How To Master FP&A Business Acumen and Communication with John Sanchez

They figured out that dog did the hood. One day, me and about 450 other people all got laid off because they shut the division down. I'm literally just sitting at home trying to figure out what my next move is. And the phone rings and it's the controller at AutoNation. Hey, we have this project. Would you be interested Meet John Sanchez. A career accelerator for FP and a pros with 20 plus years of experience. John uses leverage training, focusing on the vital 20% of skills that deliver 80% of results. He he's the go to guy who makes finance training engaging, practical, and yes, even entertaining. I was so hyper focused on my work that if I was walking down the hall, I was probably looking at a report like this. And if you said hi to me, you're hitting the register. One of them said, I'll censor this for your audience. We thought you were an a hole, but you seem like you're a nice guy. They went, thank you. If you don't understand how the business works, you're only ever going to be an Excel owner. What do you think is the number.

One softer shooting skill that we should master?

Listen. Number one with a bullet. Not even close. What did you say exactly? The number one cause for most people of not being a good active listener is instead of me actively listening to what you're saying, I'm actually thinking about what I'm gonna say next.

What is the number one technical skill that you believe FP&A professionals need to master?

It's interesting, so I would say.

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 FPA Tomorrow, where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, AKA the FPA Guy. 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. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your journey, this show has something for everyone. This week, I'm thrilled to be joined by John Sanchez. John welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Paul.

Thanks for carving out the time to join me. So I'll give you a little bit of background about John and then we'll jump into things. John has more than 20 years of experience in FP&A and now trains FP&A and treasury professionals. He is the Managing director of the training and consulting firm FPA Group. After earning his bachelor's degree in accounting from the Florida State University, John started his career as a top 10 international accounting firm, which merged with Eye. Then he transitioned to mergers and acquisitions before making his way into FPA. He held significant roles in FPA for world class organizations including Royal Caribbean Cruises and AutoNation. John's role at AutoNation included developing and managing the strategic plan financial model for a business unit that generated, oh, I guess, 11 billion in annual revenue. Small change, right? Right.

For a little while.

Since transitioning into training, John has trained finance and accounting professionals at a variety of organizations, including the association for Finance Professionals, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the Department of Homeland Security, Accenture Academy, Oracle, Verizon, and the list goes on. All right, how was that for a bio, John? Did I cover it?

I think you did a great job.

Right, perfect. I always find it fun to read bios because you're like, wait, well, how are they going to respond? What do they think? Did I cover it? Right. But you know, so we're going to start with a question I ask everybody. What does great FP&A look like to you? What's great FP&A?

So I think there's an article I wrote years ago called SWOT on the fly. And the general idea is, in fpa, I think it's very useful to have a mindset of kind of constantly thinking about doing a SWOT analysis in the business that you work in kind of all the time. Because as, as you and everybody out there knows, you could do a business plan and by the time you're done with that business plan, it's outdated already. Right. So I think good FP&A looks like FP&A professionals getting out of their chair, away from Excel, and interacting with their business partners a lot more than some FP&A professionals do to gain an understanding of how the business actually works. So when they're doing the financial analysis and they're looking at numbers, they have some context for what those numbers actually mean, how those numbers got to be the numbers that they are.

Got it. So really, one of the key things to great FP and A is understanding the business not just spending time in a spreadsheet.

100%.

Can you share an example where you've seen great FPA in action? Can you think of a time when you saw a project where it made a real difference to the business? Like that. That's great. FP and A. Yeah.

So I guess the example, I use this in some of the classes that I teach. It was a, a capital project when I worked at Royal Caribbean Cruises. The reservations department wanted to upgrade their, their reservations system, hardware, software, the whole nine yards. And it was big bucks. I don't remember the dollars, but it was, you know, many millions of dollars. And the cfo, anything related to it and software was like a hot button for him because he just believed that there was a lot of waste in it. Not quite sure where he got that bias, but that's just kind of where he came from. So we had a very simple form that we had to fill out and I had to analyze all the capital projects, calculate all the metrics, and do a presentation to the cfo, pros, cons, the whole thing. So part of that was not just figuring out the IRR and NPV and payback and all those metrics. It was being able to explain in plain English to the cfo, what's the reason that they need this capital? What are they going to do with it? Why do we need this? Right. So it was a little bit complicated. So I ended up going and spending about a half a day basically just shadowing their top reservation agent. And as he went along, he was showing me, okay, you see right here, when I was on the phone with this person who was trying to book a cruise and I had to switch from this screen to that screen, did you see how long that took? Well, we have a window of time that's considered best practices, right? You should be on the phone with someone booking their cruise somewhere in this window of time. If it's too little, you're not giving them enough information. If it's too much, you're wearing them out. There's all kinds of reasons for it. We are consistently. Everyone is falling way outside that window of the best practices time on the phone. And it's affecting our ability not just to close somebody on booking a cruise, but, but upselling them on shore excursions and all kinds of other stuff that can generate revenue for the company. So when I get a piece of paper and it's got all the numbers and all that on it, I can calculate metrics till I'm blue in the face. But when I actually Sat there and watched him in action and saw the impact that it was having. That really filled out the picture for me and it got me to ask a lot of questions that I wouldn't have asked. Now I'm armed with all of that to go back, talk to the cfo, kind of download that on him. Then, you know, there was. In that case, it was a significant enough project that there were some iterations and him coming up with more questions and me going back, but spending that time with them actually just watching the actual operational things that were creating the need for that capital was. It was priceless.

