The Soft Skills in Finance for CFOs to Build Influence and Leadership with Rosemary Linden

As you look back over your career, what is the biggest failure you have had in your career and what was the key learning from that.

So earlier in my career, I think my biggest mistake was I stepped into a leadership position where.

Today's guest is Rosemary Linden. She is the president of Momentum CFO where she helps growing companies make smarter data driven decisions. As a fractional CFO and FP and a consultant with more than 25 years of experience, she has partnered with organizations from early stage startups to Fortune 500 companies. We're gonna be talking about some strategy, some failures, some of the most unique requests or things we've had happen and hope this will be an episode that you can learn from each of us.

I think my biggest piece of advice would be to treat this failure as information and not your identity. Sometimes that makes it feel like one misstep can just define us, and that is not true.

And the next thing he said to me was, if you can't figure out how to bring people along with you, your career will never go anywhere. And he was 100% correct.

In FP&A, your tone can be just as important as your analysis, if not more important. And being right is not the job of FP&A. It's being influential.

Can you share a moment that made a difference to the strategy or bottom line, to the company you work?

The story I'm about to tell is about a client that.

Welcome to another episode of FPA 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 Unlock, where finance meets strategy. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, AKA the FPA guy. And this week I'm thrilled to be joined by my co host, Glenn Snyder. Glenn, how you doing?

Doing great, Paul. Happy Thanksgiving, by the way.

Yes, happy Thanksgiving to you. We're in that holiday season. Crazy to think we're already into December and that we finished Thanksgiving. So each week on this show, we like to bring you conversations and practical advice from thought leaders, industry experts and practitioners who are reshaping the role of FP&A 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's sponsor is Campfire. Campfire is the AI Native erp. And now let's get on to today's guest. Today's guest is someone who's earned that coveted Seat at the table. I'm thrilled to welcome her onto the show. Rosemary. Rosemary Lyndon, welcome to the show.

Hello, Paul. Thank you so much for having me on the show today. I'm really excited to be here and looking forward to our conversation.

I am as well. I think the last time we chatted for a podcast, I was still hosting FP&A today.

You were? Yes, I think I was on one of your last episodes of that.

Yeah, I think you were my last guest. And then I did a wrap up transition episode, if I remember right. So. So this was almost two years ago then.

Yeah, it was. I think it was February or March of 2025. 4. Yeah, that.

That would make sense because I ended the show end of March and I started my new show April. So, yeah, probably recorded in February and released in March would be my guess. Somewhere around there. Good memory.

All right, so a little bit of.

Rosemary's background and then we'll jump into our episode. Rosemary is the founder and president of Momentum cfo. She works with growing companies as a fractional CFO and FP and a consultant, helping leaders make smarter data driven decisions. Rosemary brings more than 25 years of experience partnering with organizations ranging from fast growing startups to Fortune 500 companies. She also serves on the association for finance professionals and FP&A advisory council where she helped shape the future of FP&A professionals. All right, so I get to ask the first question here, first one or two, and then Glenn's going to jump in. This is a standard question I ask every guest. So Glenn knows what's coming here. I like to start every episode with this. If you had to define what grade FP and A looks like, how would you define that? What would you say?

Rosemary, that's a really good question. I would say that FP and A great FP and A is defined by three things, and that is clarity, influence, and foresight. So thinking about each of those three things, first, Clarity fpme's role is really to make the complex, simple turn information into something that leaders can understand and act on. So providing the insight they need to make good decisions. That's one. Another is influence. Your technical skills in FP and A are going to get you in the door. But what really makes you a fantastic FP and A professional is being able to influence others. So partnering with the business, acting as an internal consultant, gaining that trust, you need to really influence decisions. The third thing is foresight. So FP and A great FP and A not only reports the past, but it really Helps shape the future. So foresight is the ability to look ahead, to anticipate what's coming, and to help companies be proactive rather than reactive. So those are the three things in my consulting work. Whether I'm building an FP and a team from scratch, or I'm helping level up an existing team. Clarity, influence, and foresight are really the areas that I focus on.

