How FP&A Can Use External Data to Improve Forecasting with Jeff Casale and Rich Wagner

You don't want to have FP&A with a very loud voice. Whether it's certain global markets that you want to move into. To do any of those things without really having a very strong FP and A just puts you at a huge Disadvantage.

Jeff Casal, CEO of Board, a seasoned leader with experience at Dell VMware and MarkLogic.

And Rich Wagner, Board's Field CTO and.

Founder of Prevedere, an expert in predictive.

Analytics and business forecasting.

What does great FP&A look like?

You know, great FP&A to me is really about helping FP&A a better strategic part partner of the business. It's really quantifying factors in a way you've performed in the market, what's going.

To happen next, how you bring that in, how that improves forecasting.

Our whole world's digital what we do, what we want to do, what we're searching for, what geopolitical crisis is happening. We get those signals all the time.

What advice would you give yourself?

There'd be lots of advice I would be giving myself, but a career standpoint and building the company and working with people. One thing I.

A brief message from this week's Heitle sponsor. Being an operator isn't for the faint of heart. It's like building a parachute while free falling. I found my solution in Operators Guild, home to over 1000 elite high growth leaders, the special forces of business scaling. With 150 plus events across 25 global chapters, I've found my personal board of directors and instant answers to critical challenges. Ready to join the Navy Seals of business scaling? Visit operatorsguild.com and tell them the FP&A guy sent you. Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A tomorrow where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects. I'm your host Paul Barnhurst, AKA the FP and A Guy and I'll be guiding you through the evolving landscape of fpa. 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 uncertainty. This week I'm thrilled to be joined by two guests. I have Jeff Tali and Rich Wagner with me. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Happy to be here.

Really excited to have you, Jeff. And welcome Rich. We're excited to have you.

Thank you.

All right, so let me give a little bit of background on both of these gentlemen and then we'll jump into some some questions that have a great chat Here. So Jeff serves as Board's Chief Executive Officer. Prior to that, he served as CEO of MarkLogic, where he delivered significant profitable growth and an acquisition by Progress Software. Previously, Jeff was a President at Dell Technologies, where he created and led the DTS Group into a global multimillion dollar business and held senior executive roles at VMware and EMC. Rich Wagner serves as board's field CTO. He is the former CEO and founder of Prevedere, a predictive analytics company that helps enterprises create highly accurate forecast models by incorporating the Global Economic Leading indicators. Prior to Preventary, Rich was Director of IT Innovation and Strategies for Momentum. A global leader in specialty chemicals, he brings over 20 years of technology innovation and leadership experience from Big Four Consulting and Fortune 500 companies. So again, thanks for joining me, both of you. I like to start every interview with this question and we'll go to you first. Rich, what does great FP&A look like? What is great FP&A to you?

Yeah, you know, great FP&A to me is really about helping FP&A become, you know, a better strategic partner to the business. Someone that's not just about accounting and back office numbers, but someone that actually helps kind of steer the ship and is thought of as a, you know, a real key input to all major strategic and all the way down to operational decisions. Somebody that's data driven, fact based, unbiased, and really there to support the operations of the business.

Thanks. Appreciate that, Rich. Jeff, what's your thoughts?

Yeah, I would say a lot of the same similar themes as Rich, as a CEO, I think there are very few decisions that impact the company where you don't want to have FP&A with a very loud voice at the table. The reality is to start to think about whether or not it's defensive moves based on competition, whether it's expansion, whether it's certain global markets that you want to move into. To do any of those things without really having a very strong FP and a capability and mindset at the table just puts you at a huge disadvantage. And so to me, it's really a critical element to how we do business.

Fully agree. I'm glad to hear that. I'd be a little worried if it wasn't critical given you're an FPA software.

Absolutely.

All right, so I want to start with you, Jeff. You've been CEO of board for a little over a year now. Talk to us what that experience has been like. How has it been being at board?

It's been a fantastic experience. Incredibly Fortunate to be getting involved with board. It's an incredibly exciting company. Several thousand customers, has a rich history in Europe as really sort of the preeminent FP and a platform in many of the countries in Europe. And we've seen an opportunity to expand that beyond continuing to invest in Europe. But there's clearly an enormous market opportunity obviously in places like the U.S. and so we've been taking advantage of that and just having a lot of fun, you know, sharing the story of what we've done with customers, the transformations, and really expanding that growth into other markets. So it's not just us, we're really a global company.

And I'm curious what attracted you to the FP&A software space. Most of your experience was in other industries and areas. Dell and you, I think you're at MarkLogic. So what interested you in FP&A software and board particularly?