Yeah. I could imagine actually spending that time with the business. I love that. Where you're able to see, oh, he wasn't able to sell this because of this delay, or we lost that customer because our system is lousy, basically.

Oh, we didn't give him information on some promotions because we didn't get that information in time because there was a hiccup between reservations and sales and marketing was creating the promote.

There's.

It's incredible when you actually get out there how much you miss if you're just sitting at your desk and just getting information that we ask for in a form. But that form typically is like the minimal amount of information that we feel like we need. From the finance perspective, sure, it's not optimal.

It's not going to tell the full story. It's enough to try to make a decision. But you taking the time to really gather the business reasons help push it across the line, helps you to influence and help the CFO understand, you know, there's more than dollars and cents here. This is the real reason behind this, because it's easy to look at dollars and cents sometimes and just say, okay, the math says it makes sense, let's do it. But there's often a lot more to it than just that.

Yeah. I think anytime you've got any kind of a form, I would say almost all the time, it will help you figure out the ones that are heck nos, but it's not going to typically identify the ones that are not obvious heck yeahs that are kind of in that gray area where it's like, seems like a good idea, but it's a lot of money. I feel like I need more information. And that's where you have to get. Get out from behind your desk and go out into the operations and see what's going on.

Makes sense to me. I get it. And the other thing, you always have to be careful with the form. People learn to game it that's why it's so important to do your homework. We've all seen it where. All right, I know I need to get above this number. So I'll just assume there's extra revenue. And if you don't challenge the assumptions and really understand things, sometimes you'll approve something that the business wants that there's really no chance of getting the right return.

Yeah. It reminds me of the first time I heard somebody talk about driver based planning. My first question was, what other type of planning is there? Because that's just the first type of planning I ever did. And to me it just seemed to make sense that that's what we do, that's how we do it. You know, just saying, well, we're going to add 5% to last year's budget or something. That never made any sense to me, the idea that anybody would budget that way. I was surprised when I found out that driver based wasn't what everybody did all the time.

Yeah, I mean, it seems to make a lot of sense. And you know, I get predictive modeling and those type of things can be really beneficial. And they're not exactly driver based, but they, they're still variables. You're still finding the data and it's still a similar approach. I've never been one that's understood, you know, last year plus growth, you want to do that for some of your small items, fine, I get that. You know, they're, they're less than 5% of your overall expense. There are a bunch of small little things. If you just want to take last year or last year plus inflation and hold it, I can get that. But for anything material, especially revenue, you know, cost of goods sold, headcount, never has never made sense to me.

Yeah, I was always fascinated by the, the combination approaches. Like for example, in reality we actually do a top down budget. But we say we do a driver based budget, meaning all the analysts put together a driver based budget that bubbles up to the cfo and then he just decides from the top down. Regardless of what you calculated using driver based, I'm going to decide what that number is going to be. And then you're going to have to go back to the department heads and just figure out how we're going to make that work.

Yep. My favorite is when they, you know, you come back and say, hey, we can't achieve that without, you know, this, this, this and this. And they say, okay, well here's your revenue number. But we can't give you the expenses, which I'm sure you've had happen before. Those are always the worst because I look at those and go, okay. Chances of this happening are extremely slim because you can't generally get revenue out of nothing.

When I was at Royal Caribbean, we had a new, new ship that was coming online. So we have all this extra capacity that the sales and marketing people have to fill. And the CFO says, we're cutting your budget by 5%. So me being two or three years out of college, has to go to a senior vice president and say, we got to cut your budget by 5%. He's like, how am I supposed to do that when I'm filling, bringing in more revenue, driving more revenue, filling all of these extra cabins? How does that make any sense? I'm not telling you it makes sense. I'm just telling you that's what we've got to work with. That's. I'm just a messenger.

Yeah. Never fun when you're just a messenger. So, John, I know you're you. You love communicating. You teach a lot of training around communicating. You don't strike me as the accountant type. So why did. What made you decide to get an accounting degree? How did that kind of come about?

Yeah, it's interesting. So I think ever since I was little, I always, for some reason in my head, I thought I wanted to own my own business. And I say for some reason because there wasn't anything in my life really, other than tv, maybe that. That would have pointed me in that direction. My dad was in the army for 30 years. My mom worked for civil service her entire career, almost 30 years. My brother, uncles, almost everybody in my family went into the military. So I think in part that made me want to have my own business because I saw, like my dad, for example, working really hard, great work ethic, very smart. But you're very limited on how quickly you can progress just because of that system, the way the military works.

Sure.

So when it came time to go to college, I thought, well, I want to major in something in business. And, you know, before you even go to college, what does that even mean? What's the difference between finance, accounting, management, Mark, you know, what are those different things? And I'll be honest with you, I actually chose accounting because I felt like when I looked at all of the curriculums, I felt like accounting was the hardest one in the business school. So I thought if I start with accounting and I can't hack it, I guess I could kind of work my way down. Pecking order. I managed to get, you know, to keep a B Average and graduate. And so I thought, okay. I've always heard from older people that were in business that accounting is a good background to have and it gives you more flexibility than almost any of the other degrees within business, which I found to be true because I transitioned to finance.

