Only 6% of Finance Teams Actually Influence Decisions | Soufyan Hamid

What do you say to the people? We all hear this. The numbers speak for themselves. They don't need a story.

The numbers will never share a story by themselves. You have to add context. You have to add information that's not in the form of numbers. Meet Soufiane Hamed, corporate trainer, lecturer, and speaker at The Finance Circle. A finance leader with over 20 years of experience spanning audit, consulting, and FP&A. He's been on a mission helping finance professionals and CFOs master the art of financial storytelling. I created a maturity model to make sure that people could see whether they are still reporting, which is the level 1, explaining, which is the level 2, or influencing, which is the level 3 that people should aim at.

What does great FP&A look like?

Great FP&A, in my opinion, is somehow similar to the definition we have of finance business partner.

If you were to list the top maybe 2 to 3 What are the biggest mistakes you see? And then how do people correct those mistakes, or what should they be doing?

The most important mistake I see is—

Welcome to another episode of FP&A Unlocked, where finance meets strategy. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka the FP&A Guy, and each week we bring you thought leaders, industry experts, and practitioners who are shaping the way we think about FP&A in today's business world. Together, we'll cover the strategies and experiences that separate good FP&A professionals from great FP&A professionals, helping you elevate your career and drive strategic impact. This week, I'm thrilled to be joined by my friend and, uh, good storyteller, Soufiane Hamid. Soufiane, welcome to the show.

Hello, Paul. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, excited to have you. You know, I thought about reading your background, but nobody wants to listen to me read a boring background. So I'm going to ask you to tell our audience a little bit about yourself.

I'm Soufiane. I'm based in Belgium. I have 20 years of experience in finance. I started my career in auditing, then moved to consulting to finally move to FP&A and finance business partnering during 7, 8 years. And I'm going to tell you a bit more about that in a second, until eventually 4 years ago, deciding to move and become an entrepreneur and develop my own company, my own business around storytelling and teaching finance professionals, especially FP&A and CFOs to tell better stories in finance.

Awesome. So it's been 4 years now that you've been on your own?

Yeah, 4 years and a half. So it goes fast.

It does go fast. I was realizing I'm about almost 4 and a half myself too. So.

Yeah, we started more or less together.

Yeah, we were very similar time. I started early in '22, part-time, full-time summer of '22.

Yeah, we're similar.

Well, I like asking everybody this question. If you had to answer this, how would you answer it? What does great FP&A look like?

Great FP&A, in my opinion, is somehow similar to the definition we have of finance business partner. It's just that when we say finance business partner, we often think of it as a job description. In my head, it's more like the mindset that FP&A should have. I've always thought that FP&A should bring, and it's a bit like a cliché way to say, bring value to the business. But it's only possible by having a finance business partner mindset. So FP&A should really be like the translation into finance of the business reality, but also the business wishes. And to do that, well, you have to get relationships, business acumen, communication, and all these human skills that we do not especially have when we work more in a technical way.

That makes a lot of sense. And something I find interesting is you mentioned, you know, the finance business partner mindset. To me, it's kind of what it's always been. You know, if you look at US roles, you almost never see the term finance business partner for a title, right? It's FP&A. Sometimes maybe you're a revenue manager, go-to-market finance, strategic finance. I know business partner is a job title much more in Europe than it is in the US. I've found that interesting because, you know, I see a lot of people and they'll They'll separate the two. And for me, it's always been they're the same.

Exactly. And what's funny about that, often in the job descriptions, you have finance business partners. And when you come to the job, well, it's a controlling job where you close the books and eventually do the reporting. There's not a lot of finance business partnering culture. And sometimes when you have jobs, when they talk about controlling, and you ask a bit more questions inside the company, well, you are in front of finance business partners. So this is why I really think of it as a mindset, not as a job title.

You make a great point because, you know, FP&A roles can be so different from company to company. The titles can be different. I mean, I've had roles where I'm doing very different stuff from other roles. Yes, there's some basic stuff that apply to business partnering that apply to FP&A across the board. And you're probably doing a little bit of that every company. But I've always thought mindset first, kind of role secondary. So, you know, you've built your business around storytelling and helping people become great at, you know, data finance storytelling. What is it about storytelling?

