How Generative AI is Revolutionizing FP&A Processes for Financial Leaders with Bryan Lapidus

FPA is the part of the CFO organization that provides actionable intelligence for where you're going to put your next dollar of capital.

How would you define great FP and a what does that look like?

It's creating value through decision support, capital allocation and performance management.

What are you hearing from finance leaders around generative AI?

Everybody is still wondering what it looks like. When the CEOs looked around and boards looked inside the company and they said, who inside the company is focused on value? It was the cfo. Imagine if you're the CFO and you said, I'm not going to use these great tools at my disposal. I'm not going to focus on value. I'm going to focus on the historical part. Well, what you're doing is you're limiting how much the company can grow.

One piece of advice to our audience to be a better business partner.

I had a boss who said this to me. He said, don't be a point, be a.

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Paul, great to talk to you as always.

Yeah, really excited to have you. I know you just finished an overseas trip and excited to chat with you. Maybe we'll get to hear a little bit about that as we go through things.

Sure.

All right, so just to give a little background on Brian, Brian is the director for afp. He is the crazy guy who helps with the conference every year and if you see him on the by Wednesday of the conference, he looks like he needs a week of ignition. He spent his career in FP and a did a an MBA from nyu, did an undergrad history degree, which we might ask him about and Worked for a number of different companies in senior roles in FP&A. So let's start with this question. If you had to define FP and A and you only had one sentence to do it, how would you define it?

Well, you know, I have a lot of words, so you're. I feel like you're really handicapping me by saying I got one sentence.

That's the goal.

That's the goal.

All right.

FP&A is the part of the CFO organization that provides actionable intelligence for where you're going to put your next dollar of capital.

I like it. Actionable intelligence of where you're going to put your next dollar of capital. So I had someone who defined finance. I don't know if you know who. Stu west. He's the CFO of Grammarly or former cfo. He just stepped down like a month or two ago, and he's advising them. And he summed up the finance function in three words, and it was one of my favorite definitions. He's all bet we. He's all, better, faster decisions that can help the business make better, faster decisions.

I would probably. So I see where he gets at. And obviously Stu is an expert in his area. I would take a bit of a broader view. I think of the CFO as the steward of enterprise capital. And that means managing its sources and uses from where it was, where it is, and where it's going. Where it was. Right. We call that accounting, we call that controllership, we call that audit to make sure you've got all your controls in place, where it is in that circulation. I think of that as Treasury. And then the FPA part is where it's going, the next step. Where do you put that next dollar?

Yeah. And I agree. For all three functions. Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense. So speaking of FP and A, how would you define great FP and A? What does that look like? I'll give you more than a sentence here.

Well, here, this is where I would go with Stu's definition. Right. Better decisions, faster. It's creating value through decision support, capital allocation and performance management. And I think that the way that FP&A does that, it's the why, the what and the how. Right. So that's the why. The why is put the next dollar of capital to its best use. The what is, what do we deliver? We deliver it through our financial processes of planning and budgeting, through management reporting and metrics, and decision support, financial analysis. Right. So that's the. That's the what we do. And then the how we do that through having good technology on the back end, right? You have to be able to be good backstage in order to be good on stage. And then the other how is our people, right? You have to have people who are, who have the psychological safety to question, to search and to seek out, who have the growth mindset to experiment and try different things, who have the truth training to be good at their job. And yeah, I think that's it. That's the, the why, the what and the how of. Of fpa.

And I think I just won bingo. We had capital allocation, psychological safety, growth mindset. I think there's a couple others. I agree with all of them. But you know, I just was joking that I won my bingo card.

But that's, but that's why it's so hard to find a great FP and a person, right? It's a little bit of you got to know a little accounting and you got to know finance and you got to know economics and you got to know how to communicate and business partner, you've got to have the right. It's hard to find all of that. I've had members of my advisory council tell me that it's a little bit like an apprenticeship in order to get good at the different areas or you build a team and the team has that expertise and you can pull the team together to tap into that.

I agree. I mean it's hard enough to be really good technically and soft. And what we're seeing is we're seeing FP and A being asked more and more, right? More strategic be you're seeing more kind of data science stuff being asked sometimes be more commercial and you know, it's tough. How do you find one person that does all that? And if they do all that and they're really good, what's the odds that they're not going to move up really quickly and be in some other type of role? And so it becomes tough. So there's the trying to find the right team with the skills and also trying to find those individuals that are really good in certain areas or holistic enough to really move the business forward.

