Financial Modeling for Startups to Drive Growth and Make Better Decisions with Lauren Pearl

I was running a retail company and I was really flying blind. All of the decisions I was making had to be gut instinct. I learned more about financial planning and analysis. Suddenly it felt like the wool was pulled from my eye. Suddenly I discovered like, oh, this is where the answers lie. Great. FP&A is about owning that data, that information, and finding a way to effectively communicate it to the rest of the organization so they can do their job better. When you're thinking about early day modeling and you're an fp, I think the instinct is to worry about what AI can technically do for a finance organization is one thing, but a lot of these problems aren't actually technology problems that we're having. They're governance problems. And if you put AI on top of it, it's only going to solve the technical issue for our audience to.

Be a better business partner. Today for the FBA professional, what's the number one thing you tell them to start doing?

The best thing you can do as a finance professional in an organization is to go to your peers year at another department and ask them the question, what can I do?

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Thanks so much. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, we're really excited to have you. Looking forward to chat with you. Just a few things about Lauren. She comes to us from New York City. She's a podcast host, runs her own fractional CFO business. She's been a co founder before. She's worked a lot with startups, very operationally focused and we're just really excited to have her with us. So we're going to start with this question. If I asked you to define FP and A in one sentence, how would you define it.

So in the context, coming from kind of like an operator background, I think about FP and A within the finance function as sort of the financial engineering that goes on to determine what's happened in the past, what exactly has gone on, and what are the impacts going to be of the decisions and the predictions that we're making today in the future. That's kind of how I would translate or how I think about it from an operations perspective.

I like it. And so with that kind of, from that operations lens, what does great FP&A look like? How would you describe great FPA?

So great FP&A, it's really about what it takes to effectively make better decisions, to effectively take actions. So I think, you know, I did an FP and A kind of in the center of my journey, like in the middle of my career. But before that I was an operator. And I think now in FP&A, as I learned FP&A, I think when we're kind of young in this field, and I was super guilty of this, we fall in love a little bit with our own analysis. We discover something that's really cool. We find a formula that's really sexy, and we get really excited about what FP&A can do. But it's really about the business leader trying to sit in a room and make a decision, surfacing the information. A little story to kind of illustrate this point. When I was an operator, before I really learned FP and A, before I really learned anything about the finance, I was running a retail company. And in that company, I really didn't have any financial guidance in. Within the company. We had a cfo, but they weren't particularly well versed in fpa. They were more of a bookkeeper. And. And I was really flying by, so all blind. All of the decisions I was making had to be kind of gut instinct, just, you know, based on what I thought was going to happen. And then I went to school and I went to Deloitte, and I learned more about financial planning and analysis. And I learned how to use finance to ask questions and get answered. And suddenly it felt like the wool was pulled from my eye. Suddenly I discovered like, oh, this is where the answers lie. Because really, as financial, financial analysts, we look at those answers, that data every day. We see that information every day. But it is also our responsibility to provide that information to everyone else in the organization that does not live and breathe it and get to look at that dashboard day in, day out. And so great FP&A is about taking that responsibility seriously, owning that data, that information, and finding a way to effectively communicate it to the rest of the organization so they can do their job better.

You mean it's not about that sexy formula man? And I just came back from the financial modeling world a week in Vegas where all they talked about was Excel. So I figured that's what it had to be.

It's tough, right? Because it's really cool. Like that's the troubling thing. A lot of us get into FDA because that's the exciting part. And it's hard to restrain yourself from running down those rabbit holes. And sometimes we got to let ourselves run down those rabbit holes because that's often where we find really interesting things. Like there's a research element at most of what we're doing. And so that's useful too. But on a day to day basis, it's also pulling back to the context of, wait, who am I doing this for? And what is their problem? What is their pain? And am I solving it really with what I'm doing right now?

And I totally agree with you. As much fun as the new formula is, no CEO is going to be like, oh, wow, you used a sequence here, like, right. They don't care. And so really it's about keeping in mind who the customer is and what you're trying to accomplish. Doesn't mean there aren't times, like you said, you can have fun, you can have fun with analytics and sometimes you can go deep, but you really need to. And I had to learn this the hard way, but bring yourself back up and focus on what they need, not what you want to be doing, and you'll be much better at fp.

And a totally, completely agree.

So today you run your own consulting firm. How did that come about? How did you start your own consulting firm? Let's start there.

Sure. Well, I kind of started this by accident, I will say. I was the CFO of a tech company here in New York, specialized in cybersecurity, specifically in custom engineering and research. And when I joined the firm, There were about 10 engineers and they were doing mostly work for the government, for darpa. But they wanted to grow and they wanted to diversify their client base. And over the course of four years as their cfo and really CFO slash, COO slash, I was sort of the only business person for quite a while there with a bunch of engineers. Over the course of four years, we grew that business from being a tiny group of 10 engineers to I think there were about 100. When I left and working with all of the top tech companies as their go to service provider for custom security engineering. So that was so exciting. But at the end of my stint there they weren't really wanting to grow at the same kind of pace and my role was really transitioning to being more of a maintenance CFO than a strategic one. And so I was looking for my next thing. I quit that business and I started my own startup in the housing space I was building. I partnered up with an architect to build prefab homes to the passive house standard. So like very energy efficient homes. Cool startup. We had no problem getting some funding, investors were super interested, but the sales cycles were really long because it's houses. So I started the practice just kind of as an extra way to earn a little money while we waited for that cash to come in and it was 2021 and that business just kind of exploded. Like there was just so much demand in that time for that kind of work. It really took off and ended up being a more exciting business than the startup I was running. So I gave up the housing startup and started doing this full time and I've been doing it ever since.