There's a thing about storytelling in my career that brought me to this. It's basically that I used to be bad at this, not especially at the public speaking part, because I've done theater when I was younger. Speaking in public was not really a problem for me, but the main weakness many finance people have, I had it. I didn't really realize it when I was in consulting or in auditing because most of the time my external clients or the people I had to communicate to were also finance people. So it was easy to talk in jargon, go with the details, and go with the mindset that many people have in this job in FP&A, meaning loving to have all the exceptions, thorough analysis, et cetera, et cetera. But when I arrived as a finance business partner in FP&A, well, I realized that now my internal customers were not really finance people. And After some months, well, I did a great job at automating everything. I created reports, dashboards. I even introduced Power Pivot and Power Query inside the company. So I had a lot of applause from my colleagues in finance, but I was not really invited to the meetings and I was only notified in the last minute when there was a business case to approve, et cetera, et cetera. So I thought that it was a bit cultural and that maybe I had to change company, but eventually the CFO who I had to present every month the results of the business unit I was responsible of, well, every month it was a struggle. He had a lot of questions. I thought he was exaggerating. And then I arrived with even more details, even more exceptions until one month he told me that that I was a typical technical guy who brought a lot of jargon, a lot of expertise, but the people in front of him were not experts. They were not finance people. They did not know what an accrual was. They did not know what ratio was used to create the forecast, but they did know their business. So bring them the business story behind. And well, at that moment, that was the first time I heard about story and finance at the same time. Let's be honest, I was a bit skeptical because I thought, what does that have to do? Stories, storytelling, it's for marketeers and salespeople. But I wanted to prove him wrong. And so I followed many courses about storytelling and public speaking and so on. They were great, and maybe we are going to tackle that a bit later, but they did not really respond to the reality of finance. It's not like when you present during an MBR, it's not like you are going to talk like a TED Talk or an inspirational talk.

You don't give a TED Talk on your month close?

No, I didn't. I tried, I tried. And this is basically what—

How did that go? How did— How did the TED Talk go for a month close?

Well, it was not great. Let me tell you about that story because it improved compared to what I was doing, but it was the presentations of our 5-year plan, actually the 5-year plan of the business unit I was responsible of. And yeah, it was a first for me. I was in front of the CEO, the CFO, so it was really a closed meeting. And I started with a story and I started with a bit more tension rising and so on and so on. And every 30 seconds or every minute, the CEO was, okay, where are you going to? Show me the numbers. What are we going to do in the 5 next years? What's the P&L? And I was, yeah, it's coming. It's coming. Eventually, I realized that these are really interesting when we are in an inspirational talk, but when you are in business meeting, well, it does not really work. And this is why, well, after this experience, I started to say, okay, I learned lots of good stuff, but I need to apply it to my reality and see how people react when you do one type of presentations and another. And eventually, little by little, I started to improve my own presentations, my own stories, my own structures, and my own presentations started to be well accepted. So when I saw that my presentations were often compared to marketing presentations, I thought, okay, I'm going to apply that to my team. And so I started to teach them how to structure their thoughts, how to structure their own presentations, and it started to go well. So I thought, yeah, it worked on me, it worked on my team, so why not trying to make it work on the whole finance community in the world? Because if we had that problem, most probably other people had that problem. And so this is how I started to develop first. Content about storytelling on LinkedIn. And I saw that there was an appetite for that. So I thought, yeah, my methodology that I developed needs to be shared. And this is how I developed The Finance Circle, my own company. And since 4 years now, I deliver that storytelling, financial storytelling training to a lot of companies. So that's a need that we have in our community. That wasn't filled until then because it was not really specific to finance people and FP&A in general.

Yeah. So you mentioned, you know, that you felt there was a need out there, one of the reasons, but what is it that you love about financial storytelling? Obviously you spent a good part of your career gathering the technical skills, doing audits, Power Query, you mentioned Power Pivot. You were a very detailed person. Did you kind of develop a love about storytelling as you started to do it, or was it your way of helping others and you just saw a need, or kind of how did that transition? Because obviously you recognized it, you made the changes, you saw the impact, but did you also find yourself enjoying it, or did you just kind of figure, well, I'm good at it, I'll go ahead and do more of it? Like kind of that journey.

It's a bit of both, actually.

I figured as much. It usually is, if we're honest, right?

I mean, you, you have to, to, to like what you do. And people need it. There is a Japanese concept called ikigai. I don't know if you heard of it. It's basically when you have to find the sweet spot between what people need, what people are ready to pay for, and what you are good at, and what people can obtain from that. So basically I thought it's necessary. I like doing it. I like to teach. Especially to teach in trainings. I love being with teams, learning from them. And well, there's a need that I saw. There was a clear need that I saw about that because lots of CFOs are frustrated by how their teams just communicate up because most of the time they are the responsible to go to the board, to the exco. And to explain every stories that there are in the company. But generally, how goes is that you have all the FP&A people of the business units, the regions, and so on. They do their own closing, they do their own presentations, and eventually we gather everything in a big old pack that we are going to give to the CFO. And eventually he comes with. I don't know, 80 or 100 slides, and he has no story behind that. So that's why I think that it's very important to respond to that need of the CFO, because the CFO cannot really take the time to go inside every single presentation and be the sort of bottleneck of making sense, making sense of all these closing, reporting, and so on. So this is why it's very important for them to be able to count on their teams to already do the job of making sense of their numbers. And that's what I really love about storytelling. It's that every part of finance makes their work useful. And I really love that word useful because if you don't make it usable, and useful, your work is basically something behind the curtain and it stays behind the curtain and it becomes compliance work. We have to do the closing, we have to do the report, we have to do the commentaries, and next month it's going to be the same. But if you, thanks to storytelling, make it useful, people are going to work thanks to your own job. And that's a sort of— Feeling you don't have when you just decide that your job is making the report and that's it.