I think you put your finger on the change certainly in my career, right. So I was 20 years in the office of the CFO and now at AFP I've had this time to really study FP and A as it's changed over, over time. And it used to be that you would look for all of that in one person, right before the job was really well defined you had to have that all in one person and kind of the Swiss army knife. Right. Everyone's got a tool for everything. What I really see over the last decade is that maturation has led to specialization and that especially. And you see it really in the larger companies where they'll have a reporting team and they'll have an analytics team. And so as the field has become more defined through conferences and certifications and classes and training and people like you being a great voice to talk about what we do, as the field develops its own identity, it is gaining specialization in those areas and really just getting better and better at it.

Yeah, I mean, you're definitely seeing more and more of the specialization. You know, you have the corporate reporting side. You have those people that are more business partnering in the sense that they sit in the business, support the general manager. Sometimes you have the data science person. You're starting to see FP and A sometimes have the. Strictly that finance transformation or. I mean, I had a role and the title of it. I kind of have to laugh because I had nobody report to me, but, boy, was it a title. I was the director of fpa Sales, Operations and Analytics.

All of that.

All of that. And what it was is it was a coordination role because the business was trying to switch to be SaaS. It was trying to coordinate with sales and analytics and FP&A to get the data and the reporting right. It's really just the coordination. It was very special. I didn't do a single budget in that year. I had the role. I mean, I helped the business with it, but I wasn't doing budgeting. And I reported to the VP of FP and A. And so it just kind of shows how specialized sometimes you can be. Even though I was in the FP and A department, it was an FP and A role. It wasn't traditional at all. It was specialized.

I had one CFO explain. He said, I know what FP and A is. It's everyone who reports to me who's not in treasury, tax or account. Right? But that's because, you know, at that time, FP&A wasn't defined. Right. It was all. It was the business analysts, the expense analysts, the financial analysts, the partner.

Right?

All these other things that are concerned with making helping the business do better decisions faster, allocate their next dollar, whatever you want to call it, Right? It's everybody else. And when you think about that, right? Then you can actually say, all right, this is what FP&A is. Here is the skill set that you need. Here's the network of people you want to meet in order to grow your skills. Right now we can really define how to help you be great at your job.

Yeah. And. And I think for many years is really difficult to define what is FP and A. I think we've done a good job now defining the core. But there still go company to company. Does rev ops it in fpna? Well many smaller companies often it does sales commissions are they calculated so many little edge cases. But I think we've at least got the core well defined at this point. Your thoughts? You would you agree with that?

Spot on, spot on. Couldn't have said it better.

All right, so now I'm going to kind of step back a little bit and ask a fun question that takes you back a few years. You did a history degree. How did you make that transition into finance? I know you ended up doing an mba, but if I remember right, you're doing some finance before you went back and did your mba. So how did that kind of come about?

Yeah, so I was an undergraduate history major and Spanish language minor too, just to go even further into liberal arts. And I started taking graduate history classes. I then actually my first job was at the Smithsonian. And I guess maybe the first ROI I did was trying to figure out the return on a PhD and a career in history. And I just decided that it just the business prospects, the future prospects, it just wasn't. It wasn't what I wanted. It wasn't going to take me to how I wanted to live. And I wasn't going to be able to do the kinds of things that I had wanted to do and explore. So I still listen to history podcasts, I still read history, I watch crash course history, all four different channels of it on YouTube. But career wise, I took a couple different steps. I traveled abroad, I lived abroad. And then I came back and wanted to keep that international experience and exposure. And the only job I could get was in the office of the cfo. So I moved from there. I was writing about tracking and rating mutual funds, which exposed me to the market. I was in consulting. And that was really. It was in consulting. It was being forced by my, by my partners, by my bosses to say, well, what's the economic rationale behind your recommendation? And they just kept drilling that in. Right. Strategy by itself is not enough. How does it make economic sense? And I realized I had a deficiency. I couldn't figure that out. I couldn't answer that as well as I wanted to, which ultimately led me to Go to, go back to my, my school. I got my MBA in finance and management and I've been in finance ever since.

Well, there you go. So basically you did an early on ROI and realized that lifestyle goals and history degree probably didn't align as well as you'd like.

Exactly.

So it's your favorite history podcast. You mentioned the four YouTube channels. You have a favorite or favorite history book.

My favorite podcast is the Rest is History, which are two gentlemen out of the UK and they kind of take a topic, they go pretty deep into it. So they just did seven hours on the French Revolution. They pick something and they really go in depth, book wise. Anything by Erik Larson. His books read like movie screenshots. It's amazing.

You say Ark Larson.

Eric. Eric Larson.

Eric Larson. I'll have to check him out. I haven't read him. Todd McColla has always been one of my favorite on the history side. I like his stuff.

Classic.

