Strategies for Integrating Data and Driving Decisions With Michael Dion

So how do you see it changing over the next few years, especially with generative AI and all the technology changes coming?

I think we do still have some more transformation. You still hear a lot of people saying FPA is about strategy. I think we've made that transition. I see the process work going away because that's what can be automated.

So you don't think Excel is going to die anytime soon like all these people are saying AI is going to kill Excel?

Never. To me. Great. FPA is about bringing people together. It's about bringing different departments and teams together to help your business partners make the best decisions possible for the company. Our data needs are so great now that the IT organizations can't handle them and cleansing them the way we need them cleansed. That's where we as FPA professionals to be jumping into those conversations. These tools require great data and rarely do we have great end to end data across our system.

What is the number one technical skill for FP&A professionals to master?

For me.

This week's title sponsor is Plan Buddies, the number one planning community for planning professionals. Check it out at plan-buddies.com and join me in the community today. Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A tomorrow where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, guiding you through the evolving landscape of FP&A. Each week we are joined by industry experts, practitioners and thought leaders who share their experiences with us and help us navigate today's complexities and tomorrow's uncertainties. Whether you're a seasoned FP and a professional or just starting your journey, this show has something for everyone. I'm thrilled to welcome our guest this week onto the show. Michael. Welcome to the show.

Hi Paul. So good to be here today.

Yeah, excited to have you. So, a little bit about Michael and then we'll jump into one of the first questions we like to ask every guest. So he's coming to us from Orlando, Florida. He currently works as a senior management of finance at a Fortune 100 company and he earned his Master's in finance and his undergrad from University of Florida. So, first question I want to ask you from your experience. What does great FP&A look like? What is great FP&A?

So to me, great FPA is about bringing people together. It's not about the numbers, it's not about all the the reports and forecasts we pull together. It's about bringing different departments and teams together to help your business partners make the best decisions possible for the company and sometimes decisions that would not have come out if any one department was working on it by themselves.

Chris, do you have an example of what you mean by that? Like where all the departments led to a better result versus kind of just one department doing it? Something you could think of there?

Yeah, that's a great one. So a big one we do a lot is we integrate with consumer insights and marketing. I found a lot of value in taking their insights of what consumers say they want and what consumers are asking us for and blending it with where we are or aren't seeing purchase activity. Because a lot of times the, the hidden opportunities are in things where we haven't put the product there. Which is why people aren't buying. Right. They're not buying because we didn't give them the opportunity to. And if we purely looked at the numbers, we'd be looking at our biggest product lines, our fastest growing product lines, and we'd entirely miss that demand piece. Putting them all on one page allows our operators to see that and make the right.

That's a great example, I love that, of being able to see that market research data you've done that says there's a change in trend, this is becoming more important or people are more interested in it. You can look at financials and say, okay, we're not. That's not being prefaced or pushed at point of sale. Let's marry those two together and capitalize on that opportunity.

Yeah, exactly.

Love it. So I'm curious your thoughts, right? Over the last couple of years, FP&A has changed a lot. We've seen it go from, you know, being viewed as just back office to front office a lot more to being much more strategic and commercial driven. Like as you remembered, as you mentioned, it's bringing people together, it's not just dealing with a spreadsheet. So how do you see it changing over the next few years, especially with generative AI and all the technology changes coming? Do you see FP and A being different five years from today, or do you think it'll be pretty similar to what it is today?

I think we do still have some more transformation. I think, you know, you still hear a lot of people saying FP&A is about strategy. I think we've made that transition. The transition that I see is that still today and especially when I started my career, we were very hands on in process, right? Getting the month end reports out, physically sitting down and adjusting a forecast, building models. I see the process work going away. Because that's what can be automated. But where I see the biggest shift is, and it's already starting to happen, is we need to almost be pseudo IT professionals. You know, just like how you had to learn and transition into Excel 20 years ago. You're going to, I think in five years need to know Python and need to know some of these generative AI tools that are coming out because it's how we're going to work with our data. So, and that's the biggest piece is that our data needs are so great now that the IT organizations can't handle them and cleansing them the way we need them cleansed. That's where we as FP&A professionals, even at the senior manager level, need to be jumping into those conversations. Because these tools require great data and rarely do we have great end to end data across our systems. I mean, I've worked at some companies where we had five different ledger systems on different platforms feeding into one. It's master data nightmare.

