulting.com/
Tory Bauman, Vice President, FP&A at Zayo Group joins new host Glenn Hopper. In this fascinating episode they go deep on FP&A metrics and processes at one of the most exciting companies in telecoms. Tory leads an FP&A team underpinning business decisions at Zayo whose network stretches over 16.8 million fiber miles and spans 141,000 route miles. With telecoms long at the forefront of technology, Tory explains her cutting edge philosophy around FP&A realizing “ leadership’s strategy and their goals” “closing gaps” and making necessary “pivots”.
In this episode Tory reveals:
- Her move from accountant to finance and why she made the switch
- How FP&A at Zayo is set up and the main metrics tracked including the importance of being good stewards of billions of dollars in capital investments
- Measures for forecasting churn
- Alignment as crucial to business partnering
- Early warning signs and predictive analytics
- FP&A and cost per event on telecoms network
- Using external data and macro side on the pricing decisions
- How Zayo is profiting by providing connectivity and bandwidth in the AI revolution
- How I am trying to develop my experience in capital markets and mentorship
- Why I am not shy about letting people know I want to be a CFO
- Her golf career and the impact it has made on her finance goals
Connect with Tory on LinkedIn
It’s the end of an era. This is Paul Barnhurst’s last episode as FP&A Today host. And in this episode he introduces new FP&A Today host: Glenn Hopper.
Glenn Hopper is a Chief Financial Officer with two decades of experience leading finance operations for private equity-backed companies. Glenn is an author and journalist, US Navy Veteran, #1 AI Finance leader, and a passionate advocate for FP&A.
In this episode:
- Glenn’s whirlwind career since he last appeared on the show
- Training FP&A on AI
- Why getting started on AI in finance is a painful audit
Why the first stages of AI implementation in finance have nothing to do with AI - Launching the definitive LinkedIn course for generative AI and finance
- Why it is vital for finance professionals to understand the base of AI
- Glenn’s favorite episode of FP&A Today
- Why I decided to become the new host of FP&A Today
- Why there’s no need to hide my Southern accent on the show
- Turning the tables on Paul
- Paul’s final message
Follow Glenn Hopper at https://www.linkedin.com/in/gbhopperiii/
Follow Paul Barnhurst at https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguy/
Rosemary Linden more than earned her stripes in FP&A over twenty years. Her roles included VP FP&A at Alliant Insurance Services. Director of Global FP&A at WD-40 Company and at Solera.
But after two decades in corporate finance she moved to being a fractional CFO serving small businesses (typical annual revenue of around $10million) managing an assortment of responsibilities.
This episode is for anyone in finance who may be looking to escape the corporate grind and set up as a Fractional CFO.
But Linden warns it is not for everyone.
“One of the first things I’d say to think about is, do you really want to be a fractional CFO? Because that’s different from being a full-time CFO at one particular company and comes with its own challenges.”
In this episode:
- Moving from corporate finance after 20 years to dealing with “astute” small business owners as a fractional CFO in San Diego
- Why FP&A is an ideal training ground to become a CFO
Secrets for telling a good story - Getting to what you want the people in a room to “walk away knowing”
Cash flows at small companies, opportunities and challenges - Dealing with seasonal variances at small businesses
- Advice for starting your own business as a fractional CFO
- Moving to a more analytical mindset
- Difference between, strategic planning and financial planning (Case Study San Diego Civic Youth Ballet)
- My most dangerous deep sea dive, being team Excel and Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Follow Rosemary Linden on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rosemarylinden/
Most CFOs don’t build models where 1% of their company’s net sales (not profits) are given away instantly “right from the top” to help alleviate poverty. But then Cotopaxi is not like most companies. In this episode Cotopaxi CFO, Gary Bowen, explains the pivotal role played by finance and FP&A in “doing capitalism better” while also seeking to become a billion-dollar brand - alongside other outdoor names such as Patagonia, North Face and Columbia. This includes an ambitious new strategy explained by Bowen to move beyond digital sales and into retail–and FP&A’s central role in making this happen.
In this episode Gary Bown CFO of Cotopaxi reveals:
- Starting as operations in customer service and lessons for finance
- How I began as a CFO
- When good finance talent leaves
- Doing fractional CFO services and when businesses need to bring in a CFO
- Being a "Let’s Go" CFO (vs Department of No)
- 1% of Net Sales (not profits) given away, and working that into the model
- Cotopaxi digital retail metrics explained vs retail metrics
- Moving to opening up retail stores and a four wall profitability model
- How to balance investors with giving back principles
- Getting Cotopaxi to a billion dollar company
- Flipping the script from private label to branding at Ogio (and learning the power of branding)
- Flying airplanes, Iron Man competition, and George Washington
Follow Gary Bowen on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/gary-bowen-769a7/
Kat Orekhova is Co-Founder & CEO of Vareto, a planning and analytics platform for enterprise teams. In her own words Kat has an “unusual backstory” leaving the world of math academia to build Facebook’s first-ever data science team within FP&A. At the social media giant she was Responsible for financial reporting, forecasting, and planning activities for Facebook’s core business. This was followed by stints as Head of Product at IronClad, a $3billion legaltech company, Sequoia Capital Scout, General Partner at Darkmode Ventures and co-founder & CEO of Vareto.
In this episode Kat reveals:
- The challenges of long range planning as Facebook scaled massively and trying to predict growth across countries from the US to India with more than 100 people contributing to the planing process)
- Being at the beginning of data Science at Facebook
- The move from data science and product into finance
- When should companies start looking at FP&A
- Being a Sequoia scout and what it entails and what she looks for in investment opportunities
- How (now) Meta CFO Susan Li “an absolutely outstanding” mentor insisted on a finance team with data science skills led by Orekhova
- The right blend between data science and FP&A who are “Living in Different Tools”
- Her take on the amount of data science that FP&A teams need to boost their career
- The impact of AI in finance
Follow Kat on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katorekhova/
Tolga Hocanin, CFO & Vice President, Finance & IT at Lindt & Sprüngli (Canada) gives a masterclass in CPG FP&A from his experience at PepsiCo and chocolatier, Lindt.
In this episode:
- Lessons from 20 years of budgeting and how my first budget was a nightmare
- Why budgeting is not just a math exercise
- The main metrics you need to know in CPG
- Why mix management is crucial
The 30-60-90 day plan to succeed in finance in CPG - Running both IT and finance as CFO and why this makes sense
- Building a strong culture in a finance team
- Starting with why in finance
- A $1.5M reporting error and how I responded to it
- Building cross-functional relationships with business partners
Follow and connect with Tolga Hocanin on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tolga-hocanin-cpa-cma-2958008/
Talking about the connectedness of FP&A and Rev Ops working together are all-star revenue leaders: Jeff Ignacio, Head of Go-to market Growth and operations at Regrow Ag, Arvind Chahal VP, finance and ops at autotrader Canada, and Drew Noel, VP Revenue, SCS Cloud.
First, what is rev Ops?
“Rev Ops is the discipline of aligning go-to market strategy and execution through four key pillars: process enablement, advisory and systems excellence” (Webster dictionary definition submitted by Paul Igancio).
In this episode:
- How revenue operations and finance operations need to be working together effectively?
- The challenges and worst stories when rev ops and Finance fail to click.
- The worst “bad behavior” in a go-to-market org
- Data and cultural issues with finance and Rev Ops
- Moving career from FP&A to RevOps
- How to ensure we are defining and reporting metrics in the same way
- The importance of a “data dictionary”
- How AI will impact the operations function
- Favorite Excel function or feature
Our guests:
Jeff Ignacio, Head of Go-to market Growth and operations at Regrow Ag
Arvind Chahal VP, finance and ops at autotrader Canada
Drew Noel, VP Revenue, SCS Cloud
Andrew Lynch, Head of FP&A at UK card discount scheme for public service employees, Blue LIght Card, is known to his nearly 11,000 Twitter followers as The SMB Finance Guy.
The FP&A leader also runs the highly popular Net Income newsletter regularly posts small business opportunities, scaling companies, systems, strategy, “with a few shitposts thrown in for good measure” (His writing has also been picked up by Business Insider).
In this episode Andrew reveals:
- The power of mentors in transforming his finance career from a “struggle to find someone who would take me” to high-profile roles at Anabas, Capital One, and Blue LIght Card.
- Starting a new budget from scratch and building an FP&A team at Blue Light Card
- Negotiation and sandbagging with sales and how FP&A can deal with the challenges
- How FP&A best practice saw Andrew deliver one SMB £10 million a year in revenue and from £8k in profit to £23 million
- Being Fired by Four times Bestselling New York Times author Tucker Max the day before Xmas Eve
- Skill stacking – getting to be the top 25% in the world at four or five different related things – rather than trying to be the best
- Being one of the few FP&A leaders on the comedy circuit
Subscribe to Net Income at https://www.netincome.co/
Follow Andrew at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewglynch/
Jon Allen and Duke Heninger, of Utah-based Amplēo, have brought their finance game to fast-growing companies which are between $5m and $50m in revenue. They are “fractional CFOs” – that is experienced finance professionals advising these companies on a part-time basis. For instance, one business they work with, Korean barbeque restaurant Cupbop, appeared on ABC’s Shark Tank and got $1million from Mark Cuban in 2022. Other companies they advised include Burt Brothers (a tire and services company). Collectively Amplēo helped more than 3000 companies.
But they always find the same story when they look at financials at such companies.
“It’s always the data”, says Duke Heninger, Financial Partner at Amplēo. “It’s getting things put in a way so that people can understand what they’ve even spent. Most of my clients are on a very simplified accounting system. They aren’t classifying anything in separate departments. So it’s breaking it out, trying to understand who owns what, where should it go, and ultimately everybody just sandbags just so that they don’t trip a budget”.
In this episode of FP&A we meet Jon Allen Managing Partner, Finance, and Duke Heninger, finance partner at Amplēo.
They provide a masterclass on the value of FP&A at fast-growing companies, revealing:
- Our worst budget experiences
- Our journey through finance to CFO
- What we wish we had known earlier in our career
- Restaurants in COVID Times – how we used FP&A to help businesses
- The powerful value of FP&A in restaurants
- Why FP&A is a superb career choice
- Founding companies as finance leaders
- Teaching FP&A at University
- Why great FP&A must lead to actions and decisions
- How FP&A can become good business partners
- Reporting vs forecasting
- The importance of choosing a great finance leader to work for early in your career
- Getting out your chair and talking to people
- The last things we asked ChatGPT
Follow Duke Heninger:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dukeh/
Follow Jon Allen
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonnyallen/
Amplēo provides business professionals, such as CFOs, CMOs and CHROs, to companies on a fractional basis in order to help them achieve their full potential. https://ampleo.com/
There are two different directions for AI in finance, says Didi Gurfinkel, Co-Founder and CEO of Datarails.
You can use AI to extend your hands.
Or, your brain.
He says: ”Using AI to extend your hands involves automating processes, making everything faster, reducing headcount shortening time to deliver, which is amazing. But it’s not a life changer. In this situation maybe you can reduce the gap between 10 employees to five employees but this will not be what will save your business or ultimately make it successful.
“The more interesting part is to look at AI as an extension to your brain. Here, I think this is a life changer. Letting the CFO or the FP&A manager have a tool that can be like an extension to the FP&A brain. If you take your analysis or approach to analyze your business, the AI can run it at scale with all your historical data, internal data and external data.”
In this episode Didi Gurfinkel talks about setting up Datarails, the FP&A the AI-powered Financial Planning and Analysis platform for Excel users and the multiple challenges and learnings along the way.
He reveals:
- Starting his career at Cisco the biggest IT company in the world (“I imagined that everything will be automated end of month – I was wrong”)
- Setting up Datarails in 2015 and the challenges of getting traction for an initial concept of “connecting organizational spreadsheets into one centralized database”
- Four years of trying (and How he finally found product market fit)
- Understanding the power of Excel as core to finance allowed us to focus on finance
- How FP&A use cases are the classic consolidation challenge because every FP&A process starts from collecting data from multiple sources in different structures, different shapes, and different systems.
- Our capability to transform semi-structured data into structured data landed a very strong competitive edge,
- Our “SaaS wake up call” – how we learnt to grow at the same pace with 50% less expenses
- AI is either an extension of your head vs AI as an extension of your brain and why the latter is the real game-changer
- From a good CFO to an amazing CFO with AI
- My expectations as a CEO from my finance team
- Why ChatGPT is amazing at text but the challenges come with replicating this with accurate numbers
- My favorite Excel function
- Surprising fact you wouldn’t know about me
Didi was previously a GM at Cisco. He has extensive senior management experience with a focus on growth and innovation. Didi oversees business, strategy and operations. He holds a B.Sc in economics and computer science, and an MBA in business management.
Follow Didi Gurfinkel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/didigurfinkel/
Tunc Tezel has managed FP&A at companies including Ontex, Pladis, British American Tobacco, Procter & Gamble, and Gillette. He has lived and worked in 11 different countries including the UK, Iran, Sub-saharan Africa, Turkey, Latvia, Belgium
Now, Tezel is VP of global FP&A at Ontex, a publicly listed leader in private label manufacturing baby care, feminine care and adult care products for stores including Walmart, Aldi, Lidl,Tesco and Carrefour.
In this episode provides his takeaways from a career at the cutting edge of FP&A:
- What do you do with your company’s budget when overnight interest rates hit 3000%. And the Turkish lira was devalued by 60% overnight
- How FP&A powers private label manufacturing vs working at big brands
- How we coped with the pandemic and the shift to economically challenged consumers trying private labels
- Moving from brand ambassadors to product ambassadors
- How FP&A is supporting ESG
- Business supporting finance managers – should you call them FP&A Managers or
- Finance Business Partners (and why it matters)
- The challenges of data in FP&A work
- FP&A as co-pilot in a rally car
- Secrets of bringing the numbers to life Cooking and seafood
- Why I would have loved to meet Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic
- The last thing I asked Google/Chat GPT about my finance work
Episode Notes
Connect with Tunc Tezel on LinkedIn.
Tunc Tezel: Banking CIO Outlook: FP&A Vs Finance Business
Jack Alexander was our second ever guest on FP&A Today and it remains one of our most downloaded episodes. Here he returns to exclusively launch his new book (published January 2024): Financial Management: Partner in Driving Performance and Value (Wiley Finance)
His new book is a post-pandemic and typically practical take on performance management, planning, forecasting, business valuation, mergers, acquisitions, and capital investment.
He says: “I wrote (my original book) Financial Planning & Analysis and Performance Management. Then the pandemic occurred, the Great accelerator, the great disruptor. And I was getting a different set of phone calls and requests.
“Most people hadn't really been through some of these experiences before. Scenario analysis and planning, business transformations and restructuring liquidity management and scenario planning through various liquidity scenarios. There was a need for FP&A and finance to look outside the organization at major external forces and events that are happening around the world as the greatest threats and opportunities emerged from outside such as hyperinflation and geopolitical events.”
In this episode Jack talks:
- Why my first budget was a disaster
- From financial accounting manager to CFO at EG&G
Mentoring as a path to CFO and CEO - Financial Leadership in the 21st century inspired by the pandemic and post pandemic environment.
- The essentials of value creation for a finance team
- Return to the Principles of a “Top Gun” CFO
- What’s changed - and what hasn’t in 45 years of FP&A
- How audit and transaction experience got me first promoted to CFO
- Health and finance
Follow Jack Alexander at https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-jack-alexande
Cayla Pingel has led FP&A in sports, gaming and entertainment at companies including Warner Bros, Fox Sports and most recently, 2K Games, a global video game company. At Fox Sports she financially quarterbacked the full P&L for the biggest sporting events including the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the NFL Baseball World Cup.
The senior Director, Finance at 2K describes her approach to business partnering as more like a “sports agent” (“like Jerry Maguire but more calm” says Pingel).
Pingel says “I tell my business partners to think of me as your agent. I’m going to go out and negotiate this for you from a financial perspective. Tell me what you need and let me help sell this so that we can make the case and do it.”
In this episode:
- Being at Fox Sports when live sports came screeching to a halt during COVID
- Show me the Money – managing the superbowl of FP&A at Fox Sports, Warner Bros and 2K and the power of ratings for finance
- How blowouts affect financial performance
- Uncovering the differences between Accounting vs FP&A at Fox Sports
- Why I chose the FP&A direction rather than a COO role
- Most important metrics in sports businesses
- Heavy fixed costs and the challenges of live broadcasting
- Huge tech, streaming and viewership changes in media/sports and entertainment – and how to forecast the future of the game for finance pros
- Metrics in game playing: and finance discussions about whether to put new features in a game
- Leading the Los Angeles chapter for women in sports and events
- Flying out to Prague six weeks into a new job at Warner Bros to fix a mess and the strategic resolution
- March Madness ‘Budget Season’ Challenge at Fox Sports – and why the loser has to do the waterfall charts
Follow and contact Cayla Pingel on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/cayla-pingel-410a1a73/
“I last came on FP&A Today before I started my new CFO gig, and I was pretty nervous. I was talking a lot in theory of what I thought it would be, and now I can tell you a little bit more of the reality. So it's been quite the ride.”
Returning guest CJ Gustafson–master of the hugely popular Mostly Metrics newsletter–delivers in his custom funny and frank style the lessons from his first year as CFO and the practical lessons for anyone in finance (and particularly FP&A).
- His worst budget experience - working six months on an operating plan thrown away within a week during COVID (and the surprising conclusion)
- Getting stamps on my finance passport getting me to CFO
- The biggest lessons on being a CFO-as removing blockers and letting an organization go faster.