So fun. Love that. And sounds like you really are passionate about being in the early stage versus that later stage when sometimes it may be more maintenance. Really kind of figuring out the strategy and the chaos of early days.

Yeah, I think it's, I do have a lot of experience in the early days and I think the, the real common thread throughout a lot of my journey and my career has not just been early but growing and needing to find more kind of new, go to market more commercialization, how to change. So it's sort of that eye towards the future of like how do we run the company now given that we're going to be completely different company in the next year, five years, that's I think the place that, that I tend to excel. That's where my, my brain, you know, works the best. So yeah, early stage is great for that. But right now with the advent of AI and a lot of really exciting startups, that's happening at a lot of different companies at many sizes. So there's lots of exciting opportunities.

The next question I'd like to ask is, you've done a lot of modeling in the early stages, right? Those early days. What's the hardest part of modeling in an early stage? When you don't have as much information to go on and maybe a lot of the assumptions are a little more of a guess than you'd like. I had to think about modeling during those really early days.

So I think it's interesting. When you're thinking about early day modeling and you're an FP and a person, I think the instinct is to worry about the scarcity of data and the untrustworthiness of the inputs, like your assumptions. But actually, I think that's one of the easier parts of modeling for startups. So it is true that when you're doing early stage models, you don't necessarily have a lot of inputs, you don't have historicals, because the company doesn't exist yet, right?

Yep.

To get over that hurdle, I think it's more about contextualizing what this model is for. Right. At early stage, these models aren't a forecast, they are a feasibility study. And when you think about them as a feasibility study, the fact that the inputs aren't very good, it doesn't matter quite as much because what you're really doing is putting in the inputs for reasonable predictions based on benchmarks, based on experts that you speak with, based on your plans for what you would like to do in the business. And you're essentially setting up that structure, given those assumptions and saying, is this business worth doing? And if those things that I believe are going to happen, do happen, will it be financially successful? Right. And then what that tool becomes once you transition from it just being a model into using it in the business that you're running is it becomes the financial tool that you can then place better inputs into into that will spit out the predicted behaviors. And it can also then help you check your assumptions as you're putting those historical in. So a lot of that, the issue with the, oh no, there's not enough data. It's. Well, yeah, that's. But that's not the point of the model. Right? It's not. Doesn't have to be accurate, it has to be useful. But there are some significant challenges to building an early stage model. And I think that's actually more to do with who has to build it and who has to use it. Because at the early stages there isn't often a finance team who love learning about the newest formula, diving down those rabbit holes. We aren't there yet because those founders can't afford us yet. So often those models have to be run by the founder and has to be built by the founder. So what I often bump up against are, are things like overwhelm. Right. These founders will get. They go into Excel, that might not be where they've been comfortable in the past. They may be a marketing person, they may be an engineer, they may be even like a merchant and they have this wonderful business idea and they have a lot of network, what other sort of advantages to build it. But they don't have Excel skills and they have to build a full financial model for an entire organization, which we know as FPNA people is also not the easiest model to build. So that's, I think, more the challenge. And then the second challenge I would say is that templates for this particular type of modeler are both a blessing and a curse because the template can be helpful in kind of fast forwarding their progress to creating a model because they don't have to start from scratch. They can learn a lot from templates and they don't have a lot of time. So it's really helpful. At the same time, because of their lack of skills, they may not know how to use a template properly. They don't know enough about Excel and about how this model should look to do what a typical modeler would do, which is you take modules or like logic from the template and you use the pieces that are useful for you. It takes some sophistication to do that. And so a lot of founders will start with a model, but actually end up using it and getting super confused. And then like they build a model that gives them the wrong answers, the wrong outputs, which can really get them in trouble. So those, those are, I think it's, it's those founder issues and the individual running the model that ends up being the biggest challenge.

Yeah, especially as like I said in the early days, often they don't have any finance outside of bookkeeping. At some point they bring in that first fractional cfo, maybe a little bit of FPA advisory services. Usually it's somebody who's doing both along with some controllership. You're doing a little bit of everything because they don't have enough work or money to pay one, you know, people full time for those roles. But I like something you said, you know, those early days, it's really about a feasibility study. And what it makes me think of is, right, if you're a seed stage, pre seed, sometimes maybe series A, but I say a little bit more that really it's all about product market fit. And so that's kind of that feasibility is one you're trying to figure out if the market is going to have demand for the product. And the model is also just trying to figure out can this really scale? Like if we get everything right, is this a business? Someone can Invest in, especially if you're in that early stage investor world, that will make sense. Like if they do things right and this becomes successful, can I get the exit I expect or is there just no market there for it?

Yeah. And all of the things where you can quite easily put a whole bunch of outputs into that model for things that you're curious about, you know, you have. The model of the PNL is going to tell you, you know, here's what's going to happen to the business if we hit our sales target. But then when you hit reality, you never hit your sales target because what you're talking about takes a couple of rounds to get to product market fit. So the model then tells you, okay, so what's the consequence? Like, how much money are we going to lose each, you know, every quarter when we're trusting something new and doing a hard pivot, how much more money are we burning and how much bigger is the hurdle getting that we need to hit in order to get to the same milestones that we promised our investors? So it becomes this wonderful guidepost as you're moving along. Yeah. It's an incredibly useful tool. You just have to figure out how to get it to these folks at that early stage, which I've spent a long time figuring out how to do. I do some of it, but it's always a challenge to get folks a really good model at this stage.

