AI, Technology & The Modern FP&A Mindset – Insights with Dr. Liran

What's your take on AI in fpa?

I don't see AI replacing any of those FP and A. People with a lot of contrast in the AI world and the FP&A would need to know how they manage those contrast. The great FPA is a modernized fpa.

What do you think are probably the one or two biggest failure points?

I think there are a couple of them. Probably the first one is the second is the understanding of what did you always look for the most important piece in that perspective? As a business owner, as an executive thinking about FPA as your front office of the organization, I really believe that every company needs a planning tool.

How do they know they're at the point where they should implement a planning tool?

Try to figure out where you have the most complicated problem.

Finance professionals are some of the hardest groups to sell to. What's your take on that?

I don't think it's the hardest. Team might be more sophisticated. Sophisticated enough.

FP&A guy here. Have you ever wanted to level up your FPA skills? Then check out the FP&A guys ultimate course bundle at the FP&A guy.com that's the fpandaguy.com and use code podcast to save 25% get started learning today hello everyone. Welcome to FPA tomorrow, where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis. Each week we're joined by thought leaders, industry experts and practitioners who share their insights and experiences, helping us navigate today's complexities and tomorrow's uncertainties. I am your host, Paul Barnhurst, AKA the FPA Guy, and I will be guiding you through the evolving landscape of FPA this week. I'm thrilled to welcome on our show the Doctor, also known as Laurent Lauren, Analyst. Welcome to the show.

Hey Paul. Thank you. Happy to be here.

Probably most of you don't know, but Laurent has a PhD so I refer to him as the doctor. That's where that comes from, knowing that he's much smarter than I am. So a little bit about his background and then we'll jump into our interview. He comes to us from the greater Boston area. He's originally from Israel. He's currently working for himself and has been for the last a year and a half or so now. Previous to that, he was the president of J Do for the Americas. He has a PhD in business administration and he's also served a couple different times as an adjunct professor. Currently believe Boston University, right?

Yes.

Yep. And so we're going to start with the same question. We give every Guest to start the show off from your perspective, from where you're sitting, what does great FP&A look like? What is great FP&A?

So I think the great FP&A is a modernized FPA where you don't have too much manual work and you have people that understand the business processes and do whatever they do to serve the best of company. They are in the most modern tools with the most open minds.

Can you give an example? When you say like modern tools, what do you mean by that? Are you talking like they have a good planning tool? What does a modern kind of FP and a toolset look like?

I think it's a combination. Right. A lot of people are talking today about how do you utilize AI? Definitely we're talking about fpna, EPM tools, and even utilization of standard office tools like communication teams and spreadsheets. So it's a combination of everything. But the most important piece around that is to make sure that there are not too much of manual work and people are not spending their time on just crunching numbers when machines can do that for them. And that helps them, you know, to create better insights and then better processes in their organizations.

So it sounds like a key part of any modern FP and a apartment that's going to look great is really making sure they're offloading the manual work to the machines.

Yes, absolutely. That's part of the modernization that we need in those organizations.

So why don't we have you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, your background and how you ended up where you're at today?

Yeah, well, you know, I started doing FP and A at kindergarten. I'm just kidding. It was about almost 30 years ago, but I wasn't at kindergarten at that time, but I was starting with a small consulting firm. And the consulting firm I was working for, they helped small businesses and you know, like good handyman that established a shop and later on a manufacturing plan and he didn't really understand finance. So how do you make those people to become a strong business owner with strong finance capabilities as well? So that's why we're starting with a small consulting shop. And I love the ability to see with small businesses the 360 degrees of business. But then I felt that I need more technology. So I switched to a technology company that provided both sort of EPM solutions, we used to call that office of the CFO and some business consulting. And after a couple of years I decided that I need to come with my own methodologies to the market. So establish my own consulting firm, did performance management, balance scorecard, budget planning, forecasting, selected a couple of software vendors to work with and then I merged my company with a BI company. I felt it, it's very accommodating to have business intelligence and planning both together. The company was doubling the size of consulting within about two years. And then we sold the company and one of my software vendor, Jedox asked me to relocate from Israel to Boston and help them establish the entity here in the us so that's what I did for about six years. And over the past two years I've been working, working with many other type of companies, both in the EPM space and with other very interesting scale ups.