So I'll add something to this when you talk about the storytelling. And I, you know, I've shared these before, but a lot of it's the whole idea of the last mile of analytics that Brent Dykes talks about with his, you know, data storytelling, which, you know, is so often we're great at the analysis. We can give a report. Report isn't a data story or a finance story. It's just, all right, you're sharing some numbers with them, which sometimes that's fine, but often you need more than that to kind of get a message across. So I want to ask you a question. You know, you talked about that importance. What do you say to the people, we all hear this, the numbers speak for themselves, they don't need a story. What's your response to that?

The thing is that I often make the parallel with politicians when they use numbers. And the same number can tell two different stories. The numbers will never share a story by themselves. You have to add context. You have to add also information that's not in the form of number. How many times, I mean, I'm sure you've had that in your FP&A career as well. You have the numbers, but Like 80% of the information itself is not in the form of data. It's not even in text. I remember that project we had. I was in a B2B business environment and we wanted to clearly link our reports to Salesforce to make our analysis easier and to Makes sense. Well, the conclusion was clear. Salesforce was not filled the way people had in their mind. And so it was barely usable because yes, you have to make sure that the number part was okay, but the contextual part, the one that's in the brain of the salespeople, were not formalized. If it's not formalized, if it's in the head, of the salesmen, the reps, and so on, well, you have to talk to them. You have to get to extract that information, that insight from them. And so that's why numbers themselves cannot really say a lot. I had many times in my career, I thought I had a conclusion and eventually by talking to other people, well, it was the other way around simply because I didn't have that context. That people had.

FP&A Guy here, and I'm really excited to tell you about an event I'm excited for. If you work in FP&A or enterprise planning, you're going to want to check out the EPM Summit this November in Vegas. What makes it different is that it brings together the entire enterprise planning ecosystem— software providers, implementation partners, analysts, and practitioners for independent discussions, hands-on learning, and real conversations about where AI is taking enterprise planning. If you're evaluating platforms, planning a migration, or simply want to stay current, it's definitely worth a look. It's November 16th through 19th at the Bellagio in Vegas. Who doesn't want to hang out in Vegas? Go to epmsummit.com/register To learn more and register for this exciting event. That's epmsummit.com/register. Yeah, I mean, numbers without context, it's like, I don't know if you know, do you know, you know who Nick DeBarra is, right? Do you know that name? He wrote the book Practical Charts and he says a lot of people are like, well, the chart speaks for itself. No, it doesn't. No matter what chart we use, we're interpreting the numbers behind it. And it's the same thing with the data story. There's interpretation that has to go into it. Like I said, politicians could take 2 numbers and tell 2 completely different stories with them or make 2 totally different arguments with the same number. And so, you know, it's our job to help give that appropriate context. I think that's a good way to look at it. And, you know, question for you is something you've said on LinkedIn. I'd love a little bit more about this. You've talked about how you're trying to systematize storytelling, you know, and you have some people that have this idea that storytellers are born. Not something I've ever believed. Can some people be naturally better at it? Yes. But I think everybody can learn kind of storytelling. So walk a little bit through how you've systemized it and what that means, especially for finance people, because as you said earlier, it's different, right? We're not giving those TED Talks.