All right, well, now we'll get to afp. You've been at afp, is it six years now?

Six years. It's true. And before that I was a member. You know, I, I liked it so much I joined the company and there.

You go, you get your membership and then you decided you didn't want to leave, so you figured you just joined the team.

It started when, actually it started when I was in treasury and I was looking just to keep my knowledge going. And at that time AFP was just treasury only. And I was excited to find when I moved into FP and a a couple years later that they had opened up the FP and a ARM with the certification and the ADMIT conference tracks. That was about 2010 through 2014. They did that. But I was in a position and I knew that I was going to be changing jobs and I wanted to say, well, you know, how do I demonstrate when I go for an interview that I'm more than just someone who can handle the numbers? How do I demonstrate that I think about things differently? So I got involved just by writing some articles, reflecting on what I'd done. I went to conference. I ended up teaching, speaking at conference and then teaching a class at conference. And so as a member, it helped me to raise my knowledge, my profile and to network. And then I gotta tell you, I went to conference and I just loved it. I was blown away by what they could do, what not we can do. Putting people out there and just the feel of people sitting around being really excited and geeking out about finance topics.

Nice. So tell our audience for those who aren't familiar with it, what AFP stands for and kind of just a little bit of what it is.

Sure, sure. So we are a not for profit and, and we do, I would say four things. One is we do conferences, we do so events in general. We just had our largest conference and I believe it's the world's largest in the corporate finance space. We had almost 7,000 people, 130 educational sessions. We had Malcolm Gladwell as a keynote. We had six different keynotes. We were in Nashville and it was amazing. The second conference that we have is one that is just for FP and A and that's coming up in March.

So.

So that'll be, it'll be a little bit smaller, probably 25 different sessions, all FP and A focused. Usually when people talk about this event they say, I found my tribe, right? Everybody there is FP and A. They understand what it is and we'll have the breadth and like everything else we do, it is education focused. People, you know, vendors can't buy their way into sessions. It is a competitive review to get a speaking slot. So those are the, that's kind of the event side. The second thing that we do is certification. We have two certifications, the CTP, which is the certified treasury professional, and the FP FPAC which is FP and a professional. The two certs. Over the 40 years that we've been in business, more than 40,000 people in 70 countries have earned them. So really well established in the marketplace. Third is training. We have a corporate training business and we will make, we have either generalized off the shelf sessions or we will make bespoke sessions for businesses. We have a panel, a stable of professors, of practitioners, consultants who are really experts in their area. And then the fourth is membership, which is some things are behind a membership paywall. A little bit more on the community focus as well as discounts on all the other events. Those are the four things that AFP.

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So you can take part in all of AFP activities either as a member or as a non member. Right. So we have the member and we have call it the broader community by paying the membership fee all of 495 then you get discounts and it really pays for itself in terms of discounts on conference, on certification on some of the webinars. Some webinars actually do have a payment component but also some of our research which is proprietary and deeply well executed. Some of that is behind the paywall. Other bits are available to everybody for the community.

Great. Yeah. And you know, full transparency. I've been a member now for two, three years I believe. I think I'm coming up at the end of my second year of membership and so I know what you're talking about. The, you know and I've done the certification now. I did the FPAC last oh year before. It's been almost a year and a half now. I think time's little over a year ago when I got it, I think it was about this time last year. So excited there and a big, big fan of what you guys do. I appreciate the work you do to help the FPNA community. And speaking of the P and A community, we talked about some of the challenges of hiring the role. I'm curious, what are you hearing from finance leaders around Generative AI? What's kind of the buzz there? Because that obviously seems like that's been for the last 24 months. All anyone's talked about at times is AI and how it's going to impact our work. So what are you seeing and hearing from the, from the leaders out there?

You know the phrase when all is said and done, a lot more is said than is done. Yes, that's where we are at the moment. Everybody is still wondering what it looks like and there are lots. So first of all we're going to split out Gen AI versus Machine learning AI.

Thank you. I totally agree.

The split them right, because especially the ML version is a lot more data sciencey, different kind of tools and it's a different process in a different step. Gen AI people are trying to figure it out. They're trying There is genuine concern about data security and privacy. We've seen lots of people are seeming to be figuring that out with small language models instead of large language models and really concentrating on your own data instead of broad bringing that in house is helping to resolve that. I see a lot of text based use cases. So in the healthcare sector I know one company is reviewing all of the state level laws and bylaws of what they can do to make sure that they're in compliance. Other companies are looking at contracts to test service level agreements. I really see Gen AI being integrated into the tool suite that we have already. That it'll be a front end like Copilot. You can talk to it and it will go and do things on the back end. It will help write your SQL query, it'll help you to create your DAX code on the back end and help you in that way. Roughly speaking, I would say a quarter of people are using Genai on an industrial scale. Right. Daily, weekly, quarterly, they're doing real finance with it the next tranche. Maybe 40 to 50% they are. They have plans to either implement or put a formal pilot in place in the next 12 months and then the balance are either trying to figure out how to start or honestly their companies won't let them start. Their companies have policies or restrictions in place that will prevent them.