See, I was expecting you to say something like, well, there's this cute girl. And you know, so I figured I'd go, I chase that. And accounting was where she was.

Oh, dude, it's accounting. There's that.

Yeah. Because there's so many girls in accounting. Right.

Actually, you know what, it's funny, at Florida State, there actually were. It was. I don't think there was any kind of causation there. That's definitely correlation and not causation. But yeah, it was, it was a good college experience.

We, we could go downhill in a hurry here. I have a feel.

Not I, sir.

All right. So you know, you did accounting for a little while and pretty quickly you went into M and A and then FP and A. Maybe talk a little bit about how you ended up there. You know, kind of what, what that journey was like.

Yeah. So the M and A was really not so much by design. I was working in public accounting and after about a year and a half, close to two years, I just felt like I don't think this is the career path that I want. And public accounting is kind of similar to the military. It's a very specific structure. You're a staff, then a senior, then a manager, then a senior manager, then a partner. It's very clear. There's very clear lines of, you need to be in this role for this amount of time and go to these schools and it's very regimented. Right. And so I looked at that, I saw the people ahead of me on the ladder and I thought, I don't think I want to do that. So I was just kind of looking and there was an ad. I would say I'd give away my age, but my gray hair's already done that for me. So this is back in 93, late 92, 93ish. When Blockbuster was the 10 ton gorilla in the industry. They were taken off like gangbusters and they had an M and A analyst role open. I sent in my resume and long story short, I got the job. I thought M and A sounded cool. I thought Wall street was like my North Star, the movie Wall Street. I thought, I'm going to be like Bud Fox, right. I'm going to be talking about deals all the time and I'm going to make a bunch of money. Not realizing that once I got there, I was like, what do we actually do? Like, what's a day like in M and A? I had no idea. Luckily, it turned out to be really cool. It was a lot of fun, and I would probably have stayed doing that job until the end of time, except we got acquired. And so I knew one of the analysis that we did for every acquisition was synergies, right? And so it was always the same file name, and it was called Head Roll because the biggest synergies are typically in payroll. So having done this over and over and over again on a bunch of acquisitions, I thought, oh, crap. In the course of the deal, we interfaced with Viacom's M and A guys, and they were in New York and they had a big team. They didn't need an extra five, six, seven, eight guys in Fort Lauderdale. So it seemed pretty obvious to me. The writing was on the wall. We probably weren't going to be sticking around after the acquisition. And a recruiter talked to me about this role at Royal Caribbean in planning. We didn't call it FP&A@ the time, but it was essentially what FP&A is. And so I took that role over at Royal Caribbean, and that was really my first taste of more of a. More of a planning and budgeting role. Because in M and A, we did a lot of the same nuts and bolts. We did a lot of financial protections, a lot of financial analysis, but we never even had a budget. That was one of the first red flags I had, was my boss's boss, the director of the department sat down with me one day and said, hey, I need your help. I got to put a budget together for the Viacom guys. That was the first time I realized we didn't have a budget. We just asked for stuff and we got got it right. My computer kept crashing. My boss goes, just fill out the form and send it to it. They'll get you a new computer. I was like, oh, okay. I thought that's just how it worked. Then I got to Royal Caribbean, and my God, if you wanted to upgrade your ram, it was like an act of Congress, right? So it was a very different role. Also very interesting because we also got a lot of the ad hoc stuff. We did do some M and A. I think it was Costa Cruise Lines that we were looking at. When I was there, I got heavily involved in the capital planning side of things because we kind of. We had one manager that did nothing but capital, and then the other manager Handled all the operating budgets and I kind of straddled between the two. So I worked with the manager of capital on all capital projects. And then I had four or five departments that I did the operating budgets for. Um, it was pretty cool. Cause I got what I, I felt like were pretty cool departments. I had sales and marketing, IT Reservations, shoreside and excursions. So it was a really broad kind of exposure to different areas of the business, which I found really interesting.

You know, I could see where that would be be fascinating.

So it feels like as I look.

At your career, the accounting was just, hey, let's start with the area that makes the most sense in business. And we'll adjust if we need to in school. M and A just kind of accounting. I can't myself moving up the ladder. M and A sounds cool. Let's go there. And then FPA is I need somewhere to land because I know my job isn't going to be around much longer.

Pretty much, yeah.

So like a lot of us, it wasn't. I mean there was obviously thought into it, but it to a certain extent it kind of just developed and happened. It wasn't like you went and said, okay, going to do a couple years of accounting, I'd love to work in M and A, then I'll go over into corporate finance. It was just, here's the path.

