How SaaS CFOs Can Fix FP&A Gaps to Scale Performance and Boost Profitability with Paul Lynch

A proper FPA tool with a proper integration stack will be absolutely essential. You can automate all this.

Tools that start small almost never get up to the enterprise space. You almost have to start mid market. It's really hard. What does great FP and A look like to you?

For me, it's all about Paul lynch.

Is the CEO of Centage and B2B SaaS leader with a strong track record in scaling and exiting tech companies.

He's led multiple successful exits including Assembla and Importio, and helped bring Chargify and SaaSOptics together. Today, Paul's focused on helping companies take control of their finances without relying on spreadsheets. The customer isn't always right, but if you listen to them, they'll always guide you in the right direction. If your job is not in sales, your job is to support somebody that is in sales.

What role does FP and A play in there?

Basic financial performance analytics. They must be accurate, they must be timely, and your business must be driven by them.

FP and a Software There's a couple challenges. One Is there a top two or three metrics that you really like to look at?

The first thing I would say, and I always say, is foreign.

This week's episode is brought to you by Corporate Finance Institute, cfi, the global leader in online corporate finance training and certifications. With CFI's FMVA program, you'll learn how to build three statement models, perform DCF and comparable valuation forecasting, and presenting insights with clarity the exact skills you need to move your career forward. And right now you can get 30% off when you sign up. Visit corporate financeinstitute.com and thanks to CFI for sponsoring this episode. 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. Paul, 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 uncertainties. This week, I'm thrilled to be joined on the show by Paul Lynch. Paul, welcome to the show.

Thanks Paul. Thanks for having me on. Welcome.

It'll be easier to remember the name. I just got to think of myself. Got two Pauls. All righty, so a little bit about Paul's background. Paul lynch is the CEO of Sentage and has a wealth of experience as a B2B SaaS leader, innovator and disruptor. Paul has a proven track record of driving growth in fintech, developer tools and messaging businesses. Paul previously served as CEO of Assembla, leading it to its exit in 2018, and later oversaw the merger of Chargify and SaaS Optics under Battery Ventures. That's Maxio now.

That's right, yeah.

Most recently he was the CEO of Import IO, an enterprise leader in the web data extraction and E commerce analytics space. He's now at Sentage. Paul is passionate about transforming financial planning and analysis, helping businesses move beyond spreadsheets with modern FP and A solutions. He's originally from Dublin, Ireland, but he now lives in San Antonio with his wife and three young children. All right, so first question we like to ask every guest, what does great FP and A look like to you? If you were to describe great FP and A, what would that be?

Great question, great one to start with. For me it's all about reporting. You know, the best FP&A tools that are out there are the ones with the best reporting, the ones that allow you to gain insight, to move beyond purely manipulating spreadsheets or anything else and get real time insight that you can use for whatever data driven decision making policies you have in your business. So it's all about the outputs. It's all about making the inputs easy and the outputs clear.

Can you share an example where you've seen that? Where you've seen great FP and A in your career and maybe where it's.

Helped you, I mean aside from centage, obviously.

Well, of course that's a given.

It's funny and I'm not dodging the question, Paul. I mean I think the FPA space has seen an enormous lack of innovation over the last couple of years. I think it's an area that's ripe for disruption. So yeah, you know, where is it helping? It's helping you around performance management. When you move into that sphere, you can't manage what you can't measure. I think there's a, like there's a huge white space in this market below your high end providers, you know, your oracles of this world for a real effective performance management tool in the FPA space. And you know, I'm a big believer in analytics and my children not tell me they're hungry. I say prove it with data. You know, there's a lack here, there's a white space here and there's an opportunity to be grasped. So where has it helped me? It's helped me in performance management it's helped me in planning, it's helped me in scenario insights. But where further could it help me? It could help me by getting a strong tool into this space that's not, you know, so like persevere of high end enterprise customers, high value contracts, long term contracts, affordability, real insight and fast.

So the real question is how often do your kids go hungry?

Never. Because they're used to proving stuff with data.

This I want to see. Let me know when I can come over and watch.

I always, I said in my SA, in my FinTech days, in my SaaS days, you know what I mean? What's the first hire you should make as a startup? Somebody that's able to look at your unit economics is able to look at your cac, your ltv, someone that's able to take data and help you use this to drive your business. You know Vanioff always said his first hires in Salesforce were recruiters. I think the world has changed. Your first hire should be data analysts. People that are able to take data and help you make data driven decisions. Otherwise you know, you're in Vegas playing craps, you know, playing roulette. Use the data, get it, use the data. That's it.