I love how you laid it out with three clear things. You know, we get a lot of different answers, and that was one of the more structured. Glenn, any thoughts on that one?

No, I. I thought. I thought she nailed it. You know, I always like to use the word transparency, but you used word clarity, and I think it's kind of the same thing, because so much of what FPA does is you have to bring the business. You have to connect the business to the financials and vice versa. And having that clarity or transparency in the data, in. In your reporting, in your analysis, whatever it happens to be, I think is critical. And then I think you hit on the other one, which is influence, which is we influence decisions in FP&A. And that is one of the cool aspects of. Of having a job in FP&A is that you really get to have that impact on where the company's going and having that influence on strategic decisions.

Absolutely. That is, you know, my favorite part of the job is really being able to influence and see the impact of my partnership with clients.

I thought it was building the budget model.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. And version 25:30, whatever it is. Final. Final. V30.

Really final. Dated on such and such a date. Yeah, exactly. You know, this episode, just so everybody knows, it'll be a little different. We're all going to be answering some questions, and so it'll be a little more roundtable discussion. We thought that would be fun. We're going to be talking about some strategies, some failures, maybe some of the most unique requests or things we've had happen. And we're really excited to walk through this and hope this will be an episode that you can learn from each of us. So I'll get started with the first one here, and we'll go to Glenn, and then we'll go to Rosemary on this. So, Glenn, as you look back over your career, what is the biggest failure you have had in your career? And maybe what was the key learning from that?

Well, I could tell you my biggest failure was the. The biggest pivot point in my career as well. I was working at a large public company, and I was in, you know, running FP and a for one division. And I was had, I like to call myself back then, I was a senior financial analyst. I like to call myself a glorified peon because I was a senior financial analyst but was reporting directly into the cfo. So I had a lot of executive exposure. And the CFO brings me into a meeting with the chief technology officer and says, glenn, we want you to build out a model that allocates out all of our IT costs to the rest of the organization based on how people are using various systems so people would have that ownership of those systems. And I'm looking around thinking, wait, why am I here? I don't know anything about our IT organization. And he said, well, we want an outsider to go and do it. So I said, well, okay. So I go out and I get an org chart and figure out who, who does what. I contact the IT groups and I get a list of all the systems and all the users of the systems. I interview all the executives for what they do. I gather all my information, I put my models together, and I'm like, oh, yeah, you know, a couple weeks in, I've nailed this. I'm like, totally excited. I put together my deck, I bring together the CFO and cto and I'm going to make my presentation back now. And I sit down with them, I go through everything, and the first thing the CFO says, you created something better than anything we thought was even possible. And I'm just like, yay, you know, here I am, right? And then the next words out of his mouth were, but you failed miserably. Now, I know my jaw didn't actually hit the table, but there was certainly was a loud thunk that went on inside my head. And I, I think my, my exact response to him was, ha ha.

I think was the exact word. And he said, you went over and you gathered all your information and you put everything together and in doing so, you freaked out all the leaders in IT because they didn't know what you were doing. It was like you were building a black box that they were then going to have to be responsible for. So you scared them so much that they all got together. They're building their own solution that's going to only solve about 50% of what you're, what you built out, and theirs is going to go forward because they had buy in. And the next thing he said to me was, if you can't figure out how to bring people along with you, your career will never go anywhere. And he was 100% correct. And so what was, for me, the most pivotal thing was I realized it wasn't just about solving the problem because I was still early in my career, I, as I said, I was a senior financial analyst. I loved the problem solving, but solving a problem in a vacuum doesn't help. You got to make sure you're connecting with the leaders and bringing them along. In fact, many years later, I was working at another very large company, and the CEO said to me, which is my favorite quote, leadership isn't about the people that you can control or tell what to do. It's about getting people to follow you when they don't have to. And it kind of goes along the same lines, is that anyone in fpa, if you want to be successful, you have to get people to want to follow the path that you're going down. And if you are not getting people to follow you, you need to stop and go back and figure out where, where the people got dropped off and pick them back up and bring them along thing.

That's a really good lesson to learn.