I could imagine. And then I know one of the challenges is right, many of the founders have little to no finances experience. You already talked a little bit about that. They pick up the models themselves, they try to build them, and often they're, they can do harm because they just don't know how to make good assumptions in a model, even though they may understand the business well or they have formulas, whatever it may be. But how do you, when you come in, how do you work with that founder to really help give them enough education to make good decisions without bogging them down in details? Right. Because in finance we tend to be detailed and want to go at all. They're like, just give me enough to make smart decisions and let me work. So how do you balance that and do that with a founder who really doesn't have experience with finance?

Yeah. So actually I first encountered this challenge or was given this challenge when I first I started working with, I went through the NYU Berkeley center incubator when I was a startup founder and, and when I became a forec cfo, I realized, oh my gosh, I should go back and work with that Same center I went through. I didn't recall having any kind of financial guidance during that. I wonder if they need it. So I started working with the Berkeley center and became kind of their residence finance person to help startups going through the accelerator programs throughout the year. And the director of the program came to me and said with a challenge. She wanted me to run their financial modeling course every semester that they do. Because every startup in the, that goes through accelerators needs a financial model to then go for VC fundraising. So it's kind of a bar you have to cross. So her challenge was, okay, build me a financial modeling course. But here's the thing, this is a Stern accelerator, so the business schools accelerator. But most of my startups don't come from Stern. Most of these students come from all of the other schools at NYU and they don't even know what a P and L is. And by the way, I want you to do this in under two and a half hours. And I want it to be really hands on and I want them to leave knowing everything they need to know about building a model because there's no.

One else who does succeed, right?

Yeah, easy peasy. So I took this very intimidating task and I thought long and hard about it and I actually went back to thinking about my former life in, in programming. So I, I started my career very, I grew up in a family business so I have kind of like deep family business roots. But my first job of college, I rebelled from that and I, and I went and I worked in a Microsoft partner an IT shop doing configuration of like web portals and I helped link web parts together. So I went back to thinking about those programming days and thinking about, okay, how do I break what is happening when I'm doing financial modeling into more of like a first principles thinking. Because in reality what we're doing in Excel, we are, we are doing a programming language. It has like this odd kind of like context of positioning of the cells. But the formulas that we're writing and the math that we're doing is very similar to the way that you could break down the logic in a program in software. In the course that I ended up creating the first unit of the course, the first module actually is done outside of Excel. We don't touch Excel, we don't look at templates, we don't build anything in Excel and instead we're, we actually start with pen and paper. Like I grab a chunk of computer paper and we actually write out like equation trees, right? Start an Excel or a financial model for fundraising you're modeling three statements, but you're mostly focused on the P and L. And so what is the P and L in a basic equation? It's basically your revenues minus your variable costs, minus your fixed costs is equal to your profit. That's overall what you are trying to calculate.

Yep.

All of the other equations in your Excel are basically pieces of that overarching equation. And so in the course we start from there and we basically show examples of okay, for each of these different business models, how do you comprise each of these variables? And we're breaking it down into what are the equations you're going to use to get to different variables, all the way down until you get to variables that you can guess at. Right. Which become your inputs, those variables that are possible or reasonable to estimate. And you create kind of this logic tree of how you plan to calculate things. And we go through that entire exercise for as far in depth as we possibly can and then we move to Excel. And it's amazing because what is actually happening in that course is I am forcing these founders to form an opinion to craft in math the way they think about how their business runs before they actually go and borrow from a template. Because it's that opinion that allows them to then pick the pieces that they want because it matches the math in their head rather than that it's just available. And it tends to be that founders are much more successful when they start there at then understanding and using Excel as a tool rather than looking at it and just having their eyes go fuzzy. So that's how I've done. Tends to work for the founders that I've worked with. And. But of course it's still a process and, but in terms of teaching folks, that's the best way that I've, that I've found to do it when you're not a finance person. To start.

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Yes.

And so what he does is he draws on the board, here's your. Your assets. And he'll be like, okay, you have long term, like a house. You have short term, like your cash.

Yes.

Okay. Where your liabilities, your debt payment. And he starts moving and goes, okay, what would cause him to move? Why would life, you know, your equity or your life. Well, you borrowed a loan. I love your house, you got a raise. And just showing how they move for about 10, 15 minutes and kind of walking through the different things. Then once they get that basic idea, he starts showing them some math and some ratios. Did ratios. Right. It's no different. Now you're just going to do it with numbers instead of with images?

Yes, Yes. I think it's so true. And I think there's actually kind of a larger takeaway lesson to be thought about when we're finance people speaking with people who are not passionate and in love with finance things, which is like, there is this thing that happens when you talk about technical things with a person who isn't technical in a way that doesn't make sense, where in their brain. You're turning into the, like, Charlie Brown teacher voice. Right.

They're just glazing over.

Like, it just glazes over. It's like the white noise when a bomb goes off in a movie. Like, they don't hear you anymore because you've given them something that is uncomfortable and intimidating and they don't understand, and so you kind of lose them. So I do think it's a great idea. I know when I'm teaching a course, I thought about just like your friend who was teaching the balance sheet without numbers. The numbers is the scary part, Right. The numbers is that part that makes that happen. For me, it was when you get into Excel, like, even people who look Excel all day, every day, if you come into a new Excel document created by someone else that's like, full of errors and all over the place. I mean, I look at that every day and I look at that and I get a little like. Right. It's also. It's overwhelming. So when you take that overwhelming aspect out, it's a lot easier to communicate and build a shared understanding before you get to that point.