My entire career was a lot of serendipity, even leaving Royal Caribbean. Part of that was one of my college roommates was working at Arby's corporate headquarters and they needed a guy in the planning department. And I'd been at Royal Caribbean for a little while and the guy that initially hired me left before I got there. So he already knew he was taking a role. He's now the CEO of Virgin Voyages. So he got hired away from Royal Caribbean to start up Disney Cruises. So he, he did the initial business planning for Disney Cruises. But that meant the guy who hired me was not even there when I got there. So the whole experience was kind of up and down. It was a good company, some really great people that I work with, but it, it didn't really pan out like it. I expected it to because that guy had made some promises to me that just, you know, never happened. And then the, the Arby's role came up and I wasn't there for. I was there less than a year and I got a call from a buddy that I used to work with at Blockbuster who is then a VP in M and A at Autonation. And he basically said, hey, a guy I Went to business school with, is going to give you a call. He's looking for a manager to do some financial modeling. And I told him you're the guy. And that's how he ended up over at AutoNation. So my entire career really was just kind of saying, okay, I'll, I'll say yes to that. That sounds interesting.

It sounds like a lot of it was networking. You strike me as someone who's always been, you know, big in communicating. And that's what you do today, right? You help finance and accounting people be better communicators. What made you decide to kind of start your own business? I know you started with consulting. You switched to more of the training. What has made you be so focused on the communication side of training? Kind of. What was your reasoning?

It was a grand plan, Paul. It was a well thought out based.

On everything you've told me so far. I don't buy it.

You shouldn't. It was not a grand plan. So again, serendipity. So I'm at autonation. My role, my day to day life was jockeying a spreadsheet. So it was this giant series of projections for this one business unit. It was the used car division. So think Carmax today, right? These giant 50,000 square foot used car dealerships, right? That was that concept. So what I would do on a daily basis, I'd crunch the numbers and then I would have meetings almost every day with directors and VPs of these different areas of the business. And I'd sit down with them and go through my assumptions and say, here's what we're assuming in the model. You guys have been now running this thing for a little while. Does this look realistic? Give me your feedback. And most of the time they'd look at me like, are you crazy? No, that's not right. This is what it should be. And I take my notes, I go back to my office, I update my assumptions, and then my boss would pop his head in my office every once in a while and go, dude, are you all right? Because I'd be there looking at this spreadsheet like this does this dog doesn't hunt. Like these numbers are not adding up. And he kept saying the same thing, dude, don't worry about it. The big guys upstairs will figure it out. Because the guys who had started AutoNation had an incredible track record with bunches of other businesses they took from startup to like unicorn status, right? And so the general attitude was, look, I get it, you're a number cruncher guy. The numbers don't make sense. But trust me, these guys are strategic gurus. They'll figure it out. Relax, just do your job, but don't worry about it. So about a year later, they figured out that that dog didn't hunt. So one day, me and about 450 other people all got laid off because they shut the division down and were selling things off like a fire sale. So I got laid off and I'm literally just sitting at home trying to figure out what my next move is. And the phone rings and it's the controller at AutoNation. Hey, we have this project and we need someone from the outside. And we're thinking, based on your background, you might be a good fit. Would you be interested? We talked for a few minutes and I was like, sure, I'll give this a shot. So I ended up going back as a consultant, getting paid more than I had gotten paid as an employee, doing what I thought, like, you could do it in your sleep. I mean, it was the. The easiest. It was basically installing a piece of financial software on the computer of the controller at a car dealership and then basically working between that CFO and headquarters to make sure their daily flash data got sent to corporate properly. And I was kind of like a little bit of a help desk. And it was an odd position, but they needed someone that had some financial background, not an IT guy, but could talk to it. People felt comfortable talking to someone at like a C level, but also talking to a guy in the back who's turning wrenches all day that, that you might have to interface with. And I just kind of fit that bill. I was like a utility player kind of deal. So I did that for about a year, year and a half. And by this time, most of the guys that I had started my career with were either controllers or CFOs somewhere. And I just would get calls every once in a while.

Hey, are you available?

I could use somebody for this project. And so that kind of started my consulting career. I didn't create a business plan. And then one day I realized I just finished a project and I don't have another one. I guess I should network. I gotta go, like, find clients. That's really the first time I. I realized I'm in business. Like, I thought I was just, you know, kind of just doing stuff that I never thought about. You could see how well thought out my. My career was, right? It just was flowing and I didn't give a ton of thought to it until one day I finished a project. It was like, oh, I guess I Need to go out there.

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Well, I was just gonna say, I think literally planning for a living is part of, part of the reason that I was so open to things that were not planned. Because I saw so many times like, dude, we just spent dozens of hours creating this plan and the day to day stuff we're doing does not track to this plan. And, and it all comes down to a friend of mine who had started a a, he was a partner at a consulting firm. We got together for lunch one day and I was asking him about the business. Yeah, it went great. We just celebrated our year. You know, we had this big meeting and one of the partners said, you know guys, I just want to point something out here. And it's that we had this business plan and all the clients we have right now, they have. They're nowhere in the target market that was in our business plan. And he said, one of the other partners said, do you want to follow the plan or do you want to follow the money? And I always remembered that. And I thought, plans are good, but it's the planning process where the real value is that forcing you to think about the things you have to think about in the planning process. It's not the plan. That really is the valuable thing in planning.