It, yeah, it was incredibly valuable. And it actually, I had to end up. I. I ended up having. Having to ultimately leave that company because I couldn't get out of that reputation of just being that problem solver. And because people are like, I don't want to work with him. He just does, you know, he does his own thing. And once I left the company and went somewhere else, I never heard that again because I made a point to go and really pivot and focus on things like empathy, which I think is one of the most underrated skill sets that you could have.

I would agree with you. I think empathy is critical in FP and A. And frankly, in any career job to be able to have empathy, but especially FP and A. How about you, Rosemary? What's your story?

Well, my story is kind of similar. I think my biggest mistake was not technical. It was relational. So earlier in my career, I stepped into a leadership position where I had responsibility for approving pricing decisions and a senior leader, a sales Leader. Sales and FP&A often have some tension. A sales leader pushed through a pricing change that really violated policy. And while he was technically wrong, I was totally wrong in the way I handled it. I sent a very direct email to him citing kind of the policy that he violated and how this was impacting margin. And I did not seek to understand what happened, why he made that decision. I just went straight into, hey, this is a compliance issue. You didn't do this right. Et cetera. And that did not help. It really damaged trust and it taught me a few things. I think one of the things I learned is that in FP&A, your tone can be just as important as your analysis, if not more important. And being right is not the job of FP&A, it's being influential. So this very much ties into what Glenn was saying. You have to build influence through trust and empathy and curiosity. And so that experience really changed the way I lead. And today I start with understanding the business context and I start with building partnerships with the people in the business that I know that I'm going to need to influence so that we can work together and potentially avoid things like the situation I just described.

I think that's great. I love the fact that you pointed out tone because so many, so much people think about is that you know what you're saying, but not how you're saying it. Because you could go over and you could say the right thing, but you could say it in such a way that you turn people off, which I've done many times in my own career. So I could definitely relate to that. And I think that's, that's great. I love that story.

I mean, I think another important lesson that I learned is how you deliver the message, not just tone. You know, I mentioned that this was a very direct email that I sent. It should have been a face to face conversation.

Yep. No, absolutely. You know, and in fact, actually I think I've always looked at it as you. The first place you want to go is face to face, then phone call or video chat. Now that we, we have that, the last resort is kind of email because it's most impersonal. It's the easiest to ignore it too. Well, Paul, you know what, I'm gonna, I'm gonna turn the question back on you. So how would you, you know what, what have you had in your career that you would say is your biggest failure and what you learned from it?

Before I jump on my biggest failure, two things. When you said, you know, last should be email, I heard a quote somewhere. Just because you send an email, you can't assume communication has happened. And I love that idea because you don't know if they even read it, if they got it for sure, if they've seen it. And so if it's important, yeah, I would say email is the last resort. So kind of add to your point. The second thing before I share my failure is one of the best lessons I ever learned about failure. So I'm a 20 year old I'm. I did a mission for my church, Church of Jesus Christ Latter day Saints. I'm 19, 20 at the time, you know, out there all day working, and we're sitting in front of our mission president. This guy's probably worth a billion dollars. He had ran so several very large companies, and he's, I don't know, 50 years old. And he looks at us and he goes, he called us elders. That was the name they use. He goes, I've never had a failure in my life. Like, what in the world is this guy talking about, right? We've all had failures. And then he said something that always stuck to me. He goes, I've never had a failure. I've only had a learning experience. And you, both of you, not only shared the failure, but you then shared how it changed the way you did things, right? And so if that hadn't happened, you wouldn't have learned to be better. And so that's the first thing I kind of always tell people is you. Once you reframe it and think of it as a learning experience, it really changes things for me. And I'm going to share kind of two stories of failures because they're both same, two sides of the same issue. Something I always struggled in my career was being too detailed. I drove a lot of managers crazy learning to actually focus on the big picture. And I still remember the first one. So I had a manager that literally every time I was in a meeting, he came to me. He goes, you know, you're way too detailed. I need to help you. It's like I am going to IM you and tell you to pull it back up every single time. He actually wasn't my director. He was just one of them. The team we worked in, it was fell director. And so I'd always get these messages in the middle of meetings of bring it back up. Because I had failed to really grasp that concept. It took me a long time. Then I'm in another role, and I had been passed over as the director. I thought I deserved an interview. I didn't even get an interview. The general manager didn't want to really work with me, and they brought somebody else in. Won't even go into that failure of a story. But what happened is one day the direct, the gm, comes to me and he goes, paul, I want to teach you a principle, okay? And he goes, I want to teach you the bluff principle. Cards. What does cards have to do with anything? That's what I'm thinking, you know, bluffing strategy. And he goes, Bottom line up front, like in the first sentence, I want you to get to the point so then you can add all the detail you want. And the way he said it was very clear. He would never read the detail, but he knew I like to be detail oriented, so he's like, feel free, knock yourself out. Just give me what I need to know in the first sentence. And so the reason I kind of failure is it took me a long time to learn that it kept me from being a director. Everything else, I checked every other box. The CFO loved me at the time. And as I started to learn that, it made a huge difference, and it was a real turning point for me. So that failure was thinking that I needed to take everybody through the analysis and show them the work they do. The reality is leadership doesn't care. They want to know what they can solve, and they want to have confidence that you've done the analysis right and you can bring them along. Right. Gets back to the influencing. And so for me, that failure was over a long period, but there were kind of two defining moments of really starting to realize how important it was to focus on the big picture.