If you can remove whatever it is that scares them and explain it to them in a level that they're comfortable with or that you can get them comfortable with sometimes takes a little bit of work. It's going to be much easier to bring them up to speed than trying to start with something that intimidates them and force them to learn that first.

Yeah, yeah. And this is I think really helpful also working in FPA within an organization because one of the things that surprised me, speaking about finance kind of in a public setting and talking with about finance with more people, I'm constantly surprised by the level of sort of finance comfort and knowledge with senior leaders in different departments. Like I think sometimes when we are in a room with other business leaders at a certain level, we kind of assume that, well, they have an MBA too, surely they also understand this metric that I'm talking about. But really there's a lot of intimidation even just within different departments at the same level because they just didn't dive quite as deeply. And a lot of them, you know, deep down also have that intimidation. And the same thing can happen. So even if you maybe are lower down in an organization, but you are a finance person, when you are speaking with a non finance person, being aware of that possibility can be helpful when you're communicating your report or, you know, an initiative that you'd like to drive. You have to be mindful of that potential disconnect and intimidation as well.

Agree. You have to assume that, you know, they're not one, they don't have the level you do probably assume they're at a basic level because they're in a. They're in a totally different part of the business for a reason, doing marketing or sales or whatever it may be. Now you may be pleasantly surprised sometimes to find out totally in finance or they have pretty much as good a skills as I do, if not better. And then there's other times where they have no idea. And so if you go in with the assumption of there's going to be a level of education, I need to keep this really simple versus thinking I can just talk to them at the level I talk to my manager at, you'll be much better off.

Yeah, I think that's so true. And I think it brings up why one of the most important skill sets I think that needs to be developed in an FP and a team, in a finance team really Any kind of like technical area of the business. It's listening skills. Right. It's, you know, you don't want to assume anything, but there's no reason to assume because you can ask and you can listen and you can hear the way that people describe their own problems and the language that they use. And instead of using your own weird jargony language, you can use the words that they use to describe these things and do that translation for them, which can really help you be more impactful.

Yeah. I mean, I think a great example is take the P and L I've seen. Sometimes P and L is presented with all the account numbers and the ledger names behind. They don't care about those names. What are the terms they're going to recognize? Right. How are you going to name it in a way that's just easy for them to understand? It's not a lot of work to build a simple bridge between whatever the actual chart of accounts may be and the level they need to see it at.

Totally. Totally. And also even, I mean, what's wonderful about working at earlier stage companies is sometimes we get to decide what those P and L items are going to be. And why would you use the out of the box P and L line items? If the founder running the business uses different terminology for those expenses or those revenues, like make it easy by using their own language, they're more likely to use the tool. Right. If they recognize those accounts and they have in their own brain how much they want to spend on whatever it is their light item that they have. You know, like I'm trying to think of like a funny expense that I've seen on a, on a spreadsheet. Like they're like sales, travel costs. Right. Maybe they think about that as distinct from the rest of the travel. If they have a budget in their own mind about that or put it on the P and L because they're more likely to look at the P and L because they care about that number. And it's really like recognizing that emotional attachment and kind of leveraging that to get people who are not necessarily in love with finance to love the financial data that they're able to get because of your help.

Sure. No, it's a great point. If you use that term, they're in love with or show it in a way that really resonates with them. They're much more likely to absorb it and be involved in the conversation.

Totally. Or look at the report that has something else you want them to see on it too. Right. I think A lot when working in an overall organization about like carrot and stick approaches when thinking about. Because I think as finance folks, we look at reports and we're already good. Like, the report itself is interesting to us because we. I feel like I'm not alone. When you're going in, you're analyzing the data and it's so much fun and you're excited about. I know when I'm like creating a model to answer a problem or a question I have in my mind, I'll often not look at the outputs until the very end. And it's almost like the surprise you get of like baking a cake. Like, I don't want to see it till it's fully baked. And I'm like very interested in the answer. But it's this amazing moment when I get the answer right because the financials itself are interesting to me. But for someone who's not in that mode, there's gotta be another reason. So, like, if it's a salesperson, maybe it's how they're performing against the target. Like they care about that, so they're going to look at a report that has that in it. And by the way, if you're looking for them to give you data to create your own reports, this is like particularly important in sales data because a lot of it is manually entered. If the number they care most about is their sales number, and you can only get accurate sales data when they put all their information into Salesforce or what have you, then that's kind of the incentive. Right. If they don't put their sales data in Salesforce, they don't get the credit and they are going to be watching those sales numbers like a hawk. So it's like just thinking through. They don't love the whole thing, but there's elements that really matter to them and their job and what they're trying to do.

Yeah. It's kind of funny when you gave the Salesforce example and we've all been there, very difficult to keep that data clean. And then I started my own business, realized how terrible I was at keeping my CRM up and accurate, and I'm just like, I was bad or worse. Those sales people I always beat up for not updating their, their numbers. And it gave me a whole different appreciation. It really, it really did. As I was like, wow, I think I'm worse than they were.