Got it. So you're saying about 25% are using it regularly now? It's kind of part of that process. Another we'll just call it 50% for simple math. Like you said, 40 or 50 is hey, we're planning on implementing it in the 12 months we're working on getting there. We might be able to use it a little bit. And then there's some percentage, I think you said about 10% or so where the company's just like, nope, there's just not a path to that right now.

Yeah. So on the bell curve, right? So a quarter are your Advanced users, about 50% are in the middle. Light users are planning for the next 12 months and then another quarter are on the back end and they are somewhere in between. I don't know how to start and my company won't allow me to use it at all.

Sure. Early adopters, late adopters for whatever reason in the typical bell curve in the middle. Amazing how that works, how often that is the truth. So any advice you'd offer to people listening and they haven't really got started where. How should they think about getting started with AI?

So the short answer is any way that you can any way that you can get on it, use it, experiment with it, break it, don't break it. Right. Obviously you want to stay within your compliance rules, but the first answer is to just get on board. Second is there's a little bit of a buy, build, rent. If you're not ready to buy it yet, you're not ready to create your own or I guess, I guess if you're not ready to build your own, there are ways to buy it. And I think that it's going to, we're going to see it becoming more resonant inside software. Right. So the software you already use is just going to have that as a layer. And I see this through all the EPM tools. All of them are saying they have gen AI. Some are maybe fudging the definition a little bit and saying, well, we're calling it AI, but it's really automation, it doesn't matter that way. It is going to be built in to all the software that you have or that you will buy. So it's coming and that's the easiest way for it to get there. And then the rent part is partnerships working with vendors, bringing people on contractors, support staff that can help you in the short term to bridge that. And that's how people are getting that familiarity until they can bring that resident skill set in house.

Yeah. And you know, it's definitely a developing skill set. What does it mean to be an expert in gen AI? Right. Everybody's going to have a different opinion and different ways of using it. A couple of things I think. I like that you said there's one, the software is integrating it, it's coming. Definitely some are fudging. You know, when AI first came out they had their 10 year old algorithms and all of a sudden they were now marking it all as AI. Right. Because everybody had to market that they were an AI tool whether it was gen AI or not. Now you're starting to see them build it in and I heard someone say where we want to go is you want it to be proactive and not notice it's there in a lot of cases. Okay, so I'm doing commentary. I saw a tool the other day, you could have it automatically tell you the what, like bring it up and then you start adding your details. Just like, hey, write in the comment line. Not often some chat bot, but you can just have, hey, tell me what happened here and it brings it up. I've seen the other ones with early warning signals and different things to be more proactive and that's what has me excited when does it get to that point where it's kind of naturally built into the processes and it helps us be better throughout the day.

Exception reporting is a great use case. What number looks, looks odd signal these aberrations to me, being able to build baseline forecasts and then you can layer on your expertise and things that you know that the machine doesn't know. But really to be able to do, to do the ugly part of FP&A, you know, that used to have armies of people whose job it was to aggregate data and roll it up so that other people could make that decision. Right. What if we had more people on the insight level and less on the aggregation level? I think that's where we all want to go.

Yeah. And you know, I'll get your thoughts on this. I've heard several people say this and right now I agree we'll see long term, but I'd love your thoughts. We're seeing with AI, kind of two things happen. People as gen AI, little bit more need as AI comes to be strategic, that thought leadership, that curiosity. But there's also going to be almost a little bit more of that citizen data scientist and you'll be much more efficient and effective with a little bit of coding like the fact that you write Python code and you can do machine learning and so many other things. I start to wonder if we're going to see a divergence where there's almost a little bit more of technical skills needed and soft skills, but not the traditional technical. And some of it, like a lot of the Excel formulas will just be able to use Copilot to write them and a lot of things that we used to think of technical, almost more hard technical in some ways to extend what we're able to do. Thoughts on that? I've heard that from a number of people and I think it makes sense in a lot of ways.

I think we're saying the same thing. Right. So you have your data scientists and I think we'll still need the data scientist because there's certain things that are just so advanced and require their expertise. But at the citizen data scientist level or the data engineering level, the ability to collect data from different areas to find and dig and data mine for you that you can ask the computer to go and do that and it will come back and you won't ever have to write the SQL code. It'll simply execute the SQL code based on what you have said. I think that's where we're going.