So follow the money. That's what I took away from it. Even though you. You try to bring it back to planning. I'm all about money. No, I. I give both sides of that. There's. There's so much truth to. The planning process has a lot of value. Even if the numbers aren't right, even if you change direction, you need to think strategically. You do need to link things back to strategy, but you got to be flexible and adaptable. And it's. It's not a rigid process. At least it shouldn't be. Often it is. We've all been through the rigid budget process, but there needs to be a lot of flexibility if you want to adapt and adjust, especially in today's environment. And so that's why we have rolling forecasts. And some people have done away with budgets and all these different things because is trying to find that right balance to make sure you're moving the business forward. You know, how you do it. There's lots of ways.

And like we chatted about before we started recording, you also have to be careful not saying yes to everything. Right. Back to your point about strategy. Sometimes that can get us to a point where we're going, I'm doing a lot of things that really are not my core strength. I can do them. People are offering to pay me well to do them, so I say yes to them. But at some point, we do have to kind of think back a little bit to our overall strategy and say, where do I really want to be spending my time? What's the best use of my time? So maybe saying no to that thing, even though it'll bring in some revenue right now, maybe that actually will be more beneficial in the bigger picture.

Yep. Oh, there's some great advice there. And I had a manager who said it this way. He said to me, he goes, strategy is about closing doors. And I thought that was a really interesting way to put it, because there's going to be more opportunities than you command. You got to choose what doors to close. Jeff Bezos went a step further and said, there's two types of doors. There's those that once you go through them, you really can't go back. You know, it's a fundamental change the way the business is operating. You're kind of committed, and there's doors where, hey, you close the door, you could turn around and no big deal. Like, don't worry so much about those doors that you could just open back up. But be really certain about Those doors that once you've closed them, you're committed, so to speak, it's going to be a big cost and effort to change direction.

Well, you're actually reminding why me? You remember I said I'm not sure why that, that CFO at Royal Caribbean had such a pet peeve about IT stuff. I think it's what you just mentioned. Once you make a giant investment in certain IT infrastructure, that door is kind of closed for a while. You kind of got to stick with, with that because it's such a big investment of not just of money but of time and training people and.

Right. You put a new ERP in place, you can't put a new one in place at the beginning of the next year.

Yeah, that ain't gonna worse.

You're probably locked in realistically at least five years and that's probably on the short end. You're probably more like a 10 year journey. And once you get past the QuickBooks, the zero, a true ERP implementation, you're in at least 5, 10 years.

Well, the flip side of that is I'm sure you've seen or at least heard about a lot of companies that fall into the sunk cost policy where they go, we spent all this money on this thing, we got to stick with it. So we're just going to spend a lot, a bunch more money on consultant time to tweak it to, to make it continue to work when maybe that wasn't the best idea. But it's kind of hard to be that person who says, I'm going to raise my hand and say we need to pull the trigger on this thing and make this other huge investment. That's where I think sometimes a little bit of politics comes in where it's like, yeah, that's it. That could be a clm, could be a real career limiting move.

Yes. And there are times when you do have to pull the plug and not wait the five or ten years. The example I think of as you said that some fallacy is I still remember the article, I worked for the Navy. That's where I started my career, a civilian. I wasn't enlisted, so not in the military, but I worked on a military base and I remember the article that came out that says the Navy has just spent a billion dollars implementing SAP and has nothing to show for it. It's like, you know, when do you pull the plug if you've really just spent a billion dollars? That's a really hard one. Talk about it being political. That's now out in front of all the taxpayers going, wait, you just wasted a billion and got nothing for it. Do you want to be the one that says, let's pull the plug? Really tough situation to be in. But it might have been the, you know, sometimes it's the right decision. Even though you've spent the billion dollars.

Well, if you look at some of these large organizations, I mean, the guy who was the CEO at Royal Caribbean when I was there in the 90s is still there, right. So he understands the long game. The CFO is not there anymore. I don't know when he left. But I think you, I think that's a pretty good indicator when you see patterns like that, when people have such longevity at one organization that they've learned how to get past just what have you done for me this quarter? Right. They've learned how to balance that balance. Talking to the street and managing Wall street expectations about the quarterly earnings with the bigger picture, especially a company like Royal Caribbean, you're talking about, you know, billions of dollars that they're spending every year on new ships and infrastructure. And you know, they've got two private islands and on and on. I mean that's, you kind of have to be able to balance those two in industry like that.

And I've been to one of those private islands.

Which one?

Cococay. Yes.

Yeah, I like that one. That's the only one I've been to. Interestingly, people are shocked to find this out. So I worked at Royal Caribbean back in the 90s and as employees we got free cruises and the first cruise I went on was two years ago. You want to know why?

Afraid of water?

No, no time. I could not get the time off. We were always working.

It's kind of like when people say you have unlimited pto. Studies have shown you actually take less PTO than others. That's why some companies have just said, I've chosen to be very generous in the PTO versus the non limited and really push you to take it. Because when I see unlimited ptl, I think, does that mean I'm working forever and this is just a benefits gag, so to speak?

Yeah, it's a little bit of a. It's more about optics than reality.

Yes, exactly.

Optics are a big thing. I mean, if you're a public company. Look, when I was at AutoNation, I fed data all the time to the VP of Investor Relations and I sat in the room when he was on conference calls with the Wall street analysts. And I, I don't know that I would want to have that job. It's a. It's a tough job.

