The 80/20 Strategy for FP&A Leaders to Replace Long Budgeting with Business Impact - Andrew Hull

I would love to change FP and A to be F, A and P. One of the big problems is people get too caught up on the planning and budgeting.

You believe the FP and A profession gets the credit it deserves from the business.

I've been in a couple other places where FP and a more of an afterthought and a little more reporting and back shop and do they get credit? No.

How we can better manage the budget process.

I love really condensing the time frame. The problem when you plan budgets over six months is the base change. So many things change and you got to reset everything.

What are some of those metrics that you're always looking at to see how the business is performing?

Like any business, you're always looking at profit, sales trends and growth. One of the main things we're looking at is variable margin and for an FPA professional, being able to truly split your P and L that comes into lines, into drivers and really get at a P and L that has fixed cost and variable costs.

Set a strategy for your team. Think about evasion. If you learn to do that early in your career, it's going to benefit you as you move up the chain.

Yeah, absolutely. I challenge people all the time. One way to practice that is.

Welcome to another episode of FP&A unlocked. Are you tired of being seen as just a spreadsheet person while others get at a seat at the table? Well then, welcome to FPA Unlocked, where finance meets strategy. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, AKA the FP and a guy. Each week on this show we like to bring you conversations and practical advice from thought leaders, industry experts, experts and practitioners who are reshaping the role of FPA in today's business world. Together, we'll uncover the strategies, insights and experiences that separate good FP&A professionals from great ones, helping you elevate your career and drive strategic impact. Speaking of strategic impact, this week I'm thrilled to be joined by Andrew Hole. Andrew, welcome to the show.

Thanks a lot. Looking forward to our conversation.

Chad, excited to have you. Andrew is a financial executive with progressive experience in consumer packaged goods. He is passionate about inspiring teams and partnering with business leaders to deliver results. He has a breadth of finance experience supporting sales, marketing, operations and corporate and currently is the VP of Unify in Canada. He loves setting visions and strategies and bringing them to life with objective business perspectives, principled financial analysis and inspirational leadership. He also loves winning. Who doesn't, right? And he brings the competitive spirit to everything he does. All right, so we like to start off every interview with this question just to see the different answers people people give. In your mind, what does great FP and A look like? What is great FP and A?

That, first of all, is super great to be here. Looking forward to our conversation. I love the space that you own too. I mean, I was thinking about if I was starting out my career and if I want to get in marketing, sales. There's so many podcasts and information out there, but to own the FPA space is amazing. So congratulations, looking forward.

Thank you. I love doing it.

So fpa. To me, there's a couple things. I mean, one thing I'd say about great FP and A, I. I would love to change FPA to be F, A and P because I think one of the big problems is people get too caught up on the planning and budgeting. You think about the 8020 rule. I think back in my career I've probably done more 80 budgeting, planning, reforecasting, less on the analytics. Love to see that flip. You're thinking of starting your own career. Where do you really add value? It's in the analytics piece in FP and A specifically. I've always thought there's kind of three, three elements of FP and A. And what good luck's like would of course be starting with your technical skills. I mean, how could you not start with being really good at modeling system analytics? And I'm sure we're going to talk a little bit about Excel. It stood the test of time. I love the program. People are trying to get rid of it 20 years ago. It's still there. So how do you not have great Excel skills? The second part is, of course, storytelling. I mean, in FP and A, you're faced with enormous amounts of information. How do you ultimately bring it back to business owners and explain a story? What do the numbers mean? But what I always say is the most important part, and this is maybe where I differ on some, is action. I always kind of say you could be the best functional expert at a system. You could be an amazing storyteller. But if you don't drive an action out of what you're doing, what's the point? So you have to be amazing at getting actions done. So convincing your audience through your storytelling, through your analytics to make a decision, are we going to invest in capital? Are we going to cut a product? Are we going to take pricing and following up to make sure it gets done? So you have to bring great analytics. You have to be able to tell your story. But then you have to make something different impact the business. So that's what I always say. Kind of the three levels of pining.

I really like that. I love the three levels example. I totally believe with you you could do great analysis. But if you can't impact the business, that last mile influence, what happens kind of dies on the vine. And how many of us have done that where we're certain something will work but nobody listens? And that's where that storytelling and influencing skills are so important.

That's often where finance people fall off or is a great analytic, great excel. They can story tell a little, but they leave the meaning and say, oh, you know, why didn't they implement it? Well, maybe your story wasn't perfect. Maybe you didn't bring that actionability to it. So. Totally agree.

And the other thing I love that you said is, you know, you wish it was F and P. Remember having a CFO on the podcast, CJ Gustafson, and he referred to, he goes all too often the P is fat and the A is skinny. He like, we need to reverse that. Which is exactly what you were talking about. I really. That stuck with me because I agree with you. How often do we spend six months on a budget and the numbers changed? How much from beginning to end and how much benefit did we get out of it? Probably not much.

I was trying to add up for this to do a little mental math and how many budgets I've done and you know, over a hundred and probably the classic 10,000 hours. And how many of those have they really added value? And if I'd implemented the 8020 through my career and somehow forced the budget down and the analytics up, how much more I could have impacted companies. So it's a. I think it's the 8020 of FP&A and F. A and P doesn't have the ring that FP&A does. But I still think if people put. Put that in the back of their heads, how do I impact analytics more than budgeting?

Well, I might have to see how my podcast does if I change the name to F A N P tomorrow.

I don't know if it has the same ring, but hopefully people get the point.

I'm sure they would. So you spent most of your career, I think your whole career in cpg. What have you found so interesting about that industry or what kind of attracts you to cpg?