I think that's great, Paul. In fact, actually, the way you described that, my first thought was a board deck. How you go over and you put together that executive summary. And most time, the board never gets off the executive summary. They'll look at the, you know, the 50 pages of detail that you have behind it, because you're just calling out, hey, here's what you need to know. Here's what we need to discuss. So I think that's. That's spot on, by the way. Paul, I have to share with you a little quote that you reminded me of. It was a little thing my mom used to have on the refrigerator when I was growing up. And it said, I never make mistakes, but once I thought I did, but I was wrong.

I've heard that one.

I joke with that one with my daughter. She's autistic, so she's extremely kind of rules driven. And she'll always be like, that's not true, dad. So.

And I also love that acronym that you mentioned, Bluff. You know, that's a very good way to remember it. And it speaks to the point that you have to tailor your information to your audience. You know, maybe all that level of detail is great to share with your manager, but it's not what an executive needs to see.

That's right. I think the other acronym that I've heard, I don't know if you guys Heard is kiss. Keep it simple. Stupid. And you know, so you know, I think it goes along the same lines. It's just get to the what you need to know rather than over complicate the message.

Agreed. I still remember the other one. I sent someone a one page email and she told my boss, she's like, he sent me a full page. I don't read one page emails. He needs to shorten that too long.

Didn't read right.

Exactly. Tldr. So we've all been there. All right, so one follow up. Any advice? We'll start with Rosemary on this. If someone's. I can speak today, someone's going through a failure or they've had a big failure, any advice you'd offer to them of how to manage that? I mean, obviously you shared how you learned about it, but any, any thoughts you want to share? If somebody's listening and you know they've gone through a big failure, they're experiencing one, how do they, how do they work through that?

Yeah, I think my biggest piece of advice would be to treat this failure as information and not your identity. I think a lot of high performing professionals have some perfectionistic tendencies, myself included. I'm a recovering perfectionist. But sometimes that makes it feel like one misstep can just define us. And that is not true. Sometimes people can tend to judge themselves too harshly. But the important thing is to keep it in perspective and to really think about what you can learn from this. Just like we're talking about in all the examples we gave today. I mean, ask yourself what happened? Why did it happen? What can I do differently in the future? But don't let it define you. Really move forward productively with that information. And if you need help gaining a broader perspective, it's always good to ask a mentor or a coach who can help you see this differently and help you. Right. Size this problem. Right. It's not the end of the world. You do need to learn from it, but don't let it bring you down forever and ever. Learn and move on and grow.

Glenn, any thoughts on that or anything you'd add?