I. AutoNation was one of our big clients when I worked at DME with Celera at that time, but direct marketing, they had an automotive division that was bought by a company called Solera. And so we did a lot of work with AutoNation. I supported our basically dealership division. We called it CRM, but the dealership, that's another company.

If. If that department hadn't shut down, I would have. I'd probably still be there today. I love the people that I work with. Most of the people I work with. Not most. Probably half of the people I work with were the same people I work with at Blockbuster because it was the same ownership team. And it was like this weird blend of a startup with like all of the good stuff about, like a huge mature company. Great benefits, great facilities, great pay, great environment. But like a startup environment where, like, hey, we can experiment, we can try new things. We can kind of, you know, fly by the seat of our pants and just kind of be a little bit of a renegade mindset in how we do things. Because nobody's really done this thing that we're doing before. So we're. We're kind of inventing part of this as we go. But selling cars is selling cars, but we're just kind of putting our own kind of spin on it. So, yeah, it was an interesting experience, for sure.

You know, the whole autonation's done well. You know, obviously the 400 people that got laid off might disagree, at least for that part. But, you know, they're a big company. They did a lot of things right. And so I'm sure that kind of renegade in that different style can be fun, if it fits your personality, can be a great place to be in. I want to shift gears here a little bit and jump into communication, because I know that's what you do for training today is a lot around communication. Why is it so important that FP&A professionals learn to be better communicators?

Well, from what. If you look at the data, most people agree that we suck at it, which is not good.

I substantially clarifying that suck is not good.

I was confused. Well, I have seen commercials. I believe it was Carvana where their tagline was like, we suck less. Or something along those lines.

Yes, I have seen some of those. Yeah, we suck less than the competition. And you're like, I don't think that's to brag about.

I just bought a car there. It didn't suck. Like, whoa, that's a pretty Low bar. But so honestly, the, I think the genesis of it really was my own ineptitude. So I've always felt like a people person. I've always gotten along very well with almost everybody in school, at work and whatever else. So I always thought I had really good people skills. And one night when I was working at AutoNation, we were out at a happy hour on a Friday night and I had met some people in a different department, but I didn't know. And we got into a conversation and one of them said, I said something and they laughed and one of them said, gee, you're actually kind of funny. You're. You're actually a nice guy. And I went, thank you. I think, like, that didn't sound like a compliment. Like, what do you, what makes you say that? They were like, well, we weren't going to say anything, but since you asked now, we had a few adult beverages by this point. So everyone was a little relaxed and felt like they could say what was.

On their mind, a little more free flowing, opinions going.

And one of them said, and I'll censor this for your audience. We thought you were an a hole, but you seem like you're a nice guy.

And I went, I'll censor it for everybody. There we go. I haven't got to use that button before. So I had took me a minute to find it, but I used my sense button.

When they said that, my first instinct was change the subject. Like, this is terrible. Like, make them laugh again. Do something. Change the subject. So I change the subject. You know, we, we all, you know, just kind of went our ways. At the end of the evening, next day at work, I asked one of the guys in my department, I said, hey, so and so said this about me. As a matter of fact, they even told me that several times they had passed me in the hallway or they'd been in the elevator with me and they'd said hello. And I didn't even say hi back to them. I don't do that, do I? And my buddy goes, yeah, you do. You do it all the time. I was like, what? So I started to ask more people and I realized I had this giant blind spot. I was so hyper focused on my work that if I was walking down the hall on the way to a meeting, I was probably looking at a new report like this. And if you said hi to me, it didn't even register. And I was completely unaware that I was being that way towards people. So it kind of got me started on getting into personal development. And then I realized over the course of my consulting career, after I just was consulting on my own, that being able to network and having good people skills was everything in being able to get new clients. And so about, I guess it was about 12, 13 years ago, somebody contacted me through LinkedIn and they said, hey, we're looking for someone to speak at a conference on budgeting and forecasting. We were looking at your background. Would you be interested? I said, okay, I'll give this a try. Never done it before. I spoke at this conference and it went really well and I really enjoyed it. And long story short, that led to a few more and a few more, and I realized I can actually make a living doing this instead of doing the technical FP and a consulting work. I kind of like this stuff. And I focused on the communication side because I felt like that contributed more to my own career success than my technical skills did. So I just started focusing more and more on it. That's kind of. Kind of what got me into that niche, so to speak.

So basically, it's a good thing you had a few drinks.

Probably because I was moral of the story. No, I was extremely introverted back then. So, yeah, I probably was. A little social lubricant can go a long way.

Interesting. That's a fascinating story. But what I take away from that, I think the audience needs to know is, yes, somebody said that you didn't just let it go. You asked people and then you worked on changing it. So if somebody's listening and you know, they want to become better at communicating, or if they're not sure they're a great communicator, where should they start?

What.

What would you recommend people do? Because they may not get that moment of, you know, clarity after having a few drinks from somebody?