Yeah, I know you and I have talked and we'll talk a little bit more about that. You have a lot of different exciting things you do. I appreciate you sharing your background there. I'm curious what's kept you interested in working in technology, particularly? A lot of what you've done in technology obviously has been around the FPA space. Why the finance space?

I was always seeing the finance as a starting point. I never thought about, okay, here is a solution, here is something that works better or nicer than Excel and that's it. I was always thinking about FPA as like a secondary to the CEO of the company and help navigating between different processes and inefficiencies in the organization. So finance was a starting point because there's some regulation. Okay, you need to have budget, you need to have your finance reports in place. But then, okay, if you really want to understand, if you really want to make impact, you need to understand what's behind numbers. Now technology is helping us to understand what's behind Nibber much better today. And you know, over my two or three decades of career, you know, you can see the technology getting better and helps you to do much more effective and efficient processes in a shorter time frame, get a better insight. So I'm still in the technology because I still believe that there is a lot to do with it.

Love that. There's definitely still a lot to do with technology. I would agree with that. And I'm curious how do we as FP&A professionals find the right balance? You hear people, process and technology. Obviously technology is expensive. If it's not done right, it can be a big distraction. What advice do you have about finding that right balance between, you know, your people, your processes and your technology? Any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think the starting point is people, right? We're human, we want to Control the machine and not the other way. So the starting point is people. And we need to make sure that people understand what technology can do for them. And we want to understand and making sure that people can be good business partners to any persons in the organization. Okay. So people are always the starting point and we need to make sure we invest in people in the right time. That's actually one of the reasons why we established together plan bodies. Right. We wanted to invest in people. The second piece of technology is literally, okay, what tools do you use now? I'm a little bit of a handyman and I always make sure that I have the right tools learned in my home is that, you know, if you really want to make a quick, easy job to fix, you need to have the right tools, same as, you know, the professional life. So we need to make sure that those people have the right technology that serves them. We don't need to overshoot, we don't need to undershoot, but we need to think about short and long, long term with technology and then the processes. Right? This is what is literally merging between people and technology. You don't want to implement technology without understanding processes. You don't want people that do not understand the processes in the organization. So that's literally, in a way, the globe between the people and the technology.

Makes a lot of sense. So like I said, it's people always first. You have to understand your processes and processes married with the right people. And technology enables you to do more.

Yes, absolutely.

How do you balance when it comes to technology? You see these huge price tags, Sometimes you go, is that really worth it? How do you balance that as a department of thinking, do I really need this? Would I be better investing in people? Any advice from what you've seen being a consultant, and I'm sure you've had many of these conversations of like, hey, that's out of our budget. How should companies manage that? Any thoughts around that?

Yeah, well, I think in our era there are so many technologies around, then I would definitely say that the number one goal is to make sure that the price tag is relevant for the business benefits. And if it's not, then I would advise the customer or client to find the different technology with the right price tag. I have been working with hundreds of customers and companies and I do still see like, you know, a customer reach out to me a couple of weeks ago and mentioned that for a 10 user system, they have a vendor that was charging like $100,000 for licenses and another $200,000 for implementation. There is no business benefit around that without naming any specific vendor. So I would definitely say that's the cases where you need to make sure that the investment is making sense. Now the other piece of that is that regardless the price tag, assuming that it's relevant for the organization, you need to have the right thing to implement the technology.

Right.

Can't be 100% lean on consultants that will do the work that your internal people and department needs to do. So it's all about balancing and with the variety of options today, just finding the right one with the right price.