Yeah, yeah, it's. It. You build empathy. It's why it's so wonderful as a person who's in the finance function to have a spin in Another department. I am, you know, I have my own experiences in other departments because I literally spent the rest of my career in other departments. But even a career FPA person can do the same. I, I interviewed the other day. We interviewed with Chris Ortega who's the CEO of Fresher cna. He's wonderful. And he talked about a story of back in the days where he was working at other big companies that he worked at. Within the finance function he would go and do sort of tours of duty in other functions. He'd sit down with the sales team for, you know, an evening and say, you know, let me do some sales calls with you. He'd sit down with their, you know, engineering and let me see how you're solving a ticket. He needed to sit there and be with that team because he built that empathy for what it was that they were doing, what data they needed, what data they were producing and he learned how to work better with them as a cfo. So I think that was very, very powerful and, and something that we could all potentially endeavor to do in our own, in our own careers and own jobs. Just having the opportunity to see sometimes that other side of the house is really powerful.

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Totally. I was actually there was another interview. I interviewed Rita Kale, his former cfo, long time cfo, regional CFO at Roche Pharmaceuticals, long career there. But she was describing some of her best experiences that informed her on how to be a really good cfo. And it was a less than two year time that she started her own business. She had a small business that she started kind of on a break between two tours of duty at Roche. And she said, I think her quote that in the, in the interview was something like, you know, before I did this, I thought I knew what it was to run a business, but until I ran a business, I really didn't know. It's sort of that thing where I think there must be just a lot of sort of unspoken experiences of what it's like to be an operator and to care very deeply about all aspects of the company. That gives you a different perspective when you go back into a role within the organization that's kind of niche. It gives you this incredible, incredible context to really be someone who's running the business as opposed to someone who's just working at the business.

I know you deeply experienced that. As you mentioned, you started in the business, you've done a lot of operator roles. What are the key things it's done to make you better at fpa? You get that appreciation. But are there kind of other areas that you've really noticed? You're like, wow, this background really helps.

Yeah, I think it's made me a very particular kind of FP and a person. I would say it's given me a bias for simplicity. It's given me a bias for usability and speed. And so I think when I think about sort of the models that I. My experience as operator I think has given me sort of a preference in my modeling where it's more practical. Like what is the simplest way we can do this? Leaning more towards thinking about when we're, when we're thinking about something like accuracy. I care much more about attribution than accuracy. I want context. I want to know where this data is coming from, because as an operator, I don't care. When we close the books, for example, as accountants, there's so much attention paid to rigor and making sure things are exactly as they need to be. As an operator, I have the context to know that doesn't matter unless these are huge dollar amounts. Unless this. I mean, from a compliance perspective, certainly we care about this at the end of the year, but I just want enough of a ballpark of that number because I want to know the numbers that will impact the next month that I can actually do things about. So it's given me these kinds of ways of prioritizing certain aspects and really not caring about others that I think are unique for an operator cfo, as opposed to more of an accountant CFO or a banker CFO makes a lot.

Of sense in the sense that you can recognize and go, okay, what's important? What do I need to make good decisions? It's like you're talking about earlier, you know, models being useful. I love the quote from George Box. All models are wrong. Some are useful. You know, you're closing the books, whatever it may be. The reality is the books are probably never perfect 100%. There's almost always little things that slide between a month, but if they're immaterial, they don't matter to the big picture. You're going to be able to pass the audit at the end of the year. Just move on, keep it simple, and, you know, live to fight another day, so to speak, instead of kind of fighting a battle over something that really doesn't matter at the end of the day.

Yes, yes, I think that's so, so true. And something to really take to heart. And if you want an instinct for when it matters and when it doesn't, go be an operator. Because that's how you find it. That's where you get that answer, and it's why that experience is so important.

Great. So there, there, you've heard it. Go be an operator. Everybody leave fpa.

Sorry, did I just get your audience to all quit there, Jaz? I did not.

I no longer have a show. Thanks, Lauren.

I didn't do it.

All right, well, we had a little fun there. On a more serious note, we're going to shift gears a little bit. We're going to get ready to move into our kind of standard questions we ask about FP&A and getting to know you. But I have one more question I want to ask you host a podcast called Growth Minded cfo.

I do.

What do you learn from that? Talk A little bit about what that experience has been like hosting a podcast.

That experience has been wonderful. To be quite honest. It's been one of the most fulfilling, I think, projects that I've taken on since becoming an independent consultant and cfo. So the Growth Method CFO is this wonderful opportunity to talk to CFOs and folks who are kind of experts in the CFO space about how to think about the role and how to kind of prepare yourself to be in that role of the cfo. Especially when we're thinking about these higher growth companies that are really changing the world and are really doing innovative things. How do you operate as a leader? How do you keep pace with the innovation that's happening in the broader company within the finance organization? We've gotten to speak with so many already. We've only done a few episodes, we're in our first season, but we've already gotten to speak with so many wonderful minds in the CFO space. The thing that I think I've learned the most so far, and I think as we speak to more folks, there'll be even more things to learn. One overarching theme, I would say is how focused all of these CFOs are on soft skills. I barely ever hear about technical challenges, about market challenges. We hear a little bit of that. People are talking about what's going on in the industry and the business and what's hard there. But those take a backseat to the challenges of being an impactful leader, of communicating, of motivating a team, of working together with the rest of the departments, of making the business case for the innovation, that you need to be better and better and better. What I've learned is that the best CFOs in the world think about that stuff a lot. Those are their challenges. And so I think it contextualizes sort of time spent for someone who endeavors to be a cfo, what you should be thinking about training on. So many of us focus on a lot of that technical still, being the best modeler, being, you know, the best person to get to the right analysis the data and finding the perfect tool. And these things are important. But once you get to that leadership level, it's the people problems that are really, really challenging. And so getting some, you know, swings at bat, finding opportunities to get better as a manager, as a leader, as a communicator, as a team player, that's what seems to pay off. When you really get to that next.