Yeah, go find it. So what I would say is talk to people who know you well and who you trust and just ask them point blank. Because let's say, for example, a brother, a sister, mother, father, best friend. Don't go to your boss. Do not go to your boss with this question. But if you ask someone like that who really cares about you and actually really knows you well, just get their honest feedback, like, look, I want to be a really good communicator in my job at work. Most people think that accounting and finance people suck at communication. I don't want to be that way. How do I come across when I communicate with you? Do you feel like I'm a good listener? Do you feel heard when we're talking, when we have Disagreements. Do you feel good about how we resolve those disagreements? The way we communicate, listen to what they say and look for patterns. If everybody says, yeah, you know, you're very, a very caring person, but sometimes I feel like you don't listen very well and, okay, can you give me some examples? And you start to kind of piece together these patterns and figure out. My biggest challenge in the beginning was that awareness. I was not aware that I was doing and saying things that were putting people off. I knew and trusted the guys in my department. I wasn't going to keep asking that person who told me they thought I was an a hole. I asked the guys in my department that I worked with all the time that knew me and I knew if they told me you're bad at something, they're not just trying to get at me, they're trying to help me. Right. That's the type of person you want that feedback from. Make a list. And there's so many resources out there. Toastmasters, my training. There's training all over the place that you can plug into to start shoring up those weaknesses in terms of the strengths.

Well, if I'm hearing it, it really starts with the assessment process and trying to find those blind spots. From there, there's plenty of resources to improve. If you know, hey, I need to get better at active listening. You can develop something around that. If I need to get better at telling the story or influencing all kinds of different areas within communication, maybe I need to get better at just being aware of the people around me and being social and saying hello and coming across as friendly. It may be as simple as that. Maybe you're great in other environments at communicating. Maybe it's presenting. Maybe you're just super nervous and you need to figure out. So it. Start with, Start with assessment and then develop your plan.

Yeah, there's lots of formal assessments that you can do, but I think that first one that I described is the best starting place because that gives you sort of the broad strokes of what I need to focus on. And then if at that point you feel like you need a little more formal assessment to really kind of hone in, you can do that. But I would definitely start at that sort of broader level.

Sure, I think that's a great point. Start broad and then you can do more formal assessments if you think that's needed. And they're definitely good and probably at some point make sense. All right, so we've talked communication, we've talked about your detailed life plan that you carved out at 19 and how it's all gone as planned. Now we're going to move into couple of what I kind of call standard sections. We have one around FP and A. I'm going to ask you a couple questions, then we're going to ask you a couple personal get to know you questions. All right, number first one is what is the number one technical skill that you believe FP&A professionals need to master?

Well, so you tell me if you believe this is a technical skill, but I would say business acumen.

Okay, what do you mean by that? I. I'll go with that. I could see either side of that, but this is your call. I want your opinion here.

Yeah, so I look at that as it's kind of a hybrid. There are some technical skills involved in business acumen, there's some soft skills involved in that. By business acumen, I mean understanding. So like the example I gave before about the Swan on the fly, right. Being able to go out into the business and see how the business is running, being able to sort of connect that back to what you're doing and what other people are doing in the business. So when I first started at Arby's, for example, they sent me out, I was planning there as well. They sent me out to meet with the regional director of operations and I sat in meetings with him, and I was basically just a fly on the wall listening to the meetings. And so I developed a lot of my business acumen by watching people with a very high level of business acumen, watching what questions do they ask, what are typical answers they get, and how do they respond to those? How do they evaluate the quality of the answers that they're getting to, the questions that they're asking? Just kind of learning from someone else who's really adept at that and starting to put those things in my tool belt to kind of develop that bigger picture. Because if you have exceptional Excel skills, you're great at cost accounting, you do great analysis, that's all great. But if you don't understand the business and how the business works, you're only ever going to be an Excel monkey. And as much as we all probably love Excel, I don't think most people want to be thought of as just that. That guy who's really good at Excel.

Yeah, the data monkey, the data junkie, the Excel jockey, whatever. Yeah, we've all heard them. We've all known some people like that. And I think all of us want to go beyond just that. I'd agree with you. All right, so what do you think Is the number one softer human skill that we should master.

Listening number one with a bullet. Not even close. I just think.

What'd you say?

Exactly. So there, there are lots of, of experts that talk about lots of different skills. Every class I teach, I don't just teach listening skills I teach, but it comes in to every single conversation about communication. It's in the overarching framework that I talk about. For communication, it's an acronym, clear. The L in CLEAR is for listening. If you're not a good listener, you're just going to miss a lot. And there's in a lot of cases you can't. There are cases where you just can't make up for that if you miss something.

So I'm going to ask a follow up question. If somebody is listening, pun intended, and they want to get better at listening, what advice do you give them? What's the, you know what, where do they start? If they're, if they learn that I'm just not good at listening, they think they are, but they find out they're not. Kind of like your experience. You think you're friendly and realize, oh, I'm tunnel vision. Where should you start to improve your listening? What are some things, practical things people can do?