And I'm curious, when you mentioned, you know, the business has to do something, do you find a lot of times when tools fell, do you see it the company didn't do a good job of defining the requirements and really working with consultants and being involved? Or do you think it's typically the implementation consultants or what do you typically see? Because it seems like, you know, you hear a lot about these failures and what do you think are probably the one or two biggest kind of failure points, so to speak, in that process?

So I think there are a couple of them. Probably the first one is that when we are implementing an EPM solution, we need to think about the system and not about Excel. And sometimes it's difficult. So in many cases people were thinking about their Excel spreadsheets, they tried to make those Excel spreadsheets to become a system, and it's barely possible. And that kind of mindset of okay, I just need my spreadsheet in the system is one reason sometimes for failure. The second piece is the understanding of the business processes and how a system should be evolving. In many cases you start a small model and then, you know, you keep patch it and not really thinking about that. And at some point you're ending up with a mindset that no one know how to maintain because someone five years ago made kind of strange decisions in an unrevealed code. So I think that probably the most technical problems, that system was not designed right or designed to be an Excel spreadsheet. And by nature, there are many cases where companies just didn't choose the right technology. Sometimes it's because of their lack of requirements or incorrect requirements, and sometimes just because maybe they choose a technology with a nice logo, but not necessarily something with a great fit to their needs. Needs. Thank you.

That, that all makes a lot of sense to me and I, I appreciate what you said there and particularly the part when you said they just bring a spreadsheet and I just want you to recreate this in your tool. I want to do exactly what I did in Excel, but I need the benefit of your tool. It reminds me almost about 15 years ago now I worked on a project where we were implementing Micro strategy and we took all our Excel files and basically just built them in micro strategy and nobody used them, nobody liked them. Like if you're just going to give me my Excel files, just give them to me in Excel because they're easier to use. And it was a learning lesson that you got to change for the form factor. The things need to be different often and there will be benefits to that. And in the long run, you know, we, they made huge progress on the reporting and it took, you know, a lot longer than planned. But that was a real eye opener when we did, you know, kind of POC and rolled out those first reports and I, I left the department. But I still remember that conversation with the person was leading the project of yeah, we realized we couldn't just. It didn't make sense to duplicate what we had in Excel because it works differently. There are benefits of doing it differently and that increases the likelihood of people using the reports which I think that's a similar, you know, obviously bi but I think there's a lot of similarities between that, what we often see in FP&A. So I'm going to ask you a question about selling. Is it true what they say? I always hear, you know, finance professionals are some of the hardest groups to sell to. What's your take on that?

I don't think it's the hardest team, no, but there are might be more sophisticated than others and might be more busy than other type of roles in organization. So I think it's a combination of, you know, being a sophisticated user with bunch of needs as well as being very busy and not always having the right time to deep dive into each and every solution. So I think those are the difficulties. But on the other side, I think once FP and A teams adopt the solution and like will be your best customer because they will keep using it and expand the usage. So I think even if it's a little bit hard to sell, it's great to keep the success running and moving.

There can be a great partnership there and a lot of expansion when done, right?

Absolutely. Yes.

Cool. See. So I would love to get your thoughts. I know you've consulted with a lot of different CPM tools. You've seen a lot of things in the market, especially since leaving J Docs and just curious, any technology that has you really excited or tools, anything you've seen. You don't have to mention company names if you don't want to. You can if you want. Totally up to you. But anything you've seen that has you excited at this point or that you look at and think, oh, this could be a really cool use case.

Yes, absolutely. Let's start maybe with something that I'm less excited of. And I would not name any company here, but I think that what is exciting is newer technologies. And when you just see a new product with an old technology, I'm not getting excited. And again, I don't want to give any names, but I was working with cubes almost 30 years ago. It was like with historical TN1 and sometimes you see like new tools in the market that are still coming with the same innovative in memory technology that is with us for a couple of decades. So the area that exciting me more from a technology perspective is literally how you get the FP&A data more involved with the organizational data and be more homogeneous together. Like how do we being in a situation that FP&A is not creating a silo where we know keep saying we don't want a silo organization, but sometimes we build an FPA technology that remains a silo by itself. So I'm getting more excited with tools that are more natively integrated with already data warehouses and you know, more kind of foundational data organizations. One of the companies I've seen doing that is Lumel. They have bunch of tools that are doing great planning systems that are literally allowing you both to manage your BI needs and the planning together in one place.