No, I mean, I, so I would totally agree with that. I mean, I think, you know, if the big thing about, you know, everybody makes mistakes, important thing is not to repeat them. And so that's where you got to recognize when you do make a mistake. How do I make sure I don't do this again? And, and for my failure that I, you know, the story that I shared, one of the things I would say is, you know, try and slow down a little bit if you are feel like you're really exciting, you're rushing, you want to go over and get your results and you'll present it back to, you know, whatever executive or manager or leader that you want to present it back to and take a step back and say, wait a second. And does everybody who's involved have they bought in? Because one way to look at it is, let's say if you're presenting to, you know, just an operations, you know, chief operating officer or something, does that chief operating officer's direct reports and those people are going to be impacted. Do they align with what you're doing? Get their buy in first before you go to the executive this way. Then it makes your presentation even more powerful when you get to say, I've worked with the rest of your team, everybody is aligned. This is what we think is the best solution. We rather than here's what I put together. And I think that's just, to me, it's a best practice that is not really taught very much, but it really is beneficial when you, especially when you're presenting Zach to executives.

Yeah. Collaborating and gaining that buy in is extremely important.

Yeah.

Something you said there when you said we versus I, we will always go a lot further than I.

In a company, with one exception. When somebody says what went wrong is when you need to say I.

Yes. You have to own it. I totally agree.

Yes.

And kind of speaking that when you said mistake, you know, versus failure, which the mistake could also be your biggest failure. But when I think of the term mistake, the biggest thing I would say is just be transparent. It's about owning it. Don't throw it on somebody else. Don't try to hide it. Rarely ever does someone get fired for the mistake. They get fired for how they respond to the mistake they made.

When you make a mistake, it is so important. Like if you think about an apology, right, to someone, you are being sincere. You're owning up to what you did, you're not blaming someone else. I think it goes back to what we've been talking about. You know, you mentioned transparency again, transparency and clarity. Just being upfront with people and not trying to divert attention to something else. I don't know about you, but, you know, if someone apologizes to me and it doesn't seem sincere and it's blaming someone else, that's not going to go over very well.

Right. 100% agree. In fact, I think that it goes a little bit beyond that. Because even if you want to be that leader, regardless of whether or not it was your fault. If you're leading the team, it's your fault. You got to own that. I've always kind of, my leadership philosophy is always, I want my team to get out there and I want everyone to see nothing but successes. And if there's any failure, it's on me. If it's success, it's because of my team. And that's kind of my mentality. And that's the thing, is that not only has that helped me with my own team, because now they feel like, hey, Glenn's got my back on this and I get a little more loyalty from them, but they want to work harder because of that, and they want to make sure they're not going to make mistakes because they feel bad if I'm taking, you know, the hit for their mistake. So I think as a leader, whether you are just starting off as a, as a manager or you're, you know, a director or VP or a CFO, own the mistakes and 100% agree. Do not point fingers at somebody else. Even if it's, excuse me, even if it's someone else's fault. What the best thing is, it's publicly you say, I'll make sure that that doesn't happen again. I'll take care of that. And then privately you go over and have that conversation with the person who maybe was, you know, directly accountable for that mistake.

Yeah, I think you made a really great point about talking about what you're going to do differently. Right. It's not just about accountability. This is my problem. This is my fault. But hey, here's what I'm going to do differently in the future to make sure that this doesn't happen again.

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With the cast of characters that I worked with over my career, I have quite a few. But I think the funniest one is I was working at a large public company and helping to develop methodology for product profitability. So I was out talking to a particular manager of a. Of a group, and I said to him, so, you know, what's the real driver of cost for your research team? And he said to me, well, I have to spend a lot more time on the dumb ones than the smart ones, so can you measure that?

Gosh.

And I just was, like, thinking, how do I even respond to that? And I just said, yeah, we're not going to be issuing IQ tests and using the results of the driver in our model. So I said, let's try to come come up with something else. But it was kind of a funny thing. And it was, you know, the guy I was talking to, okay, he was a little arrogant as a leader to begin with, but one of the things that he was trying to get at was, yeah, when people struggle, you spend a lot more time on. I kind of come back to, you know, maybe he should have thought about the people he was hiring or how he trained people, and again, kind of come back to that ownership thing that we just talked about. He could have easily gone over and said, yeah, I didn't get these people up to where they need to go, so I have to spend more time with him. Not quite the way he put it. So, you know, I ultimately said, we can't use intellectual capacity as a driver. And so we had to go up and come with. Come up with a different methodology. But that was probably one of the weirdest things, I think.