Yeah, yeah, that's partly What I'm getting, where I'm getting at to. I agree there will always be a level of complexity. You'll need that, right? Data scientist and the really senior person. But I also think FP&A people that learn some basic coding like Python to be able to run some basic machine learning or SQL to be able to. Because anyone who understands the basics, I've found is much more effective with Gen AI. Like if I know Excel well, I can get a lot more out of Gen AI than somebody that knows nothing about Excel and just hopes the formula is right. So I almost feel like there'll be a need to be a little more technical than what we see today with Gen AI. And I'm curious your thoughts on that for the average FP and a person.

So there is a lot of hand wringing ringing in the community about this question and it's.

I know, that's why I'm asking it, right?

It's you and everybody else, right? If the Gen AI will help you to do those simple things, then how do you learn the complex things if you've never learned the simple things? I don't have a good answer to that other than we will adapt because we always have. Right? Nobody's using the loom now to, you know, to weave their own fabric somehow. We're all still getting clothed. You know, I've, I've heard this question over the years. If certain jobs get outsourced, then how do we build our finance staff to be able to do those basics right? You know, if, if nobody's doing the, the asset, you know, the credits and debits, then how can you possibly get to the next level of account accruals? Well, somehow we all keep getting there. So I don't, I can't say how we're going to get there, but I do believe that we will, we will learn to let go of the, of the basic building blocks in order to be able to do more that middle level. And maybe, you know, I, I understand your point. Knowing Excel helps you to, to ask the question to, of what to build. I don't know, maybe it's too much faith, but I think we're going to get there.

I believe we'll get there. It'll be, it'll be fascinating to watch and I think everybody's trying to figure out what it all means. And if I had a crystal ball and could forecast it accurately, as I always like to say, I'd be sitting on a beach somewhere because I would have made a fortune at the stock market If I could forecast that accurate.

Yeah, you would own the beach, I'd own the mountain.

I'm a mountain person. Instead of the no beaches here in Utah. All right, so we covered the geni. I want to go in a little bit of, in a different direction for a few minutes. I get asked regularly about the FP and a certification along with other certifications. You know, what people should do for their career. So talk a little bit about who is the FPA certification for. Who's kind of the target student for that.

The FPAC works on both sides of the desk. If you're the applicant, right. If you're the person who's earning the cert, it does two things. It signals your interest in this area. I want to do this, I want to build my career here. Just like anything else is know like a degree. I want to be here. I want to be great at what I do. And then it also signals a certain level of rigor and preparation. Right. The certification is two exams. It is rigorous. I mean, you know this, the, the, you know, the past fail rate is, is on par with the CPA and the CFA from the other side of the desk. If you're an employer, when you're evaluating candidates, you're looking at people and you're trying to distinguish. The FPAC tells the employer, the hiring manager that this person has done the work and they know this much, right? It's a guarantee, a security blanket that they know this much. I should add one other thing, which is our survey research shows that the other advantage of earning the FPAC is you get paid more. Anywhere from 6 to 14% depending on which level in the organization you are. But there is a distinct salary increase for people who have the certification over those who don't.

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Absolutely.

All right, we'll put that to the test. I'll let you know when I decide to do that.

I think you're having too. You're having too much fun doing this. I can't see you going back.

You're actually right, I am. I don't see myself going back. You never know.

Never.

At the moment I don't see it. All right, so that covers kind of FP&A. This is a fun. When I was going through LinkedIn just looking at some of your posts, kind of think of some questions to ask and one of them I liked and I want to talk a little bit about not so much fpa, but you did a post on the difference between what you called a control focused CFO and value creating CFOs and you had some research that you pointed to in the article. Can maybe talk a little bit about that, the difference between them and why those two. Why did you kind of focus on that comparison?

Paul, do you know when the term CFO came into prominent use?

I'm guessing early 1900s.

I don't know, not even close. But it's. But you would think so, right? Because of so much of the management science that came out in the 1920s and then, you know, the Frederick Taylor and time and motion studies. Right. And the professionalization. So I looked at some research from the University of Chicago and they charted 400 plus large companies and when they actually started using the term CFO. And you can see the graph that before 1970 it was right around 1. By the time you get to the 1980s, the number had jumped and continued to climb until by the time you got to about 2,000, almost everybody had used it. So from somewhere between 1970 and 2000, suddenly everybody had a CFO. So the question is, what changed? And I think there's really three things that changed. One is we got more tools. We had the capability to do things we couldn't do before the data revolution. Right, all of that. Which clearly we're still living in.