Yeah, I fell into it. My career started at a Canadian university, Wilfred Laurier. And I got an internship at Proctor Gamble Food company And I worked at Tide Sunlight Detergent and I just fell in love with it. It's such an amazing industry being in food and consumer packaged goods. And I think what I love about it the most, to put it the one word, is its simplicity. I mean when you're working on a box of Kraft Mac and Cheese, you can impact the financials, the marketing, the sales, hr, the strategy. I mean it's only a box of craft dinner. You could get involved in the whole thing, which is, I always say, very different than if you're in banking. You're. You're working on convexity of a bond curve and maybe you understand the math, but you really understand what you're talking about. And the other thing that's amazing about the food industry is you see your work on shelf. So as a consumer, maybe you work on an innovation for Kraft Dinner, maybe you work on new advertising campaign, maybe you do the financials on a reinvestment, a new manufacturing facility. You go to the grocery store and you see it there right away. So you see the fruit of all your work and you get feedback right away. You talk to your friends about it. So. So everyone can engage in it. So I love that I've been able to use my finance degree at the heart of what I do, but I also use my business degree every day, sales and marketing, packaging, branding, everything. So it's just been an amazing, I've had an amazing career. I just love the food, consumer packaged goods industry. Fun.

Do you have a favorite product you worked on over the years? Like is there a brand that you're just really was a great experience with. It's like picking children.

I know, but I worked at thousands. I really love Delissio pizza. It was us brand is rebranded, relaunched in Canada. We set up the brand strategy, the pricing strategy. It grew from small to 200 million a short time. We had so many dis. Disagreements and back and forth on what sort of advertising we should doing price points and competitive landscape. We sold the business. I actually worked at craft most of my career. We sold to Nestle and my career went to Nestle. So I got to see Delicio, another company and then Nestle ultimately discontinued it in Canada. So I saw the full lifecycle of a $200 million brand from inception. And I worked on acquisition, I worked on divestiture, I worked on egg, worked on everything. So. And an incredibly tasty pizza, rising crust pizza at the same time. So I've never thought about that before, but maybe that would be my top one.

Sounds like you got to see that entire life cycle. Was there a part in that, like during the life cycle that we maybe you enjoyed the most or lessons learned from getting to see? Because not very often you get to see the entire life cycle. Right. That's pretty rare. So what was maybe a key takeaway or learning from seeing that whole thing?

I mean, the divestiture is always fun, getting into the math and everything that comes around the divestiture. But I think probably where we added the most value from an FPA standpoint was when the brand was starting to mature. So it kind of got to 170, $180 million and really started slowing down. And we had to spend a lot more time doing trade analytics. It wasn't just show up and have 20 million more sales. So we started a whole team looking at all the ads and the price points and looking at the lifts we got out of them. Did it make sense to run a front page ad at Walmart? You know, we get a $5 million lift, but we had to pay a lot of money to get it. Did that make sense? So where we added the most value from a finance perspective was definitely that period where we took the profitability up. Maybe not so much the sales. It was kind of later in its life stage of the product. So I love that stage. Doing the analytics on the brand and really impacting the brand, the profitability, trying to get the right trade promotion, management mix.

Sure, that makes a lot of sense. So tell us about your current role. I know you're a VP there in Canada and working for a consumer package. Good. Tell us about the company and what you're doing today.

Yep. So UNIFI is the largest food distributor in North America. So we do about $30 billion in sales. So great organization. Like I said, I've started my whole career has been in CBG. I started 18 years at Kraft, I did four at Nestle and now I've been four years at UNFI. So I'm the lead for finance in Canada. It's great company, really good people. Different being in a distributor than kind of a CPG company. I mean obviously our margins are a little bit lower. Public information on margins and distribution industry. So I own everything. Finance, treasury, cash flow, taxes, banking, P and L budgeting. Fantastic job. What I always wanted to do, run a finance organization. So I get the leadership aspect. A ton of analytics, budgeting. A lot of time with a leadership team. A great leadership team in Canada and got a great organization in the us. Some companies I work for, we haven't had the best relationship back and forth. But we've got great leaders in the U.S. great strategy. Really enjoyed the company. It's been. It's been fantastic. And I really get to use my whole finance degree on the whole gamut of beyond fpa, accounting, treasury, everything as well.

So the first role where you've owned everything, where you've had all the different functions.

Yeah, so at Kraft, I moved through kind of strategy, FPA, corporate, FP&A, marketing and brand FP&A operations. So I've owned plants and distribution centers. And Nestle, I ran sales finance and then category finance. But this is the first one I've been able to see it all, which is. Was kind of always my goal to be able to get to that spot. So. Amazing experience. Exactly. Kind of what I wanted.

Well, congratulations. What was the hardest adjustment or maybe thing you were surprised the most by as you went from maybe having just an area to kind of having all of finance?

I. I don't know if I had big surprises because I think the way my career was set up, Kraft and Nestle were really good at rotating you through. So I think if you're starting thinking about starting your own career up, how do you get into a big company that will move you laterally between roles? So I did so many different functions that when I got into this role, I've already done Treasury, I've already done accounting, I've already done corporate. I've done a little bit of everything. So to see it all together, I could leverage all those little parts. So, you know, you get some people, often they're trying to rush their way up their. The learning curve and career curve. You know, it's not bad taking some lateral roles along the way and make sure you have a good understanding. And I really think it's helped me in this job that I, you know, haven't had a ton of surprises. And of course, I've got a great team around me. I don't understand everything going on, but I've got great leaders underneath to help with that. So I'm not an expert yet. Being a big change moving to distribution. A lot different sort of financial model and where we add value than what Nestle or crafted. Um, but no major surprises. And I think that's partly due to the kind of career trajectory moving up, around and up at the same time.

Yeah, that's great. Cause I agree with you. Sometimes we are in such a hurry to move up that we just take that next role when we might be better off taking a lateral in the long Run and gaining some additional experience that better prepares us down the road. But when we're young, we often don't want to hear that, oh, wait, more money, more money.