So there's lots of exercises that we do in training. So for example, there's a lot of sort of common causes that cause people to not listen effectively. So for example, the number one cause for most people of not being a good active listener is instead of me actively listening to what you're saying, I'm actually thinking about what I'm going to say next. I don't want that little pregnant pause that's uncomfortable. I want to sound smart and relevant and impressive. So I'm thinking while you're talking about what I'm going to say and that's making me not listen very well. Right. That's just one. There's a whole bunch of these. There are exercises you can do to get better at these and sort of identify. And again, you could do a little bit of an assessment and figure out. So one of the exercises that we do is something as simple as a journal. So let's take a minute right now and think about when I reflect back on, let's say a meeting I was in last week or several meetings I was in where I feel like there were some things that I missed from, from other people. What was the situation I was in where I wasn't listening very well. What caused that? Okay, in this case, Paul was talking and I was thinking about what I was going to say next. Okay. Paul was talking. I want to identify who was talking. What's the situation? I was in a meeting. As you start to do this, you're going to start to find patterns. I do that more when I. When my boss is running the meeting. I do it more when I'm talking to my spouse. I do that more when fill in the blank. Right. And so you start to identify patterns. Now you can attack that with the plan of action that's actually aimed at where, you know, you're starting to see these things. This is just one area that, you know, thinking about something while someone's talking, judging you say something. And I don't like you as a person. So I completely tuned out of listening to the rest of the detail behind it because I just don't like you. Come to find out, everybody else in the meeting thought it was a fantastic idea, but I checked out because I. You and I just don't get along. So I just didn't want to hear it. Right. There's a ton of these that you can list these out and you can attack those one by one. And there are exercises you can do for all of them. Some you do on your own, some you do with someone else. The key to all of them is you want to do those in a low or no risk environment. So you're not practicing these with your boss. It's with a friend, a coworker. You trust a family member, somebody that knows you well enough that they can give you that feedback. And you're not making your boss think you're a bozo because you're saying, hey, I'm terrible at this thing. Can you help me with it?

Fortunately, I had a few bosses that thought I was a bozo, but we won't go there. Thank you. Great advice. I love that it's so important to practice new things in a low risk, no risk environment. I really like that. Like I say, structure. Go through and figure out the different things you need. Talk to people, make those lists, really think about it. Because we all can get better at listening. No matter how good we think we are, there's another level we can go to. Nobody is perfect at listening.

Yep, absolutely.

All right, so now we're going to move into the get to know you section. So we're going to get to know John a little better here. What do you do when you're not working? What's your hobby or passion you like to do?

Not working.

Yeah. I wondered if that's what you'd Say.

Sometimes I feel like I'm that Capital One guy. You know, a commercial where he's in pajamas at the end. So where do you go when you're not here? And he looks at him like, what are you talking about? No, I do work a lot, but. So one of the hobbies that I've gotten away from that was a huge passion for me was martial arts. I've not done it in years. Get a little older, and it's a young man's game, so I don't know if or when I'll get back to that, but that was. I still think about it all the time. I watch stuff on YouTube and, you know, like, UFC, mixed martial arts, stuff like that. I guess my biggest thing really is travel, and not, like, exotic travel all over the world, although that's cool. But my fiance and I like to just get in the car. And luckily, I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and within two to three hours, there's just tons of cool stuff to see and do. Mountains, lakes. It's probably a little bit longer to actually get to the beach, but hiking and just kind of getting out and seeing, like, I've been fortunate to go to a lot of different countries, but we have so much in our country without ever leaving our country, that can see so much diverse stuff. And then the other thing is a. A. A big foodie, which is a little problematic. The older I get, it's a little. Little harder to kind of keep my weight and fitness in check.

But I love food, so I get that one. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Mixed martial arts, fun one. Travel. A lot of good things in there. All right, if you could have any superpower, just one, what superpower would you have?

Oh, wow. Superpower. The first one that pops to mind is being able to go back in time.

So you'd be a time traveler. I thought you were gonna say a better listener.

That is a superpower. No, I just think I hear people say all the time, no regrets. No regrets. And every time I hear it, I think, I don't know, maybe you must have had a very different life experience than me. But there's a lot of stuff in my life that I would do differently, and I know that this. The whole thing. Well, you know, everything that you did before got you to where you are today. So if you're a generally happy person, which I feel like I'm a generally very happy person, very content with my life, that doesn't mean I could have got to the same place without some of the landmines. That I stepped on that many of which I created for myself. So, yeah, I think time travel would be all right.

Well, if you're able to do that, could you lay some money on, let's see, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, a few other companies for me, Nvidia. You could do that back in the early days and just send me the check when you're, when you get back.

Could you just imagine, even if I could have just timed, even the companies I worked at, if I could have just changed some of the timing. There were literally guys that I work with at Blockbuster who are my same age, they got there like two years before me and they were millionaires within a few years just from their stock. Timing is a big deal.

A lot to be said about timing. All right, well, I think our time's about up, so we'll wrap up here. But if somebody wants to learn more about you, your business, you know, kind of what you do, where, where should they go? How can they learn more about all the great services John offers?

I think the best place is probably LinkedIn. You can certainly go to my company website, vfpagroup.com t h e f p a group.com but LinkedIn is probably the best place to start. I post, I'm not as active these last couple of months as I usually am. Starting to get back into it though. But I post lots of stuff on there, from clips from my podcast to articles, commentary. That's probably the best place on LinkedIn.

All right, and if somebody wants to listen to your podcast, where should they go?

The podcast is FPA fast track, so you can just type that into YouTube. I can provide you a link in the show notes to that.

All right, well, thank you for carving out some time, John. Enjoyed chatting with you and you enjoy the rest of your day.

Thanks a lot, man. You too.

Thanks. Thanks for listening to FPA 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 download, 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.