Yes, without a doubt.

Number two, complexity and sophistication. The world became a lot more Complex, whether it was FX rates or the international trade, really the globalization really ramped up. And somebody, there's a great quote from the Disney CEO. He said, somebody has to be able to explain to the business what all these impacts in the world mean financially. How do we make a decision if we don't know what exchange rates are or the change in tax policy that was happening in the late 70s. And he goes through a whole list. Somebody had to do that. That somebody was finance. And the third was the focus on value. The focus that a company is creating value. That what do you think about it today is the future benefits, the cash streams, its ability to deliver on its mission. And when the CEOs looked around and boards looked inside the company and they said, who inside the company is focused on value? It was the cfo. And so a lot of that Wall street financial acumen, you know, the barbarians at the gates, right, all of that was brought inside. So, and we see that today where heads of other departments are coming to the CFO saying, be my partner. How do I add value on this decision? Help me make my next decision. Right? All those things we talked, talked about at the top of the pod. Well, imagine if you're the CFO and you said, I'm not going to use the, these great tools at my disposal, I'm not going to interpret and what everything in the world means. And I'm not going to focus on value, I'm going to focus on the historical part, the control part. Well, what you're doing is you're limiting what services you can bring to the company. If you say my job is financial control, you are limiting what the CFO can do, you're limiting how much the company can grow. And honestly, you're limiting what everybody in the finance organization can do. Right? Because at that point you are honestly a tax that is being administered to the P and L of every other business. It's incredibly important. I'm not denying that at all. But the rest of the business sees you as a small player in what they're trying to do. By contrast, if you're a value focused cfo, you're thinking that you're bringing financial and quantitative models and rationale to the rest of the company. You're aiding in their growth, you're helping make their decisions. Your success is their success. That means that you can create value for them. You now have a different and a larger role. You're using those three forces to make the company better and creating a more exciting career path for you and everybody else. In the finance organization.

Fascinating. I had no idea that it was the 70s that you really started hearing the CFO term. I would have never guessed. I've never researched that. That is fascinating.

It also gives you a sense of how fast the job is changing. Right? I mean, this is, this is for some of us who are on this pod, right? This is within our lifetimes, right, that this role came and it's still evolving and it's still changing. Which is also important to think. We're not done changing and we don't know where the, where the CFO is going, but we have a role to play in helping to shape that.

Yeah, no, and I've heard people, you know, I had someone on a podcast that says, you know, CFO in many ways is almost becoming the business intelligence officer in the sense of data. Or you hear chief value. You know, these different terms and different ideas. Hear some people say, hey, FPA is eventually really going to be under the office of the CEO. I know a guy that, that's where they put it. They have their planning and analytics directly under the CEO instead of the cfo. So it'll be interesting to see how it develops. But one thing I love is the term value creation. Because you see from time to time this argument on LinkedIn, hey, we should be viewed as a revenue generating cost center. No, no, we don't generate revenue. We are, we can be a value creation cost center. And I usually like to distinguish those two. So I really like to use that term. That's a big one I use a lot is. No, we're value creation and we can help the business create more value. That may be revenue, that may be expenses, that may be better. Capital allocation can be, that can mean lots of different things, but it's all helping the, the business be healthier financially.

Define what the value is and help the business meet that. You know, we talked earlier about the, the CFOs focus on capital. And so when you talked about should FP and A be the business analytics hub that reports directly to the CEO, I think that focus on capital is how, you know, you work for finance, right? If you report to the CFO and you're making decisions, that's great. You're a data analytics, you're a decision shop. The key element is if you report up to the cfo, you are concerned with company capital. There's data analytics everywhere. And you know what? Everybody does planning, right? Planning happens in supply chain. Planning happens in marketing. If you work for the cfo, you also do planning, but it's on the, with that basics of sources and uses of capital and that's how, that's how you know you're in the role.

Yeah, well said. And I agree. So now I'm going to move into kind of this FP and a section where we ask some standard questions of our guests about FP&A. So everybody gets the opportunity to answer these. So first one is what is the number one technical skill that FP and a professional should master?

Number one, technical skill. There's so many potential technical skills. Right. And you talked about R and Python and machine learning and Gen AI. But I'm going to go old school and I'm going to say that it's Excel and I'm going to say it. And I know, I feel like it's a little, a little countercultural to say that now, but I think there's really two reasons. Number one, it is still the dominant tool that everybody uses and in every job and everywhere in finance, you still need to know Excel. And number two, Excel thinking is the basis for all the other thinking. The ability to build a model in Excel and you can see it, it's very transparent, will help you to build a model in your EPM and the understanding of data and the ETL will help you with. You understand how to use a business intelligence tool. Right. And that idea of managing data, it is a great way, an essential first step to learn all of those higher level skills.