How do I go to the top? Like, that's. I've seen so many examples of people going too fast and making some money and doing okay, but then running into problems. They haven't had the leadership experience. Maybe we had some great examples having big teams. So I had team experience and leadership experience, which set me up for this. So one of the big advice I give to people starting out is, is accept lateral roles. If it keeps growing your learning. So lateral, maybe into another brand, it's okay. But can you get a lateral into another function? Can you. You get into strategy or in a corporate or in operations or see a plant, get into the service division, get into Treasury. One thing that's amazing, I find with, you know, I used to think FP&A was kind of the core of finance, but you really realize that you've got to do accounting roles, you've got to do treasury roles, you've got to touch banking and insurance to be able to do a CFO job. So FP and A certainly the core of it, but really important to get some lateral moves for your career, to be able to do that as well.

Yeah, as I've heard someone put it, we had a guy on. They call it the finance passport. Oh, that's. If you want to move up the cfo, there's certain things you need to stamp, whether it's taking a role or working on a special project. Right. You don't have to be an expert in all of them, but you definitely have to be able to check the boxes enough that somebody's comfortable, say, yeah, you can run my finance function.

I'm going to steal that. Is that a Ron idea or. I don't know if someone else.

No, the guy came from Jeff. I'm trying to remember his last name. It was almost two years ago. I interviewed him, but it was something with Gartner. They used it at the. At the company. And they talk about how there's finance athletes and finance specialists, and depending on the role you wanted, you needed to, you know, stamp certain things in your passport, especially if you want to move up to CFO or higher roles with a broader responsibility. So it was a really, really cool framework they'd implemented in their company. And I interviewed him about it. Jeff, I'll find the name and email it to you. I can't remember offhand.

Yeah, Craft was great at giving you the opportunities to. I'm going to steal that stamp your passport because you just rotate through so many elements. And I find when I got to this raw, I've touched all this. Maybe not an expert, maybe I forget some of it. Certainly my Excel skills are not what they were 10 years ago when I was doing modeling. But I've got a good passport to go with it.

Sure, I think that's pretty common. Most CFOs are not spending the same amount of time modeling as they were as an analyst or a manager.

Yeah, funny story. My team makes fun of me a lot. When we go on screen and do an analysis and I pull up Excel, you can see their faces like, get this guy off Excel. That's our job. He's not very good at it anymore. So back in the day I could run macros and Vlookup with the best of them. And now this new generation just blows me away. And it's good. I don't need that skill set anymore. I can do basic stuff. I can analyze what comes out of Excel with the best of them, but I get made fun of quite a bit. I was. They were making fun of me even back at Kraft and Nestle at my weakening Excel skills over time.

And you know, that's usually what happens. And as long as you can do the analysis and do the job, that's what's important is I say no, no. No business person ever asked did you use the latest formula in Excel for that? They really don't care. The output, the assumptions, how's it going to help me? So I'd love to ask, you joined Unified during the pandemic. What was that experience like? Maybe for you coming into a new company and just for the company as a whole, I imagine that was an incredibly challenging time with all the disruptions we had to supply chain and everything going on.

Well, it was an amazing experience personally because I had to learn sort of the leadership role in finance. I made sure that I talked to a lot of people before I came in. It was the right culture, right place. I had some friends here, some ex craft colleagues that made the transition really smooth. So that was really good. The big thing for UNFI and for a lot of food companies is our business was on fire. I mean, if you look back and look at public information on sales, obviously we are stealing from restaurant chains. What I say a lot of is this was in my career where I've seen FP and A add the most value. Because the general questions were, why is our business doing so well, and what is the underlying driver of what that was? Is it actual case growth because our business is doing well? Are our brands doing well? Or is this simply because we've got a trade off for people trading down from restaurant chains? That was the start of the pandemic. Then the next question became when inflation hit and what is drive? What's driving the inflation? How do we control it? What can we pass along through the supply chain? And then how does this all come together? So a ton of analysis on what's the underlying inflation, what will continue, what, what, what won't. We learn a lot going through that. So great experience, definitely a time for FPA to shine. I saw my team and other teams in our company do a ton of analytics, help kind of guide the company on where we were going.

Yeah. And I'm curious in general going through that experience, any advice on managing inflation? Because I think that's something every company struggled with. Right. Is this transitory? Is it permanent? How much do I raise prices? How much will that hurt volume? So many things go into that. How did you kind of think about that? And maybe some, you know, lessons learned from going through that.

Definitely a lot of raw analytics. We tried to get as much information we could, whether it was sort of Nielsen information from the industry, as much as we could on our own business. So a lot of sort of good fundamental that was not sort of high level, like do quick analysis that was down at SKU levels on what's driving pricing. So really good tools and modeling. I mean I think in business and finance you really need to know when you need to do an A plus job and get something really good and when you can kind of find float. I'd say to my team a lot, I'm okay, you're doing a B job on this. You don't need it to be perfect. That one needed to be perfect because it was at such big consequences. So probably that was one is making sure that because of the impact was so big, making sure we had good, good analytics to go with it, maybe the better ones. A lot of conversation with leadership and then a lot of potentially risk taking on what do we think the market's going to do? We did a lot of sort of gain game theories. What will competitors do, will other people do, how everyone reacts. So a lot of the other thing I love about FDA and math is the transition out of the analytic onto the whiteboard. So I love getting together with cross functional leaders, our president and everyone else and saying, okay, this is what the math shows. Let's start drawing some pictures out here of what could happen. What if this scenario happens? What does this scenario happens? What should we do? How would we react? So great financial analysis and something that needed an A, not a B job. And then a transition to sort of whiteboarding and higher level analytics and putting the two of them together.

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Yeah, I love how you said the transition. You know, you talked earlier about storytelling and I've shared this experience many times on different podcasts. I still remember one of the worst experiences I had presenting something is it went terrible. Later I asked my boss what happened. He's like, your analysis was brilliant, your presentation lacked and gets exactly to your point of sometimes we struggle to make that transition. So, you know, any advice, thoughts? You got all the analysis done. Any thoughts on transitioning it to the whiteboard, making sure the business gets the key takeaways? Is there something you've done in your career when you're putting together that presentation or you know, putting it on the whiteboard, that's really helped you connect with your business partners.