Well, I think it goes back to my earlier comments. I mean, I really don't think that you, you can be running a company or in a leadership position without affect at least, at least do those and be successful at them without really leveraging the FP and A function. So it's something that I'm obviously very familiar with. I enjoy working with FP&A counterparts and understanding how far to take that. And this is an industry that's going through an incredible amount of transformation. I've watched the evolution of a lot of the CFOs that I've worked with become COOs. Many of them have moved on to become CEOs. And so there's not just a transformation in the technology. I think there's a transformation in terms of how much can be done by really combining the core FP and A capabilities with the strategy of your business. And so as I started looking to my next company to get involved with, I just couldn't be more excited when I saw a board and the opportunity to get engaged in a company with something as exciting as being on the forefront of the FP&A evolution.

Love that. And I know I love being on the forefront of IT and getting to talk to people in different companies. And it's an exciting time for FP&A. It's become much more strategic as you talked about. It's much more important that we serve as almost like a consultant, a business partner. We're not just running reports or back office. And so I, I really appreciate that answer. Let's ask you one more question, then we'll come back to you. Rich here. But Jeff, last November, you guys Acquired Prevedere. Can you walk me through the reasoning? Why? Why was that the right acquisition to help carry you forward in this changing times for fpa.

So Private Area was, was really a, an incredibly exciting journey and it was exciting to get involved with Private Area. And it's been even more exciting now that Rich and I have got to know each other and he's part of the team and the Private Area organization has come together. But to answer your question, a lot of what I do comes from customers. I'm a very customer facing executive. That's the way I started. That's my DNA, having worked at companies like EMC and VMware. And the more I talked to customers, it just became very apparent. I would focus on what do you need from an FPA partner? What do you need to be more capable in terms of running your business? And what I heard over and over again was, hey, there's different levels of improvement that they can do in their overall FP and a capability. But they were all running into challenges with a, what I would call a closed strategic planning process that was designed within the walls of their building. And then you get out into the realities of business and all the external things that can sort of punch you in the face and throw your plan out the window. And they were looking for ways to be more proactive, to look around the corner and to be, you know, to plan better for the unexpected. Coming out of COVID I think everybody appreciates more our need to be prepared to plan for the unexpected. And so I think it came from those conversations first of all, really frankly, from a defensive standpoint where these companies were looking, how do we not get surprised? And then I think many of them started to realize this is the competitive advantage. If we can foresee some of these things and other companies are not doing it, how do we get a better view of all of the external factors and integrate that in with our planning? And there's a lot of sort of, I would say, inefficient ways and manual ways to do that. And you can throw a lot of bodies at it and put people in the room, but I hadn't, you know, these companies, including myself, who just had not found a way to do it elegantly. That's what led us on our search. We thought about building the capability internally, which was going to be an incredible effort and a multi year effort. And then we stumbled onto Privateeri and I was really sort of shocked that the capability was available and how far Rich had gone with it. And that's probably Good segue back to you and to Rich.

Perfect.

Thanks, Jeff. And I know for me, I was really excited when I saw the acquisition. It made a lot of sense because that external data is an area that I know throughout my career I didn't utilize anywhere near the level I should have. And in general, it's an area I think we need to get a lot better at. Like you said, being able to kind of peek around corners and help bring in those external factors to better think about things. Because as you mentioned, you get punched in the mouth from the outside world. Covid wars, whatever it might be. If you've never thought about that or brought some of that in, it makes it even harder to be able to forecast accurately. For sure. All right. So, Rich, why was Bord the right company to acquire Prevedere? What kind of led you to go, hey, bored.

Is the.

The right fit for us?

Yeah. So in my career, I kind of saw an evolution of software like what Board was already doing over in Europe kind of come to fruition. You know, when I first started my IT career, I implemented SAP and ERP systems, and then we'd bring in treasury like Hyperion and financial consolidation tools in all these functional applications. So it was really more the ERP space than business intelligence and data warehousing. I really thought about what I was building in Prevenari and thought, you know, that's probably the endpoint solution is I'm going to be acquired by or we're going to be acquired by one of those solutions. And then, lo and behold, tools came around that did this consolidation and things around integrated business planning. And there I knew, hey, we even fit there better. But at that time, I didn't know a board. You know, being in the U.S. primarily, it was something that I hadn't heard of until, you know, maybe several years ago, where I started seeing some even employees and things tell me about it. And people transition their careers to IT or from it. And I started looking into it and I realized, well, board does the internal right? It consolidates all these functions and this data in a great way. We can complement that with the external and to predict it. And I started engaging with them, really became a partner first and integrated our solution to theirs in really a matter of hours, and got on the phone with their chief operating officer, who was very new as a lot of the leadership team is, and says, hey, I think there's something bigger here. I've worked with all the other tools, the competitors. I haven't found one as elegant. And it is easy to Integrate with as I had it board and as I researched they hit the same target verticals. Manufacturing, cpg, retail, primary focus, that was our primary focus and experience. They loved enterprise customers. When we had great enterprise customers in the US they served functions like finance, that was their primary use case, that was ours. But also supply chain, marketing, sales, everybody needs this across the org and we have customers that fit all those functional profiles as well. And then lastly, technology. We built our cloud computing environment on Azure and lo and behold, board is on Azure as well. So very easy for us to integrate, understand and it just became the people, right, the energy to grow in North America. The new leadership team is exciting. It almost feels like a startup here in North America, you know. So for me it was, hey, this is a great pace for our energy as a company, our innovative product and really the complete us.