Yeah, exactly. Well, why do I use systematize? It's because the first thing I learned when I started to teach storytelling is that People need a methodology. People need to first know where they are and where they go, and a systematic way to do so. That's why it's very important for me to make sure that any people in any team could do the same job. And this is why systematize is very important because you don't want as a CFO that In a team of 10, one people will do our presentation in a way, 2 others in another way, 3 others in another way, et cetera, et cetera. So this is why the systematic approach can bring a lot of values to the finance function and to the company itself, because by doing so, you create a company story. And so if every business unit or every FP&A analyst has a way to create a story that will produce the same results. Eventually, you can merge everything into a big story for the CFO. During the earnings, that's very, very important, but also for companies that are not on the stock exchange. So that's why it's really important. And the way to do so for me is first to determine where people are in the maturity model. I created a maturity model to make sure that people could see whether they are still reporting, which is the level 1, explaining, which is the level 2, or influencing, which is the level 3 that people should aim at. And I realized that in the last years when I had that maturity model active and I gave them to my to my clients, 50% are still in reporting mode. So that means that we have the majority of people still reporting. That means they just drag the numbers out of the system. They eventually put it in forms so that you can recognize them. And eventually the commentaries just state what you have in the table, maybe a bit more details, but they don't go so far. The way to improve is already to provide the root causes. So that's the level 2, explaining. And that requires a lot of efforts. That's not nothing. You have to get up, go to the business, talk with them, and eventually get the contextual information you don't have in the data. So that's why I say that the level 2 is already great. It's not the best, but it's already great because there it requires already a finance business partnering mindset. The only thing is that 40, yeah, 42%, according to my last surveys, are still in that explaining mode and only 6% are in influencing mode. And that's how you get your explanations. To become something useful by helping people understand what matters, what not, by prioritizing what matters, what doesn't, and also by helping people making decisions in an easier way. Not by making the decision yourself, you're not the one supposed to do so, but by providing them options, quantifications, a way forward. All these kinds of things are ways for you or your FP&A team to start influencing decisions. And this is the stature, this financial storytelling maturity model that is the base of the system. Because when you know where you are in that scale, well, you know on which part you are supposed to put a bit more emphasis. Is it on the fact that you do not prioritize well your information? Is it on the fact that you do not find a way to map all the findings in an easy way for people to grasp? Or is it simply that you are not structured in the way you talk? Or that your slides are overwhelming? Or simply that you are not engaging when you present because you are too afraid of taking a position? All these kinds of things are ways for your teams to improve storytelling.

Makes sense. So I really want to dig in a little bit to something you said. So if I heard you right, 94% are in phase 1 or 2. They're either just giving the data, you know, we've all seen the emails. Here's the numbers you wanted, or maybe a little more. Here's the numbers you wanted for the month. We were $500,000 off. Let me know if you have questions, right? A senior leader now has to open it up and figure it out. Yeah. Did you provide the report? But nothing beyond that. Then you have the ones where, okay, they have some decent explanations, but there's no recommendations. There's no, hey, we should do this. We should do that. So you're saying you think it's about 1 in 20, if it's 6%, are actually influencing. So, I mean, that tells me, and I want to get your thought, to be great at FP&A, don't you have to be influencing the business? Isn't that saying the vast majority hasn't reached the level the business needs, we're failing at business partnering as a whole. And I'm not saying any individual, but as a whole, as a profession, we're well short of where we need to be. Is that a fair assessment?

That's a fair assumption. Uh, what I, what I would love to say is that it's an average. Uh, sure. This is why it's important to, to say that number is not telling the story.

Here comes the statistical part around this.

Because the, the thing is, This number is on companies that I had contacts with, not especially ones who took my training. And I realized that when I'm requested to provide a training in a company, that often means that people are already aware of the last mile that they have to provide. They just need the system for this. And so I realized that when I compare the groups in the companies I go to and provide the training and the average, the whole population, we already have a better status. Like, I don't recall the numbers exactly because it was individual to every client, but here we already have an improvement. That's one of the things that I wanted to say. If you take the whole population, that means that you have different levels of maturity in the FP&A models. And you have teams that have an FP&A team, but only with the name. And you have really developed strong FP&A teams. And when I go to these companies, It's mostly going from mid to high level FP&A teams who really want to provide the extra value that they lack.

FP&A guy here. I want to take a minute and share something I've been working on. I've spent several months adding new affiliate programs to my website. Probably wondering why affiliate programs. Well, I can't train you on everything, but I can show you And give you trusted resources with exclusive FP&A Guy discounts in many cases. On my website, I have several of the top FP&A AI people in the world. I have the top certificate programs. I also have other programs like Excel, Power BI. I'm bringing you some of the top people that train in the world. There's Nicholas Boucher with exclusive discounts, David I'm adding Carl Seidman with exclusive discount, the top programs, FPAC, FMI, and more. So go ahead and check it out on my website, sign up. And if you have a question on what program is right for you, go ahead and message me. I'll get back to you, LinkedIn, or you can email me. So go to thefpnaguy.com and check out my trusted list of resources. For you to upskill yourself. Good answer there. I was going to say you gave the politician answer. It was well done. I'm kidding. No, in all seriousness, you know, I joke a little bit. It's clearly an area that is a profession we need to improve on. There's no question. You know, your stats show that. Obviously we can't extrapolate that and say that applies to everybody. There's going to be different groups that are going to be lower than that, better than that, different departments, different levels. But what's clear, and I've heard it again and again, is as a profession as a whole, we don't do a good enough job influencing. And is data storytelling the only way we can influence? No. But if you're not a good communicator and you don't have at least an ability to do some of that necessary storytelling, you're limited in how much you can influence the business. I think that's a fair statement. Wouldn't you agree? Without being able to be good at storytelling, you're limited in how much you can influence the business.