You know funny you say that because my first hire when I became a director in an FP and a role was a data person. They didn't have finance experience, they had data experience because that's what I needed.

Yes, and you're forward looking with so many startups and so many early stage businesses in this space they don't have that viewpoint. They go out and they, they hire a lot of recruiters, they're backed by vc, they hire a bunch of salespeople with no leads. They don't track their unit economics, they don't track their cac, they don't measure performance and then they fail. I wonder why.

So you're basically saying what gets measured is what gets the attention. If we measure something and pay attention to it, we start to actually make a difference there versus just running around and trusting your gut.

Yeah, there'll always be a component of gut feeling business. I think I call it experience. But you know, you marry that experience to a proper, you know, performance and management tool to proper data, to proper data insights and analysis and reporting. You're onto a winning scenario.

I like that. So I want to step back a little bit and I know you started your career in sales. What was that like starting in sales? How did that kind of come about and maybe talk a little bit about start your Career.

It's an interesting story and one you're not going to be expecting. I left university, I moved to South Africa. I went to Cape Town on an Irish government plus industry sponsor program to sell whiskey. I got to Cape Town, met. I worked for two weeks in the office in Cape Town in a marketing capacity. My primary qualification is marketing in Spanish. And my CEO, David DeMart said to me, dude, you're a sales guy. They took me out of the office, they gave me an Opel Corsa car and a cell phone, sent me to Durban in the Natal region and said, when you drive north, when you hit Mozambique, that's the end of your territory. Drive south, when you hit the Transkei, that's the end of your territory. Go inland, when you hit Peter Maritzburg, that's the end of your territory. That's how I got into sales. And for the next two years as a 23 year old, I drove around South Africa selling Jameson. I don't know how much I sold, but I certainly consumed a lot and it was a lot of fun.

So you're still not sure if you consume more or sold more?

I think it's probably 50, 50 at that point in time. In 98, coming up to the second free elections there, I think a bottle of Jemison was about a month's salary for your standard South African. So it was a very high end premium product given the economic situation in the country. So, yeah, we certainly consumed a lot of it vis a vis selling it.

Yeah. And so what did you learn from that? What was your takeaway from that sales experience? Sounds like you're kind of thrown into it in another country, difficult product to sell. What was the takeaway? How has that helped you in your career?

So again, a great question. I mean, my whole career has been framed by that experience, you know, like one, you know, you got to, you can never speak to enough customers. Never, always, always be seeking feedback. Yeah. To the customer isn't always right. But if you let them, if you listen to them, yeah, they'll always guide you in the right direction. You know, I always say within every company, the first day I came into Sentage and I spoke to the company here, I said, look, if your job is not in sales, your job is to support somebody that is in sales. You know, we're here to like. Our customers will tell us if our product is good. Our customers will tell us what we can improve about our product. Our customers will give us that insight. Having a customer led product roadmap is exactly where you should be As A software FinTech FP&A. The developer tool allowing the customer to dictate it. That's different. You know, if you allow the customer to dictate your product roadmap, you'll be pulling in every different direction. But we want, we seek input, and that comes from coming from a sales background. You know, I. People misquote, you know, Steve Jobs and they misquote Henry Ford around. You know, it's available in every color as long as it's black. You know, if I asked the customer what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. All of these things lead back into a very strong product that was defined from the customer's perspective. The Model T, the iPhone, and everything else. So, yeah, that customer first mentality that comes with a sales background is super important to everything we do. And the moment you start thinking that you know more than your customer knows in terms of what they want, that's the moment your business starts selling.

So how do you balance? You mentioned you want a customer led, you know, product roadmap, but not customer dictated. So any advice around how you manage those things or how do you know when you're starting to become more customer dictated versus led Love just your thoughts on that.

In general, customer led is you're not innovating your product in a vacuum. You're not sitting there in a room full of your employees and dictating what your customers need and not talking to them. So setting up customer advisory boards, setting up steering committees involving customers is always super important. The difference between dictated and led dictated. You know, a customer comes to you and says, I want an integration to an IMO system, an emergency medical record system in Barbados. And you're like, okay, I can win $50,000 deal if I do this, like, quickly run over there. That's a dictator and that's not scalable. And lots of early businesses fall foul to this where they have that great political expression in the US the tail wagging the dog. Your sales department or even your leading salesperson starts to dictate your product roadmap. Because they come and say, I can do a million dollars next month if you give me an integration into, you know, netsuite. I'm not picking on netsuite. They're great tool, right? So you rush off and you, you build that. But, you know, more into the process of planning it where the next, you know what? Forget netsuite. I can win a million dollars if we integrate this into Paylocity. So, like, that's each customer coming back in with a Loud voice, talking to a champion inside of your business and suddenly your customers start dictating the direction your business needs to go where the reality is. Like would they be valuable integrations? Potentially. Should however your product team be focus lousy UI and UX of your product?