I can relate. I worked with a company that I don't know, we had like 10 different billing platforms and just the division I supported, I think we had four different billing platforms in one of them and two in the other. So I get it. It's a nightmare when everybody spells Delta Airlines differently. That's the example I use when I worked in travel, right? Delta Air, Delta Airlines Inc. Delta Airlines, Delta with a capital like. All right, I'm done. Delta Group, like which Delta are we using today? I totally can relate to that one a lot. One other question before I ask you. Just tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. I want to ask one more question. You mentioned you think it's going to become much more technical Python. So I'm curious, what are you doing today to prepare for that? If that's your view, Are you learning Python or where's your kind of head at in that area?

I'm doing two things. So I'm doing. I'm working on Python and I'm working on generative AI as it relates to automating processes. That's really where I'm working, is bringing those two together. And actually I've married the two together by having AI write my Python scripts. I know that'll be sacrilegious to some who like to sit down and code, but I'm all about efficiency and I've been using the generative AI to teach myself Python by learning its functionality, by reviewing libraries of code and then having the bulk of the code written by AI tools which I have found it does exceptionally well. I've had a lot of success with Python with vba. The code outputs are great because there's a right answer in there. Right. It's not. It's not so much gray area where AI struggles. If you give it very specific instructions and tell it a task, there's code for that and it generates the code very well.

Yeah, no, I've definitely seen a little bit of that. I haven't done much on the Python front. I've used it to help me with Excel. I see it often will give the code and I know it does a really good job there. I've heard a lot of people talk about that, so I appreciate you sharing how you're doing it. I think it's really exciting to see. I. You're not the first one that said AI is going to make us in some ways more technical, not less. A lot of people think it's less, but I've heard some say it's just different. There's going to be more of a need, kind of the data science side of things, maybe that programming a little bit in FPA than there is today, as well as the strategic side that continues to grow. So it's an interesting mix, if you think almost.

I. I look at it as. It's like. It's like your superhero cape. Right. AI can't do the work by itself. It needs you to guide it. And part of guiding it is being extremely technical with guiding it. But once you guide it the right way, it can 10x your abilities.

You know, I. I wanted to joke what I thought of. Have you seen the Incredibles?

I have, yeah.

Edna. No cape. No capes. That's what I thought of when you said that. I'm sitting there capturing. Sure. Because like, capes get caught. Anyway, sorry, total, total side side note, but why don't you take a minute and just walk us through a little bit more of your background, how you got where you're at today, how you got into finance. Just introduce yourself to the audience and then we have some other questions we'll jump into here.

Sure, absolutely. So. So, first and foremost, I have a wonderful wife that I met actually working at my first job out of college. So we've been together since then. We have two amazing kids, a two and a half year old and as I say, a half year old who are just, just so much fun and keep us so busy. And then my dog, who, when I'm working from home is my. My supervisor and he's actually sitting on my feet right Now I was fortunate enough to receive. Coming out of the University of Florida, I received an offer for a finance internship at kind of a dream company in the media space. I was able to develop my career there. Um, big companies move fast, and in a period of six years, I had five positions and was able to kind of quickly learn a lot of different skill sets from different managers. Was kind of looking for something new and to broaden my skill set. So I took a controller role at a startup where I was the head of finance and accounting. Have phenomenal respect for accountants because that is extremely challenging work, especially in the construction space. And quite honestly, I didn't know what I was getting myself into, but kind of learned as I went. And there you go. I had an opportunity to follow my wife out to the west coast and took another dream role at Lionsgate Entertainment, where I worked in their corporate FP and a function doing consolidations and got really cool exposure to the television production, streaming services, movies, kind of right as streaming was coming to life. Spent some time in Verizon working in their center of excellence for FP and a doing a lot of shared services, finance and planning, standardization. Some really fun work there as they kind of transformed their finance organization. One of the biggest finance teams in the entire world, which was exceptional. And now back at the company where I started my career, had an opportunity to come back, kind of marry some of my media and entertainment experience together, and it's just been a wild ride.

Fun. So speaking of media and entertainment, recently had the opportunity to do some training and one of the ladies we worked with, it was 2K, the video game company, and she just took the lead finance role, almost kind of like a CFO role. I think she's head of finance. But at Ron Howard's company, I know he merged that with someone else. Can't remember the name of it. Now imagine Imagine Entertainment. And see, I kind of. You mentioned Lionsgate. I could tell it was kind of like the dream for her. So I'm curious, media industry. Why the media industry? What fascinates you about it? You've been at Lionsgate, other large companies, Verizon, etc. What gets you excited to work in that space?