That's a very strong statement. That's also very true.

And yeah, no, I meant to be strong. I, I, you know, sometimes we gotta be a little controversial on the show, right?

No, but that reminds me of a conversation I had with, um, with a CFO, uh, in a company I worked with. last year, he told me basically that I shouldn't name what I teach storytelling course because it was basically an SP&A course, not the technical side because I don't teach anything about budgets or forecasts or something like that, but—

Smart man.

Because, exactly, because when I teach storytelling in the different steps, You're kind of obliged to develop your business acumen. You're kind of obliged to develop your negotiation skills. You're kind of obliged to somehow have an impact on the people by knowing who you talk to. So this is why I really talked about the finance business partnering part, because all these human skills elements, negotiation, communication, business acumen, and so on, are part of what does a good FP&A team, a great FP&A team. And this is why, yeah, sometimes I thought maybe I'm going to rename and start talking about FP&A rather than storytelling. But I mean, storytelling is a sexy name, right?

Yeah. I mean, if someone tells me, hey, come take my course and be good at FP&A. or be good at storytelling, right? If you say good FP&A in general, and then I come to the course and all you do is storytelling, I'm probably gonna be like, well, that's not what I signed up for. Even if I feel like I came away with benefit, I think the storytelling makes sense is I guess what I'm saying. So I agree with you. That's, that's the right name. But I also agree, great FP&A involves great storytelling. There was a slide I saw about 6, 7 years ago. There was a study done. I wanna say it was Harvard or Wharton. And I have it somewhere in all my content I've created. And they'd shared this graph. It was a graph that showed communication skills on one axis and technical skills on the other. And the farthest one up on both, there were a couple others that were just as high, but they were like tied for the highest of any profession was finance. And you don't think about that. Most people don't realize that, right? I don't think I had a finance course focused on communication in college, right? Does anyone get an accounting course of how to tell the story? Yet for advancing your career, influencing, having impact, it's just as important as that Excel function, if not more so, just as important as Power Query. Yes, you have to have the technical base, but I always say, if you really want to advance and influence the business, you got to be a great business partner and you got to be great at storytelling. Which ultimately both help you be better at influencing, which is where we make a difference.

Totally right. And, uh, that's often a conclusion that I have. It's that we leave it for the time we have. If we have time, we are going to work on our communication skills. And that's something I saw more in '23, '24 when there was the big rush on AI. So at that time we thought, okay, communication, it's a good to have. It's something that we are going to develop when we have the time. Now our budgets are on AI trainings and so on. But now it's '26 and many finance teams are coming back to what matters the most because we realize that AI is only a tool. We realize that Excel is only a tool and so on. And That whatever the tool is, if our mind and our brain is not wired to make our work useful, well, eventually that creates the same problems as it did before.

Yeah, great point. All right, so now where I want to dig in a little bit, we've definitely talked a lot about how important it is in influencing. We've talked a little bit about systematizing it, but first I want to ask, you've seen a lot of finance decks, you've reviewed them in some of your training, obviously you've built a lot. If you were to list the top maybe 2 to 3 mistakes you see, and then how do people correct those mistakes or what should they be doing? What would they be? So let's start with deck versus actually maybe the presentation part, but let's take decks for an example.

It's a whole concept, so it's not really like one mistake. Uh, I can develop ones if you want, but like the most important mistake I see is that Most FP&A teams don't make the difference between a walking deck and a deck that's supposed to be presented. I often talk about the exploratory charts and graphs and decks and explanatory. The exploratory is supposed to be a reference where you have all the information available to make sure that people can see their own departments, their own teams, their own customer portfolio, et cetera. So it's supposed to be informative and people are going to see something and ask questions about that. So it's the concept of exploring data. You can add some comments and so on, but here you just explain everything, you give everything. The only thing that when I use decks to present, so explanatory, that means that you have to sort of taking a, making a decision yourself on what to prioritize, what will matter in meeting that we are having today, in the presentations I'm giving today. And that's where most people have this difficulty is that Since we see a lot of data, it's called the curse of knowledge. Since we see a lot of data—

Yeah, I know, I deal with it a lot. I'm so smart.