Yeah, and speaking of Lumel, and I know there's several others, they take an approach of building a tool that allows you to do planning on top of your BI application. Right. I think Power BI in this case is primarily what they work with. Do you see that? How do you see that going forward? So not Lumel, but just in general that idea. I, I think there's a lot of room for growth there. Not saying it's the only way of course, but it's an area where there could be growth. But what's your thoughts of adding a planning solution on top of Power bi, that data warehouse? Because you specifically mentioned the challenge of not creating silos and data. So do you see that as an area that we can expect to see grow in the future or how do you think about that?

I would almost say that with current technologies and power of BI system, rather you take Microsoft or Snowflake or any of the, the other vendors in the field. Getting the power of BI isolated from the needs of FPA is a bit of a problem from a long term perspective. So if you're still spending a lot of the resources of building FPA solution by taking and extracting data either directly from different sources or from a data warehouse to a silo, it's a problem. And I definitely see an opportunity potentially even to current vendor, which would be very difficult for them I believe, but definitely for new vendor to say, hey, we don't want to isolate the data that is in our BI system with the data that we're using for planning and moreover we don't want to build the interfaces and the maintenance for that and we definitely don't want to reinvent the integration capacity if you already have standard tools that are doing that FP.

And a Guy Here today I want to talk about the FP and a guy's ultimate FP and a course bundle. This bundle includes over 10 hours of content recorded by Ron Montero and myself, many templates and great lessons to make you a better FPA professional. The content includes FP and a business partnering how to manage tough conversations, build world class relationships and hold the business accountable. Includes Modern Excel, which is a real game changer for the way you'll work in Excel. Excel Tables, the gateway to Modern Excel Power Query, a game changer for transforming your manual processes and loading data and then dynamic arrays. Next we cover modeling design principles. In this course we talk about the importance of designing models in a certain way and how important it is that you think about design. And last but not least, driving value through smart analysis, how you can conduct data analysis to be a better FP and a professional. Go ahead and sign up for this bundle@the fpnaguy.com that's the fpnd a n d a guy.com use the code podcast to save 25% get started learning today. Yeah, I mean I can see you're saying, right, if you're doing it all in one tool, recreating it all could be a lot of work. And so there definitely are benefits. The more and that's why you see more and more tools saying hey look, we hook right into your data warehouse. Not just BI but general tools I can name a lot. Or yes, we'll connect, we'll work with Snowflake or some have taken the approach of we'll make sure our data is really easy to export out into Power, BI or Tableau. They're all finding different ways to try to solve that because you're right. The last thing you want is a silo of your data. You don't want finance to be on an island with its data or with the business's data. Because you know, finance needs sales data, HR data, operational data, ERP and accounting data. You know, especially fpa. It's not like they're just dealing with finance numbers, usually company wide data. And you know, it's not efficient to store it in two places. That's why I think we're seeing as much of a convergence as we are between kind of analytics and FPA in various different forms and factors.

Absolutely. And maybe another factor to Heather is that sort of a recreation of the spreadsheet. I think that many vendors are trying to say, hey, we have a similar experience like Excel or like a spreadsheet. I would expect vendor to think differently and to say, no, we want to create something that is better. Right. This is part of the innovation. It's not just about the technology, it's not only about the data integration, it's also about, okay, how a modern user interfaces look like is it really needs to be spreadsheet or there could be something that are working better than our beloved spreadsheet.