Well, plug for Fred. Ron Montero teaches some good whole courses in this area. He's really good at this. So listen, taking away a lot of what he said, but I just really like the simplicity of pictures and how do you get Generally you've got analysis with a million data points that you've got to bring it down to a story. I love getting it on a one page and I love getting it into storytelling or pictures or visuals. But at minimum I got a lot of appendices if you want to go into details. It's all here. But I'm going to give you one page with a story and an actionable insight and a recommendation on where to move. So how do you take all this onto one page and everyone goes to PowerPoint. Get on one page on PowerPoint and this is my reco again, I love to get pictures in if I can on inflation, definitely inflation curves. Here's where we were, here's where it's going, here's what we see. You know, visuals really help people to bring it to life. So one page visuals, simple in English. You know the analogy sometimes that a kindergarten student would learn, would understand or how do you think to yourself, I've spent a hundred hours looking at this that other person hasn't, so how do I explain it to them in English?

Yeah, I love that. So I'm hearing the advice is. And one of the big things is really boil it down, get it to that one page, focus on English, not finance terms. Simple. Put pictures in there, but make sure you also have a recommendation and a call to action. That you don't just give them the data and leave it at that, that you help further the discussion so that actions can be taken at the end of the meeting or the whiteboard session or whatever it might be.

That's perfect. And I think we're tired of the start that you need the call to action. There's no point doing analysis that tell a story if it doesn't come with a reco that also gets implemented, that gets followed up. It's actionable, it's simple, it makes sense and it ties back ideally to your company strategy too. You're not coming up with a reco that doesn't tie back to what your leaders have told you is a strategy for the company.

Yeah, I love that you mentioned it tying back to the, to the strategy. Because often you see that's where you kind of get off the rail sometimes. Some comes with an idea, it has nothing to do with strategy and you get distracted and try implementing it. You're looking back going, why did we do that? That doesn't fit for us at all. I've definitely seen that more than once. So I want to go back to unify for a minute. I know it's obviously low margin, high volume business, right? You're sending a ton of stuff out. Are there some key metrics you really like to watch closely in this business? Or what are some of those metrics that you're always looking at to see how the business is performing?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean like any business, you're always looking at profit, sales trends and growth. That would be anywhere. But I would say fundamentally in this crosses just about any business. Certainly in manufacturing, one of the main Things we're looking at is variable margin. And for an FPA professional being able to truly split your P and L that comes into lines, into drivers and really get it. A P and L that has fixed cost and variable costs. So taking that P and L and saying okay, on every case we sell, how much money do we make on that case on a variable basis? And then we will make a different action on that versus how we tackle our fixed costs. So it's back to Management Accounting 101, splitting your variable and fixed costs. We spend a lot of time looking at variable margin and we do that total company, what's their variable margin, how's that trending? And then what is it by customer and what is it by business unit or brand? And then that comes obviously with trending and the ups and downs and a lot of analytics that comes with that. In distribution specifically, you're doing a lot of the value added we bring is ultimately the distribution element of it. So the transportation. So we have a lot of metrics that look at truck utilization. I mean in a day we want our truck to be full. A half filled truck is no good. So we look at truck utilization. Labor obviously is a big one. So labor per case sold would be a big one. And then our industry too. I mean we've got to keep our fixed costs as low as possible. So SG&A is a percentage of sales. One thing I'll bring up on that just from an FPA perspective where you can add value is it's easy to do your fixed cost as a percent and compare them versus history. What I always like to bring up as a good FPA professional is you should be looking for benchmarks. So the fact that our estimate percent is up or down is nice. But what, what does good look like? What are our competitors like? There's usually public information out there on that. What's industry benchmarks? A lot of tools out there to give you industry benchmarks. So when you bring forward, you know, finance as a percentage of total revenue and you say it's X percent, is that good? Is that bad, Is that sideways? How does the industry compare what our peers compare to that? What are you hearing in the industry? So it's great to provide that point of comparison and management as well to help assess and bring a record forward on what we should be doing.

I agree with you. I think it's a great point of benchmark and it's so much easier to get analysis of competitors. I mean, generative AI is great at summarizing a 10Q or 10K. You know, use it to ask some questions and get yourself started. It may not get you 100 of the way there, but what if it gets you 80% and saves you a day?

Have you started using ChatGPT and these other AI platforms like the last year? I can't tell you how often I use them. They're so powerful. I mean a little bit on personal stuff. I use it at work stuff all the time. Incredibly powerful for saving time. Basic stuff like take this email, make it more professional, simple stuff like that, competitive analysis. And I don't know about you, but I'm finding 98% accuracy. I ask the questions and I read through it, say, okay, I just saved myself 10 hours and it probably has one little mistake in it. I could pick. So what about you on your side using a lot?

Yeah, I, I definitely use it quite a bit. I mean I have a subscription to co pilot, to Chat, GPT and to Claude. So yeah, I'm definitely using all three. I use Claude a lot for summarizing my podcasts because I don't want. I used to go back and rewatch them to write my post to come up with things and now I just get the summary. I have it, give me key quotes, give me the key takeaways, write the article, then I just go through and edit it. I rarely have to go back to the transcript. Occasionally I will because I know they said something about this or I don't like that. What exactly did they say? But it, it saves me, I mean it reduces it probably from, you know, an hour, hour and a half I was spending to 15, 20 minutes. It's a great time saver. So that's one area I use it a lot. I've used it in analysis. Today I was using AI to try to see how it did on creating clips from a podcast. There's a lot of tools out there and I was just kind of testing it this morning. So definitely use it quite a bit. Excel formulas. It's great if you can't remember the syntax for something, just ask it. As long as it's not a brand new formula, it will tell you exactly how to write it.

I will not be using it for Excel formulas, but I use it for so many other things. My team would laugh at me if I pulled out Chat GBT and start asking Excel formulas.