Definitely, you know, yeah, no good advice and I like that of making sure you understand the pulse and the needs of your customer. But you're not driven by everything a customer says and letting it have an overdue influence when it doesn't make sense or may not be the right decision. Makes a lot of sense there. So, you know, going back to sales, I know you're a big believer in a, you know, proper sales process having come from sales, you know, making sure everybody has their Jameson. No, I mean, you know, but how do you see FP and A particularly, you know, more of the professional kind of helping the go to market sales function. What role does FP and A, you know, play in there and just kind of helping make sure things are working well.

I mean performance management, I mean that's sort of like if you're looking at your go to market, what is your ltv, what is your lifetime value, what is your cost to acquire each customer? All of these different, like basic financial performance analytics. They must be accurate, they must be timely and your business must be driven by them. So, you know, you look at a BPM solution that's in the FP and a space, okay, where are we drawing data from? How are we automating it? You know, what does it mean for our security, what does it mean for our compliance? All of these things are absolutely essential. You know, how does it help your go to market function? Like let's say you want to sell into SaaS scenario is sweet to me, you know, I mean right now Centridge sells, you know, we sell into SaaS, but we also into healthcare. We sell into a bunch of other different verticals. Right? Look at SaaS. SaaS lives in Salesforce. You want to be credible in the SaaS space around selling FP&A tools and you need a salesforce integration. You know, once you get a salesforce integration that's being pulled in, you start looking at budgeting and forecasting, start to automate these things and make them smooth. You close two large opportunities in Salesforce as lost. What, what's the revenue impact of that? Like if you close them in Q2, in Q3, do you have sufficient pipeline in there now to make your financial goals? It's core, it's key, it's crucial, you know, so people look at FBA tools. Yes, fair enough. You're selling into the office of the CFO in many cases. But you know, when I was selling Chargify, which was a billing and contract management tool, this was at the center of your fintech stack. So we were often selling this to developers and we laughed and said, you know, Chargify was a tool that was bought by developers but used by accountants. You know, you sell an FP and a tool into the office of the CFO that's got an integration into your CRM and is pulling down and giving you insight in terms of what pipeline value with a defined close rate that's, that's historically pullable, what that pipeline decrease or increase means for your potential to hit those goals on a performance basis at a future forecasted point. That's how you make data driven decisions. There's.

Yeah, no, I appreciate that. I'm curious, I know you spend a lot of time in SaaS businesses. Is there a top two or three metrics that you are kind of your North Star that you really like to look at? Like is there one in go to market and maybe other areas that you're like, I'm looking at that regularly, you know, every day, every week, whatever it might be.

So I will answer the question around SaaS metrics, but the first thing I would say, and I always say is look at actual financial metrics. The amount of businesses that we see in the smaller kind of space that don't care about gross margin, that don't care about ebitda, that don't care about it would make your hair stand on end. So first things last. You know, my old mentor Leslie Buckley used to say to me, Paul, revenue is aspirational. OPEX is real. Understand the costs in your business, understand your gross margins. You know, first thing. Now getting into particular SaaS metrics, if you're going to spend money on demand, gen marketing have proper attribution, understand where that money is being spent and where it's yielding. This the free money era that we call it like going back to you know, co in around the COVID area and after fire hose money at sales and marketing, get the leads, get the interest, drive organic, you know, drive page impressions crazy. So like what is my cost to acquire customers in real terms? What is my LTV in terms of what's my lifetime value of those customers once onboarded? What's my gross margin? Am I wanting to grow this business so much that my actual cost to acquire customers is above like the time frame to which My customers will churn out is my customer's lifetime value 12,000 is my cost to acquire customer 16,000. If that's the case, then your business is worthless. It doesn't matter how fast you're growing, you're going to get seen through the first time you look to raise or exit this business. So like there's lots of others. But for me on a go to market basis, understand your LTV to your CAC ratios essential and goodness like look at the basic fundamentals of business and financial management. What is my gross margin? What is my OPEX to revenue ratio? What is my ebitda? Again, I sound like I'm overstressing this. The reason I stress it so hard is because there's so many businesses that I've seen over the last 10 years that I paid no attention to these things.