- CFO as chief psychologist, chief contract signer, and chief risk officer
- How I prioritized my finance hires
- Views of FP&A as a CFO
- How knowing numbers better than anybody else projected me to CFO
- Why BI was put under the CFO function (“it’s like putting data insights on steroids and you combine FP&A and BI”)
- Why ARR per employee is my favorite SaaS metric
- CAC payback period as the golden SaaS metric
- How I (painfully) learned about the power of the “meeting before the meeting”
- Creating a category for yourself as CFO
Sign up for the Mostly Metrics Newsletter from CJ Gustafson: https://www.mostlymetrics.com/
Check out Run the Numbers hosted by CJ: a weekly podcast about financial metrics and business models, designed for ambitious people operating tech startups https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/run-the-numbers-startup-finance-strategy-and-operations/id1704418764
Follow CJ or get in touch with him on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/cj-gustafson-13140948/
Or Twitter https://twitter.com/cjgustafson222
Taylor Otstot is VP of Finance at Dashlane, and former Senior Director of Finance at GoDaddy. He joined GoDaddy a year before their IPO and was there for eight years as the domain registrar and web hosting company scaled from $1.5 billion to $4 billion revenue. “By the time I left I was supporting about a billion and a half of that revenue and I was running a team of about 14", Taylor says. "So not only was I part of a business that was going through a lot of growth, but personally had to go through a lot of growth.”
In this episode Taylor reveals the psychological skills and strategy he uses to win in his career.
Insights from this episode:
- Printing Excel files (aka the worst budget he has ever experienced)
- Why every conversation in finance is really a conversation about tradeoffs.
- Letting go of what “made you great” when managing an FP&A Team
- Psychology learnings that have transformed my finance career and how you can apply them to your career
- Eight Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Reflection from Eight Years at GoDaddy.
- How a hard experience showed him that in finance “ titles unlock doors, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be invited in”
- Why I am a big fan of decision frameworks and breaking out of your “normal default positions”
- Burritos vs tacos and finance decision-making (with lessons for business reviews and business partnerships)
- Why the “safe choice” isn’t normally the right choice in finance
- Secrets to building a high performing team
- The big Sales comp revelation
Notes
https://taylorotstot.com/
Follow Taylor on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorotstot/
Creativity Inc, Ed Catmull
Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Reflections from 8 Years at GoDaddy
We have an all-star panel getting into the Christmas and New Year spirit. Howard Tunnicliffe, Head of FP&A, The Economist, and Brett Hampson, Director of Finance, AllState, joinin host Paul Barnhurst, The FP&A Guy in this special edition of FP&A Today. They tackle the 12 most burning questions asked on reddit.com/r/FPandA in 2023. Mid-way we give you the end of year results of the top 5 Favorite FP&A Function for FP&A Pros, based on our 80 episodes!
Let us know your thoughts on your thoughts on these questions, what you want a panel to answer for 2024 (and of course any Excel Function shamefully omitted from our top 5).
Special guests:
- Howard Tunnicliffe, Head of FP&A, The Economist https://www.linkedin.com/in/howardtunnicliffe/
- Brett Hampson, Director of Finance, AllState
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-hampson/
12 Questions Answered on this special Holiday episode:
- How difficult is it for someone to switch industries in FP&A?
- Do you need a CPA to get an FP&A job?
- How easy is it for someone or hard to break into FP&A that has a non-traditional background?
- Any advice on how you run/lead the annual budgeting process?
- How do you get your first VP of FP&A role?
- How do you develop KPIs from scratch?
- How do you decide on when you should upgrade to an FP&A tool?
- BONUS!!! The results of Favorite Excel Function (from 80 episodes)
- What advice would you give about management reporting in a turnaround situation?
- Can you explain how the headcount process works for budgeting? How have you typically seen it work?
- If someone knows nothing about FP&A, any advice you’d offer on how to teach it or learn it? Where do you start?
- Is FP&A certification actually worth it?
- How do you de-stress, especially during budget season?
Join Brett Hampson's new weekly email newslettter, Forecasting Performance at https://forecasting-performance-2.ck.page/62f28563e1
Jeff Epstein is an operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners leading its CFO Council where he helps CEOs and CFOs at their 200- portfolio company share best practices. Epstein, one of the most famous names in finance, is former executive vice president and chief financial officer of Oracle, with a market value of over $200 billion. Prior to joining Oracle, Jeff served as CFO at public and private companies, including DoubleClick (acquired by Google), King World Productions (acquired by CBS), and Nielsen’s Media Measurement and Information Group. Earlier in his career, he was an investment banker at The First Boston Corporation.
In this episode:
- From Wall Street to first-time CFO
- Running finance at Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and Oprah-TV hitmaker King World
- The skills needed to be a top CFO
- The 3 routes to CFO: Auditors, Wall Street or FP&A
What Andy Gove OKR setting can teach us about budget setting - What is the right percentage of time to hit budget goals?
- Balancing between Elon Musk (Papa Bear) and Charlie Munger (Mama Bear) in setting targets
- Giving people the opportunity to overachieve
- Best case/worst case/base case at Oracle strategy
- The delicate balancing act of Wall Street guidance
- Using a stagger chart
- Why FP&A is so critical; how the biggest strategic decisions involve FP&A advice
Revisiting the processes as Oracle bought Sun Microsystems - Merger integration strategy worked on our sales compensation
- Truck drivers and sales commission – a must-listen to story
- How in 1983 at the Washington Post I learned from Warren Buffet and ended up scrambling to buy 4 shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Guess much it’s worth now?
Show notes
Forecasting 101 and how to build a Stagger chart
Jeff Epstein: How CFOs build a Goldilocks “just-right” budget
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
Winston Churchill: My Early Life
Andy Grove: High Output Management
Ed Hyer, as VP FP&A at Verizon, built one of the most ambitious centers of excellence (COEs) undertaken in finance.
Put simply, a center of excellence centralizes similar types of work into a single entity. While relatively common for payroll functions or “back-end transactional work”, FP&A presented an altogether bigger challenge for the COE concept.
The creation of Verizon’s Center of Excellence at the $134 billion revenue 118,000 employee company counts as one of the most audacious challenges undertaken in FP&A–ultimately comprising 175 professionals, took more than a year to complete and fanning through 24 different waves transformation to take effect. Though the impetus from the beginning was on proving the concept could work, Verizon's FP&A COE has now transformed the business in impactful and unexpected ways.
“I remember one case, where someone showed there were 16 different processes here. He said he could get it down to two, and I've just saved myself six hours on workday one. It didn't require any new tools or technology.
In this must-listen to episode Hyer reveals the secret of Verizon’s FP&A transformation:
In this episode:
- How my passion for FP&A was lit compared to other finance work
- Leading FP&A for some of the biggest US companies including Hertz and Verizon
- The “why” of creating an FP&A CoE - and it is not just about cost saving
- The lessons of building a Center of Excellence
- How COE-building places finance teams at the vanguard of automation
- The oh-crap moment when building the COE
- Heretical answer on his favorite Excel function‼
Ed Hyer/LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ed-hyer/
Paul Barnhurst LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguy/Datarails LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/datarails
“One of the myths I'd love to dispel is that nonprofits are not strategic. People think we aren’t forward thinking or just scrapping for change and trying to get things done. I've had the honor of working with organizations where we really focus on our mission in a nonprofit context in a very strategic way.”
You don’t want to miss this masterclass with Amy Omand. Omand is Fractional CFO, at 7 Seat Consulting, working with not for profits getting from early to mid-stage growth. In this episode she reveals her journey from managing FP&A at Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream (bought by Nestle) to former CFO of New Schools Venture Fund and setting up her business focused on not-for-profits.
In this episode:
- Dreyer's ice cream Budgeting Experience - the problems that can melt financial analysis with a new ice cream line launch
- Passion for K12 education and the finance factor in education
- The differences-and similarities- between nonprofit and "for profit" FP&A
- Why cash is (still) king at nonprofits
- Restrictions placed on how money is spent by nonprofits
- Taking Revolution Foods, a Healthy School Lunch Company, through their first B Corporation certification
- Why Metallica works best for budget and modeling
- The comfort in numbers
Notes
The Social Responsibility of Business: Kelly McElhaney. https://executive.berkeley.edu/kellie-mcelhaney
Follow Amy Omand on LinkedIn
Christian Martinez, Finance Analytics Manager at Kraft Heinz is an in-demand Conference Speaker and specialist who teaches a top-rated course, with (previous guest) Nicolas Boucher. In this episode discover the secrets about game changing uses of AI and Python for your FP&A career.
“We’re in the same era as when Excel was first invented,” says Martinez “There were people still using calculators and pens while others shifted to Excel and dramatically improved performance.”
In this episode:
- Why Python and Excel together at long last as a “game changer” for FP&A
- “Explainable” AI in FP&A
- How AI is improving overall budgets and forecasting
- Can non-data science people jump right in with AI?
- Getting comfortable being uncomfortable
- His path to a “boutique” course teaching practical application of AI in FP&A
- Why the best way to fully learn something is to teach it
- The most awesome uses of AI in FP&A
- How Gen AI is going to change FP&A in 2024
- Waterfall charts in Excel
Follow Christian Martinez (LinkedIn): https://www.linkedin.com/in/christianmartinezthefinancialfox/
Links
FREE COURSE – PYTHON FOR FP&A AND FINANCE. Curated by Christian Martinez
Advanced ChatGPT for Finance course by Christian Martinez and Nicolas Boucher
Product led growth is a business strategy and philosophy that puts the product at the center and the key driver for customer acquisition, activation, adoption, and retention. Parth Kulkarni, Head of FP&A, Adobe Express, recounts his chance to reimagine FP&A using product-led growth. He explains the process leading the FP&A team powering Adobe Express – a major new AI-driven product at the software giant (Adobe is competing with companies such as Canva and Microsoft Designer).
Kulkarni says: “We optimized different parts of the customer journey by adopting product led growth. From an FP&A perspective it was a fantastic opportunity for me and my team to reimagine the way that we approached financial planning and, and supported the business.”
Describing the approach of FP&A underpinned by product-led growth, he says: “We tend to forecast based on historicals. But here we took a much more bottoms up approach in our modeling, starting with building forecasts and projections around every single critical upstream metric – whether it’s acquisitions, how customers are really engaging with the product, or what kind of conversion rates are we seeing in the product, or what kind of retention we are seeing. I got the opportunity to actually understand the customer journey, translate that into a financial model, and then build my financial planning around that.
Kulkarni, with training and a background in engineering, recounts his path to FP&A and why a background in data analytics is a perfect route to a top job.
In this episode:
- Kulkarni’s path from Data analytics to FP&A as Senior Manager of FP&A at eBay – business partnering with the Merchandising / Shipping & Logistics Business and Product Teams. Followed by his career at Adobe.
- Moving from analytics to FP&A and why it is a perfect route
- Four proven pillars to become a successful FP&A professional
- The tested formula to get a seat at the table in finance
- My framework for analyzing data to get the juiciest insights – SCQA framework explained
- My aha moment in FP&A automating ecommerce/holiday space reports
- Tabla playing and love of Indian classical music
- Steve Jobs and what we can learn about his relentless desire to understand the consumer
The SCQA framework explained by Parth
Follow Parth Kulkarni on LinkedIn
Catch the full episode on YouTube
This follows one of our most popular ever episodes (episode 19: Budgeting all your questions answered). In this sequel episode, new and returning guests answer all your new burning budget and forecasting questions and challenges. Joining us in the budget and forecasting war-room are:
Alejandra Boggione, FP&A Manager and Senior Business Controller, FASTA
Follow ⏩https://www.linkedin.com/in/alejandraboggione/
Andrew Childress, FP&A Solutions Consultant Datarails (ex finance at Accupac, One Inc and Flint Group)
Follow ⏩https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewrchildress/
Annette deYoung, Senior FP&A Solutions Consultant, Datarails (ex finance at JL Clark, Berner Food & Beverage, Fairbanks Morse Engine)
Follow ⏩ https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahdeyoung/
Some of the questions tackled in this LinkedIn Live episode of FP&A Today (November 2023):
- What’s budgeting and forecasting good for?
- How do you approach budgeting in consulting firms?
- Which type of budget process works best (top down or bottom up?)
- How can FP&A be the bridge between the two?
- How does the budget work in a startup?
- What is the linkage between forecasting and the model?
- How can finance best prepare for the budget ahead of time to avoid crazy late nights?
- Revisiting the previous year’s budget – (what can be cut)?
- How can you ensure alignment between the financial plan and operational plan?
- Static annual budget versus a rolling forecast?
- How do budgets help with inflation challenges?
- How do you kickstart scenario planning?
- How often should you reforecast?
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails the AI-powered Financial Planning and Analysis platform for Excel users.
From Camp Taji in Iraq, to Will Wheaton’s narration of Ready Player One, this is the story of Frank Aburto who helped build Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) at Audible.
Frank Aburto, senior Director of Finance, leads strategic finance and FP&A at Audible the audio storytelling subsidiary of Amazon.
In his role, Aburto supports more than 150 partners across marketing and product where the FP&A function has been central to Audible's success in reaching millions of listeners around the world and becoming the largest player in the audiobook market (sales of audiobooks hit $1.8 billion in the US alone in 2022).
In this episode:
- How the military veteran applied his strategic skills learnt in Iraq, Hawai, and South Korea to finance and business
- Building FP&A at Audible through the "lens of the customer"
- The one trait he looks for in a finance hire
- Why understanding customers matters more than P&L metrics
- The power of investment banking as a route to FP&A and finance leadership
- Using SQL to get ahead in your career
- Recommendations for your next Audible book
- How to get a finance job at Audible or Amazon
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails. www.datarails.com
Follow and connect with Frank Aburto: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fcaburto/
Watch the Full YouTube episode: https://youtu.be/9w-MfrBN6K0
Airbase, a spend management company currently processes over $5 billion of annual payments on behalf of finance teams. It is a pain point Vallurupalli is all too aware of. "Moving to Airbase solved a challenge I had personally experienced at previous companies were there were 65 or 70 physical [credit]cards in a 300 person company and spend was not controlled. There was no way to forecast when someone was thinking of using a physical card, which was for anything at that time".
CFO Aneal Vallurupalli joins Paul, on Datarails' podcast FP&A Today, to talk about what CFOs increasingly require from the best in FP&A, his experiences of financial planning and analysis at previous companies, stretching from investment banking to series A companies and public companies.
In this episode:
• The importance of understanding the context and priorities when coming into a new company or role. There's always a rationale for why things were done a certain way before.
• Building credibility and relationships across the organization by understanding pain points, providing value , and conveying industry expertise.
• Moving from growth at all costs in SaaS to revenue growth
• Why he has no single favorite financial metric to analyze a business. The most important metric is often "not financial" and varies by company.
• How AI will displace some repetitive, manual tasks but not logic-based and contextual decision making which is core to finance roles.
• Why having a hunger for knowledge as the most crucial way to win in your FP&A career - with most technical skills being "table stakes"
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Read the full transcript: https://www.datarails.com/how-to-never-be-left-out-of-the-conversation-again-in-fpa-with-airbase-cfo-aneal-vallurupalli/
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J0keFw4WPjM
How is Microsoft using AI to reach up to 99% accuracy in some forecasts? In this episode of FP&A Today, Daniel Sousa-Lennox, a data scientist at Microsoft with deep experience of financial analysis, reveals all.
The Microsoft’s finance team – about 5000 people – saw its first foray into machine learning in forecasting. The team developed FINN (or Microsoft Finance Time Series Forecasting Framework) says Sousa-Lennox who sits within the finance organization, providing software engineering and data science expertise. Using machine learning and creating AI finance tools (such as FINN which has been open-sourced) Sousa-Lennox says the Microsoft finance team has replaced burdensome forecasting and Excel heavy lifting. "The tool has helped, for instance, this one team in terms of accuracy to get the revenue that they were trying to forecast for an Azure product (the cloud computing platform run by Microsoft) to 99% accuracy". But Sousa-Lennox adds that it is important to remember that AI is not "magic" and "wont lead to 99% in every single forecast" and the quality of data is paramount.
Nevertheless the results are transforming financial forecasting at the $2trillion company.
FINN alone provides access to 25+ models supporting Microsoft’s daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly forecasts, transforming the approach of FP&A.
Sousa-Lennox says: “It takes on average for a forecast used run using our tool, it takes about an hour to an hour and a half, which is significantly less than a week [previously]. It is also an hour and a half where you don’t have to be actively doing anything.”
In this episode Daniel Sousa-Lennox shares:
- Similarities and differences between FP&A in US and Panama (and banking vs Microsoft)
- Getting an internship to full-time career at Microsoft
- How he trained in Data science and technology
- How to evangelize finance teams into adopting AI
- How Microsoft is transforming its forecasting and FP&A
- Despite its success why AI is not a “magic bullet” for finance
- The two most powerful lessons in presenting AI to finance teams
- The biggest advice for anyone starting in FP&A
- Last thing finance thing I Googled ChatGPT’d
- My favorite Excel function
Links
Follow Daniel Sousa-Lennox: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dsousalennox/
FINN (Open-sourced by Microsoft): https://microsoft.github.io/finnts/
Worldwide spend on cloud infrastructure hit a staggering $169 billion in 2022 with Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) combined, accounting for 62 percent of the cloud market share. In its first quarter of this year revenue from AWS totaled $21.35 billion, representing almost 17% of Amazon’s overall revenue. What lessons can we learn from within AWS about effective cloud financial management? How can FP&A teams better understand this complex line item? We are joined by Jeff Duresky, Senior FinOps Commercial Architect, Amazon AWS. He is a finance leader who supports the cloud leader’s largest and most strategic customers – and has also held strategic FP&A roles at companies including Capital One.