No, thank you, thank you for sharing. I appreciate hearing that and starting as a partner in building and how you felt it was a natural fit. What I want to talk a little bit now is I want to switch more from the acquisition to the actual software and what you're doing, right. I know you use a lot of what we'll call external economic intelligence, you know, bringing that data in. So walk us through how you bring that in, how that improves forecasting and then if you could share a real world example from a client, would love to hear one.

So for us it starts with data certainly, right? There's data of course inside your organization, but this data outside your four walls, more of what's becoming readily available every day. Our whole world's digital. What we do, what we want to do, what we're searching for, what geopolitical crisis is happening, we get those signals all the time. And what we found is if we look at not only macro microeconomic consumer behavior, alternative data, and we marry that with your historical results, we can find things that truly are leading indicators of changes in demand or volume and quantity of your products, your financial performance that sometimes are not just weeks or days, but months and quarters in advance, we'll see these signals change. And that's really the genesis of our, our, our product is to take this global data, this five and a half million things we collect from almost every country in the world. Marry that technically with companies data to find those leading indicators or at the very least related indicators so that we can inform companies of what's coming next. And then what we've done is we found that we used to by hand try to build econometric models. We would take inflation and interest Rates and employment. And then we try to build a model to shape our demand.

Right.

And see what it's telling us. Well, AI has sped that up so much and it's so powerful that we can do that at scale for companies. So it's, it's really about identifying what you should pay attention to, quantifying it not only and how much it impacts the timing of when it impacts months, quarters in advance and then using that to inform your forecast. So what companies do, there's large CPG manufacturing companies, great case studies out there will actually take their volume and quantity. Let's say you're a chemical manufacturing business. What they've always told us is hey, 90 days, we kind of understand demand, right. That's our order cycle. We know what we're going to produce and what we can produce and what our customers wanting 90 days in advance. But lo and behold, four to six months out, something always happens that we didn't expect and it cost us millions. So what we do there is, we'll say, okay, let's take a look at that. Major product categories, major ship to in juice markets. We'll marry that with the external. Let's build an econometric model to see if we can find what's shaping demand for 6 12, 18 months in advance. And we certainly can. It's much better than just guesswork. It serves as an input into the planning process. When your business unit comes or your sales team and says, hey, we're going to grow by 10%. Well now you know, well based on market conditions, your history, that's never happened. Right. So you can kind of challenge the business and say, I know we want to grow 10% but there are some headwinds. Not only do we not see growth, but we see a decline coming. What are we going to do? What do we think our consensus forecast should be? That's what we call kind of real world planning. Right. It's not biased. It's not unbridled optimism from the sales team. It's not sandbagging. It's really quantifying factors in the way you've performed in the market and what's going to happen next.

I appreciate that and I, like you said, it's not, you know, not sandbagging but really quantifying. Right. We probably all dealt with that a little bit. Both sides, the overly optimistic and on. I know you have more than that. Where are you hiding it?

I see Jeff laugh a little bit.

You never dealt with that. Right.

It's coming, coming from a sales background, it let's just say I might be happy that there were times in my past where people, my boss did not have providers. It's, there's a little bit of crystal balling going on there.

I, I'm sure. One thing I'd love to get both of your thoughts on just you made me think of this, you know, Rich, is you talk about how AI has made sped things up a lot and made them a lot easier. So I'd love to get both of your thoughts on how, how you see AI impacting fpna, maybe what you're seeing today and how you think about it in the future because. Right. That's the topic it seems like everybody's talking about. You're probably like not AI again, but I'd love to get both of your thoughts. Maybe we'll start with you, Jeff.