Yeah. But, well, we have to share it. Otherwise we feel we hide something. Yeah. It's not the case here. You take the accountability to decide yourself, okay, I'm only going to show you these 3 points because I think that these 3 points are the most important. And that we have to do something about that. This is where the most problem comes. So it's not even a PowerPoint issue here. When we use exploratory decks for our presentations, it's simply because we did not take the ownership of deciding what to show and what not. So that's the biggest issue I see. It's simply the whole structure of the slides that we present. Because we send the slides before, so they have to be read, and we present the same slide during our presentation. But because they were read, well, they are known. And if they are, they were not read, people are going to read them during the presentations and they are not going to feel that you prepared enough to facilitate the discussion.

It's funny, as I listen to you talk, I kind of think back to my own career and, you know, one of the biggest problems I had and it nearly stopped me from getting promoted is I was too detail-oriented. You know, you want to tell Everything, and so sometimes you want to put all that exploratory stuff. And you know, more and more further along I've gotten my career, the more I've realized that no, they want to be able to trust you. You need to give enough detail they can trust you, but you need to just give them what they need to make a decision. At the end, they're looking for you to help make a decision. You don't need to relitigate the analysis you did. You don't need all the exploratory. And so I think that's a struggle a lot of people have. I had a boss that would. DM me every time I got too into the weeds. He'd like bring it back up. That was kind of the agreement he had. He helped me. And so I'd get these Slack messages. I think it was probably Skype at the time, but whatever it was. And he'd be like, all right, you're losing everybody. Bring it back up. And it was really helpful because it's not something we're taught. It can be a, it takes time to learn what's important. Any thoughts on that? I mean, you mentioned exploratory, but it really feels like it's a matter of Spending the time to decide what's important and what the people you're presenting to need to hear.

It's all a balance between knowing who your audience is and yourself knowing how the business works. Um, and I, I have a metrics to help you prioritize, and it's all a matter of first impact. So whether it's a high, low impact, the concept of materiality, I don't have to teach you, I guess, that FP&A people are generally good at it. But the other axis is whether you control, whether you have decision power on this. And most of the times we are going to talk about elements that will not bring any discussion. What are you going to do about wars? What are you going to do about inflation? Well, those elements self are not controllable. The action on them can be controllable. And so again, this forces you to think, okay, I do not have enough elements to bring to the table because with what I'm bringing, nothing is important in amount, in impact, and nothing is important in terms of control. So if I don't have anything, It means either that I don't need to come and present or that I need to complete my way of presenting so that people have something to discuss about.

Makes a lot of sense. So I want to shift gears just a little bit. So you recently shared on LinkedIn what you called 20 Years of Finance Lessons in 60 Seconds. And there's one, the way you phrased it, I thought was really interesting. So I'd love for you to elaborate, I'd never thought of it this way. You said complexity is a failure of empathy. Elaborate on that. What do you mean by that?

Yeah, I was inspired when I got this, but well, you're always inspired, Soufiane.

That's why you're on the show.

Thank you. Well, no, it's the concept. It's simple. It's putting yourself in the other's shoes. So you really think that Because our world in finance is supposed to be a complex area. Our job is supposed to be complex. And the thing is, I often think of finance and accounting as a translation of the reality in a specific language that we master. And this language is complex as such. If you fail to communicate correctly with the other people, that means that you do not have the empathy to say they do not speak that language. You just picture this. You are going to speak, you speak a language that's spoken by maybe 1% of the world population, and then you appear on TV and you speak that language. Most people will not understand you. That's the complexity I was referring to because you do not think What are the people at the other side of the screen going to think, going to analyze, going to simply grasp in what I'm saying? And so here, that's the thought. So many times you hear people talking in jargon. Yes, our actuals are so, and we think of deferrals that way. And then So many times I saw in an exco meeting, people talk about different IFRS rules, and that's not the goal. That's the complexity I'm referring to. You should not think that this is needed by the people. You should not think that it's even digestible by those people. That's why you need to put yourself in their shoes first before Thinking, this is what I'm going to communicate and this is how I'm going to communicate.

Interesting. I get what you're saying and I could see that is you're making it overly complex because you're not putting yourself in the other person's shoes. You're not really understanding where they're coming from, thinking the language they speak versus the language we speak. I like it. That one really made me think for a little while. I often talk about empathy, but not quite in that way. You know, when I talk about complexity, I often say, Complex is easy. Simple is hard. It's often easier to be complex, which kind of gets into your failure of empathy. The complexity's there because you're taking the easy route instead of really understanding.

There's a say that a famous French writer, I don't remember which one, said, I wrote you a long letter because I didn't have the time to write you a short one.

Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. I can't remember who it is, but I know exactly what you're talking about. I wrote you, yeah, like a 2-page letter because I didn't have the time to write you Paragraph or whatever. I've heard that idea before. And it's, it's really true. I remember grad school, our first class we had our strategy class, you know, we had to do these assignments that we felt like should be 5, 10 pages long, we always had to figure out how to get them into one page. And it would take forever, because you just have to keep cutting and cutting and cutting. And by the time you're done, you have left what's important, That's not easy because the first time you write something, you do something, you present something, you're almost always going to be longer than it needs to be.