I'm with you on. It's still critically important. It's one of the two most mentioned. The most often we get is spreadsheets. Sometimes people will say Excel, sometimes they'll say spreadsheet preferred verbally, Excel and financial modeling. Those are the two most common answers we get. And you know, I've often said Excel in many ways is a gateway to data analytics, particularly modern Excel. What I mean by that is tables, power, query, power, pivot, dynamic arrays, now it's Python. The stuff you can do in Excel. If you drop somebody that used Excel 15 years ago into today, they wouldn't hardly recognize the tool other than it's still rows and columns and it's green. Or they just start to use all the formulas they knew before, not realize it's a completely different tool.

One of the 200, 100% agree with you. It is, it is the gateway to everything else that we do in finance.

Yeah, it's amazing. I mean it's really amazing what they've done. All right, number one, soft skill.

Number one, soft skill. I mean all the soft skills are Becoming more important. I feel like it's cheating if I say business partnership, because that includes the relationships. It includes the communication and storytelling as a subset of communication. I would say it this way in terms of hard skills and soft skills. I'm going to steal a line from one of our event speakers. He said that we're in a world where compute power is becoming cheaper and it's hard to compete with that. And he gave an analogy. He said, imagine there's a world where there's only two beverages, and those are coffee and tea. All right? You could tell he's an economist. Imagine a world. So suddenly, imagine that coffee becomes free. We use coffee to drink. We use coffee to water our plants. My dog sitting over here on the floor is drinking coffee. Right, Everybody. Coffee is used everywhere. What happens to the price of tea in this scenario?

Becomes virtually free.

Right? It craters, right? So his point was compute power, now called AI, Whether either flavor of AI compute power is something that we can't really compete against. So he said his name was Avi Goldfart from the University of Toronto. And he said, don't be a bad computer, be a good human. Don't try to compete. And be the tea when coffee is free, be the cream and sugar, the thing that makes it work better, Right? So it's that sense of learn how to use the tool, learn how to communicate the outputs, learn how to see what it can't see, Right? So things that aren't in its data, those human skills combined with a compute power at our disposal is what makes for great FPA going forward.

So I'm going to put you down for Be the coffee.

No, not the coffee. Be the cream and sugar. Oh, that makes the coffee better.

Got it. So I'm going to put cream and sugar. And speaking of coffee, if you get the chance, you know, Damon west, is the coffee being parable. I won't go into it. We don't have time to run through it, but I'll tell the audience to get a chance to read about that. And his story, absolutely fascinating, went from being a drug dealer to basically a life sentence to prison to being one of the most inspirational keynote speakers in the world.

Got it. The Coffee Bean story.

Coffee Bean and Damien West. You made me think of that when you gave the coffee example. All right, all right. Third one. This is kind of a fun one because I never know where people are going to go. If you could wave your little magic wand and change one thing about fpa, what are you going to change?

Budgets, man, budgets.

Just a look on your face as you said that.

So I sit on the advisory board for, for the CFO alliance and CFOs getting together, talking about it. And the last meeting, this one guy is just sitting there and he says, if my kids, he's got a kid in college and she's going to finance. He says, if my kid is still doing budgets the same way I'm doing budgets, I feel like I will have failed as a professional. Right. It's still painful and it's critically important. And I've, I've been in this role long enough that I remember when it was, everything is going to be beyond budgets, and we're not going to do budgets anymore. And here we are still doing budgets. There are ways to do it better, there are ways to do it faster. The technology can help. But if I can make a magic wand, man, people are still suffering with us.

I agree. When I asked on LinkedIn one time, Is the budget process broken? 70% of people said yes.

Everybody knows it, right? Yeah, we all know it. We all hate it. You know, there's a high percentage of us who, you know, who are listening to this podcast who are going to spend six months doing the budget right there. There are better ways.

There's a lot of things I loved about FP&A, the eternal budget process was not one of them.

And then you got to love when you do the eternal budget process from the bottoms up, and then it goes to the board, and the board comes down and said, we had a number in mind. We didn't tell you, but your bottoms up process doesn't get there. So go start over.

Yeah, I hear you. I had one year where it took us till I think six months into the year or four or five months to, you know, finalize the number. We finalized it, and we were so far ahead of budget at this point that two months later, corporate decided to redo everybody's budget and they did it on their own and didn't consult us. So I got all these new numbers and I finally, multiple times my variance commentary said, I have no idea what's driving the variance because I didn't even put the other. I, I just couldn't make, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. And, you know, I consider myself a pretty good FP and a person pretty diligent, but I literally put that on a couple comments. I have no idea.