Why do you think that is? Why do you think businesses get caught up in paying no attention to those key metrics of understanding their margins and their opex?

I wrote a, a couple of years ago about, you know, the collapse in 2008 when the financial collapse happened and basically you couldn't get. The banks were either bankrupt or they were so tied up in terms of government legislation around their, their ability to loan that there was this huge cavernous space appeared in the market where people really, where were they to go to get capital to grow? Where were they to go to get capital to create companies? And VC really emerged at that point. The early VCs were great. They guided young entrepreneurs through. But soon, as is always the case in free market economics, you had a cohort come in that weren't really interested in returning any kind of investor value. They just wanted to raise, deploy and they wanted to raise their next fund so they could get their 2 and 20 there. So these guys then came in and said, grow, grow, grow. Don't worry about everything, don't worry about your costs. We figure out that growth cures everything. And they destroyed so many good potential business. They destroyed so many good. That's where this kind of growth at all costs, growth in all areas. And what happened? This is what happened. The tide went out. Those businesses that have been trying to grow like crazy and have been giving no thought to the unit economics, to their financial structures went back to that VC and said, hey, we blasted through the 50 million you put in as our series A, let's get our series B going. And they were like, well, we can't follow our money. We've not returned any value to our investors and our investors have bailed on us. And those businesses failed and they're failing. I mean, it's not a. I talk about this in some way for some reason about being in the past. This is the present. This is where we live right now. Lots of VC firms that were irresponsible with the capital from the LP capital raised and deployed poorly have been unable to raise again. And lots of businesses who were steered in the wrong direction to grow, grow, grow, are going back looking for an additional series to continue to drive this insane kind of economic policy and are unable and they're, they're failing.

And I'm curious as did you ever find yourself kind of getting caught up in that free money era, grow at any cost or has it always kind of been your view, let's make sure we balance the cost and growth. And really, you mentioned OPEX is so important. So I feel like you've kind of always been on that side. Hey, even if the money's there, let's make sure we're really doing this in a very measured and mature manner.

So I don't like. Do I believe that there's a, there's a place in the world for vc? Absolutely, sure. Do I like vc? No, I don't like it as a model. I think if you go to founders and say you're bootstrapped, feel the pain, like understand it. I mean, there is no free money. The free money that you're spending so recklessly, someone had to earn it. There's checks and balances everywhere. So often the fundamentals that young entrepreneurs lack are because they raised too early, go through the hard stuff. Like we all did, learn how to grow businesses on a shoestring, work the hours, you know. So have I ever got caught up in it? Never. As far as Scaleworks is concerned, the venture equity fund that sits behind Sentage. Like we believe in profit and reinvestment, we believe in control, managed growth. We typically don't run, you know, burn in our businesses. Now we have done in the past, if we have a particular business that is growing very strong, no problem. You know what I mean? We'll feel the growth. But you know, dropping money into businesses to drive like low growth, no, not for us. And it's something I've never got caught up in. I've gray hair because I do worry about the capital that I need to return in terms of money that's been invested in any of our businesses or any of our funds. Someone had to earn it. Never forget that.

Great way to look at it. I appreciate that. Someone had to Earn it. And I totally understand, like you said, hey, if it's high growth, we're happy to fund the growth, we expect the return. But just to continue to throw money at something, expecting it to go from low growth to high growth is not a strategy.

And you know, it's not sustainable. It just does not work. Now, like I always laughed and Paul, at one point my marketing team, will we laugh about this to this day? Like, I mean, I always felt that sort of social media was a vanity metric for fintech tools. So I said, turn off all our social media spend. You know, if you believe something, then have the conviction to prove it, right? So I always said, like, you know, advertisements for a fintech billing tool on a social media platform and no one on that platform is buying those tools. So I turned it off and my organic search tanked, Tanked and I went, that's interesting. People channel switch so they may see you on Instagram or Facebook and they come to you on organic. So, you know, like that. Be responsible. You're not going to throw money at something to get it from no grow to high growth. There's so much more to it. There's category design, there's strategy, there's messaging, there's positioning, there's the product. Money does not cure, will not get you from flat to growth. No way. It'll just get you in trouble with your investors and with the bank.