So there's two big things. The first thing is I love storytelling and presentations. And the media industry really lends itself to that because first of all, you're working with people who are storytellers. They're. They're a fun group to be around, very creative, very passionate about their product. And the media industry is made up of a lot of Events, right? There's movies come out and TV shows come out, and there's all these big events that create really cool stories to tell in the finances. And I end up tying into that. It's also really challenging to forecast because you're working with products. You know, when I was at Verizon, there's momentum in a subscription business, right? What we sold last month, we're not going to lose half of our customers overnight. It's just not going to happen. But in a media business, you put a movie out there like we would do at Lionsgate, and if you got within 20% of the box office forecast, you were thrilled because you're going off of historical comps, right? You're looking at, well, if we're going to do Hunger Games 2, how much did Hunger Games 1 make? And you go from there. And you're never going to be right. We always say you're never right in forecasting, but you're really never going to be right. You're not going to be right on the timing, the size. And you have to make all of these cost decisions. How much you make the movie for, how much you market the movie for, before you even know what your revenue is going to be. And that interplay of building this kind of portfolio and hoping that the portfolio succeeds almost like venture capital, that really fascinates me from a finance and forecasting standpoint. I like a good challenge.

I could definitely see where that's the challenge is. You were mentioning that in forecasting and how widely different they could be. I recently listened to a podcast where someone was talking about forecasting the ERAs tour, right. Taylor Swift, and I imagine that was probably one that was under forecasted. I don't think anyone expected it to be that big. Right. It's like the movie that goes huge, like, you know, Forest Gump. I don't think anyone quite expected that to explode. Or you got the opposite. We spent 300 million on this movie at bombed at the box office, and we're going to lose a ton. Because the rule of thumb, I heard once from somebody this was independent. I don't think it may be as true for big, huge companies. But he was a small independent filmmaker and he goes, I basically need to make about three times what it cost me to get my money back. When you add in the marketing and how much the movie theaters get and all the cost along the value chain, and often that doesn't happen until you release it on video.

That's very true. Yeah. I mean, and even TV shows typically don't make money for three or four years even going beyond kind of the box office for movies. It's, it's a very challenging industry and you make a lot of bets and investments a long time before the revenue comes in.

Yeah, I talked to somebody once that had to basically figure out what the value into perpetuity were of some of the biggest brands in the world in media talk, like Lion King as an example. Like, what is the value of Lion King 2? All the toys in the future, all the shows, everything that happens, they had to do that for a number of big names like that. And they shared kind of that experience and they had to do it 20 years ago and try to figure out what the value was into perpetuity. You think it's hard enough to try to forecast a year ahead now? Try to look into the future and also figure what are the different streams that are going to be in the future. You know, I'm guessing 20 years ago, probably didn't think everything was going to be streaming like it is today. Right. So just very different economics and just amazing to hear her talk about that. So media, I do think it's a really fascinating industry.

And oh, by the way, in media finances, forecasts for revenue determine how you amortize film costs. So you also get to explain them to the auditors.

How does amortization. Let's jump into that. But I know I have some other questions here, but I never thought of that. I think I may have heard that once. But how does the amortization work? Like, what's the typical life that you amortize a movie over? How do you think about it?

The United States under GAAP. So you'll look at something usually over a 3, 5 or 10 year life, kind of depending on the size of it. Ten years is the most. And you build a curve of all of the revenue streams that can come in over that period, which of course floats. Right. Because we're guessing what that is. And then each accounting period, once the actual results have come in, you adjust the remainder of the curve and then you take the percentage of the film costs and amortize it in that period. So it's, it's a weird one where usually when we're doing any kind of accounting exercise, accountant could almost do it in a silo if they needed to. But it's one rare one where the kind of like somehow some insurance works. It's where the curve over the remaining life of it that finance provides actually determines the percentage of amortization in that quarter.

Yeah, I mean it's kind of like when you're doing accruals for revenue at the end of the month. Often accounting needs finance help to understand that this is more complex than that. But I do know a lot of what you're talking about with accruals and amortization and because I I supported travelers check and different situation but we. You took breakage revenue and in the international markets in the US it was all considered abandoned property and was turned back over to the states because you could identify the person not so much with gift card. Right. If you can't identify the person you could take some abandoned property revenue. Not a cash transaction but it makes your revenue look better on the P and L. And so I had to forecast what every a spend down curve for all the different countries and currencies and different products out 40 years. And after 40 years you took whatever was left over once you got to 40 years and assumed nobody was going to cash it after 40 years. But they still could because you had a liability into perpetuity if they encashed it. You then had to adjust the books. So it was. That was a monster model.