Yeah, it's a great question. It'll be interesting to watch. I mean the spreadsheet is a fabulous form factor for prototyping, wireframing, many things. One of the biggest weaknesses, and I think this is something, I don't think this is something that many FPA tools are much better at, is the multidimensional aspect of modeling. Right. You know, spreadsheet, you have rows, columns and you have sheets. You can get three or four dimensions. I mean you could technically get more if you get really complex with your formulas. But in multi dimensional modeling you can sometimes get, you know, 8, 9, 10 levels deep without having to change your formula. It's just a matter of stacking everything in and it spreads it out. You adjust accordingly. I think that's one of the biggest benefits. And for me, I love the spreadsheet interface, but I also love seeing other things people have done, like visual interfaces and things on top of that. Because I agree with you, we don't want to continue to just do the exact same thing with technology. I had somebody say one time, will Excel ever die? And we asked him yes or no and his response was it should. And what he meant by that. And he was an avid user, he's changed thousands of people in Excel. He goes, In 20 years, if Excel looks the same, if it's not a completely different tool. We failed because how fast technology is advancing it should be much better than what we have today. So it wasn't so much Excel die or not. It was like the current form should not be what we're using in 20 years. Look at a calculator or a phone or, you know, a computer. Almost none of them look like what they did when they first started.

Yep.

And so I get what you're saying. I think that's a really good point. And so I wanted to ask you, we've talked quite about, about technology. What's your take on AI in FP and A. I know you've done work with AI and particularly generative AI. So what's your thoughts there? What. What are you seeing as the use cases today?

I think it's an amazing opportunity. That would be maybe the highlight. More and more people would need to learn this technology and to know how and where to implement that. Right. That's. There is no question about that. And I'm probably not the first that is saying that. And I don't see AI replacing any of those FPA people. I think there is a lot of stuff that the FPA people would need to do from a process perspective, from understanding, but I believe that it makes it literally the AI adds like additional pair of hands, if not more than that, to every FP and a professional. I did with Plan Buddies, a nice workshop for AI and I showed a couple of examples that AI can help us to. It actually teaches us some new ideas that we never heard about, but we also see so that AI is actually having all the malfunctions that finance needs to fix. It's not really auditable. You don't really know who is responsible for the data. Right. So there are a lot of problems with AI that we need to tackle yet. So I think there is a lot of contrast in the AI world and the FPA would need to know how they manage those contrasts, but definitely use it as another pair of hands, if not another two pairs of hands for the work.

Sounds like it's definitely something we should be using. There's opportunities, but we still have things to solve.

Absolutely, yes. But on the other hand, maybe not. On the other hand, AI should start now and the ability to adopt AI should start, you know, rather sooner than later.

For each and every organization, 100 agree. Every company, every person should be playing with it, figuring it out, using it, figuring the use cases, some more than others, depending on company and what opportunity and access they have. So it's going to vary, but there are use. I think everybody can get benefit out of it today. I know I've got a ton of benefit out of it. I use it all the time. Right. And so I know there's opportunity and that's what everybody needs to find. If you're just burying your head in the sand, you're missing out, which I'm sure there are some people doing that, but there were also some people to do that with the calculator and the computer and the Internet. They're all just fads, right?

Yes.

I want to ask a question. You've been a business owner, you know, running your own consulting firm. You've been a president of a company. What do you expect from your finance and FP and a team? What did you always look for?

To me, the FP and a team should be the front office of the organization. We have the concept of front office and back office on investment firms. Me, it's a very similar concept. Like this is like the deal desk of the organization, FP and a need to think in terms of how do we lead the business, how do we sit not next, but with the CEO and look at data, look at opportunities, examine risks and mitigations and check the processes and the data that we are having. So I think the most important piece in that perspective, you know, as a business owner, as an executive, is thinking about FPA as your front office after.

Organization and what's maybe your favorite memory or favorite thing FP&A has done over the years. You're like, wow, that really impressed me. Something that kind of left you going, I wish all my FP and A people would do that level of work.