“As a finance professional the more you understand cloud, the better the insights you’ll be able to drive” – Jeff Duresky
In this episode
- Jeff’s worst budget experience (aka professional service accrual releases).
- The link between cloud financial management and FP&A
- trading fixed expenses in cloud
- Smart decisions related to cloud expenditures and management
- Common cost language – how to get it right
- Secrets to cloud forecasting
- Promoting the best finance and engineering team conversations around the cloud
- Finding reductions in costs for cloud users
- Core metrics to assess and unit costs (cost per gigabyte, cost per instance)
- First steps to begin forecasting cloud costs
- My biggest finance strategic moment
- The last finance thing I googled
- The importance of taking notes in a career in FP&A
Notes
How to establish and drive a forecasting culture
How to talk about cloud with a non-cloud audience (business partnering)
The Key to AWS Optimization
Follow and connect with Jeff Duresky on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffduresky/
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails, Datarails is the AI-powered financial planning and analysis platform. Keep your own Excel financial models and spreadsheets and benefit from AI for data consolidation, reporting and planning.
The market for pet brands is enormous. Two-thirds of American households own a pet and collectively spent $136.8 billion on them in 2022. In this market, Chewy is winning the hearts of owners. The pet-food, health, and supplies company is famous for providing portraits, gifts, free food, and handwritten notes that delight pet owners. In this episode, Matthew Herbert, Chewy Director of Finance, reveals the FP&A undercoat that keeps this Fortune 500 favorite purring.
Herbert says customer service at the company is in “my opinion the strongest moat within the organization…it has its own finance arm, and it has the backing and support of technology and other resources to make it successful because we really believe that we’re here to provide a delightful experience for our customers. Pets are part of the family, and we want our customers to know that we view them that way.”
In this episode:
- How Chewy does FP&A
- What KPIs does FP&A manage at Chewy and how its set up
- Using data to help tell the story at Chewy
- How Matt overcame adversity, such as being laid off and team conflicts faced
- Leading FP&A at the fortune 500 high growth eCommerce company (i.e. Chewy)
- Secrets to effective business partnering
- Insights from 15 years of Investment Banking, Programming, Retail, Consumer Products, and eCommerce experience
- The impact of being a self-taught programmer on a career in finance
- Why finance remains the best role for strategic impact supporting C-Suite Executives
- His brand-new training courses (https://biztrix.us/) based on best-in-class Excel, PowerPoint, Word, SQL and VBA experience
Links
Follow Matthew Herbert on LinkedIn
Matthew’s training course at https://biztrix.us/
What happened when two highly-skilled Excel leaders took on the "best of the best" in the sport? Paul Barnhurst reveals the inside story when he pitted his FP&A-based Excel wits in the The Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC). Taking the ultimate test alongside him is fellow-first timer “Excel Ninja” Ajay Patel, who teaches thousands of subscribers advanced Excel.
Giving his opnion on the two Excel jousters is Andrew Grigolyunovich, FMWC Founder and CEO of AG Capital. The trio talk Excel-at-speed, improving skills, and the functions they can't live without.
- Getting to know Andrew Grigolyunovich: From being a CFO at 21 to founding the Financial Modeling World Cup
- Ajay Patel (aka the Excel Ninja) a fifth degree black belt in Tang Soo Do talks his favorite Excel functions and his FMWC ultimate test
- Optimization planning and Analysis vs FP&A
- The inside story of Paul and Ajay’s grueling FMWC experience
- Secrets to creating classic Excel use cases
- Advice for getting started in competitive Excel
- Best advice to improve your Excel skills
Guests:
Andrew Grigolyunovich, Financial Modeling World Cup: Founder & CEO of AG Capital
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewgrig/
Ajay Patel, The Excel Ninja, Founder of the Excel Dojo
https://www.linkedin.com/in/theexceldojo/
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails,the AI-powered financial planning and analysis platform. Keep your own Excel financial models and spreadsheets and benefit from AI for data consolidation, reporting and planning.
"I have been at the inception points of three companies-Intuit, Netflix and Mozilla Firefox. And now I’m just trying to give back as many lessons as possible” Jim Cook
Jim Cook shares his front row experience as first finance hire at streaming giant Netflix. He reveals the finance business partnering lessons learned from supporting fellow co-founders Marc Randolph and Reed Hastings building the company from obscurity to one of the biggest brands in the world.
How did finance at Netflix contribute to the design of the first red envelopes? What are his lessons that can transform your FP&A?
In this episode:
- Coping with unrealistic budgets experience at fast-growing startups
- What it’s like as Finance Hire #1 at Netflix
- Rebirthing the browser market at Mozilla Firefox
- Lessons from M&A and IPO at Intuit
- Lessons to deliver blockbuster FP&A
- The FP&A as CEO
- The power of a “listening tour and finance partnership”
- Using your voice in FP&A
- What storytelling really means for a finance professional
- Two strategic finance moments that changed the game for Intuit and Mozilla
Links from the Show
Netflixed by Gina Keating (Amazon)
That Will Never Work, Mark Randolph (Amazon)
Netflix versus the World. (Full Documentary, YouTube)
Five lessons I learned from Netflix – Jim Cook
Contact Jim Cook on LinkedIn
Email jimCook@benchboard.com
Drew Murphy nearly became a meteorologist. But he opted for a different type of forecasting, warning of impending storms as an FP&A professional. A fast-paced finance career saw him land a part role at Procter & Gamble (while studying)-his senior year saw him work 30 hours a week as a plant accountant. Following six years of FP&A at Procter & Gamble (including analysis for Gillette and Braun), he took roles at Vistaprint, Mimecraft (where he was central to their IPO) and a CFO gig. Drew then launched community FP&A Hey with his co-founder Yarty Kim. The mission of FP&A Hey is to “help time starved FP&A professionals get their free time back, their personal freedom back” offering resources and mentoring for FP&A professionals.
Core to his career approach is a clear mantra: “Find best practices, find people that make you better, work on things you enjoy.”
In this episode he discusses the implications of this approach to upgrading your career and work life balance in a busy finance role.
In this episode:
- Drew’s worst budgeting experience in his career
- Shaving forecasting with Gillette and Braun
- how to impress sales executives with quarterly sales performance analysis
- Best practice for a monthly profit forecast and team management process
- Why you need to be at a place with “people you respect and admire”
- The importance of relationships in finance
- How the IPO process felt like a “wedding”
- His strategic finance moment delivering (at Mimecast) growth of 40%, EBITDA expansion over time as a percentage of revenue
- Why FP&A pros must learn accounting and a business model
Links from the Show
FP&A Hey. Because they don’t teach FP&A in school. Grow your skills, networks, and careers, all while having fun.
How to impress sales executives with quarterly sales performance analysis: https://www.fpandhey.com/how-to-impress-executives-with-quarterly-sales-performance-analysis/
Contact Drew at Drew@fpandhey.com
This special edition of FP&A Today sees 1,524 finance pros join a LinkedIn Live session. In this episode Paul and a special panel answer all your burning questions on how Finance teams are practically using AI to advance their careers (and bring instant productivity to their businesses).
Joining Paul is Adam Shilton, Founder, Tech for Finance and a world expert on “Helping finance pros turn systems into superpowers with AI”. In addition he is joined by Sloane Kolt, Head of Datarails Labs, which recently launched FP&A Genius, an AI powered solution transforming FP&A.
Some of your big audience questions answered:
- What was the last thing you used Generative AI for?
- Ethical questions in AI and Finance (eg. Do we own the model that AI built?)
- What are the most common use cases for AI in FP&A, and accounting post ChatGPT?
- What are the differences between AI in big vs small companies?
- How should finance leadership use AI and adapt it in their team ethos and processes?
- Privacy, security, AI and Finance - what are the risks?
- What are the secrets of effective Prompting in finance?
- Clarifying tasks with your AI Chat
- Lessons from building a new finance AI tool
- Favorite non ChatGPT AI tools you have seen
- Best advice for getting started with AI in finance
- Rapid fire questions: favorite Excel function and person I would most like to meet.
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails,the AI-powered financial planning and analysis platform. Keep your own Excel financial models and spreadsheets and benefit from AI for data consolidation, reporting and planning.
YouTube video of the episode
Blog post and full transcript
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
Rick Warren, Chief Financial Officer & Chief Operating Officer, Innovation Care Partners, brings lessons from more than 25 years in Healthcare Finance. This includes roles as senior finance and FP&A roles at Ascension (one of the one of the largest private healthcare systems in the United States), Banner Health, one of the largest nonprofit health care systems in the country, and CVS Health, one of the US’s largest retail pharmacy store chains. This is a must-listen for anyone who is interested in finance procedures in healthcare and the most important metrics in healthcare for anyone in finance.
This episode covers:
- How finance can help transform healthcare equity – the challenge of getting lower socioeconomic group fair healthcare coverage
- Rick Moving from a political science degree to finance and ultimately CFO
- The importance of Relevance over precision in FP&A
- The nightmare budget which crashed before it was saved
- Lessons from Boy Scout leadership positions
- Margins for hospitals still struggling post-covid
- The fundamental healthcare financial metrics including reducing hospital expenses, admissions per thousand, ER visits vs primary health care physician, SNF nursing home days spent, revenue and expense per member per month
- The secrets to effective business partnerships in FP&A
- Favorite Excel Function
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails,the AI-powered financial planning and analysis platform. Keep your own Excel financial models and spreadsheets and benefit from AI for data consolidation, reporting and planning.
Aarish Shah is Founder of EmergeONE a Fractional CFO firm for venture backed UK tech startups and scaleups (from Seed to Series B). He has spent close to two decades operating as a CEO or CFO, and now specializes in helping startups understand and act powerfully on their numbers. In this episode, Aarish shares his insights on financial planning and analysis (FP&A) in startups and the fundamental lessons he has learned in his career.
- His “worst budget ever” when one of his factories burnt down in Papua New Guinea
- Who he would most like to meet
- His Nothing Ventured podcast and key lessons talking to players in the venture ecosystem
- Why he likes the constant “challenges” of Series B startups over other stage companies
- The difference between "building" the playbook and "running" the playbook in startups
- How to consider your finance tech stack scales pre-seed to Exit
- How FP&A should consider their tech stack
- Why you need to spending your money at pre-seed
- Investing in early stage businesses in the UK
- How do we go about creating a budget and forecast for a startup?
- Key metrics I use to analyze startups
- How startups can cope with the drying up of cheap capital
- How to get your CFO to say yes
- Favorite Excel function
- How AI understanding is the one skill every FP&A practitioner needs
Episode links:
Nothing Ventured Podcast
EmergeOne Fractional CFOs
hello@emergeone.co.uk (to contact Aarish)
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails,the AI-powered financial planning and analysis platform. Keep your own Excel financial models and spreadsheets and benefit from AI for data consolidation, reporting and planning.
Follow Aarish on LinkedIn
YouTube video of the episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
Ashok Manthena has supported FP&A teams at some of the biggest and most well-known companies on the planet including Google, GAP, and Ingersoll Rand. This included a period at Google which was striking because of “the amount of resources available for finance” particularly when it comes to killing manual finance processes. He says there is an in-built DNA to “automate manual processes”. He says: “This bubbles up naturally when they find there is an, there is a manual process and everyone comes together and thinks about how to automate that process.” In a second career stage Ashok has been a leader in AI finance carrying out practical research, giving keynote speeches and providing practical advice on transforming businesses through the use of AI.
- Rapid fire questions: Why I want to meet Gandhi – to doing Doing sensitivity analysis in ChatGPT
- Why we should all be embarrassed by the stat that 70% of FP&A is spent on getting the data (vs only 30% on insights)
- The power of meetups meetups and the return of face to face meetings for finance learning
- What my career FP&A career at Google taught me
- The near future of automation and AI including running daily reports to the CFO
- Why data priority needs to be the #1 priority alongiside faster surfacing of data issues to leadership
- How I became a leading AI finance speaker and writer and started a tech startup
- Two ways AI is going to revolutionize FP&A Departments forever
- How ChatGPT will be a new interface for finance – practical examples
- The playbook for smaller finance teams and businesses to thrive in the AI age
- Advice to get started with AI in FP&A
- The role of data science in the future of FP&A
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails,the AI-powered financial planning and analysis platform. Keep your own Excel financial models and spreadsheets and benefit from AI for data consolidation, reporting and planning.
Follow Ashok on LinkedIn
YouTube video of the episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
“The male prison population in the United States is about 15% psychopaths. So if, if you’re a warden and you work all day with prisoners, and then at the end of the day you go to some award ceremony honoring local CEOs, you’re probably interacting with a similar number of psychopaths at each event." Jack McCullough – President of CFO Leadership Council and 26-time CFO.
Jack MCcullough’s background gives him an unprecedented perspective on financial leadership. Having started hist career at Big Four audit firm KPMG, he subsequently served as a CFO for 26 different companies, often in a part-time or interim role, working with about 35 CEOs. In his words “several geniuses, a handful of lunatics, and two or three who were both. But I learned from each person and became a more effective leader.”
In this episode Jack McCullough reveals:
- How to work with Psychopath CEOs
- Mental health and finance and overcoming difficult leaders
- The importance of personal brand-building for CFOs and FP&A analysts
- How Jack invented the phrase “CF-No” in 1984
- Why FP&A professionals and CFOs need to build their brand today
- The things that CFOs most want from their FP&A leaders
- His most strategic finance moment – or how COVID transformed his business
- Mentoring in finance and the power of being mentored by Gen Z talent
- Why he headlines his finance conferences with Guns n’ Roses and AC DC
- Who would he most like to meet
- His most manual processes ever
- The surprising two traits that CFOs must achieve today to have any chance of success
- How to become a CFO
Episode Links
Books by Jack McCullough:
The Psychopathic CEO: An Executive Survival Guide: Jack McCullough
Secrets of Rockstar CFOs: Jack McCullough
The CFO Leadership Council
Watch on YouTube
Follow Jack McCullough on Linkedin
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
Robin Kiziak is Financial Controller and Finance Business Partner at VF Corporation (home of outdoor brands Vans, North Face and Timberland). Previously he has been a finance business partner at Hotel Chocolat and UK home improvement leader, Wickes. He also runs the website, There’s Nothing Funny About Finance which aims to move finance away from stereotypes (think Dr No or Beancounters). In this episode Robin reveals how he has used humor to disarm tension in meetings and become a finance business partner trusted by his colleagues
In this episode:
- Robin’s Favorite Finance Joke
- How to be a finance business partner (“with a part of the business that don’t want you there”).
- The negative stereotypes of finance and how to overcome them
- The power of soft (or human) skills
- The distribution metrics behind Vans and Timberland’s finance successes
- Costs vs service as the “holy grail” in retail
- How to start off in a new finance role – which financials to look at first
- The biggest financial surprise you found
- Snagging an unsung hero award
- Biggest advice to an aspiring FP&A professional
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails,the AI-powered financial planning and analysis platform. Keep your own Excel financial models and spreadsheets and benefit from AI for data consolidation, reporting and planning.
Links – There’s Nothing Funny About Finance
Follow Robin Kiziak on LinkedIn
YouTube video of the episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
Tom Hood is one of the most influential leaders in accounting. The Executive Vice President, Business Growth and Engagement, at American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA has been named the Second Most Influential Person in Accounting since 2011 by Accounting Today Magazine (only pipped to the post by AICPA CEO Barry Melancon). In giving him their award the publication cited his “legendary energy, imagination and ability to foresee the future, and focusing them specifically on management accountants, helping them reimagine “the Future of Finance.” On Linkedin Tom has 780,000 followers and the platform recruited the accounting leader as one of their Top Voices. His passion for technological innovation in accounting has been evident since the early days of VisiCalc to Excel and ChatGPT. This combines with his rigorous enforcement against bad actors in the profession, and optimism about the future.
In this episode Tom Hood describes one of the biggest shifts in accounting as “The Great Join between accounting and FP&A”. Hood says: “We need accounting to make sure the numbers are right and to maintain our stewardship and trust. But we also need the financial viewpoint, which we saw big time in the pandemic. This is needed to reimagine what’s next in the profession.”
Hood also reveals his passion reflecting accounting’s role as one of the most fundamental tenets of business- and wider society“Accounting is a language of business. It is a language that many people‒dare I say most people‒don’t truly understand. You become the value interpreter of everything about a business.”
In this episode discover:
- Tom’s career trajectory from to CFO at to Maryland Association of CPAs to EVP at the (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA)
- The merger between the AICPA and CIMA (UK-based) and the global power base this provides the accounting profession
- The Great Join between FP&A and Accounting
- His passion for accounting tech as continuing to revolutionize business – from the dawn of VisiCalc to ChatGPT today
- His role in stamping out unethical accounting practices
- The changing up the CPA Exam and what it means for you
- How AI has already changed the game for accountants and how companies are transforming accounting
- How he got into accounting as a way of getting into the FBI and why that didn’t work out
YouTube video of the episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
Jake Luerkens and Connor Frischmeyer are co founders and partners at Auxo Partners, a finance advisory firm that helps startups make better decisions and grow strategically.