Level, it's amazing how often it comes back to those soft or human skills, whatever we want to call them about relationships and developing with people. Yeah, just so, so critical. At the end of the day, I think we forget that sometimes it's easy to get caught up in the technical skills and. Yeah, how do I learn that new formula? What's the new tool? And just so you know, when you said, you know, finding that perfect tool, it doesn't exist. In case anyone was wondering, you're not going to know.

You heard it here.

You heard it here first from the FPA guy. Doesn't exist. No, but, you know, it's easy. Like I hear. So you hear. Sometimes people have this idea, well, once we get this new tool, it will solve my problems. No, it won't. It's just an enabler. It's the people in the processes and managing people and processes is more about communication and culture and being a leader than it is about technical. Are there technical aspects to it? Of course we are. In finance, there's a level you need to have that's just really a baseline. The real work happens at that human level.

It's so true. It's funny. I was just recently at a CFO dinner where we were talking about the future of sort of finance within the context of AI and sort of what we think AI is going to solve for us. And that was one of the points that was brought up in the context of onboarding AI, which was, you know, what AI can technically do for a finance organization is one thing, but a lot of these problems aren't actually technology problems that we're having, they're governance problems. And if you put AI on top of it, it's only going to solve the technical issue. It's not going to solve the issue of silos or politics or bureaucracy or the other stuff that's truly slowing down the processes within the organization. So I think you're so right. It's. It's really important to bear in mind that it's not always the tech. It really can just be about other aspects.

Yeah, I think often it is. And from what I see, the great leaders understand that.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Like great FP&A. You realize, yes, you need to have the baseline technical skills, but then it becomes the relationships, the influencing, the storytelling. You can have good FP and A on somebody's, maybe average on some of those and great technically, but if you want great fpa, you're going to have to have some people that have great soft skills.

Totally. Yeah. You have to have those people in there to be the communicators of all the great analysis that you're doing.

Yeah. Otherwise you just. It dies on the vine. I've been there where you think, oh, I did great analysis. So they'll follow it.

Yeah.

You actually put thought into it, how they think about it. No, you just assume because you knew and you knew it was right that they'd understand that. So.

And it's not. You have to get it over the line. The analysis is only so good as your communication about the analysis. Right. Like that's your bottleneck because no one else is going to see it as deeply.

I used to present it to a global cfo and I still remember my blasting. It was a disaster. I've shared this story before. I won't go into all the details, but the line that always stuck with me, I'm like, what went wrong in that presentation? He looked at me, goes, your analysis was brilliant. Your presentation lacked. And I was like, all right, thank you. Point taken.

I empathize because I have a similar story. When I was sort of early in my CFO days at that same tech company that I helped to grow, we were kind of improving our, what we called financial engineering because FPA was not a term that the engineers were willing to use. Yep. And I was able to put together a report that helped us see sort of like a profitability per practice, which had been very challenging for us to discover before implementing some, some extra steps in our, in our finance stack. And so I put the whole report together. I was so excited. We finally had a view on like what each practice was doing. I put the whole presentation together. I, I put it into Slack because that is how we communicated. The engineers did not like beating, so we did a whole Slack presentation. I dropped in the channel after all this work. My response was crickets. Nothing. No one responded at all. I think one person who was like the head of research, who was just a nice guy was like, this is great just to be kind. But it didn't have any impact because none of them had the context of why this was useful. And I had to go through that hard lesson to realize, you know, what is it that they care about in this report? How does this translate to their actual job? And had to kind of then iterate through, okay, this metric doesn't matter because they don't think about profitability on a day to day basis. What do they think about? Well, they think about numbers. They think about which projects they're working on. Oh, okay. Maybe we have to move toward more towards utilization. We share utilization next month. Oh, they cared about that, but they freaked out. Okay, so let's make. So it's like this. You really have to be thinking about if it's resonating. You described the person who's looking at your report as your audience, and I think that's the way to think about it that you're really presenting to an audience. I've also heard it described as that's your customer. And in the same rigor that like a product manager has to think about that product market fit, you have to think about report market fit for the person that you are that you're presenting that report to.

Yeah, I know. Jim Cook is one who always talks about it. Your customer, he does a really good job. He used to be the CFO of Firefox or Mozilla. You want a great interview. He's really, he's, he's great. He was first financier at Netflix and just does a great job of helping understand how much it's not about the spreadsheet. That's not your product, it's the insights. And these are your customers and your job is to make their life easier.

Totally. I think that is spot on. Totally agree with that stuff.

All right, so now we're going to move to the FPA section where I have kind of some standard questions we ask. These are ones just designed to be relatively quick. Just give us your kind of first thoughts that come to mind. I have four or five of these and then we'll wrap up with a personal get to know you section. So the first one, if I asked you what the number one technical skill for FPA professionals to master, what would you say?

I would say technical hygiene. So again, going very practical. You can do the most crazy, amazing analysis using all of the like, most innovative tooling and skill set. But if it's not clean, clear and organized, if you don't have accuracy checks, if you don't have the ability to quickly debug it and remediate, if you don't have those aspects, it doesn't matter because you're going to present it and it's going to fall on the floor. Right. You're going to encounter changes the day before the meeting and it's going to cease to be relevant and there's nothing you can do about it. So getting the ability to have excellent technical hygiene, I think is the most important skill set you can have as a modeler.