Well, honestly that was many years ago. And I have FP and a team that on top of their, let's say, standard financial roles, they also dealt with the real performance, not the real, but classic performance management of organization like balance cords and other. And they were 100% focused on the pillar that many companies are kind of not really observing in the balance core card. And that was the learning and growth. And they actually asked to see how we can implement as part of our budget and forecast processes in the organization, those KPIs of learning and growth within the organization. And I think this was like, you know, super innovative. That was about a decade ago. And I believe that even today there are not too many FPA professionals that are really thinking outside of the box. Not just let's look at our current processes, at the current data, but let's motivate people in the organization to grow and support the organization not with the day today, but with the tomorrow.

I love that, that they were involved in learning and growth and thinking about tomorrow. Because you're right, that's often an afterthought, not. Not a focus. And so I appreciate you sharing that one. I love that one. I think it's an area we could all do better to think about that within the budgeting. And often it turns into an area of, hey, learning and growth. Where can we cut the budget? Not how do we ensure that we have a culture that creates an environment of learning and growth. I mean, I've been guilty of it. We probably every finance person has where they go in and ah, good place to cut the budget. But I. So I really like that because it shows you're thinking holistically and about the company as a whole. Next, I want to ask you about the community you've created. So you started a community called Plan Buddies. Can you tell our audience why did you start that? How did that come about? And you're smiling and I probably know why, because this involves me. But we'll ask you anyway.

Yes, of course. It's like it's a mutual question. Right. We need to ask ourselves.

Yes, but you are the one who started it, not me. You came to me, so that's. You can tell the backstory.

Okay. So honestly, the backstory is coming back to people, right? On a day by day basis. I'm usually speaking with dozens of people. And what came to me is that people are looking their challenges sometimes as their own problem in their very specific organizations. And sometimes, you know, those people not really aware of the mutual challenges that we have in the fba. And challenges are not necessarily just how do I crunch data or how do I cut cost or what template should I be using or what tool. It's literally just sharing like business practices, processes, how do I get the new hires in the better ways and so many other stuff. So Plan Bodies was established first to understand that there are other people with planning challenges that want to learn from each other. And it was focusing really on the human factor. No big brand names, no big company names, not necessarily being sponsored by technology vendors, but literally being able to create a shared knowledge between people and also maybe some friendly relationship with, you know, which never heard.

Love it. Thank you, thank you for sharing a little bit on that. And what's been your favorite experience with Plan Buddy so far? How's that? How's it been?

Wow. Actually there are many of. It's more than just one favorite. I loved what we did at the opening event when we had the four days with great speakers and hundreds of people joining in and writing comments and jumping from one topic to the other, which is like a typical FP and a day, everything all over the place, right? You need to think about your business partners and HR and methodologies and finance and operations. So I think the opening day was one of the greatest experience and I think the other piece is literally the one on one conversation with people I never had from companies. I never heard the names all around the globe. Right. Not only here in the US it was amazing to have those one on one conversation. The small groups that we have sometimes, that was amazing to share the knowledge, to have some fun. You know, the combination of your jokes with some professional materials was all great.

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So I think the first question is very simple. I really believe that every company needs a planning tool. Whether that's a small enterprise above of course a couple of million dollars. If that's an enterprise, a couple of billion dollars. You need the planning tools. It doesn't make sense. You have accounting system, you have CRM system, you have all those systems in place and you don't have a tool for your front office of the organization. That's a problem. Right? So I think FP and a tool is something that every organization, once they have CRM accounting system and similar supportive system, they need FPNA tool that checked.

Now Excel or Google Sheets is sufficient once you get past a few million.

No, I definitely don't think so. I think those are productivity tools. They meant to serve individual person. They do have some collaborative features, but those are not systems. They will never be able to become systems. So I, I don't think it's right to take something and you know, twist it into something. It is not right. It's. It's almost like, I don't know, putting a coffee, a ground coffee in a tea bag. Right? You can do that. Is that the right way of doing it?

Probably not right not being a coffee or tea drinker. I'll take your word for it.