They have been in "the sidecar" as companies scaled from $2m to $50m, providing internal finance, FP&A, capital markets advisory and SPAC (special purpose acquisition company) support.
In this episode:
- When should startups think about bringing in fractional FP&A services
- The rise and fall of SPACs (including a rap about SPACs)
- Why investors are focused on a clear path to solid business models
- How FP&A can help companies not blow their fundraising
- The most typical problems companies face in raising money
- Why Excel is the most flexible tool for finance
- Biggest Excel nightmares
- How to get started in FP&A
YouTube video of the episode
Transcript of the episode
Connect with Jake Luerkens and Connor Frishchmeyer on LinkedIn
Connect with Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
Links from the episode
Auxo Partners
Spac Dream By Cassius Cuvée featuring Mags Lionne
Ladies and gentlemen, let’s get ready to modelll! Broadcast on ESPN, watched by tens of thousands of people around the world, and featured across CNN,BBC, ITV, and The Atlantic, the Financial Modeling World Cup (FMWC) is the hottest esport on the planet. If you ever wanted to apply for the Excel Modeling World Cup against top stars, feature on ESPN, or wonder if you have what it takes, this is the must-listen to episode of the year.
Chief Operating Officer of the FMWC, Maksims Sičs reveals the inside story of how the “Excel World Cup” was started and the success story ever since.
Maksims Sičs is himself an expert in Corporate Finance advising customers on financial planning and analysis at companies including AG Capital, and PNB Banka.
In this episode Maksims reveals:
- How the Financial Modeling World cup started
- The success of the sport in creating a global Excel community
- How a little help from Microsoft helped FMWC get broadcast on ESPN
- The glory: the prize fund for winning and being an Excel world champion stands at $30,000 jackpot and a trip to Las Vegas
- The pain: how one competitor tried to do the final stage in VBA and his Excel crashed five minutes before the final
- How to enter the tournament for only $20 ticket
- How good do you need to be to enter the competition?
- How a competitor called the Excel Wizard Bo Rydobon managed to complete cases in 2 minutes through dynamic arrays
- Helping SME business with finance in his (second) day job
- Why FP&A provides “light in the darkness” for a business
Enter the Financial Modeling World Cup
YouTube video of the episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
When FP&A Meets Treasury with Mike Richards
“Spend 10 minutes a week on yourself. Nobody else is going to take charge of your career except for you. If you sit back, you are going to lose.”
Mike Richards, CEO & Founder of The Treasury Recruitment Company, has helped professionals in the US, UK and Europe find dream treasury roles at companies such as Chanel, IKEA and Porsche for two decades.
Mike also hosts the popular podcast, The Treasury Career Corner Podcast which has seen 250 treasury guests and more than 120,000 downloads
In this episode:
- Modern treasury defined
- The best paths to collaboration between Treasury and FP&A (aka grab a coffee ☕)
- Association of Finance Professionals' certifications for treasury and FP&A
- The guide to understanding treasury operations for aspiring CFOs.
- Financial risk management, capital structure, cash management, banking, relationships, and decision-making for treasury
- How to get a job in a job market that sucks
- Horrible finance job descriptions
Links
Upcoming speeches and conferences featuring Mike Richards - https://treasuryrecruitment.com/treasury-roadshow/ Including New York Cash Exchange, then EuroFinance – Barcelona & then AFP, San Diego
Listeners can connect with Mike here - https://www.linkedin.com/in/mrtreasury/
Head to Treasury Corner podcast here - https://treasuryrecruitment.com/podcast/
YouTube video of the episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails (www.datarails.com) is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
“You can throw me in any water. Stormy, cold, or hot and I’ll start swimming.”
And swimming is exactly what Jenny Fuss did.
Jenny Fuss, CFO of Boart Longyear, talks about the challenges of international experience, the importance of having a diverse set of skills in an FP&A team and how to achieve storytelling and influencing in FP&A.
Originally from a small town in Germany, Fuss wanted experience of working and living abroad. When the opportunity to move to become a CFO of a joint venture in China presented itself she took it before relocating again to continue her global career in Houston Texas, and expertise as a finance leader walking the shop floor in manufacturing companies.
This episode covers:
- Jenny’s advice for an international-based career
- The power of FP&A to provide game changing analysis when you have new customer, need to find a new way to contract or enter new markets
- What CFOs expect from a new breed of FP&A teams
- The challenge of doing less F and P (and more analysis) when facing high pressure cycles such as month end closes and budget planning
- Why she favors a three-year forecast from FP&A
- The #1 priority for a CFO in their first 90 days in a new role
- Owning up to a million dollar mistake
- Jenny’s favorite thing about Excel
- Her top advice for someone starting out in FP&A
Follow Jenny Fuss on LinkedIn
YouTube video of the episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Wassia Kamon built FP&A from the ground up at Intralot software, the the software behind the US Powerball lottery (as an insider she couldn’t play the lottery for nine years).
And Wassia knows something about winning against the odds.
She arrived in the US aged 17. As she points out “only 3% of people getting a CPA are black”.
Wassia says: “Growing up in the Ivory Coast I was not a minority. Coming to the US I had to learn what it was to be a minority.”
She started posting regularly on LinkedIn after “seeing that there’s nobody that looks like me that’s talking about finance. “I never had a black boss, I never reported to somebody that was black. So the fact that I’m in this role means that other people saw me for what I could bring to the table and hired me.”
Her rapid rise has seen her become a finance executive with roles as VP of Finance at Boehringer Ingelheim From there, she moved on to more FP&A-focused roles at Boehringer Ingelheim, a global pharmaceutical company, as finance business partner for different business units, to VP of Finance at Low Income Investment Fund (managing $2billion of investments). She was recently recognized as an up the 40 under 40 honoree by CPA Practive Advisor.
In this episode learn:
- Her approach to learning on the go in switching from accounting to FP&A
- The value of “starting where you are”
- How to make sure finance speaks the same language as the rest of the business
- Putting ongoing meetings ahead of an annual meeting when it comes to budget and other big ticket items
- Secrets to managing a team and getting the most out of colleagues
- Book recommendations to boost your FP&A career
- How being “overly confident” led to her biggest FP&A career blunder
- Her favorite Excel function that changed her life forever
- What’s better, chocolate or Cheetos?
YouTube video of this episode
Full episode transcript
Follow Wassia Kamon on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
For AFP FP&A Continuing Education credit please complete the course via the Earmark Ap, must pass the quiz with 80% accuracy and send the completed certificate to pbarnhust@thefpandaguy.com for issuance of 1 hour of credit toward your AFP FP&A Certification.
Today's guest is…Paul Barnhurst. Usually sitting in the presenter’s chair, this special edition sees Paul Barnhurst, aka The FP&A Guy (and host of FP&A Today), reveal the highs and lows from his storied career in FP&A at American Express, Solera, and DigiCert. Guest host is Annette deYoung, FP&A Solutions Consultant at Datarails, herself an FP&A veteran at companies including manufacturer, JL Clarke.
Highlights? Discover a rookie error that saw Paul deliver bonuses to the worst performers (yes, you read that right), rather than the best. How he met Jimmy Carter. The inside story of FP&A forecasting for American Express’s (then) money-spinning Travelers Cheques business, and how his biggest FP&A tech accomplishment is still in place at a previous company.
Get to know your host as Paul reveals:
- The winding road to FP&A from his beginnings in government procurement contracts
- His big break at American Express despite “not really knowing what FP&A was”
- With a love of numbers, why he was drawn to FP&A as his passion
- Accounting vs FP&A and the best techniques he has used to manage the relationships
- His key learnings to becoming a truly excellent FP&A business partner
- The fears and journey in leaving big corporations to become a top FP&A consultant
- Why finance tend to be such laggards when it comes to tech adoption
- What’s it actually like using Google Sheets?
YouTube video of this episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
For AFP FP&A Continuing Education credit please complete the course via the Earmark Ap, must pass the quiz with 80% accuracy and send the completed certificate to pbarnhust@thefpandaguy.com for issuance of 1 hour of credit toward your AFP FP&A Certification.
Danielle Stein Fairhust literally wrote the book on Excel and Financial Modeling. Well two books, actually. Using Excel for Business and Financial Modelling and Financial Modeling in Excel for Dummies.
Here, the Excel MVP from Australia provides her secrets to financial modeling.
- Her road to financial modeling after traveling for seven years, and leaving investment banking Why Excel is so crucial for businesses
- Budgeting and forecasting vs financial modeling
- How she was commissioned to write her famous books
- Difference between creating a LinkedIn course vs writing a book
- Encouraging and raising the profile of women in financial modeling
- Secrets to training and behind the scenes of the Financial Modeling World Cup
- How to Become an Excel MVP
- The biggest issue people face with financial modeling
- The Financial Modeling Institute work and how to ace the test
- Favorite Excel Function?
- Biggest advice for someone starting in FP&A today?
Links
Danielle Stein Fairhurst: Using Excel for Business and Financial Modeling
Danielle Stein Fairhurst: Financial Modeling in Excel For Dummies
Danielle’s LinkedIn course (new), Excel: Financial Functions in Depth.
Follow Danielle Stein Fairhurst on LinkedIn
YouTube video of the episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
For AFP FP&A Continuing Education credit please complete the course via the Earmark Ap, must pass the quiz with 80% accuracy and send the completed certificate to pbarnhust@thefpandaguy.com for issuance of 1 hour of credit toward your AFP FP&A Certification.
Bjarte Bogsnes has helped companies, from IKEA, H&M,Pernod Ricard, Volvo and Equinor (Scandinavia’s largest company) scrap traditional budget approaches and move to “Beyond Budgeting”. In today’s episode Bogsnes rails against the “misery” and “borderline unethical behavior” in traditional budgeting within companies, as he talks about the seachange happening in businesses. He talks to Paul Barnhurst as he publishes his new book, This Is Beyond Budgeting: A Guide to More Adaptive and Human Organizations (2023).
The episode covers
- Definition of beyond budgeting as an antidote to “serious problems with traditional management”
- How traditional budgeting gets “trust” and “predictability” wrong
- Your answer to “Why are you budgeting?” shows the problems inherent in existing process
- How budget process are “borderline unethical”
- Equinor (Scandinavia’s case study) change
- Making organizations more adaptive and human in the process of transformation
- Don’t start with rolling forecasting
- How a Vinyl collection of 3,5000 is a unique musical passion
- How Beyond Budget “will happen” in the next decade
Links
Bognes Advisory bogsnesadvisory.com
FT (case study of Ikea): CEOs forced to ditch decades of forecasting habits
Bjarte Bogsnes: This Is Beyond Budgeting: A Guide to More Adaptive and Human Organizations
Follow Bjarte Bogsnes on LinkedIn
YouTube video of the episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
In this special FP&A Today episode, Paul is joined by three Excel experts whom Microsoft has recognized as Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs). Learn why it is important to up your Excel game and how you can do it. Below check out offers (saving $$$) from our MVPs exclusively for listeners of FP&A Today.
Get all your questions about Excel answered by the expert panel:
George Mount, Founder Stringfest Analytics
Celia Alves, CEO, Solve and Excel Consulting
Mark Proctor, Excel Off The Grid
In this special episode:
- Our MVPs on when Excel first emerged as a difference-maker in their lives
- George Mount on the failure of finance to adapt to technology
- The challenge of finance teams descending to the lowest common Excel skill set
- The untapped power of PowerQuery and where to start
- The power of prepping your data properly
- Python vs Excel
- Automating Excel reports using Python
- How to deal with tricky Excel issues
- Will Excel go extinct with the rise of AI
- The thing that you absolutely could not live without in Excel
Connect with George Mount
Connect with Celia Alves
Connect with Mark Proctor
Special Offers Exclusively for FP&A Today listeners
1) George Mount
Subscribe to George’s newsletter to get access to his data analytics resource library and many other goodies https://stringfestanalytics.com/subscribe/
2) Mark Proctor
https://exceloffthegrid.com/fpa is an exclusive offer for our training academy to the listeners of FP&A Today - 30-day full access trial for $1, followed by a $100 annual discount. This is valid until 31 May.
Excel Off the Grid
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ExcelOffTheGrid
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markstephenproctor/
3) Celia Alves
Celia offers an online course about automation of Excel Reporting procedures. Check out the special FP&A Today discount here https://snapreportschamp.com/course
DISCOUNT CODE for 20% OFF: FPA20
(valid up to June 4, 2023).
Subscribe to Celia’s newsletter https://snapreportschamp.com/subscribenewsletter
Celia Alves - Solve & Excel - on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/CeliaAlvesSolveExcel
YouTube video of today's episode
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Syed Nadeem is a top finance leader in Saudi Arabia. But the director of Budgeting at listed telecom company, Zain KSA, says he considers his previous failures as pivotal to his position today. He says: “When I was young [and experiencing failure] I felt so disappointed I thought my world was going to end. Sometimes you don't get a promotion and you see other peers getting a promotion. I struggled after getting my CMA (Certified Management Accountant). Sometimes you are not getting good increments, or you are about to hire someone and they reject you. But what I learned is this failure actually makes you strong for the future role.”
Today, he shares his full breadth of experience-both good and bad and explains why he provides (free) mentorships to businesses on a daily basis and to his 15,000 followers on LinkedIn.
In this wide ranging interview Syed explains:
- Uncovering the power of FP&A in companies providing a “helicopter view of companies”.
- The role and limitations of certifications in FP&A
- How “selling” is the core to getting a good job in finance
- The power of technology in FP&A and “unlearning and relearning every day”
- The secrets to effective communication with senior leadership
- How bad experiences make strong finance business leaders
- The secret to talking to Investors in a Language they Understand
Links
Get a free one-to-one career session with Syed at https://calendly.com/syednadeem/connect
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Syed Nadeem on LinkedIn
YouTube video
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Maura Feddersen, behavioral research manager at Swiss Re, is an economist who previously worked in the economics team of two of the Big Four Accountancy firms: PwC and KPMG.
She got switched on to behavioral economics as “I always felt there was something a bit missing in economics. [Economics] assumes that people act quite rationally…and that was just not the case. Behavioral economics brings together the economics, as well as insights from psychology, to try to assess how humans really make decisions”.
This fascinating episode with Maura, uncovers the lessons that FP&A teams can learn from behavioral economics to improve forecasting and the power of “knowing what knowing what you don’t know.”
This episode includes
- New research revealing that investors predictions are only slightly more accurate than a chimp
- How new forecasting methods improved accuracy at Swiss Re by 5%
- The cognitive biases we need to be aware of that undermine accuracy (such as the dangers of groupthink)
- Meryl Streep’s Oscar nominations and your forecast confidence levels tested
- How to try and manage cognitive bias
- The true economic impact of uncertainty in the global economy and in your business
- The opportunities and limits of AI forecasting
- Using RIO (Rational Impartial Observers)
- The biggest failure in her career
- Favorite Excel function
- Her biggest advice for someone starting out to get really good at forecasting
Further reading
Actuaries magazine: So You Think You Can Underwrite [Maura Fedderson]
Insurers, take heed of these 3 common forecasting fallacies [by Maura Feddersen]
Recommended books
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction Paperback - Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner
Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan, the Impact of the Highly Improbable
Annie Duke, How to decide
Adam Grant, Think Again, The Power of Knowing what you Don’t Know
Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Maura Fedderson on LinkedIn
YouTube video
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
For AFP FP&A Continuing Education credit please complete the course via the Earmark Ap, must pass the quiz with 80% accuracy and send the completed certificate to pbarnhust@thefpandaguy.com for issuance of 1 hour of credit toward your AFP FP&A Certification.
Are you starting to think about your budget for the next year? Stop right now, argues Mikus Krams.
As a former senior director of strategy and finance at Chili Piper, he described budgets as a shackle — you’ll be held prisoner to the assumptions you make for the next year.
In this episode, Mikus Krums, the B2B Saas finance leader turned co-founder of Trace Space, says budgets are unlikely to be relevant for small agile companies. He tells Paul Barnhurst: “Let's say you're doing some activity and it's yielded you some results. If halfway through the activity you figured that it's not working, why would you still keep pushing it? But if you have a budget, that's exactly what you are doing…it just felt silly to be living that way.”
In this episode Mikus describes
- Bottoms up planning as the most impactful strategy for agile B2B SaaS companies
- The reason that budgets are bad for business
- ROI mindset as core to his finance thinking
- Managing incentive structure through a Rev Ops approach
- How on target earnings are sometimes more mirage than reality
- Managers as “powderkegs” and “snipers”
- The path to moving to a continuous forecasting methodology
- His biggest failure in his FP&A career
- Banking as a powerful route to FP&A career success
- The importance of lunch with business leaders and individual contributors in a business
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Mikus Krams on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
For AFP FP&A Continuing Education credit please complete the course via the Earmark Ap, must pass the quiz with 80% accuracy and send the completed certificate to pbarnhust@thefpandaguy.com for issuance of 1 hour of credit toward your AFP FP&A Certification.
“I would like to see FP&A drive the planning process for go- to-market just because I think they will have a better natural understanding of what it means to actually build a plan.”
Scott Stouffer, a former engineer, is a serial entrepreneur and founder. Currently he is CEO and Founder at scaleMatters, the world’s first Go-to-Market Optimization Platform. Previously, he executed the sale of Salsa Labs, a non profit CRM to PE firm Accel-KKR at a period of $12MM annual revenue and 70 employees. In this wide-ranging interview he reveals the real impact he believes CEOs, such as himself, are looking for in choosing CFOs and building a finance team. He also argues for a bigger role for FP&A – including leadership of a company’s go-to-market strategy incorporating how an organization can engage with customers to convince them to buy their product or service.