But well, you know, you should do that just to see what they do, you know. Wait, is it April 1st?

Now you say it. Maybe I'll wow them and get some new funky formula and Say, hey, your hlookup looks like you forgot to put the index formula inside it, so.

Well, good luck. Let me know how that treats you. I'll be curious to see what you end up with.

Probably not.

Well, so you had mentioned in your LinkedIn bio that you love setting visions and strategies, that those are two things you love doing. What is it you love about that? Why those elements?

I think the heart of it's fun is the simple word. It's super enjoyable to get involved in strategy and vision. I think part of it, after doing my mba, I got a lot more exposure, a lot more readings to that side and you, you just. It's incredible to see something come together and it's neat. In fpa, usually doing analytics, bringing recommendation on certain parts of a business. But if you could start with setting the vision strategy or as maybe you're more junior in your career, maybe it's just a brand, maybe it's a division of business, you get more senior, the whole company. If you can set a strategy and a corporate direction, have the leadership to have your team follow you and then bring analytics to back it up and make recommendations on the way. So powerful. I was using the Delissio example before a little bit of setting strategies along the way and bringing analysis and bringing it together. So it's fun, it brings together. I find a lot of my education from school because you can bring in marketing, hr, sales, finance, bring it all together, bring a corporate strategy in. I always challenge my teams. Even if they had a team of two or three people, I'm like, build a strategy for your team. Like, why would I do that? I'm like, because you're practicing. Because one day you're gonna have to build a vision for a team of 40, a team of a hundred. And then one day you're gonna have to bring a corporate strategy forward for a whole organization. So practice it on smaller things wherever you can. So ultimately, it's super fun. I love the fundamental swot and Pest and Porter whiteboarding. It's getting thoughts down and then taking all these thoughts and saying, how do I get this down into, you know, two or three sentences that we're going to get out to organization and a simple message. I love that and I love the.

Examples you gave for, you know, employees of, hey, set a strategy for your team, think about a vision. Because if you learn to do that early in your career, it's going to benefit you as you move up the chain. Like you said, you know, the more senior you get, the more you're going to have opportunities to work on vision and strategy and the more important it's going to become.

Yep, yeah, absolutely. I challenge people all the time, practice on junior stuff. I mean the other thing I talk to people a lot about is one way to practice that is let's say you're in a, you know, bank or a big multinational company or a food industry and you're more junior. So it's a little hard to get involved.

Sure.

What I did early in my career was I got on boards, board work outside of my company. Generally a non for profit. When you're starting out, what's amazing and that could be anything from your daycare, your church or sports organization or volunteer other sort of volunteer organization is you be you go from being a junior analyst on a massive company to being a board chair, a treasurer on maybe a hundred thousand dollar business. But what's amazing about that is you can set the strategy for that company and you can practice those skills you can give back. And even though it might be your daycare and maybe the budget's, you know, a million dollars, you're like, but I'm setting the corporate strategy, I'm building The execration, the CEO's compensation plan, all the stuff that might take you 30 years later to get to when you're running Coke one day. But it's one advice I like to give people is, is get volunteer board work because you're doing this in your day job when you're in your career and find a way to practice this so as you move up you can steal those experiences along the way.

That is really good advice. I like the idea of board work. You know, when I was in grad school I competed in some strategy case competition and it was a lot of fun as a team. I love doing that. Although remember, you know, you didn't get to bed till 3, 4 in the morning, then you're back up at scraping and you're just like okay, can I do a good presentation on two hours of sleep?

But love case competitions. I mean that's the other advice I give people is around education. How do you keep your education going? I found my MBA super valuable just from a strategic landscape, more courses, more theories, deeper into porters and pests and all that sort of stuff and tools you could bring forward. So how do you bring your job experience, your education and hopefully some outside work as well? Case competition thought that was amazing experience, team building and everything. So love that.

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No, they were a lot of fun. I love, I love doing them. And agree the team aspect, the collaboration, the learning put you in a real kind of, you know, pressure, low risk pressure environment. Like right. What's the worst happens from a risk standpoint? The judge doesn't like what you presented, you move on. It's not like you actually have to guide a company and if you do the wrong thing you could, you know, a bunch of people could be laid off.

Yep. Yeah. Love those experiences.

So I'm going to kind of go back here a little bit. You know you talked about how we need to reduce the amount of time we send on planning. Right. The 80 should be on the analytics. So as you look back over your career, any advice on how we can better manage the budget process? What should companies be doing in your, in your opinion to shorten that time frame to get to be able to spend more time on analytics?

Great question. I, I, I asked so many of my industry peers that question and there's just no gold standard model. I, I found all my years Pepsi seemed to do it the best. A couple examples of some stuff they did but some concrete advice. So things I like saying to people is and this is, I don't want to say controversial but not everyone agrees. I love really condensing the time frame because I find you use the example earlier a six month budget cycle. The problem when you plan budgets over six months is the base change. So many things change and you got to reset everything. How do you say listen, we're locking ourselves down for two months. We're going to go hard, set a budget come out. So I like compressed timelines. I really like doing a budget once, doing a really good job once a year. Nestle kind of ran often more of a rolling forecast. So you're updating it frequently, frequently, frequently. I really like that one time try and do it right, as right as possible in the 8020 rule and then move on. I love and I've done this so many different ways and there's no perfect way but you need that mix of top down and bottom up. So you need your executive team doing a really good job of a top down budget. So listen guys, we're trying to grow sales at 3% profit 2x cash flow y. Here's the constraints, couple key assumptions. We want inflation played here, this plan here, this plan there's. And then you need to drive empowerment in your team to build a bottom up budget because you want ultimately the empowerment to come through the team. Now ideally the two of them match and then you have all your cost centers that tie to your top down, your bottom up and they built the bottom up, you built the top down and everything works. And it never works out perfectly. But that would be the perfect budget. A bottom up where everyone's involved, they're empowered to set their own things, building their own assumptions and it matches to a top down. Shareholders are asking for X or corporate strategies Y and they all match up. But invariably you've got a couple tough meetings in the middle where you've got to push some teams a little more, do things a little differently. But those are probably some of the big things. Compress timelines, use your planning system. I like using it once, maybe twice max and then get into Excel. So I really like Excel for high level RNOs. You're three months into your year going to Excel, do an RNO or you know we have 5 million upside on sales, 2 million upside on profit. Here's the couple drivers. Make sure everyone agrees. Don't go back and put that in your planning system again. Don't do a bottom up by skew. Keep everyone out of that. Think about that F, A and P and it's always a trade off. When you're a non finance professional it's easy to say okay finance team, go do another bottom up build. I want to get that to the exact dollar. The trade off is you're taking all those resources away from people that could be doing analytics to drive the business. So have faith, you've got a good budget. You can do an R and O and get it plus or minus in Excel and then free up everyone's time to do analytics to drive the business. So that's a couple, couple ideas on budgeting.