Sure. Yeah, I'll take maybe a different perspective because I think I know where Rich is going to go. There's so much that we can do in leveraging the enormous complexity and just the volume of the macroeconomic data that we have in something like primary. What I think is probably the area that we could tap into the most with with AI that's going to be the fastest time to value, which is one of the things I focus on a lot whenever I look at some of these investments, is that there's still a movement in FP and a where the executive leadership team is relying on a level down or two levels down and there's a delay. So you've got people that are comfortable with these systems, they're comfortable in accessing it. But maybe when you get into the leadership, they're more accustomed to going and having those second level conversations and there's so much power and information that is available today, whether or not it's what we're talking about with things like Primitaria or just the overall real time information that is available when you pull together instead of all of these disparate Excel spreadsheets, you have everything in one real time system. It gives you the ability to do some what if planning that gives you a real competitive advantage. But it can be overwhelming and I think it can be intimidating. And if we can start to leverage AI to simplify that to allow interfaces where executive teams can do some very easy modeling, just asking questions around, hey, what if we went ahead and we decided to go move, you know, 10% of our excess utilization of resources into some of these high growth markets? What would be the flow through implications in terms of, you know, margin and expansion and, and you know, what do we see as some of the markets that are really trending more higher growth on, on some of the verticals that we're very strong in. And what would it look like if we sort of did some reutilization of excess capacity into those areas? In some cases it'll work, in some cases it won't. But I think leveraging AI, you can run these models at such a speed and get such quick feedback and the accuracy is increasing so significantly, partially because you can now take in all these external factors and all this other data. So I think one of the areas that is not talked about enough is, is how AI is going to improve the level of adoption and interaction of executive teams with their FPA team and with that data and the power of the data. And I think it's a very natural flow towards the role of the office of the CFO becoming far more strategic because it's going to get to a point where I don't think you're going to have many CEOs that are going to want to do very much without having that group at the table.

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Yeah. No, your example hit home. You know, we used to in my company come back from a board meeting and it'd be a fire. We'd have to go figure out, well, what happened over here. You know, maybe it was in Europe. We had a miss. By the time we could get answers back, it was a new fire.

Right?

That wasn't even the question anymore. We just couldn't get it back to them soon enough. So I also see AI is the time to value as much, you know, know, much faster. The time to insight is much faster. It really reduces the routine and mundane. You don't have to do that as a human. Right. We don't have to do 24 statistical tests by hand.

Right.

Or select 50 different variables and try and plot them out. Let's let AI do that so we can be more strategic. So I think that's a huge part of it. Time to value, time to insights, amount of data we can process. Certainly Jeff is exactly right. The thing that I think makes what we build at private area now, Borg, what we call signals and foresight so valuable with AI is it now also brings the context, doesn't just do the math. For us. Gen AI actually explains models like a team of our internal data scientists and economists could do. And it does it in seconds. So this is getting an answer of, okay, you're down 10%. Not only that, the why. And it sounds very educated. It understands what drivers it makes sense. Business leaders need that to adopt technology, to adopt things like AI, they need the context. This makes a naive person in FP and a sound like an economist, sound like a data scientist.

Right?

Sound like an industry expert admittance. And I think that's where this is now becoming mainstream.

Right?

We actually bring the context, not just the numbers.

I would have loved to have that.

So I could have sounded good when.

I was working with rpa.

You know.

Kind of speaking to That I, I'd love to get both your thoughts, you know, bringing in external data just in general. So not talking private area or board, but just, you know, FP and A departments. It's an area we've struggled with. I'd say very few have brought it into forecasting. So someone's listening to the show and they're like, well, where do I start? How do I think about this? Because sometimes you think data science, econometric, you know, statistics, and the head just goes, yeah, I'm out. No thanks, I got my spreadsheet and I'm good. So where should people start? And people start with you on this, Rich. I'd love to get your thoughts of what advice you could give to the average kind of FBA team out there that's trying to do a better job of bringing this type of data in.

Yeah, there are two really good examples of what I learned. You know, certainly as a technologist, you start getting really into the weeds quickly when you start talking about data and modeling and statistics. But what I've learned is listening to CEOs. One of them came to us and actually we were in a meeting with him and his executive team and he said, CPG company said, hey, you know guys, I know that you guys know, in this case demand 30 days out wasn't. It wasn't the three months like the chemical company. He, he said also, you know, there's always something around the corner that we didn't see coming. Cost us a fortune. And that's really what previder is about. So what he was trying to do is just really get ahead of, of some big disruptions, right? Some events that would happen that they didn't see that maybe they could have. And it's not every single indicator, every factor they should look at. It's these big things. Hey, egg prices are going up. When's that going to affect us?

Right?

It's a main ingredient, one of our products. How long is that going to take so we don't just ignore it. Another CEO, large logistics company, one of the largest in the world, came to us after in Covid. We were getting Christmas presents in January, not December, because they didn't anticipate demand correctly. He said, we need an early warning dashboard. And to me, that's it. That's what these guys were looking for, right? Those early warning signals. They would tell them that there's some event that's going to impact them that otherwise they would ignore. And it may be a big indicator like industrial production or raw material prices for Key ingredients for them that they just were ignoring because they didn't have an automated, systematic, or repeatable way to watch those signals. So I would start with that. I would get myself an early warning dashboard. Things that keep the CEO and CFO up at night, make sure you're not missing them. Then we can always get more granular. We can always get more statistical, add more horsepower, more data to it, and then start really getting granular models out there to the rest of the organization.