40 years, I can't imagine.

And there wasn't good. You know, the data was suspect in different periods and times as you could imagine going back 40 years. It wasn't like it was a nice clean where you could run a statistical algorithm and be like oh yeah, this all makes sense. Nope, there was never good enough data. So you were making a lot of assumptions. I can relate a little bit different situation but I get the that challenge there and the questions with the. The accounting team. You run a website called F9Finance and I know you've written a ton of articles on there. Tell me about that. What motivates you to write so much?

So this started as a passion project during COVID and something that I was so passionate about. I really felt the need to continue. The biggest thing for me is really bridging the gap between kind of the academic and I mean that by kind of all like the current resources around finance and practically what's happening in the workforce. And part of that is that as people transition from college into the workplace. But another bigger part of that is the people already in the workplace with very busy leaders with not a lot of time to invest in training and trying to develop their careers and become better finance professionals. A lot of the materials that are out there are today not translating into the real world of finance. Right. You're not going to find great books about how to handle Situations where a business partner just doesn't want to work with you. Right. You're not going to find people who want to kind of transparently talk about these things. You're not going to talk about or keep up on a lot of the technologies that are happening. How do we think about AI coming in? How do we find visualization tools? More importantly, what I found, how do we do these kind of automations and visualizations and cool things if our company won't pay for them? What are the ways we can kind of find low cost or even free ways we can do this and roll it out? Even if it's just your own job? Right. There's just not a lot of people kind of taking that personal approach to help the individual finance professional succeed the way finance really is. And that's something that I really wanted to help people with, especially as technology just keeps taking off and going faster.

Hey there, it's your host, the FP and a Guy. And today I'm thrilled to talk to you about Plan Buddies, one of my passions. It's where professionals meet excellence. This isn't just any community. It is a community ran by and for planning professionals. At Plan Buddies we're all about fostering connections, sharing knowledge and providing mentorship among our members. Ready to elevate your career? Visit plan-beddies.com and become a member today. And here's a special treat. Use the promo code the FP&A N D A guy. The FP&A guy for an exclusive 25 discount on your first year membership. Well, kind of an example, a little bit different when you speak of technology and just not even knowing what's out there. So I did a presentation Yesterday talking about FP&A tools and the market landscape because demoed on 100 tools now at this point and seen a lot of that market. And we asked some questions of basically what's holding you back from implementing a tool. And the number one thing people said was just lack of awareness was what's out there. And that surprised me. I knew it would be on the list, but I didn't expect it to be number one. I figured it'd be the data integration or the, you know, the ROI from the cost perspective or all those other typical things you see, change management, that kind of stuff. And so it just goes to show people don't know where to go a lot of times because they're. We are awash in data unlike any time in our history. And it's generative AI has substantially accelerated that and it can be Overwhelming to even know where to start. So I think that's great, you're doing it. And what's kind of been the response? What do you hear from people or how's that side of it?

I've gotten really great response on it. One of the biggest things I try to do is even though I'm speaking to a professional audience, I try to use very simple and straightforward language. I write my articles, I go through and I scan again for any technical jargon acronyms. I pull them out and put in simpler language. Then I go in a third time and I put in simpler language and try to make it as funny as possible. And people have found that it is just a lot more approachable because we're not only saying, here's this very simple guide, talking just plainly and hopefully humorously. And my jokes aren't always that funny if you ask anybody. But hopefully humorously. And then, and then giving you an Excel workbook and taking you through the Excel workbook and walking you through step by step, how to approach it and then going a step further and saying, and here's a couple of tools, paid and free, right? And the paid one can do all of this. The free one can do this and bring this to your company and try to get this in your transformation roadmap, or take this and implement your own job. So acknowledging the reality that you can't just take a page from a textbook, walk in your job and do that. And it works. All these nuances that are so often forgotten in that entire process and so far people are loving it.

I have to ask. Full time job, 2 kids under 3 I think you said writing lots of articles. I know you do other social media stuff. Do you sleep?

Rarely. But that's usually because of the six month old waking us up. It's a lot of automation and process. I try to really practice what I preach and everything is written by me. But I found some really cool ways for AI to assist me in the processes of creation.

Sure.

And to kind of speed up what I do. At the end of the day, I want it all to to be me, be human, be authentic. But I found a lot of ways to batch process, to automate things on the back end, to streamline things. And that goes for both my day job and at home. I want everything to go fast. I want to get my team home at a reasonable time. I am constantly looking and constantly trying to find my processes wherever I can so that we can all get home and spend time with our families where it really matters.