Yeah, I appreciate the advice. Yeah, everybody's going to have a different opinion, but I can understand the compressed. I often think it's too long. You know, bottoms up is great. I love when you said the ideal is when they match. I can't say I've experienced them. Matching.

No, never, never.

That. That's the dream for all of us. Right, to get that, that Bottoms up done. And the board. Yep, looks good. All done.

I don't think it's ever matched for me. I've certainly had examples where it's close enough and you tweak. I always find you, you got to do the top down first and you let the organization know, listen, we're trying to get back to shareholders with this plan. If you're in this range, we're talking, if you're planning something completely different, we have a big problem here. And then come tell me early in the process. Okay, you set a 5% sales growth target. I'm looking at minus 2. We need a meeting right away, not at the end of planning to say we have a big gap. Early conversations back and forth. So hopefully you get to a 5% top down, a 4% bottom up, and then you can, you know, tweet.

Couldn't agree more with those conversations. Bring issues early, have an idea of what's expected when you start. I had one year with the business where they wouldn't give us any numbers. Like just build it all up and then see if it comes back at the end. And we had to cut everything across everybody, you know, based on a top down approach. And nobody recognized their numbers. And it was just, it was just a nightmare. It always is when that happens.

Everyone's lived through that. They go build it and come back and show me and someone says, I don't agree. You got to give some guardrails. At least play. This is the sandbox you can play in. The other thing I really like doing is portfolio management. So it works in the food industry or works everywhere to say, okay, let's, let's put all of our brands, or if you're in the banking, if you're banking products in a grid of what's growing and what's making the most money and therefore what do we want to promote. So if you have brands in this category, you're more likely to get more marketing budget, more Capex spending. If you're a divest brand or a hold on to brand, you know, don't bring a record or bring your advertising up. We're not going to give it to you. Don't ask for Capex to build an innovation on a new sku. It's not going to happen. So I think your strategy team's got to do a good job of saying to all the business units, here's where you fit into the master story. You know, you guys are a hold, you're a grow, you're a divest, you know, you're an invest brand.

Yep. No, I hear you. I think that's great, great advice for every brand to kind of understand. Here's how we're thinking about you strategically. Here's your framework you need to operate in because it saves you so much time if you know up front versus guessing.

Yeah, that should be strategy at P and A along with the strategy department and marketing putting that together. Agreed.

All right, so we're going to move into our FPA section. This we have a couple questions around FP and A kind of looking for some kind of quick, short answers. We'll start with the ones we ask everybody. What is the number one technical skill that FP&A professionals should master?

I'm going to. I love to hear your answer. It's. It's got to be Excel. I don't know how it's not. I mean it's. If you go back and ask people 20 years ago there, let's get rid of Excel, let's get into all these other systems and I've watched it the last 20 years and everyone comes back to Excel. There's a couple neat systems out there. Power BI looks really good, but I don't know how you don't have amazing Excel skills. We'll talk about the sauce side and probably storytelling other stuff but you have to start with Excel and tell me what, what are other people saying? Is there a dream system that's going to replace Excel?

I mean spreadsheets are going, aren't going anywhere obviously. You know a lot of startups use Google Sheets, which is very similar to Excel. I mean I think every FP and a professional has to have spreadsheet skills and those are preferably going to be excellent out. No question. I think some of the other answers I get sometimes you hear financial modeling. I've heard simplicity. I've even heard one say anticipation, a couple say accounting. But definitely the most common answers for sure are some combination of spreadsheets and modeling.

I don't know how it's not. I mean, I'm sure everyone's met a genius Excel modeler that can't get themselves out of it. Present it. That's where the soft skills come in. But you, you have to start with that. Like, if I didn't have those skills back in the day, I don't now, but I wouldn't be where I am.

Yeah. As I've often heard it said, your technical skills get you your first job. Generally, your soft skills get you promoted.

Good. Yep. It's a good analogy for sure.

So what's the number one soft, softer human skill we need?

I mean, I don't know how. It's not storytelling. We talked a little bit before, but ultimately your technical skills generally have a oodles and oodles of data. And it's your job because management doesn't have the time to get through it all, conceptualize it up and make it simple. And you're asking for advice on presenting before. How do you get that onto one page? I have done this analysis on this scope. I've looked at all this. My conclusions are A, B and C. And based on that, my recommendation is to do P. And here's potentially a visual of what that looks like. You, you have to be able to tell it in English to tell it simply. Without an Excel formula, you're never going to say, I did a vlookup to get. No one cares how you got it. I pivoted this and put no, I don't care. How do you bring simple answers in for management to take action? I was talking about that earlier. Then, beyond the storytell, bring a recommendation and bring it. That ties back to the corporate strategy. So the corporate person you're presenting to says, my strategy is X. They're listening to me. I can see how it links to our corporate strategy. You know, it makes money, it's solid reco, it's, you know, we. It's doable. So it have to be storytelling with a, you know, a bias for action.