Love that. Never had it put that way, but I get it. Reminds me a little bit of what in says, who's the executive director Of Financial Modeling Institute, Inchnor. He goes the number one problem with models, he's like, there's not even a close second is design. Like it always comes back to poor design. People will be going on and on about this problem and they'll be like, stop. That's not your problem. Problem is you designed it wrong.

Yeah.

And just always tells them, look, if you design it well, which is, you know, a big part of technical hygiene, there's other things in that as well.

Yeah.

It makes your life a lot easier. So I, I, I, I like that answer. What about soft skills?

Soft skills. I think I go back to kind of our discussion before. I think listening is the biggest soft skill you can have in FP and A and really absorbing and trying to learn the language of the person that you are trying to communicate with through fpa. And that's challenging because none of their words are going to be the same. None of their terminology is going to be the same. It's a big heavy job to translate that into your, of your area of expertise because it's a highly technical area of expertise where the concepts they, there's going to be concepts they don't even have words for. Right.

Yeah.

You have to do this thing of listening, absorbing, empathizing, and then trying to find a way to translate what you're doing in that language that you hear. I think that's the most important.

Listening is huge. I think of active listening and be able to really communicate people with people. So I have a question for you. I'm curious what you'll answer here. Do you think the traditional budgeting process is broken?

So this one I have a funny answer to because as a person who's mostly worked in smaller businesses, I've not often been a part of traditional budgeting.

Because I wonder if you might say that.

Yeah, well, so at high growth companies, budgeting has to happen really differently because things change so quickly. So what is typically best practice at companies like this is we plan quarter to quarter and we check month to month or even week to week and we're less doing budgets and more doing like capital allocation plans so that we have the ability to measure against what we think will happen long term. Like annual budgets. At a high growth company, they make no sense because you're making these huge bets and you have to be able to have the optionality to switch things midway through when it's not going exactly the way you planned. In the downside and in the positive side, if it goes way better than you thought, there's no Reason to keep to the budget, you got to pour that money on the fire and, and, and grow the rocket ship. So yeah, I would say if you're deploying traditional budgeting to a high growth company. Yeah, broken. Because you shouldn't use it.

And you know, I know you're a true finance person when you use the term optionality. That's what I just, when a guest uses that I'm like, all right, they definitely are steeped in finance, they just use the optionality term. But I, I would agree with you and say in startups I like it, we'll go with that. If you had to use one for the rest of your life, one budgeting or kind of forecasting method, top down or bottom up, which one would you use?

Top down every time. Top down actually helps you think strategically about the business and so it is a more helpful tool. You're going to get bottoms up in actuals anyway. So I don't feel like there's much use in modeling using it.

All right. I like it. Alrighty. I'd never quite thought of it that way. I do a lot of bottoms up, but we'll go with that one. Sorry. And that's because I work with large companies, you work small. So it's funny how different it can be. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about FP and A, what would you change?

I think I would make it more understood as a function by more people in the world. So when I speak on kind of a daily basis with small to medium sized business owners, they don't understand the difference. When I say finance, they don't understand the difference between finance, accounting, bookkeeping, fpa, treasury, banking, none of these. All of this in their brain is just finance and monolith. And they have no knowledge of what they can get out of these different functions by help, by gig, by employing people who are masters of these different functions. And so they make mistakes. They will hire an accountant and ask the accountant to do a forecast and the accountant will do a forecast based on like, you know, the last three months benchmark or even worse like last month's benchmark including revenue. And we'll call that a forecast or we'll. Because they don't have any knowledge of how to do a driver's based forecast and it's basically useless, right? Because they don't understand. They ask the wrong people to do the wrong thing and then they get a terrible taste in their mouth for all of them. Finance. And I seen this happen again and again and again. And again, where owners and operators will just say, I hired this accountant. It was terrible. I hate working with accountants. I hate working with finance people. I ask for something, I never get the thing that I'm expecting, like it's. It's just a wash. They're all useless. And I think it's issue, this misunderstanding that causes that to happen. So if I were to change anything, it would be a better understanding for more business operators of the differences of what we all do and what they can get out of us.

Makes a lot of sense. That would be nice. There's definitely times when they have no idea and they don't know what to expect. Like why is hired a fractional CFO firm? And they really hired bookkeeping.

Yeah. Oh my gosh. That. And that's more common now. Right. I think, like the market is also getting a little more confusing because the market's getting tight. And so a lot of folks who do one thing are trying to collapse to whatever's the most powerful right to.

Say they do everything with not necessarily the skills. Sometimes.

That's right. So it's adding to that confusion, I think, which is very frustrating. So I think it's also, you know, I think a lot about this as kind of the responsibility of sharing that knowledge with more folks so that they at least know who it is that they're seeking out at any given time. I think a lot of my work as a consultant is spent assessing like what is really going on in your organization? Who do you really need to bring in here that's going to solve for the problem that you have and knowing if that's a control or if that's someone in FP and a. Or if that's just a really great bookkeeper, you know, and that's what's going to get them the most happiness and problem solved. By taking a new finance person into the org.

Yeah. Getting the right person is huge. All right, we're going to move into the get to know you section. So these are just kind of some fun questions for the audience to get know about more about you. So you ready?

I'm ready.

All right. What's your favorite hobby or passion? What do you do when you're not working?

Oh my gosh. So I actually, before I went into software, my first job, I actually had two options. As my first job being a programmer is option number one. Option number two is actually to be in a rock opera group in Boston.