Love It I may. I'm going to hire you as my process consultant.

Someday I will build you a process map all day. They're, they're very clunky. I don't like software. I get an 8 and a half by 11 piece of paper and I just draw my process and that's my process map.

There's something to be said for that. Sometimes just a great piece of paper is better than any system out there. All right, so in your resume when I was looking on LinkedIn, you shared an experience. I want to ask about you. Talk about how you transformed business reviews with your leaders into a story based approach. Love to learn more about that. Talk about that process, kind of how that came about, why you did it and how it was received.

Sure. So we would do a lot of. Across my career, I've done a lot of financial reviews where the executives would want to bring in kind of all the team, the managers. Right. And when I would take over these decks, they were page after page of just a wall of numbers. And if we were lucky, there'd be a few bullet points in this. And I would look around the room and nobody was paying attention at all. It was crickets. It was painful. It was painful for me because I didn't even have much, much insight to add. We just can't keep doing this. And this was before anyone had even really told me about storytelling. But my goal going in was to just engage people and make them, dare I say, excited about finance instead of dreading when it was our month, you know, our week of the month to present. So the way I started again, we had these decks that were just walls of numbers. The very first thing I did is the first page instead of an executive summary, instead of a wall of numbers. Waterfall cause of change. One of my absolute favorite tools for analysis. And I would bucket this in two ways. I would bucket it in kind of the technical and the noise. Think about accounting adjustments. Mike made an error in the forecast. All the stuff that isn't really a business driver. It's just kind of the back end. It's important to point out, but it's.

Not the business, not where you want to spend the time. It's not usually controllable. Sometimes you have to aggressive, but it's not the controllable item.

Exactly. And then from there we go into not P and L line items or you know, here's revenue and labor. We would go into buckets of, of stories of major things that happened in the business. Right. Something, something closed, something opened. There was an Emergency, there's something that's not resonating with consumers. And I would break down the business performance from those stories and then the rest of the presentation would be digging into those stories to help everyone understand how the financial performance connected to what they, the management team were seeing every day in the business, to make it very tactical and tangible for them and hopefully where I could to give them some things that they could do to turn those red numbers, if they were red, to positive or to learn from the green numbers on the page and then put all the walls of numbers in the appendix because you still need those. We're finance people, we have to show up with our walls of numbers.

Yeah, there definitely has to be some numbers in there. But I really appreciate that and taking that story based approach and thinking it from the business perspective because so often those reports just end up in the round file basket instead of really being used. So I'm curious.

Yeah, I always say if you ever want to, if you ever want to know if people are reading your reports, just take a month and stop sending them all and see what reports they ask for.

Very, very true. I've built dashboards in Power BI where you're like, okay, nobody's looking at this. Hasn't been updated in three months and haven't been asked a question, so it's not really needed. So it's like, okay, what do we do now? Because nobody cares about it. Is it because of the report? Because they're not aware? You know, then you start asking those questions of what's the reason? And if it's something you're delivering every month and nobody's reading it, you know, it's because there's not value. Because if there's value, they'd find time to look at it. Regardless of how busy they are, the average person knows where they should spend their time. What advice would you give to somebody listening who's thinking, where do I start? I want it to be more story based. I know my business reviews are not very good. I have the same problem you do. I look around and everybody has that look of like, all right, when's this meeting over? And I'll give an example. So my partner and I do a lot of training. His name's Ron Montero. And there's a craft commercial. I don't know if you remember it. He was working for Craft at the time. It's a Philadelphia cream cheese. And you see the one lady get all excited. She's all, deb, there's a budget meeting and you see her during someone else budget meeting and you get everybody in the room, the guys up there, just really boring with the char and this and this. You see everybody eating bagels with cream cheese. I can't wait for next month's budget meeting. You know, kind of that idea of like, oh, I get what I want, had nothing to do. You could tell they're all bored to death with the actual meeting. And so we kind of share that and talk about how you need to change things. So what advice could you give for people that are maybe going through that experience where it's pulling teeth or you got to bribe them to get them into the room?