So if I'm hearing you right, kind of that early warning dashboard, you know, example, what's happening with the egg industry, if that's one of your key products, maybe you're tracking what's happening to the supply. Right. Right now it's gone way up with all the issues they had with chickens and the ones they had to put down because the disease and stuff. And so if you were tracking that, you would see that at least a little bit before it flowed all the way through the market and you could start preparing yourself. Is that the way to think about this?

Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, very rarely do things happen all at once, like maybe Covid. Only in my history of my, you know, it career or my. My leadership career, career Covid is the only time I saw immediately everything shut down and stopped consumer spending. Then you would see reciprocal effects on pricing and supply chain disruption. Things happen over time. And those things like starting to see cases of bird flu rise, people searching for it online, good indicators that there'll be something happening or something coming maybe months in advance. So that's what I would do. I'd look for those key things that impact your business. Do some discovery in a system to see what's impacted the last time you had a big miss, and then make sure you're paying attention to that.

I love that. And I think it speaks a lot to scenario planning, which we haven't necessarily talked about, but I think so often people just do scenarios is worst case, base case, best case, instead of what happens if there's regulation that impacts my key ingredient and how do I track that? So I know what changes I should make based on. I think that kind of feeds that. So I really appreciate that answer there. Thank you. Jeff, anything you'd like to add to that? Any thoughts on your end on what FP and a department should be doing?

Maybe the one thing I would add to that is just the level of simplicity at which that can be done. I think oftentimes organizations sometimes don't appreciate the number of sort of factors that could externally impact the, their, their organization or their business. And when they realized how easy it can be to literally go pick off a menu and, and go choose and then, you know, after 30 or 60 or 90 days, if you feel like, hey, some of these are not really materially affecting it, but maybe there's another set of factors that would. I think just again, applying the same what if methodology that you do to any great FP and a business, do the same thing. When you think about external forecasting, what's going to work for you? And I think what Rich has probably seen a lot of times in his career is oftentimes it's not what you would expect. People are surprised. Sometimes it's a secondary or tertiary effects where there's leading indicators that maybe are very far off. And you just hadn't thought that those could potentially be impacting your business. I do think, as Rich explained, there's very little that happens all at once. Most of these things are a series of factors that are put in play, in motion and it really becomes a bit of a map. And some people have that map. I think of it a little bit of night vision goggles. Some organizations have those and some don't. And wouldn't you rather be the organization that is able to sort of see through the dark a little bit, look around the corner? And so I would say don't be afraid to go in and just start by pulling in some of the ones that seem like maybe they're obvious and then adding other ones in as you go and do some modeling.

I love that. It doesn't have to be difficult. Start simple with a couple things out there. Ask your leadership. They're probably gonna have a good idea of what some of those things may be. You know, you could also look at external, you know, what other companies are doing, what they list as their risks and things that they're concerned about in their annual statements or whatever and get an idea of a couple things. I really, I really like that. It's a great point of, you know, start small and build. But one thing I think both of you have mentioned throughout and I think is really interesting, I'd love to get your thoughts. As you've mentioned, kind of, you know, being able to look out ahead or kind of look around the corner. So there's a CEO of a large company who started his career in FP and a worked up cfo. And he always says, I want FPA to be able to peek around corners. And that's kind of what I hear in a little different words. And the other one is somebody once said, the top skill I want an FPA person to have in the team is the ability to anticipate. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that idea and maybe, Jeff, we'll start with you just because I see it seems like it's been a little bit of a theme here and would love to get your take.