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Well, this is attribution stuff. We got a great business in the Skyworks portfolio called Full Circle Insights, which is a specialist attribution tool for Salesforce. There's a good plug there for the guys. And these businesses exist because attribution is hard or they wouldn't exist.

Yeah, no, I, you know, having run my own business now for three years and trying to figure things out is always tough. The one that I've never quite cracked yet is why I get almost as many or more sales for my courses from Canada than the U.S. haven't been able to figure that one out, given it's a tenth of the size. But it's one of those that I'm like, all right, you know, I don't know. But if they keep buying, I won't complain.

It's Canadian fiscal prudence.

There you go. Maybe. But it's always kind of made me kind of laugh. It's been one of the funny things we joke about.

One of the things I noted when coming into the Bearing in mind, Paul, I've been in the job for six weeks, so, you know, I do have a background in terms of fintech in the fintech space, but, I mean, I am relatively new to the FPA space. There's a lot of FPA businesses in Canada. There is, and they're good businesses as well. Like, they're not crappy businesses. So.

Yes, no, I agree. There's a lot of good ones. So what other observations? You've been six weeks in the CEO chair, you know, first time in kind of an FP and a business role. What's it been like so far? What are, you know, maybe a couple. Couple highlights.

So it's very like. I love the space. I mean, I, you know, fintech and FP&A. We're. We're not. We're both. We're. We're close together. You know what I mean? So there is a huge gap between the two. What have I do. The lack of innovation is shocking. I really like. And guys like you are driving it, you know, having these conversations, making podcasts like this and bringing it to light. Like Excel. It's an incredible tool, but it's 40 years old. It's 40 years old. Is it the best software tool, business software tool ever created? Very likely. But like, surely you know in 1985 when we were listening to the Thompson twins and you know, talking about Band Aid, you know, would you have thought that 40 years later when we're talking about AI? I launched an AI chatbot today, Maestro, that we would be still talking about the same business tool to measure budgeting, forecasting, you know, to plug into newer tools like BI and tableau and stuff like no, you would have said, don't be ridiculous. I mean it will go the way a word star or word perfect, you know what I mean? The Amstrad. But it hasn't. So, you know, why is that? I mean it's a tool that's beloved and do you really want to attack it? You know, but that's my first observation. There has been a distinct lack of innovation and some of the businesses you mentioned earlier, I mean these are just plugins. So they're sitting on top of this older kind of technology too. Like we don't know. We did a debt finance business here as part of the group and the CEO Johnny said to me the any real finance guy doesn't use Google Docs, they use Excel. So again, I found that funny. This kind of almost, you know, you're either like Git, GitHub, you know, these GitHub evangelists, like, you know, you say GitHub or crap like and they punch you. You know what I mean? This kind of allegiance and this kind of reverence that comes to like shadowcrate. Google Docs is terrible. Like we close a lot of business where you have like an operational team inside of a company that are using Google Docs and the finance team are using Excel and we become Switzerland. So the finance team won't move to Docs, the operational team won't move to Excel. So boom, you know, how are you going to do your fbm, how are you going to do your P and A, get a third party tool percentage. So they come to us for that. So you know, we act as that bridge. You know, again, very interesting. You know what else a huge kind of divergence in terms of the size of businesses playing here. You know, you got your biggest companies in the world operating on one end and very small lean businesses on the other. And not, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, this is my observation, could be wrong with this and you could tell me. So there are huge amount of movements up and down the stack. You know, you've got, it's very hard for you to get up into that top quadrant. And these guys have been there for a long time. You know, the Reporting side of this. Like we do it very well but we're 25 years old, don't forget. So we've been around a long time. Still lots of plugins to your third party analytics tools which I find interesting. People plugging into your tableaus of the world and looker and stuff like that. What else is there a clear leader? Paul, I ask, you know, look at your version control, it's a clear leader in GitHub you look at like CRM, there's a clear leader in Salesforce, you know.

No, I would say there's. There is a clear leader. It's.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, good. There you go. Yeah, and I mean Excel's Excel has.

Been around forever, right? 70% of people will you still use spreadsheets for planning. Of that 90% plus is Excel. So they're the clear industry leader after that, you know, you go to the enterprise space. No, I mean you got oracle, you got TM1, you got SAP, Anna Plan. I wouldn't say there's a one stream. You know there are some other smaller ones too but those are probably the five main, you know, kind of more of the enterprise. Anaplan is, you know workday has some enterprise for sure but I'd say they also have a lot of upper mid market. But there's not a clear takeaway. I mean I could list 30 tools that, you know, probably are 50, close to that, at least 15 that are, you know, over 50 million in revenue and and up in their FPA space. And so there is not we the SAS Tech Stack by Ben Murray. He does the SAS Tech Stack survey every year. If you look at it, the lowest market penetration for the top five tools was FPA software at 13.