Okay, I have my coffee here. So now for the second question. My methodology of implementation is very straightforward and I have a couple of rule of thumbs for that. The first one is that always take your most difficult and most challenging problem and the easiest problem to resolve. Right. A lot of companies are saying, oh I have like a low hanging fruit that will start with that. But they forget about all the complexity and they ending up with the incorrect tool or the incorrect team or something like that. So try to figure out where you have the most complicated problem. I don't know, could be costing, could be inventory management, contract management, whatever it is, and could be something more simple like okay, just need to consolidate numbers. So take those two problems when you evaluate tools and the next stage is literally starting with baby steps. I am not a great believer of, okay, now let's do a $10 million project, hire a bunch of people and tons of consultants and just goes that I think organizations that are not starting with small and, you know, growing with their tool, with the solution, with the understanding of how technology solves business problem, I think they're spending usually a lot of money and they're getting into the risk that the system is not really resolving all the problems because it becomes another system and still people are then exporting the data, you know, from that system to Excel to increase the productivity. So it's all about baby steps, taking one model after the other, making sure people in the organization understand the technology and the benefits and make sure you can start with the tool as soon as possible and not after a year. If you have to implement the tool for six to 12 months, it become irrelevant once, you know, you launch it.

A lot of truth that if you take too long, by the time you get done, your business model's changed and you have a lot of, a lot of problems with many tools. All right, so this section is our kind of FPNA rapid fire section, so to speak, where we have a couple different questions we ask. Looking for kind of quick, short answers in general here. So the first one is what is the number one technical skill that FPA professionals should master?

Understanding data.

I like understanding data.

What is the number one soft skill in understanding business? Business processes.

So we got data and business processes. And then how are you using generative AI yourself today?

I use it too often, I guess. No, I'm using it almost everywhere. I'm using it when I need to write emails, blog posts, articles, because I'm not a native speaker. And that. So real great help. It makes my processes much faster. And I also use it sometimes when I just want to check data correlation and a few other stuff. I'm always double and triple check that. So I never use AI without at least double checking. And again, it's not just one check. At least double, triple check the results.

I like that. It's a, it's a good reminder that, look, check it a couple times. Don't just blindly trust it. I saw sometime someone put out a post and it said, if you need any changes to this post, let us know. We can rewrite it for you. And that was at the bottom of their post. You're like, I wonder who wrote that post. They were in a hurry and left in the. The AI part at the end of. Do you need any corrections?

Yes.

Yeah, always good to check. We've all probably done something like that before. I know I have. All right, next one here. If you could wave A magic wand and change. One thing about fpa, what are you changing?

Modernization, modernization mindset. Stick to the future, not to the past.

So elaborate a little bit on that because you didn't say just modernization, you said modernization mindset. What is a modernization mindset?

So, you know, for. For years I was pitching a lot about transformation and how is it important for finance to make a transformation into the digital era, tools and so on. Now transformation in many ways failed because it became huge. A lot of people are afraid of that. And it became like long enterprise project never ends, and when it ends, it's no longer relevant. Right?

Yep.

So modernization mindset means that, okay, let's do the low hanging fruit, but keep doing them over time and not just think about modernization as one project that is done. So the modernization mindset, let's keep looking what's going on out there. Let's look at our organization, let's see what resources we can bring together, what technology we can use and keep evaluating that over time and implement that in small pieces. Right. Not necessarily everything in one day. And that keeps your FPA to be current, to be updated, to think, you know, in a modern mindset and not just about, okay, how do I reconcile the numbers from whatever last year?

I really love how you talked about it as a journey. The modernization mindset. I've said before, transformation is about more of an evolution. It's not an event which is kind of like modernization. If you're just like, hey, once we get this system in, we're in good place. That's the wrong mindset. So I really like how you explained that. I'm gonna. I'm gonna steal that. Just so you know, I will. I will quote you, but I'll still. That's how I get all my content. Oh, wait, I shouldn't admit that. All right, this next section is where we get to know you personally a little bit. What's your favorite hobby or passion? What are you doing when you're not working?