Rock opera. Tell us more.

So I was a singer and a. And a guitarist together and separately and so it's kind of considering professional musicianship as my full time gig before I decided that was not a particularly efficient way to make money. So I do that a bit. I have pivoted since moving to New York. There's so many really talented musicians here that I don't always dig into music because it's a little bit tough to try to, to, to perform here. But I do a lot of other creative things. The pottery behind me I make in a studio and here in Brooklyn I do a lot of pottery. And the other thing I do for fun, you just saw walked by behind the camera, which is my dog, who. My dog Naya, who also keeps me having fun and going on hikes on the weekends.

Yeah, I see he wanted the couch there. He's like, I'm moving.

Yep, yep. Changed a spot from, from, from behind the desk to the throne on the couch.

Well, fun. All right. If you could recommend one book to our audience to read, what's your recommendation?

Oh, I'm split between two, but they both teach the same thing. So I would say, especially from an audience who wants to work in like a high growth organization or a startup, I would recommend reading the Lean Startup, which is like kind of old now, but it gives this really interesting kind of ethos around building an MVP that I think is also really translatable to the finance role within those organizations because you really have to be super pragmatic about how much work you put into any one thing when you know it's just going to change tomorrow. So I think that can be a really great way to build that ethos. The second book, I discovered it a couple of years back, it's called the Financial. I have it right here actually, because I knew I'd forget the title. It's very long. The financial controller and CFO's toolkit. It's by David Permenter. What's wonderful about it is it kind of does like Lean Finance. So it takes a lot of those same practices of being lean, using estimates, getting stuff quickly and not caring as much about rigor until year end. It kind of takes that second step from Lean Startup to do some of that translation into how you could think about this in a CFO seat or in a controller seat. And I found it really interesting. So that's a, that's my big one. But I think you need the context of Lean Startup to kind of see where it's coming from. So I would do like, I'd read Lean Startup and then I'd read that.

I haven't read Lean Startup, one I really like in the startup area that I read in school, which dating myself now because I think the book's about 30 years old, but as Crossing the Chasm by Jeffrey Mohr.

Yeah, I mean, start. If you're going to go into the store space and you don't come from that space, I would recommend reading a ton about kind of startup ethos because it is a really big switch in terms of prioritization, the kinds of models you'll be using, the kinds of conversations you'll be having. Yeah. And those books are a really great place to start.

So don't start a business like I did and just make it up as you go, is what you're saying.

I mean, you could do that too. You'll very quickly.

All right, when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Well, I always thought I was going to be a musician for a really long time.

I was wondering, since you mentioned that earlier, if that was going to be. So was guitar always your instrument as a kid or kid was a piano singing. Where'd you kind of start?

I tried. So I was a singer first. I tried piano. My parents tried to get me to do piano. They said I had to do piano before guitar, and I hated piano. And having then become a guitar player, I had. I don't think the piano helped at all. I should have just started guitar. I started guitar, I think, as a way to accompany myself when I was singing, but I ended up going in very different directions with both. I was training as a jazz guitarist and I was training as like an operatic singer. And so I ended up not doing them together quite as often often as I thought I would.

Got it. All right, well, thank you so much for joining us. We're going to go ahead and I think wrap up here, just have two questions. The first is, yeah, you can offer one piece of advice. I think I know what it is based on conversation. But for our audience to be a better business partner today for the FPA professional, what's the number one thing you tell them to start doing?

I think I'm going to steal another great tidbit from Chris Ortega, actually, who talks about the best thing you can do as a finance professional in an organization, to work better with other departments is to go to your peer at another department, whether it's sales, technology, marketing, what have you, and ask them the question, what can I do to help you in your job? What problem or what question do you have that you're trying to answer what problem do you have that you're trying to solve? And then whatever they answer, putting that through the lens of okay, well what can FP and A do? That sort of being this kind of in service to the rest of the organization by being in tune with the other department's problems is how you become this really valued partner throughout the organization. You become known as a person who can really help, can really fix, can really solve problems. You build trust that way, you build connection that way, and you have a bigger impact. So I would say that that would be the, the one thing that I would think about doing at any level within the finance organization.

Thank you. Love it. Last thing, if someone wants to learn more about you or maybe get in touch, what's the best way to do that?

Yeah, so the best way would probably be through LinkedIn. You can find me I'm Lauren Elizabeth Paul Pearl on LinkedIn. The middle name is mostly so you can distinguish me from the other Lauren Pearls who may arise. You could also catch me on my website which is laurenperrallconsulting. Com. Or you can check out the growth minded CFO on all major podcasting platforms and YouTube. If you want to follow along with my content, you can follow me on LinkedIn, but the other place would be my newsletter. I have a newsletter called the Daily CFO and you can sign up for that on my website on laurenperl.com or you can do it on LinkedIn too.

All right, great. Well, thank you for joining us Lauren. Pleasure chatting with you and look forward to sharing this with the audience.

Me too. Thank you so much for having me on. This was very, very fun.

Thanks. Glad you enjoyed it. I enjoyed it as well. Thanks for listening to FP&A tomorrow. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star rating and a review on your podcast platform of choice. This allows us to continue to bring you great content guests from around the globe. As a reminder, you can earn CPE credit by going to earmark cpe.com downloading the app, taking a short quiz and getting your CPE certificate to earn continuing education credits for the FPAC certification. Take the quiz on Earmark and contact me, the show host for further details.