Yeah, I wonder what your customers would have said if you had sent out an IQ test. What's this for?

Yeah, I wasn't even going to broach that. Not to mention the fact that he had some very, very smart people on his team. So I was not going to be insulting them with that.

What about you, Rosemary?

Well, I've seen a lot of weird things in 25 plus years of FPA. Some of them are not safe for podcast.

You're not going to spill the beans.

I'm not, no, I'm. But I think one thing that most people in FPA can relate to is being asked to create projections with some wildly unrealistic assumptions. Right. So I was working with a startup once that was raising capital for investors are trying to, you know, pitch to investors to raise capital and they needed some solid projections. There were a few problems, though. They had an excellent product, but the product didn't work all the time. They had also just signed some agreements with resellers overseas. And while those contracts stated that the resellers were supposed to provide estimates of what they'd be able to sell, we had no forecasts at that point. They had not provided that information. We knew that this would take a while to get up and running or I knew that. I don't know that. The executives of the company realized that the pricing in these contracts was unprofitable in some cases. Yet despite all these things, they wanted me to project millions of dollars right away in sales with almost no marketing budget. You know, no thought to what are we going to do with all these returns that we're getting for this product? Product that doesn't work. So, you know, I understand why they wanted to show those projections, but my job isn't to create a fantasy, it's to create credible projections. So it's just interesting what people ask you to do. Sometimes you just have to say no. It's good to help them understand why it doesn't work. But I think that when you're talking about projections and assumptions, realistic beats impossible every time, right? Realistic versus completely unrealistic. And in a case like this startup, when you have unrealistic projections, that can be really detrimental because you're counting on this revenue to come in. And when it doesn't materialize, well, you've just burned more of your cash. Runway. Right.

You know, it's interesting because you, I think you, you hit on something that is, to me, one of the most vital things of anybody working any finance role. It's integrity. And you gotta have integrity in the work that you do and the forecast that you do. And just because somebody says you're gonna grow the company at 500% doesn't mean it's actually gonna happen. And our roles, I think, in FP and A is to have that integrity and to kind of stand up and raise Our hand said, you know what? This just doesn't feel right and to not do it. So I applaud you for that because a lot of times people say, hey, I'm being told to do it. Okay, I'm just gonna go and put it together.

Yes. And I mean, integrity extends to thinking about the investors. You know, they're relying on these projections. They're investing capital because of the projections. And if they're completely wrong or unrealistic, that's not right. You know, it's not right to mislead people into offering capital.

Agree. You know, and Glenn, I think you, you made a great point there of, you know, integrity. I still remember I had a, a boss and he could get very impatient. He was extremely intelligent, very diligent and, you know, and hard working. And we, we had a problem with getting our commission plans all cleaned up and transferred to new ones. We had a lot of old lingering ones and we had some real issues with them. One month review, and it's like, why are we paying out this? Like, because that's the way the commission plan is. Well, I want you to change it right now. We're pay, we're not paying that this month. And I look at him, he said that a couple times. And I'd always be like, I'm sorry, I'm not doing that. We have to communicate to the people before we change their pay. And he'd all, you're right, but I want it for next month. And he would always immediately back off. But I always would just very straightforward, like, no, we can't pay people different than what we promised. That will get us in trouble. You know, that he would step back and be like, fine. But it was always, I want it fixed for next month. And I would just kind of laugh because it happened a few times. And you. The first time I paused for a minute, like, oh, what do I say? Because he was a very demanding person. But I was like, well, it's the right thing to do, you know, so speaking to that integrity. And never once did I, never once did he push back on me other than like, well, why can't we? And I had to be like, well, here's why. And then he would just back off. Like, as soon as I explained it, it was, it was always fine. So I think there's just that importance of pushing back sometimes is really important. But do it professionally. Don't make it personal and emotional issue. I'll share mine here of the strangest request I received. So I'm working in a company and they were really, they were in the process of transitioning from mostly being kind of a portfolio to truly an operational company trying to integrate everything. And one thing they were trying to get a handle on was a good understanding of headcount. So I get the request from somebody. It came out to the entire us, all the different businesses, we need to fix the headcount system for the last three years. And one of the guys goes, I have a file. We can just manage that. And so I had just taken over his role. So they centralized all, decided I had to do the entire US. I'd been at the company for six months. And then he comes back and says, to make sure you. We want it. We want this to be correct. And we know the data in our HR system isn't right, and we know the data in our finance system isn't right. So you need to talk to all the hiring managers to get this right. We're talking thousands of people in the U.S. you know, not. Not like 50 people. Plus this company had an extremely high turnover. So going back a couple years, most of those managers were gone. And I went to my boss and I'm like, I'll do my best on this. I'll take the data. The only thing I can guarantee you is this will be wrong. And he just kind of laughed. He's like, do your best. I get. It's a strange request. We got all done in a week later they came back and said, these numbers don't make sense. Sometimes you have headcount in cost centers where there's no dollars or dollars and no headcount. And we were just like, I'm not surprised. Like, what did you expect? So that, that was a fun one because we knew from the beginning that the numbers were just going to make no sense.