Yeah, I think it absolutely is a theme. And you know, I just think of the way I leverage our FPA group and the way we think about it and you know, when it comes to what we talked about with that forward sort of 90 day view, you get that through just interactions with your team. If you're talking to your croft, how's the visibility? Oh, I just went out, I was on the road, I talked to my team, we're talking to these customers. Everybody has a generally good idea, right? You go and you figure out, you know, how's it looking in inventory. We have an idea, I go to the developers, right? Where are we at in terms of software releases? I mean, everyone is ultra confident on this 90 day window. So what I would say is the 90 day window is table stakes. Nobody is going to beat anybody based on what, you know, over the next 90 days. So the true competitive advantage is beyond the 90 day window. And I would say some companies are pretty good at 90 to, you know, 120 and you start to. But the further you push that out, I think what starts to happen is all of the major competitive differentiation or advantages that companies have, they all start to dissipate rapidly the further out you go. Because just so few companies really make that a core competency and a core skill. And so I think that just becomes a huge differentiator. The other thing I would add, which we're seeing, you know, on our leading customers, I would say on a regular basis is we talked about it, Paul, a little bit at the beginning. It's this, you know, hey, do I have to wait and go get an answer and come back? Well, the opposite. That is, yes, you are trying to really be very forward thinking, but there's a time to value. We'll combine the two of those. Combine that desire to have an instant answer with looking around the corner. That's this whole idea of total agility in planning, right? Complete continuous planning. And I think for most organizations, whether it's just become the history where we came from, these batch based systems and we're used to waiting for the new cycle to run and get the updates and for whatever the reason, most organizations don't actually run with true continuous 7 by 24 planning. That is, I'd say, where the puck has been going. And now we have a lot of companies that we work with that are already there. And that to me is nirvana. You want to be at a point where there is no daylight between the planning, between the questions. You're running real time continuous planning all the time. And if you're doing that, it allows you, when you leverage AI or some of these other capabilities. Now, as soon as an idea pops into someone's head, you're modeling out what that looks like. There's no delay. And that's where it gets super exciting. That's why I think you've mentioned on some of your podcasts and I hear more and more we really are getting to sort of the next evolution of the strategic value of FP&A. And I think people have seen only small glimpses of it. But when this, you get more organizations moving to continuous planning with a level of agility that I think is sort of game over. Right? It's going to be the differences between companies doing that and not doing it is literally going to be winners and losers. And you're going to hear it on the earnings call. When you get on an earnings call and a CEO is like, whoops, right? You know, I have to, I'm going to have to surprise you. Even though I told you three months ago that the future was looking good, now I got to tell you that it's not looking good. And the stock plummets on almost every one of those cases. You can go and look at the earnings call and I can tell you which company does continuous planning and which one doesn't. You do continuous planning. That just doesn't happen. Right. Unlike what Rich said, can a Covid happen? Okay, but there are signals and they're out there all the time. And I think that really is the exciting part of what's happening at FPA is this continuous planning.

FP and a guy here. And I want to tell you about the Planning and BI Showcase. Gone are the days of juggling multiple platforms. Now, with business intelligence tools, you can integrate planning directly into your BI system, the same system your entire company already uses. Join me on March 20th for the Planning and BI showcase, where industry leaders will demonstrate how top BI tools are reshaping strategic planning. See firsthand how modern FP&A solutions can drive real value across your enterprise. The event features live demos from leading BI solutions. Whether you're a CFO or an FPA professional, you'll discover the tools that can help you deliver more value across your enterprise. Don't miss out. Register today at www.excelevents.come planning.in.bi showcase and take the first step towards smarter data driven decision making. I really like that term continuous planning. I've seen some use connected, you know, all different things but I, I love that idea. Hey, it should be connected and continuous. We need to move to a much more agile process. Six months for budget repo casting every quarter for the average company is just outdated. It's not sufficient nowadays. So I, I'm with you on that. I really, I, I, I like that. So thank you for you know, kind of sharing, sharing your thoughts there. I want to go to a next question here and we'll start with you on this one. Rich, both of you have served in leader leadership positions. You both been CEOs. Rich, maybe talk a little bit about what do you look for from FP and A like maybe early in your career and as time went on did it change much? But how do you, how did you think about fpa?

Yeah, you know, I've not only you know, been part of it in a smaller organization but and software company I started but also in a large, you know, enterprise company that was a conglomerate, privately held, lots of companies, lots of M and A activity. What I saw through my career and then as I scaled my company was first it's accounting and numbers. I've got to do this, you know, I've got to close my books, got to pay taxes, etc. So I need someone to help me with that. They're really just an Excel jockey right when you're small. And then what I saw is actually the enterprise company we worked with, our CEO started really relying on our CFO as his right hand person. I mean they essentially started even moving functions like it underneath of them because they became more of a strategic partner because it's so important. There's so many other things to do around finance, financial planning, working, capital decisions. All those things take someone that really, that's their day job. They've got teams of people, that's their day job. They're looking at financial data, they're doing analysis, they have access to actual numbers within the business across functions. That's when I think they became a partner. I saw it quite a bit. You know, even as I grew my company from, from two people to maybe 50 people, it became more and more important that I had somebody kind of a right hand person looking out for me because there's lots of things you have to do to operate a business, to manage people, to manage your board of directors, there's lots of risk out there and you've gotta have somebody with a finance background, you know, a good planning analysis team that can actually identify those and kind of help protect you. So I see em as really a partner to the CEO more so than ever. Love it.

And I'd love to. I'll ask both of you this and see could either maybe share an example.

Where FP&A gotta make sure that people are even asking the right questions. Because you can spend a lot of energy, not just me, but a leadership team can spend a lot of energy going down a path and it's probably not the best use of their time. And how many times in organizations have people been at whatever level and a request comes down from the board or the executive team and they're like, here we go, we did this before. This is basically going to be a big errand. We're going to gather all this data and we're never going to hear anything again. And so I think oftentimes the FPA team becomes the voice of reason. It's where the rubber meets the road. And, and I really think that critical thinking skill is, is, is fantastic.