I often say when I have my training participants, when they do have to present in the end, I often say, get to the point. When you are not at ease with a topic or even when you are not concentrated enough, you tend to overexplain. And then you explain once and then you will re-explain in another way until the people start nodding, et cetera. But sometimes say the word, say the sentence, and let people just ingest what you said.

Well, I love how you said ingest. One of the things we often talk about in, in our training when we get into storytelling Is don't be afraid of the pause. Don't be afraid of just taking a breath, waiting a minute, let people absorb things, right? And that's kind of what you're talking about a little bit there is sometimes we just need to share it and then be quiet.

Exactly. The, the, the pause does really incredible things because, yeah, just like you said, it gives time to people to Well, digest what you've just said and it creates a sort of tension for what's coming. So you have a double effect there, but you'd better be good in what's following then.

Yeah, exactly. If you, if you give a pause, especially for dramatic effect, you better make sure you follow it up with something good. Otherwise, everybody's like, okay, that, that bombed. Which unfortunately is usually what happens when I tell jokes, but that's another story.

Oh, that, that's another story indeed.

Ouch, I'm hurt.

No, um, I love your Excel jokes, Paul.

Everybody does. What can I say? No, you gotta have fun. All right, so I want to move into what we call our FP&A section. These are some standard questions or similar questions I ask every guest. Sometimes I modify them a little bit, but if I was to ask you What is the number one technical skill FP&A professionals should master? What would you say it is?

The technical skill? Well, I would say the driver tree. Why? It's because it seems weird when we are in, after a long run in FP&A and that we had a long career, but Many people, when modelizing their financial model, their forecast, their budgets, or even any other models inside their companies, I saw so many parts that are often, I wouldn't say hardcoded, but that do not depend on operational drivers. And those operational drivers sometimes we use what I call results instead of root causes. Like when I was working in a SaaS company, for example, ARPU was used as a root driver, like average revenue per user. The thing is that this depended on the tier that people took about the subscription and also about out-of-bundle consumption. So there were so many things behind that, that just using ARPU as the basic driver was already misleading. You were not able to make any decision based on that. You were not able to, how can I say, just Think about the strategy that you are going to develop next year to reach the targets. What am I going to do? Just do a bit more marketing on the high tier? Just going to increase the prices on the out-of-bundle? All these kind of things that was so frustrating. So that's why I would say that the first technical skill or the top technical skill that I would love FBA teams to develop is the driver tree, because thanks to that, you go until the driver that makes the most sense in the process.

You know, it's funny you mentioned the driver tree because, so I'm getting ready to release my first LinkedIn Learning course. It's on business acumen and we spend, I want to say, 3 videos talking about the value driver tree and walking through examples, 3 or 4 videos. So First person I've ever had who has said driver tree. So I love it.

First answer.

That's different. So thank you for sharing.

Yeah. And I didn't know you were developing that. So great.

Yeah. It should come out hopefully in a— actually, it should come out before this episode's released if all goes well. We'll see. It's in production.

Excellent.

All right. What about the number one soft or human skill?

Well, I'm—

Where could you go with this one? I'm really curious.

Well, I'm sort of compelled to say storytelling then.

I would've never guessed.

No, but I mean, of course, especially because the way I conceive storytelling is a mix of every human skill that you are supposed to bring. You, you cannot bring any good story to people if you don't put yourself in their shoes, know the business. Uh, know how to negotiate, know how to handle conflicts. All these elements go together in a good story. So yeah, storytelling.

All right. Well, you didn't surprise me there. So, well, nah.

At least the development of my response surprised you, right?

All right. So to build on storytelling, what's the most important skill, mindset change? What's the number one thing people need to do? to be great at storytelling?

One of the things is that they have to develop a sort of let-go attitude. They need to be able to understand that what they see is not especially what they need to show. They simply have to prioritize. And that's why this let-go attitude, it's also developing a sort of accountability. of the finance team, because as such, you have to decide. I don't say that you have to make decisions at the business level, but you have to decide what to bring to the table. And basically you become a chef that creates the menu. You do not have all the ingredients on the table. You do 3 dishes and maybe 3 entries, 3 main dishes, et cetera. You become a chef. And that's this mindset change that a lot of people have a hard time to develop. In most of the trainings that I have, I often have people, yeah, but what about this? We saw that in our dataset, or what happens with that? Well, it's analyzed. It's good. You made sure that there was no issue that needed to be brought to the table. That's good. You just live with that. Yeah, but don't we hide something? No, you don't. You decide and that's it.