Again this is these kind of things. Like as the business geek, right. I find very interesting, right. I know Ben as well, very well. Great guy, the SaaS CFO. If you look at Play Bigger, right which is like for me, like because I'm a big believer in category and category design, you know what I mean? Some people sleep with the King James Bible by their bedside. I sleep with Play Bigger. You look at Play Bigger, right And it will tell you that there is only room for two category positions. Okay. You have the category king and the category queen. You know where there's Coca Cola, you only got Pepsi. You know where there's Uber, there's Lyft, you know where there's GitHub, there's GitLab, you know what I mean? The reason why that is is because they emerge and then capital and labor will flow to the category K. So people will want to work there because they want, they don't. They don't want to work at some nameless kind of rideshare. They want to work at Uber. But all the talent goes there and all the capital goes there. In terms of your larger private equity funds, they want to back the winning company. So where it used to be a case that you would have a large corporate entity and then like a whale, a lot of small little fish will come and bite pieces of it and bring it down under a perfect economy and economic practice, that's not the case anymore. Once you establish your position as the category king with the capital and labor, you pull away from the market. That's not happening in FP and A. And that is interesting and I don't know why, but I'm certainly going to figure it out and maybe we can debate it again.

Yeah, when you think you have it figured out, let me know. I mean, I'll give some thoughts. I think, you know an FPA software, there's a couple challenges. One then every business plan is a little bit different and that leads them back to Excel again and again. Most companies have a planning tool still do some percentage of their planning in Excel. Usually revenue. Revenue is the hardest area. Headcount, opex. That's pretty straightforward. Capex. It's usually the differences in revenue models where everybody tends to struggle. It's why we're seeing more of these rev ops go to market finance tools. Things like that are really trying find ways to make sure all that data is there and keep you doing your revenue and planning. I've seen a number in the last year of kind of that go to market finance kind of category starting to grow. That's my take of part of the challenge. And the other is, you know, everybody wants the flexibility of Excel but they want the integration, the security, the benefits of a tool, multidimensionality, whatever it might be. We could go on for a while. And I always tell someone, whenever someone asks me about an FP&A software, they're like, I want it to be as flexible as Excel. Like, well then just say stay in Excel. Semi structured, non structured data is going to be more, you're going to get more flexibility than a database. But there are things you're going to get by selecting a tool that will make your life easier. You have to decide what's most important. But if it's truly just flexibility you want, a blank canvas is going to be more flexible than a software tool that Has a database on the back end doesn't mean it's the right choice. But those are some of the things I think that are making it challenging for there to be a category leader. And there's a big difference between enterprise and small and even sometimes enterprise and mid market. So tools that start small almost never get up to the enterprise space. You almost have to start mid market. It's really hard.

Super interesting from a business modeling perspective. You know, I mean I came in, we had an established roadmap, it had a bunch of stuff on us and I was like, I just want this. Like I want Excel. Okay, let's double down our worksheets component part of it. I wanted to operate exactly like Excel. So look, I may diss on it Paul, but I mean at the same time, as I said, it's probably the greatest business software tool ever released and people do like it. So like I want my worksheets component percentage to operate like Excel as if you're in Excel because people are used to it, they're comfortable with it. And like people don't want to learn like guys my age. Like it's not that we can't learn new things. I don't want to reinvent the way that I'm doing things entirely. So you know, like those are my observations. Lack of innovation, straight like peculiar in terms of the way that the business has developed outwards. All those things make it very interesting.

Yeah. And then I'm going to switch gears from software to minute to people. What's your kind of take of just the FPA as a profession in general? It feels like it's changed over the last, you know, a lot over the last 10, 15 years and kind of your perspective being a CEO, you know, have you seen what FP&A does, how IT functions change or what are your thoughts as you look at your career and kind of the FP and a.