I'm doing a lot. I like to do stuff though. Seriously. So I think my second passion is really teaching. That's why I'm with BU now. I have passion to make food, especially when my kids like it and they like almost everything I make, not just the cakes. And I like to be outdoors and do hikings and some skiing over winter time. So being active and. And see the world out there.

No, you got to come to Park City and do some skiing. I've been waiting for that.

Yes.

I'm gonna put it out there to the World. Everybody ping Laurent and tell him to come visit me in Utah. All right, next, if you could recommend one book to our audience to read. What book are you going to recommend?

That's a difficult one. You know, I'm looking right now on my professional side of book, but I'm also thinking about the science fiction and the mystery book that I'm reading. I have over there my corporate finance, like big one. Let me, let me not choose one. But I would say to people, reap whether that's to inspire your imagination and enjoy a good old book. If you like romance or if you like more actions. I like action and you know, spy stories and that kind of stuff. Or if you read really to learn from professional, I would just say read. I'm, I'm always, I always read and I keep reading a lot. So I don't want to just, you know, point on one and, you know, mistreat all the others.

All right, well, we'll let you get away with that. Tried, but that's fine. Now I, I love the just read because I'm not a big like business book reader. I mostly read for pleasure. I work, I work so much and do other things. I want to kind of let the imagination go and that's often why I read a lot. So I, I get it. We're all different. If you can go anywhere in the world tomorrow, where you're going, what's your favorite travel destination?

When I used to live in Israel, my favorite travel destination was here in the US So I'm now here and I would say that my favorite travel destination would be always back to my homeland in Israel.

I thought you were going to say that. I figured that's probably where you go makes a lot of sense and I know you have family coming to visit, so enjoy that. It'll be exciting for you. If you could have dinner with one person alive in the world today, you can take anyone to dinner. Who you taking to dinner?

I think it would be maybe Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft.

Why him?

There are many reasons. Just for a disclosure, I did a very large project with Microsoft and it was last four years since he was just joining Microsoft until most recently. And I've seen how the organization was shifting and changing not just from the other side, you know, seeing like almost like one of those kinds of old feathers, becoming like the most modern company with AI productivity and cloud solutions. But you've seen the culture in the organization evolving and a lot of other stuff. And I think it would be a fascinating dinner to have and understand about, you know, the mindset of people that makes, you know, such a great work with huge organizations.

Yeah, he, he'd be a great one to have. There's a lot of them that have just done amazing work that would be fun to have dinner with. I think he would be a, he would be a cool person to have. All right, so wrap up questions here. We're just coming to and over time, if you could offer our audience advice to be a better FPA business partner. So particularly on the business partnering side, what advice would you give them?

In one word, it would be storytelling. So I think you need to be a good storytelling when you come with requirements or when you come with recommendations. You need to think about the story. You need to make sure you know how to convince people with the ideas and explain it. Very good. You need to make sure that the data looks in a way that is resonates for people and you need to come with all the background stories to lead people forward with ads. So being good storytellers will make you a better business partner and much more successful in your journey.

You know, if we had more time, I'd have you pull out your Kermit the Frog and tell us a story so people could see what it's like. But we'll hold that toward a future episode.

Yes.

Anyone who knows they're on here likes Frog. So we figured that could be a fun storytelling for a future episode.

But there is a reason behind that, right? It's because they always jump forward.

They do. So modernization always be like a frog jump forward. Don't get boiled. If you're jumping forward, it's harder to get boiled. See? So we got it covered.

Yes, absolutely.

All right, if someone wants to get a hold of you or learn more about you, what's the best way for them to do that?

LinkedIn. Check my names. It's a very unique name. Liran Edalist and I'm very responsive. I usually be very responsive.

So yeah, there's not many Laurent Etalists out there, not especially with a PhD, that's a doctor. So thank you so much for joining me. I really enjoyed chatting with you today, Lauren, and excited for audience to get to know a little bit about you and you know all the great work you're doing out there in the tech space. So thanks again.

Thank you. It's my all pleasure. So thank you.

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