Again, I love getting a perspective for someone who didn't come up from FP and A because it's, it's good to see what they think versus what finance people think. So thank you. Appreciate that Rich.

He yeah, I think for me in the FP and A, it's the analytics. So there's lots of tools and technology that are available, new ones every day. There's AI agents now. There's all kinds of things that you can just ask simple questions. It'll run a Python script for you. So I don't know if that really is the key thing, the knowing that one technology, because it's going to change. It's just the analytical mindset and being able to actually translate that into something that others that aren't as technical can understand. You know, maybe it's somebody that's got a day job that's not analytics, that's not in math, that doesn't understand modeling or what you mean by modeling versus an econometric model versus statistics and Python. How can I translate that, you know, to my business leaders? So I think that's, it's not so much a technical skill, just analytical mindset that's got good communication skills. Because technology is going to change. You may have been graded Hyperion Essbase 20 years ago, but it's not quite as relevant. Maybe today in your career, maybe there's another application, another technology, or maybe technology's becoming less of a barrier with AI if it's a natural language. So I think it's being able to translate all that analytical thinking into something that others can understand.

Yeah, I, I appreciate that. And you made me think when you mentioned tools. I've seen some job descriptions, sometimes that will list 15 different tools you need to know. And I'm like, shouldn't it be about critical thinking, analytics, understanding, modeling? Like, yes, I can get listing a couple tools, but in general, it's not that hard to learn one tool over another if you have the right mindset and you're curious and you're the type of person that would be a good FP and a professional. So I'm like, are you focusing on the right area? But I probably digress a little bit.

But, you know, sometimes they, I'm just.

Like 15 different tools, really? Good luck.

Yeah, I, I think you're absolutely right. Especially when you see, you know, these LLM models are going to start to do a lot of this stuff. And so what's the stuff that's not in the model? It's, are we asking the right question? And have we framed the question in a way where we're going to get a useful response before we go spend a fortune to go fire up those GPUs to get us that answer? Because you know, how you go about thinking about these questions and the skills that you have, the analytical skills, the critical thinking skills. There's plenty of horsepower now to go do the crunching. Right. We're going to have, that's going to get commoditized. But where the value chain is going to be flipped is who are the people that actually understand the, have enough technical depth to understand these models, to figure out the intersection point between what the business is trying to achieve and what the models can do, the good and bad of the models. Right. Because the models are, you know, they're going to drift and they're going to come back with answers that don't always make sense. And that's going to come back to the framing of the questions. And I think that creates a huge opportunity for people and at fpa.

Agree.

Thank you for both those answers. I really enjoyed that. The next one is what's the soft skill or human skill that they should master? Rich, we'll start with you.

Yeah, you know, I, I think that collaboration is, is really key to success in my career, even I worked a lot with CEOs and CFOs, business units and finance teams, supply chain teams. It was really the ability to kind of collaborate, put all the pieces together. So I think the personality, you can't be just behind a desk, maybe at home in a dark room. It's really going to be about collaboration and being able to understand the business end to end. And just think of it, hey, we're a chemical manufacturing business, right? We're not an FPA business. I want to understand that business and I want to be able to see how I can support all these different functions with the role that I have in an organization. So I think it's collaboration, Jeff.

I think the FPA talent that's going to really come to the surface are the ones that are moving more on the emotional intelligence curve, where that's not what you typically thought of with FP and A. Right. You thought of who really has these skills to be able to go through and has the accounting and has the analytics. And as you mentioned, Paul, you've got these 15 things you can list. And again, as more and more of this is able to be done by AI and other capabilities and as you're going to see more and more companies on comprehensive systems where executives are collaborating all the time and talking and it's continuous planning, I think you're going to need people that can sort of manage all that disparate activity. Like, you know, personalities matter. Who are these people? Do they tend to be overly pessimistic? Do they tend to be overly aggressive or optimistic? Or, you know, what are the other dynamics that are going into this? Because now it's not just going to be a spreadsheet. And what's the answer on the spreadsheet? Everybody can look at that now. It's going to be, we have all the information in one place with all the econometrics in there and all these factors. Now it's going to come back to the humans again, right? How are people interpreting this data and what decisions do they make? Because just because you have great insight around the corner that other people don't have, it doesn't mean that you then make great decisions with that data. And so I think the more that the folks in FP and A can really get to the other side of this and get some empathy and understanding who they're dealing with, I think that's where you're going to start to see many of these folks on the track of CFO running companies. Because then I think you really have the full skill set. Right. You understand the full life cycle, you understand the strategy. And I would really implore folks that you're. I think you're in probably one of the ideal positions that you can be in based on where technology is going. I don't think there's been another time where you're going to be more strategically relevant than over the next decade. Question now is just how do you differentiate? Right. In that during that time.