So again talking as a user as opposed to the CEO of an FPA tool, the one big change over the last like 15 years, data. I mean we just have so much more of it. And you know, I look at import business, to which I was CEO of you mentioned and chairman now. I mean this is a data scraping tool. We scrape data and we deliver that data back in and people make data driven decisions using it. You know, this is the big changer and FPA lives at the center of that. You know, can I take this data? Can I use it in a format that's going to allow me to measure performance, to measure outcomes, to predict to forecast. That's, I mean that's it. And it's getting more and more and more accurate. So those businesses that are using data at the center of their decision making processes are the ones that are going to succeed. I mean you look at the, you know, what is the big world changing event to make FPA like the relevance of FP and A become more and more and more significant? It's this explosion in data. You know, what is the, like, who are the winners and losers? The winners are going to be those that take that data, corral it and use it in a way that they can make decisions. The losers are going to be those that don't and go with gut feeling. You know, you know what companies within FP&A are the ones that are going to succeed. Like they're going to be the companies that make this like quick digestible and allow you to do scenario kind of analysis quickly. And that's it. But the key change is this explosion of data.

You know, you remind me of a quote when you talk about making data driven decisions and the winners will be there. I can't remember who said it, but it was, you know, in God we trust, all else bring data.

Absolutely. So.

And in this day and age, yeah, the amount of data we have available is astronomical. It can be overwhelming sometimes, but you need to be able to figure out how to corral it and use it to your advantage.

So like, I mean one of the things I was like from an integrations perspective, like, which is actually like as you know, at the absolute core of fpa. Right. Presuming that your data is correct in all your systems. Okay, there's the big Absolutely, absolutely, absolutely. Like and you know, rubbish in, rubbish out as they say. You know, a proper FPA tool with a proper integration stack will be absolutely essential. You can automate all this, pulling it in on an automated basis with an underlying AI driven or machine learning driven logic to allow you to forward forecast out. That's where the winners are right there.

No, great point. All right, we're going to move into a section I call this kind of the our FPA section where I asked a couple standard questions that I.

Be nice to me, I'm only in the job six weeks.

Oh, I think you'll have an opinion here. Don't worry. What is the number one technical skill that you think FPA professionals should?

I mean right now I think it's being able to use Excel because there's been such a lack of innovation. Okay. So I think it varies, okay, it varies in terms of what size of the company is utilizing the FB and a tool. Okay. I mean smaller businesses that are using, you know, the tools for performance management, the finance team will have a different skill set. So I think the marriage or the merger between finance and it is going like this. It's accelerating through the roof. And Excel, to be fair, has driven a lot of that. So it becoming an enabler in your business as opposed to a call center, hugely important. So you want your finance team to be reasonably technical, whereas previously you had a clerk that had a hat on and he depends on filling out his double entry accounting systems. Right. So what's the number one, the skills that they need? They need to be technical, they need to understand software, they need to understand integrations, they need to understand how these things work. In Santa johndeer we have an extremely technical cfo. He understands software and he understands finance. And bring those two together, you've got power. So for me, you know, I want my, my cfo, I want my finance team to be technical.

Yeah, you're definitely seeing a convergence and more of that. So what do you think about soft or human skill? What's the number one for FP and a professionals?

So for human skills?

Yeah, like soft or human skills? Yep. The opposite of the tech.

Again, it depends on what are the drivers in terms of using an FPA tool. Like are you looking to grow your business super fast? Are you looking to pull in terms of your business, are you looking to drive it to profit and take distributions out? You know what I mean? So like if you want your business to be have control growth and you want to be taking distributions out to pay back to your investors, I mean you need to have a financial professional in there that has that mindset that they're looking to corral costs opex in the business, drive gross margin. I was at a saster several years ago and the CEO of Twilio, whose name escapes me but a brilliant software entrepreneur, his CFO told him that they couldn't get their gross margin was capped out. No more, couldn't get any more. So we told him we give him $100,000 for every percentage he made it better over the next 12 months and he improved it by 12%. So depends what your motivations are. So depends what your drivers are, what your motivations for the business are will depend on what the human skills required of your FP and A professionals are. For me, I want to grow this business, but I don't want to grow it at all costs. So I want A I want a team operating my FPA platform and software that marry to that profit and reinvestment, you know, responsibility.

Thanks for that. We're going to move into the get to know you section. So we ask a couple more questions to get to know Paul a little better. So first, one, favorite hobby or passion? What do you like to do in your spare time when you're not working?

I love food. My mother was a chef. I grew up in kitchens. I've always cooked, so I love going to the store. I love looking at the produce. I love. I don't buy stuff on Amazon. I want to choose my steak and I have the butcher at the meat market, I have the butcher cut it down for me. I want to cook seasonal fresh produce. I love wine, I love whiskey. I'm a very social person. I like to entertain. On the sporting side, I'm a big soccer fan. Liverpool being my team. On the football side, I like the Bills. And when it's not minus 200 in Buffalo, we like to go see them on a playing sports level. You know, I had a very active sportsman in my younger years and now approaching 50, my knees aren't the best in cold weather. So it's golf and tennis. Plus I have again, as you said, three young children at home which take up a lot of my time.