I really, I love the bias. Fraction. And yeah, storytelling is one we hear a ton. Communication, I've heard active listening, sometimes business partnering. You know, there's a lot of interaction between them. Persuasion. But, you know, it's usually almost always some form of communication is generally the answer I hear by far the most often. There are some others, the most common.

Persuasion's a good one. You have the insights and the knowledge. How do you persuade your leaders to take action?

Yeah, early on in my career I thought, but it's just a good idea. Everybody will follow along. Yeah. I quickly realized that's not how life works.

I. You're young and egotistical, maybe a little, and you've done the analysis and you know you're right. And I used to say to people, but I know I'm right, why aren't they going along with me? Well, I didn't tie it into corporate strategy. I didn't make it simple. I just said I'm right and go with me. And you really learn. It's important to bring people along and give them context, but keep it simple.

The facts without the story really often don't speak for themselves to the broader group. They may to you who did the analysis. But without that persuasion and that storytelling, a lot of times it's just like, well, no, but then here's what I always believed. And I don't buy your numbers. All right, this is a fun one. I like to ask because I just love to see the different answers we get. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about fpa, what would you change?

I mean, I think it's back to the fpa, FA and P. I mean.

I could, I, I figured you were going to go there. That's what I was expecting.

I mean, the backup one would be AI to build an amazing budgeting system that saves all of us hours and hours of work. And that'll happen one day. But I think the main one is really just getting people mentally focused on how do I get myself out of trying to do a hundred percent perfect forecast. Because if you six month of forecast, by the time you get to the end, you got all this new information, your budget's wrong. Like how do you get your mindset of one day a week I'm doing budgeting and forecasting and four days a week I'm doing analytics. And even if my budget, I did a B, B plus, I got the company going the right direction. I'd much rather have someone who has a couple errors and doesn't have a perfect budget, who brings five analysis where we take pricing change, mix, discontinue this, invest over here, bring a strategic analysis on asset allocation. I take that any day over, you know, a perfect budget. So I, I think a F, A and P mentality, I like it so.

That we're, we're going to change it to F A, N P. And you know, when it comes to shortening the budget and be able to focus on analytics, but being a business of one, it's great. Now you know, my Budget, spend a few hours like, ah, good enough. Let's just go start doing stuff.

It's probably a lot easier without a boss. A who wants a, you know, doesn't always agree with not wanting a perfect budget, but.

Yep, I just got to go. Is there enough cash flow to pay all my bills this month? The timing. Okay. Is this idea working? If not, let's try something else. It's a pretty, pretty simple budget process. All right, so this is a question I haven't asked this one before. Wanted to get your thought as, you know, as you look out at the business and look at your career, do you believe the FP and A profession gets the credit it deserves from the business? Kind of the respect that it should have.

That's interesting. I mean, I'd say it all depends on the group. I mean, I'm being part of some really strong FP&A functions and some not so strong. Obviously you get more credit with better functions. I'll use craft as an example. Kraft had FP and A at the heart of what it was doing. I mean, philosophically, you were a business partner. You're involved in everything. And what that drove from a finance function is we said, okay, we've got to hire the best people out there. So we were at the best universities in Canada and Ontario, the best MBA schools, hiring the best and brightest. So that built the best people in. We invested in technology and tools. So when we were made this center, we brought everything and got with it, got the right people. So I would say a hundred percent. There were awards for finance professionals. There was always cross functionals one together. Finance was included. So I really like that culture of putting finance not at the center, but an integral part of the business. You know, I've been in a couple other places where FP&A is more of an afterthought and a little more, you know, reporting and back shop. And so did they get credit? No. Now this. Is that a circular reference that because you're doing reporting, maybe you don't get the best people in and you might get the best people and they're not bringing analysis and recluse for it. So it's kind of a circular reference. So I'd say that places where I've been where we have really good FPA teams, I got a great FP and A team now, and I think they get credit for some of the great work they do. But I think it's a little bit what's the business asking for? If you set up a finance function, if the President say sets up it to be a reporting function, then you're probably not going to get credit because you might not deserve credit because you're doing reporting. If the president leadership team sets it up as an analytic function that we want value added up. So you need to bring good governance, good controls, but analysis is a big part of it. I'm sure you get the credit you deserve.

Makes a lot of sense and I'd agree with that. As I look back at my career is it's really, are you doing analytics? Are you asking to be strategic? If you're just doing reporting, it's hard for people to really be like, oh wow, that's a great report. You added so much value. And so there's a cultural aspect to it, but there's also that how do you when you get into that role, if they're just asking reporting, how do you build a relationship so you can go beyond that? Right. How do you try to help the business realize that you can add value? And sometimes you can do that in some companies and sometimes you're not going to do it till you go to a new company.

I think some of the best people that worked in FP and a formula, usually some form of self starter and really junior you might give them a report and they do find a way to simplify automate and they come back and say, hey, that last person took a week to do that. I do it in a day now. What can you give me these other four days? And I'd like to take on this project and could I go look at this and then you know, someone like that's always going to get the credit they deserve. So you know, how can you be a self starter and look at simplifying your reports yourself to free up time to do the 80% on the eight.

I love that. Yeah. So nothing is better than having a self starter with strong technical skills that can take things and automate them and then come ask you what else can I do? I mean I've had a few like that and makes your life so much easier as a manager. All right, we're going to move into the get to know you section. Have just a couple questions here to get to know you a little more personally. What's your favorite hobby or passion when you're not at work? What do you like to do?

I love to golf, but I'll say on an FPA podcast, one of my favorite things is to play poker. And it poker is such an amazing game to hone. You're not doing calculus and trigonometry. But you're doing math. Probability. I love that part. But I love people watching storytelling. So poker is about telling a story. I'm telling you what hand I have, and I want you to make a mistake on your betting because I'm telling you I have this hand, even though I don't. So I love the aspect of that. I love the competitive part of it. You know, being with friends and having a good time and being competitive. But I love that poker brings an element of math, but an element of psychology and as well. So I would. You'll see me out playing golf or playing poker with my friends.