Yeah. And you know, it's, it's sad but true that that is what people think of our profession. And one of the things, you know, a lot of us are trying to change. I'd say the biggest thing is the last thing you should do is touch your report. I'll just start there. The first thing you should do is not touch your reports at all. The first thing you should do is learn your business inside and out and build incredible relationships with your business partners. That is the first thing before you do any of this and that applies to any role in FP and a part two. We're still not going to touch the report. You're going to rebuild your forecasting process. You're going to learn from your business partners what really drives the business. And you're going to make sure you have the best, most effective driver based forecasting model possible. Because it is impossible to report on something if you don't have a way of explaining why it changed and why you got to the forecast. Because as we all know who've been doing this for a while, sometimes the forecast itself is the reason you miss. Not that it was wrong, but the assumptions made were not the right assumptions and now we know that. And sometimes it had nothing to do with the operation team. And you need to have a very clear process of explaining what drivers changed in the business. Then you can start thinking about your reporting. But think about what the drivers are that are really key. Look at what drivers changed materially and structure your story around that. And then as you start to build your report, don't just think about finance. In almost all of our roles, not all, but in most of our roles, there are other partners who have great data. There's marketing, there's consumer insights, there's some of us have industrial engineers. If we have supply chains, we have supply chain, the sales teams, there's all these other teams with great data Depending on the part of the company you're supporting. Even if you're in corporate, your investor relations team and there's the component of Wall Street's expectations. Get these other partners, get some of their data and build a really robust story around it. Because financials are just number on numbers on a page. What matters is that we can do something about it. The numbers are not being produced in a silo. Then finally build your report and put it on paper. Preferably automated with some really cool stuff there if you can. But then build your report, put it on paper, present it with the story standpoint and you will have much happier business partners and you'll probably be able to actually drive some strategic changes for your business because it gives you such a level of influence. When people listen to the words you.

Have to say, you know, as I hear you say all that, I boil it down to build relationships, bury the operations with the finance, really understand the operations, understand your business partners. Bring that all together and tell that business story with the operations supported by the financial numbers. Not let financial number numbers. Is that a kind of a fair summary?

We are a support function. We're consultants. At the end of the day, yes, we have to make sure corporate gets a good forecast and can keep cash in the bank. Absolutely. All that has to happen. But that's not where we add value. That's where we're a cost center. We add value by supporting the operation and helping them do the best work by supporting them in their role. And we need to remember that we're that support function and focus on where we can really add value while also making sure we get all the compliance and key functions.

Sure, the compliance, all that's important. But that's table stakes. That's not the value add. The value add, like you said, is in the relationships and helping drive the business forward and better telling the story and ensuring we're making good decisions. So often it comes back to relationships. FP and a guy here Today I want to talk about the tool FPA professionals use more than any of Microsoft Excel. If you're not learning modern Excel, you're missing out. Modern Excel includes dynamic arrays, Power query and so much more. That is why I'm excited to share my new Microsoft Excel course. In this course, talk about Excel tables and how they're the gateway to modern Excel. You need them for power query, you need them for copilot. Talk to you about Copilot and I also talk about dynamic arrays. There is 50 plus videos in this course register today. Go to the FP and a guy. Click on my courses Microsoft Excel and it will take you to the course. Use the code podcast to save 20%. Sign up today.

I often find we're the data practitioners in the room. Even if other people have data, they don't necessarily know what to do with that data. But because we're the data people and because we're used to taking a topic not a lot of people want to talk about and making it approachable. We can even help the other departments make their data approachable by incorporating in our presentations because they don't necessarily always have that training or that background to do it. But our teams, our analysts, have that background to bring data together.

Agreed. So that makes a lot of sense when we talk about data and data based insights. How do you make sure you're delivering insights to the business everybody talks about? We need to drive insights and we need to be data based and review our data. But any practical tips you can offer to really get insights out of your data versus, you know, data paralysis or looking at them for the sake of looking at them?

Absolutely. So I think, first of all, I tie everything back to the drivers I like to personally, for my area, whether it can be in our system or offline, have kind of my single source of truth where my key drivers are the things that I know I need to care most about, the drivers that really move the business. I have those quickly, easily, readily accessible. I probably know them offhand. And my whole team has the same KPI calculations, so on and so forth. But what's really important then is as we look at the drivers and as we look at a variance, I ask why and why and why? Until you get to a point where the operators can do something.

Because those five whys actually work.

The five whys actually work. Yeah. So you follow the whys until the. Until you get to an action the operators can take. Right. If we're just saying a variance, there's nothing they can do with it. If we're saying the variance and we get down to the P and L line item, okay, well, we're getting closer. Well, then the P L item changed. Why did it change? It changed because this specific thing happened in the operation. Why did that thing happen? Okay, how do we prevent said thing from happening? Or if it was good, how do we make it happen again? Then I've gotten to a point where I've taken the data and gotten it down to a level. The operators can literally do something with it it otherwise they walk out of the presentation with a bunch of numbers feeling good or feeling bad about their performance and no action to take. So you should always walk in with data to incite action from the business.