This interview covers
- Scott’s roadmap for growth leading fast-scaling companies
- Why many CFOs are “glorified controllers” (and why that is a problem)
- How FP&A can prevent sales and marketing teams “from winging it” by bringing the “analytical brain power” to the
- The power of a good plan in a fast-scaling business
- Should Rev Ops and Data be owned by the CFO
- How FP&A should be the first port of call in building a companies Go-to-Market strategy
- How finance teams can work better with sales teams and better modeling sales capacity
- Why in 60% of cases companies have too many sales people by failing to do proper modeling
- Why you need to hone self-confidence as a skillset
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Scott Stouffer on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
For AFP FP&A Continuing Education credit please complete the course via the Earmark Ap, must pass the quiz with 80% accuracy and send the completed certificate to pbarnhust@thefpandaguy.com for issuance of 1 hour of credit toward your AFP FP&A Certification.
The second-biggest bank collapse in U.S. history created a storm for CFOs and their finance teams during a panic-induced 48 hours in March. It only ended as regulators took control of Santa Clara, Calif.-based SVB and a dramatic intervention by financial regulators.
In this special edition of FP&A Today, meet those in finance and FP&A who saw the events at Silicon Valley Bank first hand. Understand how the banking crisis played out and how ongoing ripples continue to impact everyone in FP&A and how your finance teams can cope with the ongoing aftermath.
The panel:
Josh Aharonoff (aka Your CFO Guy), CEO and Founder, Mighty Digits had many clients banking with SVB and had to make quick decisions as news broke. He shares Finance & Accounting Best Practices & Advice everyday to his nearly 85,000 LinkedIn followers
Follow Josh on LinkedIn
CJ Gustafson is a CFO at a series B startup, PartsTech. He has been in the startup space within the private equity sector and has helped to scale venture backed companies for the last 10 years. He also authors Mostly Metrics, an irreverent and analytical spin on metrics which has crossed more than 10k subscribers.
Follow CJ Gustafson on LinkedIn
Casey Woo is a seven-time high Tech CFO- turned investor. He has held finance and CFO roles at Silicon Valley companies including at WeWork and property tech companies before founding an “operators community” turned investment fund FOG ventures.
Follow Casey Woo on LinkedIn
What is covered in this episode:
- Casey Woo explains being at the “heart of the storm” in Silicon Valley with a close personal relationship with SVB
- The reasons that VCs put pressure to withdraw money from SVB in a classic “prisoner’s dilemma”
- How the fallout from SVB continues to impact companies and particularly finance professionals
- The challenges for CFOs, particularly in tech, seeking to fundraise after SVB’s crash
- What are the differences between fractional banking and Ponzi schemes
- The initial $250,000 ceiling on federal deposit insurance explained
- How could KPMG have given SVB a clean bill of health with so many stored-up challenges?
- Why is the impact of raising rates so dramatically different than in the 1970s when no banks failed?
- Strategic advice for Treasury and FP&A pros going forward post-SVB
- The importance for CFOs and FP&A leaders to understand “second order effects” beyond cash entering and leaving the building.
- How the SVB saga has emphasized the value of an FP&A function that can show everything that's happened, is happening, and is going to happen “and being in control of that story” - allowing you to take action quickly.
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
“I am definitely starting to see more people with an FP&A background becoming fractional CFOs.”
Michael King, founder of The CFO Accelerator, coaches hundreds of fractional CFOs and accountants in building “6 and 7-figure advisory firms”.
King arrives on the bustling fractional CFO scene at a time when demand for part-time finance chiefs working for several companies is higher than ever. In King’s words in the next decade a small business having a fractional CFO will be just as common as bringing in a bookkeeper as hiring fractional CFOs becomes the “cost of doing business” at small and medium-sized enterprises. And according to King, those with an FP&A background have a significant advantage.
“FP&A really gets people ready for those CFO technical skills. So when I think about FP&A, I'm thinking about things like forecast projections, budgets and models, and data management, alongside communications across functional divisions within a business. And that's a huge part of what a fractional CFO has to understand”.
Covered in this episode
- King’s path from being a navy nuclear engineer to a fractional CFO leader
- The essential skills you need to be a fractional CFO
- When should an SMB choose a fractional CFO
- Why budgeting and forecasting are “everything”
- The key to using the fractional CFO position to connect the strategic goals of a business
- Why people in finance must learn to love sales
- When to move away from a fractional CFO and appoint a full time finance chief
- Why cash flow is always “the first” and most important metric for any fractional CFO service
- Why you only need a small number of clients to “make a killing” as a fractional CFO
- How the Fractional CFO space will explode in the next decade “regardless of the economic picture”
- Fractional CFOs need to be “operating as far away from the decimal as possible” to be successful
- The process of adopting kids as the thing few people know about Michael
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Michael King on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails, the FP&A platform for Excel users.
Episode links
The CFO Accelerator podcast with Michael King
The CFO Report (Youtube channel)
The The 5-Minute Fractional CFO Newsletter
“I must admit, when I was doing accounting, I never liked my FP&A colleagues. In fact, as a matter of at times, I hated them. I thought they didn’t understand accounting. They always push to reduce the number of days it takes to close the books when they have very little clue what's going on.”
Abdul Khaliq, Group Financial Controller, at Abu Dhabi National Hotels
In our 50th episode of FP&A Today, we bring together an all-star guest list who have had experience working as both accountants and in FP&A. Drawing on their experience they look at the frequent clashes between FP&A and their accounting colleagues (be warned no one pulls any punches!). Plus, the secrets to a more harmonious relationship between FP&A and accounting.
Get ready for The Dual of Accruals, the Toe-to-Toe on Cash Flow….with all of your questions answered about the day-to-day realities of FP&A vs Accounting.
The panel:
Lyndi Porter is accounting controller at Solera, a global leader in vehicle lifecycle management. She has more than 16 years accounting experience and has managed FP&A teams
Follow Lyndi on LinkedIn
Abdul Khaliq, Group Financial Controller, at Abu Dhabi National Hotels. 20+ years of progressive experience in accounting for Real Estate Development and Hospitality industries.
Follow Abdul on LinkedIn
Josh Aharonoff (aka Your CFO Guy), CEO and Founder, Mighty Digits. He shares Finance & Accounting Best Practices & Advice everyday to his nearly 85,000 LinkedIn followers
Follow Josh on LinkedIn
Terrell Turner: Co-founder and fractional CFO at TLTurner Group (NY Times featured CFO | 40 Under 40 CPA). He also provide bookkeeping services to law firms to make accounting and finance less complicated.
What is covered in this episode:
- The crucial differences between accounting and FP&A?
- The 4 main reasons FP&A practitioners and their accounting colleagues clash.
- The business fallout when FP&A and accounting fail to co-exist
- Best practices that have worked in your career to bridge the gaps.
- Potential impact of AI in the FP&A-accounting relationship
- The crucial role of a Tech stack
- The importance of the chart of accounts in this relationship
- Getting the 10Qs and 10Ks out and the impact on FP&A requests
- The fastest way to get from accounting and FP&A and the qualifications
- Favorite Excel functions for accounting and FP&A pros
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
“It’s like a fuse being blown. You can push as much power as you want through the device, but if the fuse is gone, it isn't going to work. That's exactly how I felt.”
Alison Allsopp is Head of FP&A at NHS Supply Chain, a crucial cog in the UK’s National Health Service. Prior to this, Alison was promoted nine times in her previous role at credit card company, Capital One. Despite (or maybe because of) this rapid rise up the finance ranks, Alison faced prolonged self-doubt and feelings of “imposter syndrome”. One day she reached breaking point. “As much as it was a real low point in my life, it was a huge turning point.”
In this episode Alison reveals how she managed these challenges in her career and lessons for those facing a similar situation.
Other highlights:
- Spearheading FP&A in the supply chain of the NHS just as COVID-19 hit throwing the NHS into crisis
- The importance of building trusting relationships and being open and transparent
- The secrets to getting nine promotions within a company
- Differences between big business FP&A and public sector FP&A
- The untold role of FP&A’s strategic role at the NHS during the pandemic
- The biggest opportunities and challenges for FP&A professionals today
- The interesting fact that many do not know about Alison
- Her favorite Excel function
- The power of a good Waterfall
- Her biggest advice for someone starting out in FP&A
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Alison Allsopp on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
Egor Lyasko is Head of FP&A, Northern Europe at The Kraft Heinz Company, encompassing some of the world’s most loved brands including Heinz ketchup, Philadelphia Cream Cheese and Lunchables. After gaining a master’s degree in biochemistry from the University of Oxford, Egor started at Kraft Heinz as a trainee rising rapidly in six years to Head of FP&A, Northern Europe.
What we covered in this episode:
- His rapid career rise at Kraft Heinz attracted by the ketchup maker’s “culture of ownership.”
- The principles of finance transformation and the core lessons learnt
- How Kraft Heinz manages its annual budget cycle (and what he would do differently next time)
- The role of integrated business planning at the world’s fifth-largest food and beverage conglomerate
- The importance of being a “mini CFO’ in a sales finance partnership role
- FP&A as Guardians of the P&L
- Why he doesn’t have an ambition to become a CFO
- His perfect retirement dream
- His favorite Excel function
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Egor Lyasko on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
Many CFOs preach about keeping up with technological change. But CFO Glenn Hopper went a step further. As ChatGPT talk reached fever pitch he was ready with a proof of concept for an FP&A version of Chat GPT. For good measure he also provided 30 pages of documentation about the process (“Application of ChatGPT to Build an FP&A Tool”) - to acclaim among FP&A professionals.
Hopper, a serial startup CFO, and U.S. Navy veteran who earned a master’s degree at Harvard says: “I wanted to see if someone with just a base understanding of the underlying technology could use artificial intelligence to first off build a tool that would help automate some of the FP&A processes and secondly, get to a way where you could use that tool to interact with your company's financial data.”
The Chat GPT project was a perfect technical project for Hopper, playing to his technological mindset and skills foreshadowing technological transformation for finance professionals as explored in his book Deep Finance In the Information Age: https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Finance-Corporate-Information-Age/dp/1637351240. The study also draws on his career and love of FP&A.
In this episode Glenn Hopper discusses
- His unusual transition to CFO, moving from journalism in the Navy to product manager.
- How a passion for writing helps to formulate projects and challenges in finance
- His experience with financial transformation in finance companies and the lessons he learned from the experience – as set out in his book Deep Finance
- How having a mathematical and analytical mindset is crucial for anyone in FP&A
- How his biggest corporate failure (missing a $1.5million invoice in budget preparation) was essentially his “origin story” to becoming a transformative CFO
- How he wrote a feature film – a low budget horror movie, The Hanged Man which streamed on Netflix
- His favorite Excel function
Links from the show
Deep Finance In the Information Age: https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Finance-Corporate-Information-Age/dp/1637351240
“Application of ChatGPT to Build an FP&A Tool” - https://github.com/ghopper3/ChatGPT-Project/blob/main/ChatGPT%20for%20FPA.pdf
The Hanged Man (2007) Written by Glenn Hopper https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1185596/
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Glenn Hopper on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
Nicolas Boucher has a simple message to anyone who wants to move from audit to FP&A.
The Head of Finance and Controlling at Thales says: “You can do it. I am an example of that.”
He says many skills are transferable from audit to FP&A. “Looking at financial statements from different companies in different situations and different industries” is one. Another is understanding “the figures compared to the past or compared to trends to give assurance to the figures. This is actually what you are doing as FP&A when you are analyzing the actuals against the budget or against last year.”
After seven years in audit at PwC which took him around the world and saw him get “battlefield promotions” Nicolas didn’t want to remain in audit forever and wanted “something more operationally close to the business.”
In this week’s podcast he explains how he made the move from audit to FP&A and the skills he has learnt in his 15 years as a finance leader.
Whether it is his past as a DJ (“When you have control of the microphone from 500 people, you need to know what you have to say and to have the confidence to do it”) or board reports and his daily content as a global finance thought leader with 127,000 followers on LinkedIn he explains the importance of stopping people from being “ bored” or losing attention.
He also reveals the inside scoop on a new course “giving everything that I learned the last 15 years” - that he wishes he had been given when starting out.
In this episode Nicolas reveals:
- How to shape your audit skills to to get a role in FP&A
- His key learnings in a finance career that has taken him all over the world including France, the US, and Singapore, and across audit, controlling and FP&A roles.
- The secrets to hitting 126,000 followers on LinkedIn as one of the leading FP&A (and general finance) influencers
- His lessons from a large-scale finance transformation at Thales
- The importance of communicating “bad surprises” early
- His early DJ Career and the lessons for a career in finance
- His new course, Become a High Performing Finance Professional
- His favorite Excel function
Links from the show
https://nicolasboucher.online/ Become a High Performing Finance Professional course with links to his content online
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Nicolas Boucher on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
What does Carmen Turner love about FP&A? “Being able to provide businesses the insights they need to make great business decisions.”
The Director of Financial Planning and Analysis at Carmen Consulting Group who has managed the FP&A business partnerships at top companies such as McGraw Hill, says: “I work to help the businesses manage their budgets to target and understand their financial story.”
But she started her career not in finance (or through a traditional route).
She began her career as an electrician.
But programming robots and wiring facilities saw her gain skills which have been used daily in her 14-year finance career - not least troubleshooting, problem solving, collaboration, communication and the ability to educate others on complex (financial) wiring.
In this week’s podcast Carmen provides insights into how FP&A teams can give business the appropriate insights to deliver great decision-making.
This episode covers:
- Carmen’s definition of FP&A as a primary educator in the business
- How doing an MBA switched her on to FP&A as a passion
- How she built the first FP&A certification more than a decade ago and how it helped her understand how processes differ across industries and companies
- Putting her finance-first thinking to the test when starting her FP&A consulting business
- Her four step approach to mastering sales-FP&A business partnerships
- How to effectively build a sales compensation strategy that works
- Why she advocates for rolling forecasts
- The importance of adopting a risk and opportunities approach in budget and forecasting
- The importance of a buffer in place when it comes to budget deadlines
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Carmen Turner on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Asif Masani has an inner belief that has guided his entire career. “Whatever I learn something, I don't feel good if I don't share it”.
This ethos has taken Asif on a journey to become an FP&A leader and author. He has just published his first book about FP&A, hit nearly 60,000 followers on LinkedIn and his daily advice has almost single handedly opened the eyes of Indian finance people to FP&A as a career. Unsurprisingly, his education-first focus has led him to lead FP&A (APAC and India) at e-learning company Coursera (which facilitates 7000 courses, and which set up its FP&A team three years ago).
For such a stalwart of FP&A only nine years ago Asif admits “I had never heard about FP&A before” until he landed on a role as financial analyst at Citi. He has since had FP&A roles at companies including Pfizer, and Great Learning.
In this episode Asif talks to Paul Barnhurst about his career journey:
- From audit at EY to FP&A
- How a struggle to find a job led him to become a top FP&A influencer
- The top advice for finance people to build their own online brand
- How he embarked on writing his new book, All About FP&A, a 220 page guide for those entering the profession
- How FP&A operates at e-learning provider Coursera a 4k employee company offering 7000 courses
- The importance of special projects driving value in FP&A at Coursera
- Core metrics which he tracks closely
- The evolution of FP&A in India
- The outsourcing of finance functions to Indian companies
- The biggest trend in FP&A in 2023
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
https://www.datarails.com/fpa-today-episode-44-asif-masani-all-about-fpa/
Follow Asif Masani on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
The VC behind buzzy startups Calm, GoFundMe, Udemy and Gong is bullish on FP&A. Ryan Abdullah an Investor at Norwest Venture Partners tells FP&A Today says there are four reasons why VCs rely on FP&A, particularly during a downturn.
Firstly there is a huge increase in appetite for forecasts. Secondly FP&A must take account of labor shifts in startups (not least caused by large layoffs). Thirdly, ( investors who are all about growth) see FP&A as an ally and “profit center” to help businesses “grow and do better”. Fourthly FP&A is delivering an agenda with other departments to define budgets “rather than just entering numbers in a spreadsheet.”
In this episode Paul talks to Ryan Abdullah covering:
- How VCS look at the role of FP&A and the benefit to their portfolio companies
- Which financial insights and KPIs matter most to investors
- The role FP&A plays in big fundraising?
- What do VCs see as FP&A magic
- The importance of realistic and accurate models for VCs
- The importance of robust software for handling and cleaning financial data
- The challenges and opportunities for SaaS KPIs
- His biggest success and biggest failure
- Ryan’s photography hobby and how it helps him to think about investing
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Ryan Abdullah on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Kevin Appleby, COO of Grow CFO, asks potential CFO applicants a simple question.
Okay, I know you want to become a CFO.
But what sort of CFO do you want to become?
In fact, he explains, there are three types of CFO.
You need to know which one you will be.
- The “Financier”. Specialists in startups, they excel at tackling fundraising rounds, and M&A. They often move from company to company.
- The “Transformational CFO”. This CFO wants big improvements in processes and in the way that the internals of the company work together. This CFO often heads several departments including finance, procurement, HR, and IT.
- The “Strategist” – the clear right-hand man or woman of the CEO, constantly analyzing the strategic direction of the company.
Somebody from an FP&A background fits into any of those roles depending on what they want and their strengths, argues Appleby.