I love that last part. You decide and that's it. It's just remembering it's— you're bringing what you think is important. Will you get it right every time? No, you won't. You'll make mistakes. We could both share examples, I'm sure, but that's part of your job and that's part of the learning and you do the best you can. All right. These are the get-to-know-you sections. So we're moving past FP&A. Get to know you a little bit personally. If you could keep only one app on your phone for the next year, which app would you keep?

Yes, but it's going to be Spotify.

I think someone else said WhatsApp.

So yeah, I know why.

Why Spotify?

Yeah, because I mean, WhatsApp, I could just go back to the simple text messages and I'm going to, to be able to live with that. But Like Spotify, music is an important part of my life. I don't play any music instrument, but I really love to listen to music. I love to listen to podcasts. And so this is the go-to app that I just use when I'm home, when I'm in my car, because I really like music and old-style music. It's really difficult for me to admit that I became old and I start to criticize young people's music. But yeah, no, it's the application that I would use all the time because it simply gives me a sort of break during the day to listen to old albums, to a good playlist that I made myself or that others made. And that gives me some fresh air to my mind.

All right, so we got Spotify. If you had to give a TED Talk tomorrow, On a topic outside your area of expertise, what would you give a talk on?

Yeah, outside of my area of expertise is a bit difficult because I gave a sort of TED Talk in a company when I was younger some years ago, and it was about how I think that AI is not going to take our jobs. It's somehow related to what I'm doing today, but No, a TED Talk would be about how I think that we lost our ability to debate today. It's frightening how I see the world going in the communication part, in how people are ready to accept other people's idea. You do not have to follow them, but you just have to accept That they exist. And the world became so extreme that it frustrates me. It's really hard to have a conversation without having people that are open-minded and are simply able to think, okay, I'm thinking something else than you, but I'm happy that you share your thoughts about a specific topic. And so conversations today are either black or white, but they are never gray anymore. And that frustrates me a lot. So.

Yeah.

I won't develop a TED Talk about that, about the need to go back to that, because this is how we developed our civilization today.

I will listen to that talk. So let me know when you give it. I fully applaud that one. I'm with you 100%. All right. So what are you going to change about FP&A? You've had a minute to think about it.

Yeah, I didn't think about that, but—

Yeah, I asked you 2 other questions, so I'll give you a few seconds.

Let me just think because it's a big responsibility, but yeah, no. Okay, good. Yes.

It came to you.

Yeah. Now, what I would change about FP&A is what I observe most of the time. There is a sort of pyramid of communication. What I call the pyramid of communication is when you are an FP&A analyst, you are going to present to your manager and the manager is going to present to the directors. What I would change is to give all people from all the hierarchical structure, the possibility for them to present in front of a business partner, in front of any type of audience, because there are always people who are ready to listen to anyone. It's just that culturally we are limited to the management committees, the exco, the board, while there are staff meetings all week. There are all hands that are developed for the whole company, the whole department, the whole building, and so on. So just give the opportunity to anyone to come and present one of their topics. Not only will that give them more opportunities to practice, but also more visibility. And that's a way for them to develop their own career, their own knowledge of the company. And to become even more useful.

Alrighty. I like it. All right. So as we wrap up here, we're at the end of our time. Just tell our audience a little bit about how they can follow you if they're interested in training, how they can reach out to you. This is your opportunity to give everybody a 30-second sales pitch or whatever you want. But as we wrap up here, I'll give you the last word.

Excellent. Thank you for that. Well, I'm Soufiane and you can find me on LinkedIn, Soufiane Hamid. And there I'm all day sharing information, insights, thoughts about storytelling and finance business partnering in general for FP&A. And you can also find me on thefinancecircle.com. So I specifically train FP&A teams on how to develop and systematize their storytelling approach thanks to full-day trainings, workshops. And also events that are created for offsites. So if you have needs for full-day training or simply if you think of organizing an offsite for your FP&A team and finance teams, just contact me and you will see how we can develop and systematize the communication part of your FP&A teams.

All right. Well, perfect. So thank you so much for joining me. I enjoyed the conversation as always, Soufiane, and I'm sure the audience will enjoy it. Keep sharing the message you're sharing about the importance of storytelling, and thanks for coming on the show.

Thanks for having me. It was fun, Paul.

That's it for today's episode of FP&A Unlocked. If you enjoy FP&A Unlocked, please take a moment to leave a 5-star rating and review. It's the best way to support the FP&A Guy and help more FP&A professionals discover the show. Remember, you can earn CPE credit for this episode by visiting earmarkcpe.com, downloading the app, and completing the quiz. If you need continuing education credits for the FPAC certification, complete the quiz and reach out to me directly. Thanks for listening. I'm Paul Barnhurst, the FP&A Guy, and I'll see you next time.