Agree. It's really about driving insights into action. And you know, something you said there. 5 why is another framework I really like. It's kind of along the same. Same lines is what now what? So often the month end is just we tell them the what. Like I remember being in a meeting one time is like one of the leaders. If I have to hear one more thing about we miss because of accounting stuff, it's like I'm going to lose my mind. Tell me about the business. Because unfortunately we had a lot of accounting issues going on at the time and we had one business where literally they were driving hundreds of thousands or millions and it wasn't that big of a business. Changes each month. I thought he was. He just about lost his mind. I felt really bad for him because he's like, I have no control here. My numbers are terrible. And has. Has stuff that happened years ago because there's a major bunch of accounting and control issues with this one department that was not fun. But anyway, I digress a little bit. So that. That makes a lot of sense to me. What you said there of really, you know, digging into the whys, focusing on always driving action or at least making recommendations. Are they all going to be accepted? Of course not. Maybe only a small percentage will. But they're going to appreciate that you're always coming with ideas and not just saying, well, here's the problem. You guys tell us how we're fixing it. The P L EBITDA is down 10%. Go figure it out. Thanks. You're just a cost center, right? You know, versus a partner. And that's what I love about kind of what you've talked about here with the storytelling, the insights, the different stories you shared is it's about being a partner. So I want to shift gears here as we kind of move toward the end of our podcast here. Before I jump into what's called our rapid fire section, I want to ask you one question. What is the best advice anyone's given you during your career? What's the best advice you've received?

The best advice I've ever gotten is to make your boss's life easy. I think that's been the most transformational because, you know, well, my core job is focused on taking care of my business partners from my career standpoint. My boss really drives your career. Right. And your bosses will sometimes pull you along to new opportunities. And are your biggest advocates. And what that really for me has looked like is being very proactive on their behalf. Right. A lot of us will share calendars. Do I see big things coming up and I can make sure that the deck is on their desk just as they like it. Before they go into a meeting, I make sure that if they're taking something to their boss or to the cfo, that that is some of the best work that they've ever been able to take. Because I want to make sure that they look good going into that meeting. Because if I make their life easy and I make them look good, then they have every reason to advocate for me and help me grow. So aside from building the relationship with them, just found this very good, very good career hygiene and career advice to kind of help. Help propel things forward.

Yeah, I think that's great advice is make your boss look good. You'll look good at the end of the day, you know, meet their needs. So here's how our rapid fire section works. I have a few questions for you and the idea is to keep them short. No more than, you know, 30 seconds or so to answer these. And I'm going to start with the first two. That should be really kind of easy to answer. Short answers. What is the number one technical skill for FP&A professionals to master?

For me, driver based financial modeling. It's not something we talk about as a separate skill, but I think if you're working in a corporate setting with FP&A, that is very undervalued and the average person I come across doesn't know how to identify good business drivers.

Love it. That's. That's a good one. What's the number one soft skill or human skill they should master?

It's a little broad, but relationship building. We're.

That's what you were going to say.

We're, you know, we're not a numbers function. We work with numbers. But 90% of our job is building relationships and getting people to. To talk to each other and to trust us.

What's the one app at work that you can't live without?

Oh, boy, that's a good one. I think Think Cell. I am obsessed with waterfalls and I pay for Think Cell myself because I just absolutely love the ability to build waterfalls that quickly.

All right, so I'll ask you one other question. When it comes to Excel, what has you most excited about the future of Excel?

I'm a big fan of Copilot and some of the other add ins coming. I think we're going to see the add ins start talking to each other in the near future. You know, you think about kind of bringing together and it started to happen, but bringing together, like the ecosystem of Copilot and all the power software. And from a data management standpoint, that gets me very excited.

So you don't think Excel's going to die anytime soon? Like all these people are saying AI is going to kill Excel.

Never, never in a million years will you take Excel from us.

The way we manage data is perfect for a world that no longer exists. Over half your team's time is spent cleaning data. Imagine a notebook that does the work for you. Turn dirty data into a powerful asset with analyst intelligence. Join Modern FP and A teams@analystintelligence.com today. So I'm gonna have to pry it out of your cold, dead hands is what you're telling me. All right, I know you're currently using Generative AI. What's your favorite use case?

My favorite use case is. Is writing code. I mean, just as an easy example. I was never the best VBA coder as much as I like to use it, but a couple quick VBA prompts specific to the workbook I'm working on, tell it the intersections of your data, tell it where you want to output. And I have yet to have to correct a single line of code for VBA. It's probably been the best, most reliable output from ChatGPT, but you're saying it's.