But getting to know your strengths as CFO or in FP&A is crucial to achieve the most from your career. He says: “If you're strong in something and you take time to develop it, you can become fantastically good. If you weak in something, you can spend a lot of time to become mediocre.”
This is just one of the insights that Kevin Appleby has gained as he mentors top CFOs in the UK and the US as part of the fast-growing mentorship service Grow CFO. In this episode of FP&A he maps his career from audit (“I never really wanted to be an auditor”) and FP&A (“back then FP&A as a term didn't really exist”) at one-time great manufacturing company, Imperial Chemicals Chemical Industries (ICI) and as a management consultant at PwC turned mentor and consultant with Grow CFO.
This episode is essential for anyone seeking to move from finance or FP&A to the top finance position. Kevin Appleby explains to Paul.
- How GrowCFO was founded and how it is identify skills launching CFOs you into the next phase of their career
- The core competencies of highly successful CFOs
- The importance of budgeting and zero-based budgeting and the increasing power of FP&A for CFOs
- Why the value of your business is a multiplier of the bottom line (not the top line)
- Why every business (not just manufacturing) must engage with activity analysis
- His biggest FP&A Failure
- His best advice for FP&A professionals
Links from the show
Grow CFO - https://www.growcfo.net/
Grow CFO Competency Framework https://www.growcfo.net/growcfo-competency-framework/
Career routes to the CFO https://www.growcfo.net/research/career-routes-to-cfo-2022-report/
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Kevin Appleby on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
First the good news.
FP&A hiring is not slowing down.
In fact, FP&A is considered even more crucial in challenging business circumstance, according to FP&A recruiters and hiring managers brought together in this special edition of FP&A Today.
Michael Jouris, finance recruiter, Addison Group says: “I have seen a lot of acquisitions by private equity backed companies in the recent months and they want to be more sophisticated with their reporting and in these times, FP&A is more important than ever.”
Sophie Bunce, Director of FP&A at fast-growing SaaS company Paddle who, has just hired more FP&A professionals in her finance team, adds: “In any economic environment, good FP&A is necessary. But In a rough economic environment, FP&A is even more important.”
Joining Paul Barnhurst for this special episode:
- Sophie Bunce Director of FP&A at Paddle
- Angela Kulzer, Director of Sales and Recruiting, RiverLink Staffing
- Michael Jouris, Addison Group Executive Search Consultant, Finance & Accounting.
This episode is essential listening for anyone looking to a future role in FP&A, or seeking to hire for an FP&A role in the future.
Highlights from this episode on lessons to secure your next role include:
- Perspectives on the current market for FP&A job seekers
- Remote working in 2023 within the CFO’s Office
- How to separate the “what” and the “how” in updating your finance experience and talking about your career
- How to powerfully show the outcomes previously achieved in your roles (based on what employers actually want to hear)
- LinkedIn vs Resumes
- How best to apply for a new role in FP&A while in an economic downturn
- The importance of your network
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Connect with our guests on LinkedIn:
Sophie Bunce Director of FP&A at Paddle.
Angela Kulzer, Director of Sales and Recruiting, RiverLink Staffing
Michael Jouris, Addison Group Executive Search Consultant, Finance & Accounting
Connect with Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Connect with Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Aviv Canaani, VP Marketing, Datarails, and Christian Wattig, Head of Training at Datarails and founder of FP&A Prep, join Paul Barnhurst for a conversation about marketing vs finance in a business.
In the world of business it sometimes feels like finance and marketing are talking a different language. Christian Wattig has been the FP&A leader at some of the highest profile marketing teams on the planet at P&G and Unilever where campaigns for brands such as Dove, Skippy and Hellman’s saw marketing spend hundreds of millions of dollars. In this episode he talks about some of the biggest challenges, misconceptions, and opportunities between FP&A and marketing and actionable insights when partnering with creatives in a business.
Joining Paul and Christian is Aviv Canaani, VP Marketing, Datarails.
Giving the marketing take on the finance-advertising relationship, Canaani has led multi-million dollar marketing campaigns at companies including IBM. Since then he has led marketing at hyper growth startups, Workiz and Datarails. In this frank discussion Canaani talks about the conflicts with marketing: “We are not always sure that the finance people have our best interests at heart.”
Also in this episode
- How can FP&A teams work with marketing on long-term marketing investment
- How to build trust between finance and marketing
- The best way to make a finance case for marketing investment
- How to best market to an FP&A audience
- How FP&A can help measure direct response marketing
- Making yourself aware of the wildly different incentives for finance teams vs marketing teams
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Connect with Christian Wattig on LinkedIn
Connect with Aviv Canaani on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
Links from the episode
FP&A Prep
https://www.fpaprep.com/
FP&A Prep is a one-stop shop for content, training, and mentoring on Financial Planning & Analysis topics.
The #1 FP&A Community (Slack) Join here
https://www.datarails.com/the-global-community-for-fpa-leaders/
A global community and resource hub for modern FP&A leaders like you
A slightly different episode this week, featuring not a finance chief, but a CEO talking about the power and impact of FP&A on business strategy. Jeanette Dorazio, CEO of Leadpages, joins Paul to discuss the daily impact FP&A is having for her company, a leading SaaS no-code website and landing page builder.
In this episode Jeanette Dorazio discusses with Paul:
- How FP&A teams can actually get that coveted seat at the table by “seeing the patterns” in a business
- How FP&A works with her in monitoring key metrics for growth
- The CEOs playbook for FP&A during a downturn
- The best and worst FP&A work she has seen in her career
- Why FP&A should be a “very close first” for hiring into the finance team after the CFO
- Why the visibility of FP&A needs to improve
- The power of Excel in shaping her journey through product management to CEO
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Jeanette Dorazio on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Casey Woo is a serial high Tech CFO turned investor. The Harvard educated financier “escaped” a life as an Investment Banking Analyst, at Morgan Stanley to take a big pay cut and join a 10-person startup (“If you wanna do tech, you gotta go to the Bay Area”).
Since then, he has held finance at CFO roles including at WeWork and property tech company Landing before founding an “operators community” turned investment fund FOG ventures.
In this episode Casey talks to Paul Barnhurst about his journey:
- How finance was seen as a “second class” citizen when he entered Silicon Valley and how he had to “learn a new language”
- How he built up the Operators Guild “a club of number twos” ( finance, ops, HR, talent, legal, IT) into an exec community of 700 leaders who now run the FOG VC
- What good FP&A looks like at an early stage company
- When early stage companies are making $200,000 $300,000 total is when FP&A can be a powerful addition
- Why FP&A leaders need to focus on business first rather than finance first
- The CFO’s future as the Office of Business Intelligence that will separate the The Ancien Régime CFOs with those who can adapt
- If CFOs are not “pounding their fists on the table” asking to own data they will not survive
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Casey Woo on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
This episode is all about financial modeling from one of the world’s experts. Ian Schnoor is
Executive Director at the Financial Modeling Institute (FMI) & President and Founder at The Marquee Group. In this episode he provides frank assessment of why most financial models fail and how you can take instant actions to instantly transform your financial modeling.
This is absolutely essential listening for anyone considering taking the Financial Modeling Institute’s world-respected accreditation program. The program is recognized by companies like Goldman Sachs, Moody’s KPM and Morgan Stanley as the most rigorous validation of financial modeling skills and ranges from foundational, to advanced, to Chartered Financial Modeler and Master Financial Modeler.
In this episode:
- From investment banking to creating the world’s only accredited financial modeling training
- The skills you will need to pass the robust accreditation by the Financial Modeling Institute
- Why employees are increasingly requiring proof of financial modeling skills
- The multi-disciplinary skills required to excel in modeling including design, data flow, communication and storytelling
- How the integrated 3 statement model is the table stakes for being considered a good financial modeler
- How you can get your financial model humming smoothly - you should not have to pop your car hood to show the engine
- The power of a committee approach to modeling and design in a company
- Nixing our favorite function question: There should be no favorites in Excel, but pick the tools that will help you to get the job done you have in front of you
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Ian Schoor on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
In this special jam-packed episode Paul Barnhurst looks back on 2022 (and with special guests) reveals the biggest predictions for FP&A in 2023.
This episode looks back at one year of FP&A Today and how our dedicated audience helped us reach more than 40,000 downloads in our first 35 episodes across 100 countries.
In between we hear Paul’s favorite FP&A guest insights from the first 35 episodes interspersed with new hot takes on everything you need to know in FP&A for 2023 from FP&A leaders, Soufyan Hamid, Hector Rubalcava, and Mario Vasquez.
In this episode:
- The winner of the yearly question of FP&A Favorite Excel function revealed 🥇
- The best Excel jokes you need to know
- The favorite Excel functions of Jordan Goldmeier, Lance Rubin, Kathy Svetina, Francesca Valli, Jon Laudi, Chris Reilly and Paul Barnhurst
- The #1 advice to make your FP&A journey better in 2023 from Jack Alexander, Zoe Cooke, Stéphanie Herbots, Chris Reilly, Carl Seidman, and Paul Barnhurst
- Predictions for FP&A in 2023 from Soufyan Hamid, Hector Rubalcava, and Mario Vasquez
- How to move from accounting to FP&A with Cameron Janke
- The revolution with Gen Z FP&A with interns at Credit Suisse and American Express entering the finance workforce for the first time
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Glenn Snyder, builds high performing FP&A teams from scratch.
Now VP of FP&A at Mobileum, a telecom analytics leader, Glenn continues to enhance a reputation for transforming FP&A into an engine for Silicon Valley growth earned over nearly two decades.
Previously he has built finance partnership teams At Charles Schwab, followed by revamping annual budgeting, forecasting and financial reporting at $4B global Real Estate company Digital Realty, restructuring a15-person FP&A team at Global Growth Holdings, and leveling up the FP&A and Data Analytics teams at online design marketplace Zazzle before his latest FP&A adventure at Mobileum .
In this episode Glenn reveals the secrets to building high performance FP&A teams. Glenn discusses:
- His reason for sticking with FP&A over 18 years (not least the ability to strategically interact with every aspect of a company)
- The power of quarterly forecasts to secure alignment in a business and transform a business direction
- Why building a new FP&A team will see you work 80 hours a week and considerable “mental awareness”
- The power of creating a three-year FP&A Strategy in your first 90 Days which sees 95% of goals hit
- The power of eliminating manual work in FP&A
- How to powerfully speak up in FP&A (even as an introvert)
- How to differentiate a leader’s role in FP&A vs those you manage
- The secrets to hiring someone for an FP&A role and how to find the things that can be taught vs those that can’t
- Why FP&A and data analytics need to work better together
- The real way to approach build a successful finance business partnership that lasts
- His most valuable lessons after achieving several finance software implementations
- The failure that forced Glenn to work on his soft skills and transformed his career
- His secret life as a lifelong baseball fan and published author
Watch the full show on YouTube.
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Glenn Snyder on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
In this special LinkedIn Live/ FP&A Today, join Paul Barnhurst and our all-star panel to answer your questions about hard-won experiences about data visualization and storytelling to get FP&A a seat at the table.
Our special guests joining Paul Barnhurst are:
- Pooja (Laddha) Jaju, Lead Financial Analyst (6Sense and Accenture)
- Soufyan Hamid, Independent FP&A Professional (Proximus, Deloitte)
- Ron Monteiro, Founder KICT Inc (Campbell Soup Company,
The questions they tackle from around the world, include:
- How data visualization is important for your career and growth in the business?
- The first dashboard you created and what you learnt from that experience?
- Your favorite chart for making an impact
- The Absolute Worst chart in FP&A
- Getting your finance team to better understand the importance of data visualization when in a leadership role?
- How improving your presentation skills can advance your career?
- How can you best present month end financials using principles of storytelling?
- Most powerful advice to ace your next presentation
Watch the full show on YouTube.
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Pooja (Laddha) Jaju on LinkedIn
Follow Soufyan Hamid on LinkedIn
Follow Ron Monteiro on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Jeff Marx, VP and Treasurer of large global chemical manufacturing company Hexion, reveals how anyone in finance can land their dream job. His method is to encourage anyone in finance to adopt a method called “the finance passport”.
Rather than chasing “shiny titles that look good on LinkedIn” anyone in FP&A should consider the concept of a “finance journey” to become an all-round player. This means taking a trip through Treasury, tax, audit, and investor relations to be rounded and be able to talk confidently about all aspects of finance, improving your impact on whichever role you are in, but is especially powerful for anyone with CFO ambitions. “I've had roles in internal audit, financial planning and analysis, controllership” says Jeff revealing how this journey has transformed his mindset.
In this episode Jeff talks to Paul Barnhurst about:
- Understanding the finance passport and how to adopt this shift in your career
- Moving from a promotion-based to a growth-based mindset in finance
- The difference between a finance “athlete” and a finance “specialist”
- How Treasury and FP&A can work most effectively together to drive business efficiency
- His favorite Excel formula
- Why ability to communicate effectively remains the best advice for anyone in FP&A
Watch the full show on YouTube.
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Jeff Marx on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
68 Ventures is a holding company for numerous operating entities transforming the Alabama Gulf Coast and Florida Panhandle.
FP&A is central to this mission, says Joseph Clayton Business Analyst at the company. At 68 Ventures the FP&A team is tasked with analysis that is fueling multiple big ticket real estate deals. Specifically, FP&A oversees a due diligence process to “ensure we're getting land at the value that we need in order to sell those lots at a profit to pay back our lenders, pay back our investors” alongside “tracking the schedule of the project.”
But Joseph’s career actually started in basketball.
With aspirations of playing in the NBA, Joseph played college basketball until injury cut this career short. After being warned off law as a profession, he found a passion for finance after a series of roles showed him the powerful role of “financial data is in the decision-making process."
This inspiration of game-changing finance remains at the core of his mindset at 68Ventures. He discusses the central role of finance in providing storytelling and business partnering in a complex holding company which has 17 different entities. The 68 Ventures brand comprises an entity purchasing land, another developing the projects, home building, to a landscaping entity and pest control company (companies include Truland Homes, Vault Mortgage, Southeast Plumbing and Gopest).
In our first episode tackling FP&A and the real estate sector, Paul Barnhurst talks to Joseph Clayton about:
- The key metrics real estate FP&A leaders need to obsess over
- The role of FP&A as interest rates rises impact homebuying after a sustained period at rock bottom
- The partnership and decision-making process of FP&A across a company with 17 different entities
- The whys, and how’s as 68Ventures went through a process of replacing manual Excel processes to choosing an FP&A software company - and the lessons learnt
- How to overcome an instinct to achieve complete accuracy in forecasting
Watch the full show on YouTube.
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Joseph Clayton on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
You may not have heard of Cotopaxi. But you have likely heard of similar companies doing something different- Ben & Jerry’s, Allbird, Patagonia, and BrewDog.
What these companies have in common is B Corp certification. This is awarded to businesses for meeting the highest standards of accountability when it comes to social and environmental impact. Last year Cotopaxi also gave away $1.3million in donations as part of its pledges.
But how does an FP&A team work to advance this mission? How can FP&A work to achieve goals which are ultimately not about maximizing shareholder wealth.
Cole Dixon is FP&A Director at outdoor sports company Cotopaxi which has a tagline of Gear for Good on its high performance and eye-catching gear. For Dixon, the FP&A function at the company is central to “upholding a mission of our founders Davis Smith and Stephan [Jacob] that Cotopaxi can get us exploring and make a positive impact on other people’s lives. So we’re really truly committed that all of our products can be repurposed and that we prioritize human rights.”
Every FP&A metric – units per transaction, average order value, average store volume, the inventory returns for stores – also incorporates the company-wide mission.
Listen to the fascinating story from Cole Dixon in this week’s FP&A with Cole Dixon and Paul Barnhurst.
In this episode Cole reveals:
- The Ecommerce metrics and FP&A role that helped Cotopaxi to open stores during the pandemic
- How FP&A partners with marketing to succeed in new ventures, such as the outdoor gatherings (Questival)
- How Cotopaxi handled scenario planning and cash flow planning as stores closed during the pandemic
- How he dealt with his biggest failure at Skullcandy, the lifestyle audio brand where he managed FP&A prior to Cotopaxi
- How to build an FP&A team from scratch as he did at Cotopaxi
- The importance of constantly “looking forward” to finding new values for in FP&A
Watch the full show on YouTube.
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Cole Dixon on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Engineer-turned-CFO Sruthi Lanka was drawn into finance after seeing her parents - themselves brilliant engineers - losing money in the markets. “I couldn't understand how people who could solve incredible math puzzles in their head could not figure out how to make a return in the markets. And so that's what led me down this path of navigating into finance.”
Today she is CFO at investing app, Public.com, the biggest competitor to Robinhood, famous for the “GameStop Frenzy which rattled markets in January 2021.
In this episode Sruthi reveals
- Her vision for FP&A as central to business and executive leadership
- Her experience of The GameStop Frenzy in late January 2021 which coincided with her joining Public.com, helping it explode from “a relatively young startup to having over a million members”
- The centrality of data or analytics partnering with finance and why some engineering and SQL is an important skill set for CFOs
- Her founding membership of FSuite in which StartupCFOs meet to discuss everything from the best tools to complex challenges they are facing
- Why a regular monthly meeting with FP&A is “sacrosanct” - in order to optimize what is measured and show progress against targets
- The importance of FP&A doing the “hard work” of building “simple” financial models
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Show Links
FSuite (A thriving, invitation only community where CFOs turn to excel in their career and day-to-day)
Follow Sruthi Lanka on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Chris Reilly's first finance experience was historic. He worked on the Lehman bankruptcy at the height of the financial crisis in 2008 unwinding the investment bank's portfolio with "sights of empty offices and employees being laid off". This period at management consultancy FTI Consulting occupied days and nights dealing with the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Following his consultancy days, Reilly moved to Hilton Worldwide in a more traditional FP&A treasury senior analyst role. Here he learned to love private equity and ended up pursuing middle market PE in Denver for nearly a decade. In 2020, made his "pipe dream" of setting up his own consultancy business a reality, founding Mission Capital Consulting where he provides custom built M&A and FP&A models. He also runs a successful course Financial Modeling for Private Equity ("I started saying to myself, I wish I could have coached myself or coach an analyst or something like that on how to do this the right way because of all the sleepless nights I spent doing it the wrong way.")