I love that, Nadia.

How do you differentiate? Great advice for people. I know we're pretty much near the end of our time, so we're going to ask each of you one question to kind of get to know you a little bit personally, have a little bit of fun here. So we'll start with you, Jeff. If you could swap jobs with anyone in the world for one week, who are you going to swap jobs with and why?

Yeah, so that is actually really easy because I just finished a book on Elon Musk and then I watched his press conference and I'm trying to figure out if he's a real person or a cyborg because apparently he has, I don't know, like a dozen children and he's now up to what, seven companies and he's also uncovering billions of. So I would just like to be him for a week to figure out first of all if he's real, if it's the first sign of alien life on the planet, but just to sort of understand how he is able to do what he does. I think it's humbling for any CEO when you're struggling to run one company and you've got a guy out there who seems to have nine personalities all operating at the same time at a high level. All, you know, most of these Fortune 500 companies, right?

@ this point, yeah, it is pretty crazy to see how much he runs. You have to wonder. So would love to bring you back on after you've had that week. Yes, it's really an alien or not. So if that happens, I don't think.

I'll be able to come back. I think I would. I think I would pro would probably my last role. I think I would self combust within the week, but it would be fun while it lasted.

Well, then I guess this will be the only time. Rich, one quick question for you. If you could go back and give yourself your younger self one piece of advice, what advice would you give yourself?

Lots. Lots of lessons learned, I tell you. So there'd be lots of advice I would be giving myself but from a career standpoint and Building a company and working with people. One thing I learned, that culture wins out over talent. And what I mean by talent is maybe technical talent. And I had to learn that lesson because I think there's. When you're starting a company, when you're in technology, when you use technology tools a lot, you usually go for that person that you think or people you think have the highest degree of talent and you think, oh, that's what really matters. The entire company is being the most technically talented or the best at my trade. But boy, you build a company, if that person can't fit into the culture of the company, it really is a big issue.

Right?

You're not going to be successful. So you may be guarded, thinking, I've got to protect this talent that I've got. No one's going to replace it. But you can't let the culture of the company really deteriorate because of that. It mattered so much more. You can replace talent. You know, I think we all think we're pretty special and gifted, but honestly, there's a lot of people like us, maybe even more talented than us out there and available. So don't be afraid of that. Culture matters. People matter. You'll find technical talent and you'll find people that are really gifted in marketing, but boy, if they can't get along with the rest of the team. And I think you'll, you'll. You'll really suffer from it. So that was something in my professional career I learned.

Thank you. I really appreciate that. That was a great one. And thank you both for joining me. I mean, I've really enjoyed this hour getting your perspectives, you know, learning more about board, talking about external data and a number of different things. You know, we'll put a link to board if people want to learn more about the software in the show notes as well as both of your LinkedIn profiles. But to give you kind of one last thing, if there's anything you want to add before we go. Jeff, any last words you want to say before we close?

Yeah. First of all, I just want to thank you, Paul. I mean, this has been a great session, I think, to be able to have a forum like this where anything that's long form I think is so much more powerful. And you see a lot of snippets out there about FP&A and sound bites and I think they have people on TikTok and everything else. But to be able to have a place where it's very clear content, you actually get into the issues. You have these discussions I've listened to a number of yours and I think it's great to have this forum because it creates a community and that is where people want to go to learn, they want to find like communities and they want us just to get into real dialogues with real people. So I think this is a great forum to do it. And then I would just say again, I think this is, you know, for all your listeners out there. It really is even more exciting and interesting and dynamic than I thought when I joined board. The amount of change that has taken place, I know is pretty significant. And as I try to peek around the corner and I try to do the best I can to see where things are going from an industry perspective, you know, hold on. Because it really is an exciting place to be and it really is moving the needle for companies.

Thank you. Appreciate that. Rich, any last words from you?

No, I think I echo, you know, the sentiment here is it's awesome to see people that are really interested in their professional career and share information and act as change agents, you know. So I think it's a great forum and, you know, it's something that's interesting to me. I love the thought leadership. Appreciate that. On the selfie side, you know, for me, the future is already here, right? There's, there's so much information about what's going to happen. It's now technically possible. So I just think that every company is going to plan with both internal and external data. It'll be unheard of in just a few years. So my whole goal and vision is to help as many companies as we possibly can. You know, no matter if we're bored or if we're previtary for any other of our competitors. I just think there's a better way to, to plan for your business and it's technically possible and that's what I get excited about.

I love that. Rich, I think you cringed a little when you said other competitors. You paused for a minute like, no, come to board, please. No, I'm just easy a little bit. But thank you so much, both of you. It's been a real pleasure. I'm, I'm so excited for the future of fpa. Love what, you know, you guys are doing and bringing that external data. So thanks again for joining me.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, Paul.

Appreciate it.

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