I understand that kids definitely take a lot of time. All right, curious to see what you'll say on this one. If you could have any job in the world for one week, you could have anyone's job or any type of job, what would you pick?

So there's so many different iterations there. I mean, if I could have that job, would I want to drive into social entrepreneurship and would I want to make things better for people? Like we do a lot of work like everyone else does with not for profits. So, you know, do I want to get into one of the larger not for profits and drive efficiencies in there? Because sometimes they're not that efficient. I make that kind of contribution, you know, do I want to, you know, is this around, you know, what's like running SpaceX? I mean, there's groundbreaking stuff, you know, very interesting, you know, running rocket ships. Every tech geek in the world would feel that way around that as a product. Like, I mean, Elon himself has become quite a divisive character, but not getting to politics. But I mean his businesses are incredible. Right. I should actually say Elon Musk, calling him Elon suggested I know the man, which of course I don't. Right. Elon Musk, you know. No, it's, it's, it's a good question. It's a challenging question. NASA, we don't like to know, are we alone out there?

That'd be a fun one.

You know, getting answers to that. Maybe running the data archive for the US Government and having access to everything. That might be interesting too.

Yeah, that could, that could be a fun one. You could write quite a book after just a week.

I'm not sure that you're going to get published on that book, though, because.

I'm thinking there could be some challenges.

But, you know, details, those kind of ones would be interesting. Yeah, yeah.

No, when you mentioned Elon Musk, I had someone respond. They're like, I want to be him for a week to determine if he's human or not. How does someone run seven different companies like he does? He's like, I want to see if it's really an alien. And I just kind of.

I think the labor money would be on a. Is an alien.

There's probably some truth to that. All right, favorite travel destination. If you can go anywhere in the world tomorrow, where are you going?

So presuming I love the Caribbean, I love Grand Cayman, I love Sicily. You know, Sicily is a fabulous summer destination when you're staying, say, in Termina and you're looking out over Vesuvius erupting. Cayman is just such a lovely, safe place. Beautiful weather, great water. I'd like to get back to Ireland. It's a beautiful place. The weather, however, is a little bit challenging for me, particularly seeing as I'm used to Texas and, you know, I think in terms of less travel places, Sub Saharan Africa, beautiful. I'm not sure anyone's ever seen the stars in the sky until they've actually gone there. There's so much light pollution in the developed world. Like, go to the underdeveloped world or the emerging world where we don't have this terrible light pollution, and then you can actually see what people saw, you know, 500, 1,000, 2,000 years ago, as opposed to what you're looking at every night. When you look into a light polluted sky and see the North Star and a couple of others, Alpha Centauri. When you go to Africa and you look up and you see millions upon millions of speckles, you realize that, like going to Graham Hancock, you know, astrology was of course, at the center of prehistory because what they see, we can't. That's quite a profound answer to your question, Paul.

Well, thank you. He gave a few different options there. So I think we're just about out of time here. I think we'll kind of wrap up. So, last question, if someone wants to learn more about you, you know, get in touch, learn more about maybe sentage, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, ping me directly. Paul.Lynchentich.com or come into the website, fill out a contact us form we'd love to show you and demo it. As far as from a personal experience perspective, if you've heard something that you'd like to follow up on a personal level, or if there's something you feel I can help you with from your business, hit me up on LinkedIn. You know, that's the best place to get me. I'm on the other social media platforms, but I don't really use them for me like I'm. Social media for me is around business connections as opposed to telling people what I had for dinner. So LinkedIn's the place to find me and look, I mean you don't put.

All your dinner menus out there, pictures when you go to the butcher.

I'm just not that interesting like here. I'm not wanting to flect, but I am busy. You know, this, this as is everybody but like reach out to me if I can help out with anything and I'll do my best to carve out a couple of minutes. Particularly if you're taking that leap as an entrepreneur for the first time. It's always challenging. If I can help in any way, I'm happy to.

All right, well, I appreciate that Paul, and thanks for joining us. Enjoyed getting to chat with you today and have a great rest of your.

Thanks, Paul. It's been a pleasure to come up. Keep doing what you're doing. You're raising the tide for all of us.

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

Sam.