Chris is a leading voice in finance on LinkedIn, providing his more than 25,000 followers with insights and practical advice each day.
In this episode he talks to Paul about:
- How he became skilled in finance through “sink or swim” encounters that taught him modeling and FP&A
- How mastering the Three Statements changed his career trajectory
- The brutal response from a boss that changed his attitude to financial modeling forever
- His worst model? (Or why is still haunted by 7,000 rows on multiple tabs)
- Why every financial model starts with the end user in mind (and how to do this practically)
- Why the model itself should not be considered only a means to a “conversation”.
- Why building a model of their own lives” can be the most powerful beginning training
- His new courses including financial modeling for private equity which have attracted five-star reviews
- How he went from fine arts and Spanish double major to a career in finance
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Show Links
Link to Chris's course: financial modeling for private equity
Follow Chris Reilly on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Anders Liu-Lindberg is the co-founder, partner and COO of the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn. He has ten years of experience as a business partner at global transport and logistics company Maersk.
Within the world of FP&A, Anders can lay claim to being the most well known voice, blazing a trail for the function's ability to transform businesses. On LinkedIn, he publishes frank and combative insights to an audience of more than 100,000 subscribers throughout the world challenging FP&A to provide more strategic value.
In this podcast Anders discusses:
- How he moved from "pretty poor numbers" as a LinkedIn creator 10 years ago, to be the leading influencer on FP&A
- Why more voices on FP&A on LinkedIn and other platforms is propelling change for the profession
- Why business partners need to better understand key drivers for their business and translates insights into action
- Why change in FP&A is still not happening on the scale that businesses need to see
- Analytics vs FP&A? Should they be competing
- What is really meant by common buzzwords "business partnering" and digital transformation
- Why he feels that in common with other finance professionals he held himself back for too long to avoid breaking out of his comfort zone.
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
Read the transcript and blog post
Show Links to Anders Liu-Lindberg
The Finance Masters Podcast
Trends and Finance in Accounting
Future of P&A and Business Partnering
Follow Anders Liu-Lindberg on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Did you miss the biggest FP&A gathering of the year?
No worries. This special episode FP&A Today has got you covered .
From the conference floor of the AFP (Association for Financial Professionals) in Philadelphia (23-26 October), Paul Barnhurst sums up some of the key themes of the conference talking to some of the participants and key speakers. More than 100 educational sessions tackled everything from using AI to improve FP&A forecasting, to skills in building trust, and essential drivers business should focus on.
In this episode hear from FP&A all-star guest list:
- Bryan Lapidus AFP - subject matter expert on FP&A
- Christian Wattig ex-Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and Squarespace FP&A and lead on the FP&A Prep course
- Chris Ortega, CEO of Fresh FP&A, and fractional CFO
- Hector Rubalcava – director of finance at OCC, the world’s largest equity derivatives clearing organization.
- Brian Malambo – Head of Monter Capital Partnership based in Zambia and investing in sub-Saharan Africa
- Mario Vasquez - Director of finance for the EW Scripps Company
Read the full episode Transcript
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Ben Murray is known to his 40,000 dedicated subscribers simply as “The SaaS CFO”. On the number one website for SaaS finance (thesaascfo.com) Ben provides blogs, research, courses and templates based on more than 25 years running finance teams . Ben is also hired by SaaS companies: from small, private technology firms to global multi-billion dollar public companies.
But few people know that Ben honed his career in FP&A.
Calling Financial Planning & Analysis "the key to strategic finance" Ben explains how this work is “near and dear to my heart” and provides a masterclass for FP&A professionals.
Ben's formative career roles included manager of FP&A at Manager, at fitness company, A.D.A.M., Inc and (miles away from SaaS)Director, Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) at Pinnacle Airlines Corp. Since then he is called in by finance teams to enhance FP&A alongside other finance functions.
In an essential listen for anyone working in or considering a career in SaaS FP&A, Ben talks to Paul Barnhurst about:
- Rising up the ranks from FP&A to CFO and beyond
- How FP&A and finance can make an impact in a downturn
- The essential SaaS metrics most relevant for today's business
- The “end of party” for SaaS valuations and funding and what finance should be doing
- The best practice he has learnt from advising multiple SaaS FP&A teams
- Product led vs Sales Led SaaS companies - and the metrics for both
- The importance of proper accounting foundations
- The different expectations of SaaS business at $1million ARR, $5million ARR and $10million ARR
- His best career advice
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
Read the transcript and blog post
Show Links
Link to The SaaS CFO website - https://www.thesaascfo.com/
Link to the SaaS CFO academy (with 5k+ students) - https://www.thesaascfo.com/the-saas-academy/
Ben’s recent blog post on setting up an FP&A function in SaaS - https://www.thesaascfo.com/financial-planning-and-analysis-strategic-finance/
Follow Ben Murray on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
In two companies, Nick Brignola, has shown the power of FP&A steering big ticket medical acquisitions. Firstly, almost a decade ago, Nick led FP&A at manufacturing medical company, Schering-Plough snapped up by Merck in a $41.1 billion deal. Then in June 2022, at Cloudmed, Nick’s FP&A team oversaw the Atlanta-based healthcare revenue recovery provider being acquired by Revenue cycle management company R1 RCM ( $4.1 billion). In this straight-talking episode Nick reveals the secret inside story of FP&A's behind the scenes role in closing M&A deals. He also discusses:
- Getting to 1% Forecast Accuracy in Pharma and the lessons others can learn.
- The vital metrics anyone in pharma manufacturing need to know.
- What are the main differences betweeen Corporate FP&A or Business Unit (or operational) FP&A?
- FP&A Vs Sales The secret for FP&A teams to truly challenge your sales team (productively)
- His secrets to building the most effective and dynamic FP&A team which bring results
Follow Nick Brignola on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Read the Blog and Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
It is fair to say that Larysa Melnychuk did not have the expected start to a career which has since seen her emerge as the biggest transformational force in the FP&A profession
Larysa was born in the former USSR in Siberia to a Ukrainian family. Opportunities in the USSR were limited. She was resigned to give up on her childhood dream of international travel (“It was absolutely certain that I would never be able to travel.”). Eventually, Larysa and her family moved to Ukraine where she studied engineering.
However, it was her skills in finance that brought her opportunities.
She moved to the UK more than two decades ago through a British government initiative for talented finance immigrants that set her on her career.
In the UK, she gained a chartered management accountant from CIMA and spent 15 years leading FP&A teams including at a subsidiary of HSBC Bank and at multinational engineering company Invensys (now part of Schneider Electric).
Today, as founder and CEO at FP&A Trends Group and the International FP&A Board, Larysa is pushing FP&A to new levels, having launched 27 chapters across 16 countries hosting webinars, posting resources and championing the industry.
In this episode Paul Barnhurst speaks with Larysa about:
- Her career from the USSR to international finance leadership
- Definitive new findings around the real impact of the pandemic on FP&A
- Scenario management compared to scenario planning
- How to assess FP&A maturity in your organization
- The new role of FP&A Data Scientist and how to get there
- How companies including Microsoft, Swiss RE, and Deutsche Bank are capitalizing on of AI to change their FP&A approach
- Best practices towards using external data to forge new FP&A analysis
- How the horror of war in Ukraine has affected her personally and impacts her perspective
- Why it is vital for anyone starting in FP&A to be the Agent for Change, rather than complain about routine
About FP&A Trends
FP&A Trends Group is a high-profile thinktank whose mission is to identify and share the latest trends and best practices in modern Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A).
Follow Larysa Melnychuk on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Read the Blog and Full Program Transcript
Watch The Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
CJ Gustafson started as an M&A Advisory Associate at a Big Four firm digging into the finances of big tech or healthcare firms for large buyouts. This was followed by a switch to a large private equity firm where he “learned financial modeling to marry what I learned in consulting.”
However, his stellar FP&A SaaS career (“moving from the funder to the funded”) began as he moved to a $500m-VC backed backup and data management platform. He set up the company’s first FP&A function. Though he would soon become a leader in FP&A SaaS, he first had to ask what the function involved. "I was like, 'What's FP&A? What do I do here?'" However, he soon understood the power of the role: “It puts you in a great position to get into that room. You're the one with the keys to the operating plan. You have the analysis as to how things are trending.”
In a follow-up role at another rocket ship startup, CJ joined as Director of financial planning and analysis, and later Director of Investor Relations where he oversaw a rise in headcount from 150 people to almost 1,500 people and a valuation of $8.5 billion. His FP&A team was forced to constantly evolve as the company needed to forecast its needs with growth. The SaaS FP&A achievements included working closely with their recruiting team hitting ambitious targets for hires without breaking the operating plan; enhancing board reporting as they learnt over time what investors found most helpful; and adding more and more reporting as new leaders climbed to the top of the organization (sales, marketing, product).
Overall, CJ built FP&A teams of up to six people. His strategy? “ I first started by hiring financial athletes - people who could just dig in and do multiple things. Then I expanded the team to include people with specific skill sets - like systems or revenue. The biggest challenge is always to make decisions with 80% of the data you wish you had. We need to put a stake in the reforecast at some point, even if we would have liked a few more days to run more analyses. The other challenge is that you're constantly changing tires on the car while it's in motion. There are no pit stops in the hyper growth SaaS world. So if you need to, say, move from google sheets to an FP&A tool like Datarails, or move from QuickBooks to NetSuite on the accounting side, you have to do it while in motion, and not sacrifice any accuracy.”
He has now realized a long term goal of becoming CFO, starting in September 2022 as CFO at PartsTech, a tech ordering platform stopping the hassle of professionals buying auto parts.
In this episode of FP&A Today CJ talks to Paul Barnhurst about his journey from private equity to SaaS mastery, and ultimately his CFO role. In this essential episode for anyone interested in SaaS for FP&A he discusses:
- His motivation for creating the fast-growing finance newsletter Mostly Metrics, an irreverent and analytical spin on metrics which has crossed more than 10k subscribers (and growing!)
- The best way FP&A can create impact for M&A activity
- 3 absolutely essential SaaS FP&A metrics based on his experience at rocket ships
- The one thing he is most scared of in his new CFO role
- The painful FP&A mistake that CJ made that changed his entire approach to financial presentation forever
- The differences between his roles in FP&A and investor relations
- His strategy for moving from FP&A to CFO
- His boxing career
- His most inspiring advice for anyone in FP&A
About Mostly Metrics
Mostly metrics is a weekly business newsletter about finance and business models. It’s a collection of things I’ve learned and thought about in the trenches as an operator.
Follow CJ Gustafson on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Blog and Full Program Transcript
Watch The Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Gabriela Gutierrez is Financial Planning & Analysis Specialist at eBay Classifieds in Germany.
Gabriela is one of our most international guests. Growing up in Ecuador, she did an MBA in Barcelona and studied in the US. She now works in Germany leading revenue forecasts for the core divisions of the online juggernaut eBay Kleinanzeigen.
At eBay Kleinanzeigen (Kleinanzeigen is the German word for classifieds) she is responsible for revenue forecasting for 70% for the largest classified online ads portal in the country. She splits her days providing forecasts for the main business, advertising, subscriptions and classifieds. (After the sale of the eBay classifieds division it belongs to the Norwegian Adventina , in which eBay in turn holds 33 percent).
In this episode, Gabriela discusses the pivotal moment in her career: how she learnt to love coding and embraced data analytics and ML to deal with the vast amount of data at the company.
She discusses spending hours and days and months learning Python (“I would spend hours trying to understand where I had made an error”) and eventually experimented with Meta’s Prophet - a forecasting procedure implemented in R and Python and her strong working collaboration with the data analytics team at the company.
Originally choosing finance over a fashion career, she fell in love with FP&A as perfect for someone of her mindset, a natural introvert, who nevertheless comes alive when talking with others about numbers: “I love how you can see how any initiative in the business will influence the revenues or cost” and “tell the story using numbers.”
In this episode Gabriela talks to Paul about
- Her path to FP&A
- Her secrets to balancing the metrics across the company’s advertising, subscription and classified forecasts
- Her deep relationship with the analytics team
- Whether analytics should be within the finance team?
- Her journey from FP&A to data science
- Using AI to predict revenues in FP&A
- Her passion for Germany and interests outside of finance
- Her biggest advice to succeed in FP&A
- Her favorite Excel function
Follow Gabriela on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Blog and Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Jon Laudie has managed FP&A at some of the US’s most iconic companies: Netflix, subscription streaming service, Ancestry, the largest for-profit genealogy company in the world) 1800-Contacts, the world’s largest contact lens store, and Lucid, the visual collaboration suite.
Building on his 15 years of experience in FP&A, in August 2022 Jon was announced as the new CFO of Zerorez, a $150M-revenue leader in residential and home services (using non-toxic products) which operates in 70 markets.
Jon Laudie reveals his playbook for rising up the ranks from analyst to CFO and the methods he used to advance his career.
In this episode Jon speaks to Paul Barnhurst about:
- His experience at companies including Netflix, 1-800 Contacts, and Ancestry
- Metrics that mattered to FP&A in these roles and its importance for anyone in similar sectors
- An analysis that led to winding down a company and delivering massive gains for Ancestry
- The importance of raising your hand to get life-changing opportunities in your FP&A role
- His role in Ancestry’s near-IPO and what he learned from the front seat experience
- The biggest opportunities and challenges FP&A face including the requirement to use predictive analytics
- His favorite Excel function
Follow Jon Laudie on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Blog and Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Howard Tunnicliffe studied chemistry originally. Once he realized he “wasn’t the greatest experimental chemist ever” he made a switch to finance.
It was during an audit contractor role at US tech company Dell in 2007 that his eyes were opened to an unseen part of finance: the “rockstars of FP&A”. He saw FP&A as a place which joined “psychology” with the “nuts and bolts of how companies actually make money”.
Howard is now Head of FP&A in the subscriptions business at The Economist. The newspaper dates from 1843 and is consumed by 1,185,000 of the most highly influential subscribers in the world.
In this practical and frank episode, Howard reveals the inside story of his career in FP&A and how a revamped FP&A function has driven growth at The Economist.
Howard talks with Paul about:
- How a relationship break up caused Howard to focus on soft skills that now define his career
- How the FP&A team are told to find analysis and insights which contribute to paying back their salaries up to five-times
- Moving core metrics from “volume” to “value” as a response to digitization of news
- The importance of moving from hybrid roles to “centers of excellence” in finance
- The key to successful business partnering with sales and marketing teams concentrating on drivers which bring sales
- How FP&A managed a pricing strategy that increased total revenue by 15% and customer lifetime value by 20%
- Though “unglamorous”, how listening in finance is key to all good finance work
- Book recommendations to enhance soft skills that have transformed his career
- His favorite Excel function!
Book Recommendations from Howard
- Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism,
- Brian Tracy, Eat That Frog
- Daniel Goleman, Emotional Intelligence
Howard’s Courses
Grab these courses offered by Howard Tunnicliffe to improve your Soft Skills in Finance:
- Become a Confident Networker
- Leadership and Influencing
Follow Howard Tunnicliffe on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Blog and Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
In this special LinkedIn Live/ FP&A Today, join Paul Barnhurst and our all-star panel to answer your questions for budget season based on their decades of experience.
1) The best piece of advice you give - or have been given for a successful budget process over your career?
2) Top Down or Bottoms Up Budgeting?
3) Should we move beyond budgeting?
4) The role AI can play in budgeting?
5) What do you do when leadership comes up with unrealistic numbers?
6) How do you incorporate and manage your finance tech stack during the budget process?
7) What does the budget process in a startup look like?
8)What impact did COVID have on budgeting?
Listen to the expert advice of guests:
- Michelle Govindsamy, FP&A Expert (former Barclays and Hollard Insurance)
Follow Michelle on LinkedIn
- Aaron Sallade, CFO, BiggerPockets
Follow Aaron on LinkedIn
- Zachary Rial, Director FP&A, Peek
Follow Zachary on LinkedIn
- Annette DeYoung, FP&A Solutions Consultant, Datarails
Follow Annette on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
What does Generation Z Want from FP&A?
Between them, college students Gabriel Valentin Navarro, Charlee Wambolt, and Derek Baker secured FP&A and finance internships at companies as diverse as Credit Suisse, Clark Construction, Amex, Expedia, Regeneron, and SavviLegal. In this special episode we explore the experiences of a Gen Z cohort experiencing work in FP&A for the first time.
In this special episode we meet guests:
- Gabriel Valentin Navarro , Intern at American Express (University of Washington)
- Charlee Wambolt, Intern at Credit Suisse (Brigham Young University)
- Derek Baker, Financial Analyst at Clientbook (Brigham Young University)
They reveal:
- How to get an internship in FP&A and is it necessary?
- The best advice for people seeking their first FP&A role?
- Skills and tactics to maximize your internship experience?
- How to take ownership of your internship experience?