A lot better than going to Google and trying to find somebody else's code and copy.

Oh, so much better that for some reason that just never. That just never works for me.

You run it and you're like, all right, where's the error?

Yeah.

So this next section is the get to know you section. We want to know a little bit more about you personally. What's your favorite passion or hobby you do outside of work?

I mean, I've said it to my wife that it's modes of travel. I am really passionate about cruise ships and airplanes. So kind of a big cruise ship and airplane nerd. I've been on 46 cruises across almost every major cruise line. I can look up in the sky. We live right by the airport. I can look up and point out airplanes and say exactly what type of airplane it was down to the series. My nerdy side hobby.

Gonna say, congratulations, you are officially not just a finance nerd.

Yeah, I'm Mike the finance nerd. And Mike the Mike the nerd. You know, you just take the finance.

Word Out I'm a nerd as well. So we can. It could be Paul the Nerd and Mike the Nerd. Maybe we'll title this episode that.

That sounds great. I love it.

Pollen Mike, Nerd out on numbers. There we go. You got it.

There's your new podcast right there.

Yeah, I. That could be a fun name for a podcast, actually. Gotta have a little bit of fun. Maybe I'll change. Change it. The beard weirds out on numbers or something. We'll come out, come up with something. What is a book you can recommend that you've read to our audience if you give them a book recommendation. Where are you going?

So I go really old school with this to Dale Carnegie's how to Win Friends. Influence People.

I knew, as you said, old school, that's where you were going.

It's very cliche, but sometimes cliches are cliches for a reason. It is unmatched. I've never read another book that is as effective and is as timeless as that book. I mean, there's a lot of other ones I've read recently, a lot of newer titles with some cool insights, but it's. It's just the fundamentals of, of how people are and I think it's things that will never change.

Treat people the way they want to be treated. People love to hear their own name, show interest in them. So basic. I mean, if I was to sum up the book, those are probably the three things I say. There's a lot more advice to it. You're writing people's names down. Just little things that anyone can learn to do. Nothing in there is one of those things that you have to be overly talented to do.

If I had to sum it in one sentence, it's be nice and treat people with respect.

Yeah, golden rule. It's pretty simple, but we so often forget it. So you love planes, you love cruises. If you're going on a trip tomorrow, you can go anywhere in the world. Where are you going?

Hawaii. My wife and I went there for our honeymoon. We have a Hawaii themed living room. It's just a lot of great memories there. And plus you can fly there and take a cruise ship once you get there. So there you go.

Got it. So you're going to fly and do it all together. I like it. If you could have dinner with any person alive in the world today, who are you taking to dinner?

I would take Steve Martin, first of all. I just think he's hilarious and it'd be a funny dinner. But also from everything I've seen and read and learned about him. He just really understands people and how people tick and then he uses that to make them laugh. And I would just love to hear more about that just straight from him.

That's the first time we've got Steve Martin. That would be a be a fun one. I want to be the fly on the wall for that dinner. Just don't squash me. That's all I ask. All right, so if you could offer one piece of advice to our audience to be a better business partner today. What's that one piece you're going to tell them.

So just as I said about making your boss's life easy, make your business partner's life easy, make them look good. Because again, we're in a support function and our job is to help grow and propel their businesses. Our job is to make their lives easy, to give them the information they need to make decisions and to be responsive, accountable and very collaborative with them. If you just focus on making sure they are very happy and taken care of, you will be better than 99 of the business partners out there.

A simple example I give is, yeah, I was in a role where often commissions and the forecast would come due at the same time. And I get this call, why isn't your forecast loaded? Because I chose to pay our employees. Never once did I get this, why didn't you put the forecast first? Pretty self explanatory. And so, and you get some people that wouldn't do that, oh no, I got to take care of my boss. It's like, no, no, always put those fundamental needs. Forecast can wait a day. Put those first. Make your business partners happy, make them look good and they're going to appreciate you. Totally agree. So if someone wants to learn more about you, get in touch with you. What's the best way to do it?

So you can find me on all the social media platforms as well as our website, f9finance.com where we have a bunch of email addresses. But to get me fastest, I'm most on top of my LinkedIn inbox, either Mike's FN Finance or Michael Dion.

All right, great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. I've enjoyed chatting with you. I think it's been a great episode and hope the audience loves it as much as I did. So thanks for joining me. We should do this again sometime. Thanks, Mike.

Absolutely. It's been a pleasure speaking with you.

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