So, favorite type of poker. Do you have a certain game you like to play?

Texas Hold'? Em? I don't think I've. We used to play goofy games years ago. That's all we play now, so.

Got it. I like it. All right. If you could recommend one book to our audience to read, what's the book you're going to recommend?

I'll give you two quick ones. The. If you're looking for strategy books, this is. This is my favorite. It's always on my desk, Playing the Win. It was written by one of the old executives of Procter Gamble, and it's kind of a must read. So if. If your manager or boss says to you, I want you to build a strategy for this book brand, this whatever, this division, this unit, this brand, you gotta read that book. It's, you know, it's not a huge read. It dumbs it down, explains corporate strategy. And it's really about congruence. So it really focuses. Focuses you and makes sure that you're thinking through the whole value stream. You're being congruent on your strategies all the way through. So it's a lot of fun. Great book. On a personal level, if someone's looking more for development, one of my favorite books is one called Strength Finder. And I'll give you the 30 seconds behind that. One thing in my career, really big in a sort of development planning, I really used to emphasize a lot, these are the things you gotta get better. These are the things I gotta get better at. And I had this one employee who was so amazing at one thing, and I didn't understand why we were spending so much time on his little tiny development needs and holding it back because he was so good at this other stuff. And what Strength Binder talks about is you got to where you are in your life because you have strengths. And so why not double down on those strengths? You can still improve Your weaknesses. But take your strengths. Maybe it's your presentation skills, your analytics, storytelling, whatever it is. But double down on your strengths rather than spending all this time trying to fix development needs and weaknesses. Of course, there's a mix of both of them, but if, if you look up Strength Finder, it's a really short book. It also comes with an exercise on how you determine what your strengths are. But I think about stars I work with, like our friend Ron in his career, you know, you see strengths that they have. And I'd rather see Ron double down on his strengths and grow through the company with that than spend all this time doing development plans on small things, you know, so development plans are important, but I just love Strength Miner. Really changed my mindset on. I'm going to really double down on what I'm good at.

That's great. And I've seen some other things about that. You're going to get more benefit over the long run by focusing on your strengths and making them just excellent. Make sure you really stand out than trying to get all your deficiencies to good, get them to the level you have to, to move up. But don't try to make them great. Really focus on your strengths to really set yourself apart. I. I think it's perfect analogy.

I never really thought of that way. But yeah, if you get your development needs, at least they're at the good level. Maybe they're not going to become overarching strength, but once you get them there and you don't, you gotta make sure you don't have a career staller. I like to talk to employees about like, listen, this is not only a development needs, a career staller, like, you have a big problem, we gotta address that. But you don't have career scholars and they're just development needs. You keep working on it, but you really say, okay, what I'm amazing at is presenting in front of audiences. And that's what's going to make me a CEO one day. How do I keep working that, keep getting in front of people, keep showing what I'm good at? I could go work on my technical skills, but that's what's going to make me, you know, the CEO one day. Not being a technical expert because your development needs now as an analyst, as a manager, as a director, as a vp, they all evolve. You know what? My development plan now as a VP is much different than when I was a, you know, junior analyst.

Oh, I'm sure it's changed a lot. All right, so we'll do one more Question, then we're going to go ahead and wrap up. If you could be any superhero, who would you be and why?

I'm not really a superhero guy. I don't like the, not a big Marvel comic and all that sort of stuff. So I'm gonna say a kind of goofy one. And I, I love Sherlock Holmes. I love detective and analyzing and problem solving and I just used to love the British Sherlock Holmes TV series and they've done different iterations of them. But I, I, I would be that I'd want my brain to be even more powerful, helpful to solve problems and you know, call not necessarily the business world, call bad people out, but find problems and, you know, I guess it would be solving crimes on that side in the business world, you know, solving problems. So I, you know, I always joke about wanting to be Sherlock Holmes and I love in Excel, being a Sherlock Holmes. I can't do the formulas with all these, this new generation now. But what I can do is look at a spreadsheet and say, that doesn't make sense. I don't know what form. I didn't even understand that formula. But that number coming out is not right. So go back and look at that. And they'll sometimes say, the Sherlock Holmes of my Excel templates.

Yes. Being able to pass that sniff test and look at something and just say it's wrong. You don't need to understand the formula, you don't need to understand all the inputs, but you can just look at an output and be like, that doesn't make sense 100%. That's need to figure out why.

Definitely one of my strengths.

Love it. And I love the Sherlock Holmes example because my wife loves Sherlock Holmes. British.

So what do we, other than Superman or Batman or the Hulk?

You know, I haven't asked that question very many times, so I, I kind of mix it up. I've been trying some new ones lately, so I can't think of any good answers to that one yet. But I would imagine if I started asking it more. Yeah, the Batman, the Superman, you know, the normal ones, we get big. Somebody one time, you know, wanted to be able to be invisible.

Yep. Might be nice.

Yeah, I wouldn't mind that one. Sometimes be a fly on the wall in some of those mediums.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, thank you so much for joining me today. I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. You know, and if somebody wants to learn more about you or possibly get in touch, what's the best way for them to do that?

I mean, definitely through LinkedIn. I mean, I'm on LinkedIn every day looking at stuff you know, I love now I don't know if you play it. LinkedIn's added a bunch of games on there now which are really fun little puzzles and games. Oh, I love it. So such a great brand strategy because it pulls me into LinkedIn. Then I see what's going on with my contacts. I just love LinkedIn to keep up with the industry and everything's going on so that that would be the way to reach me. My emails on that and all my contact information. So anyone's ever interested in talking or whatever that would place be the place to get a hold of me.

Well, perfect. Yeah, no, I have played the games and obviously I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn as well, so I understand that one. So thank you Andrew. Thoroughly enjoyed chatting with you and I'm sure my audience will enjoy this as well. So thanks again.

Thanks a lot. That was amazing. I appreciate it.

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