- What employers need to know about the approach of Gen Z in finance, and where employers are failing.
- The university classes which most prepared them for a career in finance
- The values that Gen Z is looking for in their next finance role?
- Their biggest advice and takeaways for other college students taking their first steps towards internships and jobs?
- Their favorite Excel function of the next generation!
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
John King, Senior Manager, Analytics & Insights, Private Brands at Walmart reveals how the largest US retailer makes use of a “firehose” of data. This amounts (according to some estimates) to 2.5 petabytes of unstructured data from 1 million customers every hour.
Walmart’s FP&A unit ensures this potentially limitless information provide instant business decisions for the US retail giant.
First John explains his path to being an FP&A leader, starting as a Geographic Information Systems (GIS analyst) at Tradewind Energy in Kansas.
Here his love and appreciation for technology - which plays a central role at Walmart- was born. John's passion for technology saw him thrive at his roles at two of Walmart’s FP&A divisions: Realty Market Strategy, and now Private Brands. Private brands - a good that is manufactured for and sold by Walmart competing with brand-name products is a huge source of data and revenue. In fact,18 of Walmart’s private brands do more than $1 billion in sales and its largest name, Great Value does more than $27 billion a year globally.
In this interview John speaks about the intersection of FP&A and business-decisions at Walmart and his career.
- His passion for technology and the tech stack used at Walmart
- The core metrics which Walmart judges FP&A on and what other retailers can learn
- How to get insights for the business “today or tomorrow” through dimensional modeling
- How to keep focus on the most important data in the face of potentially limitless consumer data
- As both a Python and Excel expert, whether FP&A leaders need to know Python, Excel or both?
- The importance of taking logic and analysis to the data - rather than the other way around
- The most important advice for anyone starting in FP&A to succeed
Follow John on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
More FP&A teams should take advantage of the secret power of Monte Carlo simulations, argues Jamie Genge, Head of Financial Planning and Analysis at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
Genge runs FP&A at the NPL which employs 775 scientists to provide research in science, engineering and technology to support scientific and commercial innovation in the UK. Some of the world’s most significant innovations have origins at NPL, including radar; packet switching, the forbearer of the internet; the ACE computer; and the cesium atomic clock.
Jamie’s start began studying Human Geography before moving to audit at PwC. Jamie went to work for the National Physical Laboratory in the UK where over 11 years he has held multiple roles, including his current role as head of financial planning and analysis for the National Physical Laboratory (NPL).
In this wide-ranging interview Jamie provides his take on
- Moving from audit to FP&A
- How FP&A acts as bid support in governmental organizations such as the NPL
- His passion for Monte Carlo analysis, a mathematical technique to account for risk and upside in decision making
- How Monte Carlo is used in the sales funnel, with examples from NPL
- How NPL conducts its budget and forecasting
- Bottom up vs Top Down budgeting
- The pride of building a team in FP&A as one of the greatest career achievements
- The challenges and opportunities in FP&A at this crossroads
- Jamie’s gardening project as an analogy for FP&A
Follow Jamie on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Matthew Bernath, based in South Africa, has been a financial modeler for 15 years. Such was his thirst to learn best practices in the field, he set up a podcast, The Financial Modelling Podcast. Eighty episodes and 100,000 followers later The Financial Modelling Podcast is now ranked as one of the top finance podcasts.
Matthew is head of data ecosystems at Shoprite. In his previous role, Matthew steered the data analytics capability of Rand Merchant Bank, building a Rand-wide data ecosystem. He is also a startup investor.
In this special crossover edition between FP&A Today and The Financial Modelling Podcast Paul Barnhurst (aka The FP&A Guy) and Matthew Bermath, explore:
- Why Many FP&A teams are missing a trick to perform real analysis (the “a” in FP&A)
- How FP&A can better use financial modeling
- Key skills you need to improve your financial modeling
- The vital importance of understanding macro events in FP&A
Matthew then turns the tables asking Paul key questions such as
- His take on the state of FP&A?
- How non-finance people (who hate finance) should approach dreaded budgeting and finance?
Follow Matthew, Host of The Financial Modelling Podcast, on LinkedIn
Follow Paul, Host of FP&A Today, on LinkedIn
Follow Datarails on LinkedIn for the latest FP&A Insights and Thought Leadership
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Lance Rubin is one of the world’s leading experts on financial models. He has created thousands of models for some of the biggest companies and literally wrote the instruction manual on financial modeling as a certified trainer for the Financial Modeling Institute.
In this wide ranging interview Lance reveals the secrets to successful financial modeling:
-How to Instantly Improve your Financial Modeling
-Why you need to build and Treat a Financial Model like your House
-The Best Resources to Learn better Financial Models
-How to achieve Better Storytelling in FP&A, and bringing Emotion to the Numbers
-The power of non-financial data to change your models
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
Episode Links
FM Knowledge Hub
https://fmwiki.glideapp.io/
Oz Du Soleil
https://www.youtube.com/user/WalrusCandy
Financial Modeling Institute
https://fminstitute.com/
Modelcitizn website
https://www.modelcitizn.com/knowledge-hub-apps
Financial Modelling Elective by the CA (ANZ) which includes the study guide Lance wrote a significant portion of (Chapter 4 design and build a financial model).
https://www.charteredaccountantsanz.com/become-a-member/course-descriptions/ca-program/financial-modelling
Financial Modelling Podcast
https://financialmodellingpodcast.com/
Eloquens
https://www.eloquens.com/?ref=modelcitizn
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Christian Wattig is one of the world’s leading experts in FP&A having led teams at Unilever, Procter & Gamble, and Squarespace. Today Christian is FP&A Solution Architect, Datarails, and manages the top-rated FP&A Bootcamp explicitly designed for professionals who work full-time and want to ramp up their FP&A game.
In this wide-ranging interview Christian provides actionable advice for any FP&A professional:
➡How FP&A can help marketing attribution
➡The need for FP&A to embrace Gray Areas
➡The importance of curiosity
➡His FP&A Bootcamp teaching hundreds of FP&A leaders
➡Hard-won secrets for business partnering
➡The need to forecast ranges
➡How to cope with vast data
Follow Christian on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
From a family of entrepreneurs, Kathy Svetina was always going to run her own business. Kathy first took financial planning and analysis roles at big companies such as AON and Wolters Kluwer for more than a decade. Then, Kathy founded Newcastle Finance, providing Fractional CFO services – supplying financial expertise to startups and fast-growing companies not yet able to justify a full-time CFO and facing growing pains. Kathy uniquely serves women-owned businesses (achieving $1M to $10M in annual sales).
In this wide-ranging interview Kathy describes:
- The growth of fractional CFOs in business
- The challenge of data consolidation nightmares in small companies
- The optimal way of starting FP&A in fast-growing businesses
- A favorite Excel function that felt like angels had landed on earth.
Follow Kathy on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Aliyyah Abdullah is Strategic and Operational Finance Leader, Universal Foods Limited. Based in Trinidad and Tobago, Aliyya began studying management, which she describes as “closer to psychology”. Aliyya only shifted careers to finance when a friend told her about an opportunity. After getting a degree in accounting, she specializes today in working with top SMEs in finance in the food and beverage industry, most recently at Universal Foods Limited – maker of Charles Chocolates, Sunshine Snacks and Universal Lightly Frosted Corn.
Being a leading finance expert in a country of 1.4 million people, Aliyya gets to perform a number of roles including FP&A specializing in supply chain value.
In this episode of FP&A Today Aliyyah discusses
- The importance of leading and lagging indicators in food and beverage FP&A
- Why she has focused in the past 12 years on small business FP&A
- Secrets to mixing finance and operations to add value
- How a food and beverage leader is managing mounting supply chain issues such as the rise in the cost of a containers
- How her love of Horror movies has got her through anxious FP&A moments
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Carl Seidman is an FP&A Leader who works with Fortune 500 companies providing advice and strategy on best practices and scaling FP&A. In this interview Carl discusses:
- His background in turnaround and restructuring of businesses
- His “first retirement” from business at 32, which formed the basis of a TEDx Talk (519,000 views and counting).
- Setting up his own business focused on FP&A advice to the Fortune 500
- Why successful FP&A always means anticipating
- Why large companies do not always have the best FP&A processes
- Public speaking skills as a game changer for any FP&A solution
- The evolution of software as the biggest opportunity in FP&A
Follow Carl on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Leader being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Anna Oblakova has spent 15 years in FP&A - it is the only job she ever wanted.
She started her career in large Russian companies. Beginning her career at VMHY Holding her first taste of FP&A was being pushed into the deep end of M&A, due diligence and business valuations.
Future accomplishments include building an FP&A function from scratch at Bank Zenit where she eventually managed a team of 10 FP&A professionals. Following a career break, Anna moved to France where she is manager of FP&A at Sodastream (bought by Pepsico for $3.2 billion in 2018). In this interview Anna discusses some of the highlights of her career including:
- The reasons for setting up the online resource and blog FPANDA CLUB
- The 50 shades of FP&A Maturity and why it is important to measure FP&A progress
- How FP&A teams can use personas to build better business partnerships
- Why it is vital that key metrics to follow should be aligned with the strategic objectives of the company
- The constantly growing gap between expectations of stakeholders and FP&A teams
- The need for continuous learning to succeed in FP&A
Follow Anna on LinkedIn
Check out the FP&A Club website founded by Anna Oblakova
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Pro being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
For Stéphanie Herbots, a finance perfectionist, everything was going to plan. Stéphanie got her masters degree. Sailed into a career in finance. Controllership and FP&A roles for the most prestigious companies followed This included budgets and forecasting for a division of telecoms giant, Orange.
Then it struck.
Stephanie faced a series of challenges in the midst of the 12th revision of the annual budget (no exaggeration!). Becoming a mum. Staff leaving. Being forced to pick up the slack for FP&A challenges with strict deadlines. Stephanie could not cope.
Stephanie faced burnout and a spiral of low mental health she describes as “slow and vicious.She had no option but quit finance
In episode 8 of FP&A Today, discussion Stephanie speaks about her journey, with Zoe Cooke, FP&A Director at We are Social, who has been a powerful advocate of mental health in finance throughout her career.
Leading the discussion FP&A Today host Paul Barnhurst, who himself has seen the impact of mental health first hand and is among those leading the drive for better recognition and transparency among the FP&A profession. This wide-ranging conversation discusses
- The specific mental health challenges within the FP&A profession
- Proven advice to lead and cope with stress, burnout and mental health in finance
- The limits and challenges of forecasting in uncertain times
- How challenges with data and manual processes can be overcome
Follow Stéphanie Herbots on LinkedIn
Follow Zoe Cooke on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Pro being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Kenneth Fick, had it in his background to be in FP&A: His father spent 40 years in FP&A at Fisher Price.
Ken is now Vice President of Financial Planning Analysis at Citrin Cooperman which is a $350 million accounting tax and advisory firm based in New York. In this interview Kenneth discusses:
- Being a 20-year-old watching the chaos unfold at Circuit City which is now taught as an example of corporate failure in America
- While technical skills get you first roles, you get promoted through skills in influence and storytelling
- Becoming a leading name in FP&A through his writing – including a viral article about how to exactly define to a stranger what FP&A is, at a cocktail party
- His budget process and love of budgeting as a means of listening to the company
- Why it angers him that FP&A is being judged on predictions
- How fuzzy data is at the core of FP&A
- Linear regression and statistical modeling in Excel
Follow Kenneth on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
Read the Full Program Transcript
Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Pro being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
FP&A veteran Cameron Janke has spent most of the last decade working at HealthEquity, the largest health savings account in the US. Cameron played a large part in the company going public in 2014. As HealthEquity took off so did Cameron’s career – he rose up the ranks from SEC Reporting and Analysis Manager to VP of FP&A at the company which now has assets of $20.3 billion and Cameron oversaw 32 consecutive quarters of the company meeting or exceeding EBITDA consensus.
- In this masterclass for anyone in finance, Cameron explains:
- How he took the initiative to move from accounting to FP&A by building his own forecasts and sharing them with management
- Why anyone involved in an IPO Needs to Worry more about Day Two – not just Day One
- How FP&A can best manage ongoing M&A opportunities and not get sidelined
- The secret to building the best performing FP&A teams
- Plus how a Kind CFO's words gave him a leadership lesson to remember
Follow Cameron on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
- Read the Full Program Transcript
- Watch the Full Episode on YouTube
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Pro being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Gemma Davie, Associate Director, Performance (FP&A) leads a team of 12 in her FP&A function at comparethemarket.com, one of Britain’s best loved finance brands. Speaking to FP&A Today she reveals her secrets for producing excellence.
Gemma defines excellence in FP&A as driving action and leading to better customer outcomes or a tangible benefit. Gemma reveals her unusual “squiggly” career path to Director, the importance of prioritizing her FP&A team’s development, how FP&A has moved from scorekeeper to top coach in business, and why most FP&A teams are only thinking about cash flow when it's too late.
Plus, a surprising hobby that not many people know about.
Follow Gemma on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
- Get the full program transcript
- Watch the full YouTube video
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Pro being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Francesca Valli is highly sought after when CFOs come calling to discuss high-priority transformations (their top priority right now). With both a finance accounting background and training, Francesca, combines decades of expertise in finance, IT and technology and AI and machine learning. Her experience of complex finance transformations underpinned by technology, include leading a digital transformation supporting a £1 billion ($1.26 billion) spend for multinational beverage alcohol company, Diageo.
However even at the biggest, most well-run finance teams the complex and misunderstood issue of change management remains an expensive and difficult challenge.
In this wide ranging-interview for FP&A Today, Francesca reveals the essential things CFOs, and FP&A teams need to know in undergoing any type of transformation. As well as sharing their horror stories of change management programs (Paul reveals a $12m mistake in a deeply flawed change management he observed) the interview also reveals:
- What "putting your house in order first" means for finance teams before undertaking any finance technological transformation
- The biggest common problems of misalignment
- How to avoid overhyped promises of some finance technologies and the questions to really ask vendors
- Whether AI and robots will really steal FP&A jobs and what you can do to remain relevant?
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Follow Francesca on LinkedIn
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
- Get the full program transcript
- Watch the full YouTube video
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Pro being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Bryan Lapidus has more than 20 years of experience in the corporate FP&A and treasury space working at organizations like American Express, Fannie Mae and private equity-owned companies. At AFP he is the staff subject matter expert on FP&A, which includes creating and curating content to meet the needs of the profession and membership. Bryan also manages FP&A Advisory Councils in North America and Asia-Pacific that act as a voice to align AFP with the needs of the profession.
Bryan speaks to Paul Barnhurst aka The FP&A Guy giving the benefit of everything he has learned speaking to thousands of practitioners of FP&A at the AFP’s conferences, roundtables and interview sessions. He discusses everything from the importance of a finance passport, FP&A certifications, core skills to be an effective challenger, how budgets have changed - and not changed - since COVID-19, and the one change that FP&A pros all need to master.
Follow Bryan on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
- Get the full program transcript
- Watch the full YouTube video
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Pro being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Jack Alexander is an in-demand speaker, author and advisor coaching the world’s leading finance teams, specializing in creating world-class FP&A teams. Jack has been a CFO of companies, such as Mercury Computer systems, and EG&G, before becoming a best-selling author of the FP&A handbook, Financial Planning & Analysis and Performance Management (Wiley Finance).
Drawing on more than 40 years of experience, Jack speaks to Paul Barnhurst aka TheFP&A Guy about the origins of FP&A the essential things that CFOs are looking for in their FP&A functions; how to immediately start more effective scenario planning in uncertain times; how to get - and keep - your seat at the top table and become a Top Gun: Maverick; and the rookie mistakes he continues to see from FP&A teams.
Follow Jack on LinkedIn
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
Follow DataRails on LinkedIn to find out about upcoming episodes and the latest FP&A news
- Get the full program transcript
- Watch the full YouTube video
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Pro being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
Jordan Goldmeier started out with a degree in accounting, and went on to become one of the leading experts in data science and Excel. Recipient of the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Award, Jordan is one of the leading global minds on data science, data visualization, and analytics. Jordan currently works with Fortune 500 companies and institutions. His latest book, Becoming a Data Head: How to Think, Speak and Understand Data Science, Statistics and Machine Learning is a #1 Best-Seller across multiple categories.
In this wide-ranging interview for FP&A Today, Jordan gives his outspoken views on whether FP&A pros need to know coding; the first stages to awesome analysis; the best Excel joke of all time; the problems with Excel education; and the Excel function he would die on a hill for.
Follow Jordan on LinkedIn.
FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.
Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.
With Datarails on your side for FP&A you get improved data integrity and visibility helping your relationships with your internal business partners and external stakeholders; real-time latest version of all your company’s data in one place, with version control, audit trail and records, ensuring errors and multiple versions are avoided; the ability to let your data tell your story through proprietary, built-in visualization of critical KPIs in real-down; and drill-downs to answer questions on underlying data on the spot.
Get in touch at www.datarails.com
- Get the full program transcript
- Watch the YouTube video
To suggest a great guest for the show, or if you would like to be the FP&A Pro being interviewed contact jonathan.m@datarails.com
FP&A Today is the podcast for Financial Planning and Analysis. The weekly show dives into the challenges and opportunities within the world of FP&A, interviewing FP&A leaders, CFOs and other finance pros in order to give you the freshest insights and takeaways. Each week our top guests provide actionable advice about financial planning and analysis – from career goals to navigating challenges, and powerful Excel tips.
Our weekly show provides unrivalled insights for navigating FP&A.