I, I, I don't know where this number came from, so I can't comment on how we're missing it.

Basically, it was so frustrating. But I finally just hit the point where I'm like, I'm done trying to make this up. Here's the answer.

Nice. That's phenomenal.

So, all right, we're going to move into the get to know you section. Favorite hobby or passion?

Favorite hobby. Well, judging by this past weekend, you would say raking leaves.

Well, if you love it so much, you can come out here and do it for me.

I'll take a week out in Utah.

All right.

That's probably what it would take, right? I'm actually searching for hobbies. There's lots of little things that I enjoy. My wife and I both like to cook. She's a little bit better at it. So I guess that means I, I have a hobby of doing a lot of dishes. You know, I do a lot of biking. And right now in, in fall, it's a great time to be out, but I'll be an empty nester starting next year, so I'll have time for. To explore more hobbies. So ask me a year from now and I'll have a better answer.

All right, we'll check that out. One book you'd recommend to our audience.

I mean, I'm going to stick with. With anything by Erik Larson. Devil in the White city about the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago is unbelievable and like, sweating edge on your seat. Historical truth. Dead Draft is also great about World War I. So anything from Erik Larson?

Got it. I like it. All right. When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

Clearly an FP and a professional.

You know what this means? That's sign language. So those who are listening on audio will go have to see the video to understand that one. And it's not American Sign Language, it's Paul's sign language.

I didn't have, like, a true calling, which is really, which is really interesting because as I go through, as my younger daughter is applying for schools, I'm looking at all the essays, and so many of the essays are when you come here, what do you want to study? What. What clubs do you want to join? What do you want to do afterwards? I was never that kid. What I wanted to do changed on a yearly basis. I didn't want to be a history teacher for, for, for a long time. I wanted to be a travel writer. You know, back when the let's Go books were. Were popular, I wanted to be the let's Go travel writer, you know, checking out hostels all, all around the world. But I think I was Just always open to curiosity and trying things, which is sometimes made for a trying and challenging career path. And I think it's definitely that. Curiosity has made for an interesting career path.

See, I figured you always wanted to be like Mark Ripken or something, you know, quarterback for the Washington Commanders, now Redskins, whatever they're called these days.

Jaden Daniels is, is an impressive dude, man. We're excited in dc, I bet.

All right, so last one. If you could have an alter ego, what would it be?

I'm gonna let you down. I, I, I don't, I don't have a good answer for this one.

Oh, man.

What if other people said, you know what?

This is a new quiet first time I've asked it. I mixed it up last week. So you're the first one to get this one.

I'm the first one to get it, yeah. I'm sorry I don't have a good answer for you.

That's all right.

All right.

If you could be a superhero, who are you going to be? I'll switch it up.

So in this house, we're huge fans of the whole Marvel Cinematic Universe. Wisecracking Robert Downey Jr. In Iron man and just his whole story arc of how he changed, but it's the fact that he kind of built it on his own. He did. He wasn't imbued with superpowers. He just kind of used his mind, his creativity, and saw things that weren't there. So, yeah. So the rdj, early Iron man movies, I love those.

All right, so we got you down for Iron Man. All right, we're going to move into our kind of wrap up here and just have another question for you. If you could offer one piece of advice to our audience to be a better business partner starting today, what would that advice be?

Don't be a point, be a line. I had a boss who said this to me. He said, the point is somebody who shows up every once in a while. Hi, I'm here. Give me your budget. You put a couple points together. Hi, let's talk about this. Help me understand this. You come by and you speak to that person more often. You put enough points together and you become a line. That's how you become a business partner. You're there. You're there consistently. You're not always asking, you're giving. Don't be a point. Be the line.

I like it. I think I could see that making a LinkedIn post one day. I might even credit you for it. All right. If someone wants to learn more about you or get in touch. What's the best way for them to do that?

Honestly, I'm on LinkedIn all the time reading what other people say, listening to you and others posting occasionally. I will say that there are at least three other Brian Lapidus out there. I've met two of them and they're great guys. I'm the one who works for AFP though.

There you go. So if you need to find the right Brian, look for afp.

Exactly.

And Brian with a why.

One of the other ones has a why as well. Like I said, he's a good dude.

You can narrow it down a little bit with the Y, just not all the way. All right, well thank you so much for joining me. I appreciate you carving out some time to chat with us today and thanks for all the work you do for the FP and a community Paul.

It was a ton of fun and look forward to when we get to hang out again.

Same here. Looking forward to it. Thanks.

Cheers.

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SA.