That's frustrating too, because you spent so much time chasing down that information only to know that it would be wrong.

Exactly. That's why I at least appreciate my boss. Like, unfortunately, I can't win this one. Just do your best and I'll. I'll manage it after the fact.

You know, one of the funny things is I. I'm always amazed at companies, and I've seen this at most of the companies I've worked at, where the headcount isn't aligned properly with where the people actually are working or who they report to.

And I was like, how do you.

Hold people accountable to a budget? If HR is saying here, you know, these are the people in each cost center, and payroll is based on that. I think if People who are just in the wrong place. So unless everybody's making the same, you know, the same salaries, you're going to be off in your, in your calculations for your budget. So it's just going to come out anyway. And I, you know, I've. So, Paul, I feel for you. I've been there many times, and many times HR is like, well, we don't care about Cost Center. We just care about people. It's like, yeah, if the people in the cost center kind of thing, you know, it's in your system, but it does have to get resolved. And if you don't have it, you don't really have much integrity in your budget.

Yes, it was a huge problem at one. We spent forever trying to get it cleaned up and finds out it all fixed. And I had forgot somehow to move over the guy who was the general manager. So he was the most expensive in the entire business and his cost hadn't been moved. And fortunately, they opened something up to clean some things up. And I slid it in as part of that. My boss knew about it, but we got it. We were able to slide it all in as part of that. I'm like, thank you. Because I did not want to explain that big, huge variance every month, especially given who it was, because I'd be explaining it to him in front of everybody else. And you got it. You can't just say, oh, I forgot your salary. It's that much, you know, doesn't go over well. I forgot my own bonus once. We missed a number and I, I didn't want to explain it. I realized it was a retention bonus. I had like, what's this bonus? And I dig into it or like, 20,000 off, and it was my retention bonus. And so all I said is, that was a retention bonus. For some people that was missed. Like, I'm like, I don't want to explain who that was.

So you know what, Paul? So that's going to lead me to my question, which is if you could get rid of anything in FP&A, what would it be? And so, Paul, why don't we start with you? Then you just kind of had the mic and Rosemary will go over to you afterwards.

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That is such a common problem. It really is. And I think one of the ways that it can be addressed is really setting clear objectives and goals up front so that you know that what you're working towards and you're not just getting these budgets that will never fly and going back to the submitter and negotiating again and again and again. Sometimes a little bit of a top down approach does help. Let's talk about what we're trying to achieve here.

100% agree. Set. Set some targets and objectives up front. I've seen it done the other way. And the worst is when management just keeps having them go through it all. I did this with one company, we got to the end and they wouldn't set any objectives. The entire process. They just decided to cut Everybody by like 10% and they made us do it at a a top line and then send it back to everybody and they're all like, well, what does this mean to my headcount numbers and what is it? Well, here's what we assumed and nobody was happy, right? It was just a bad year all the way around because you couldn't explain anything to anybody.

Rosemary, how about you? What would you cut?

If I could eliminate One thing about FP&A, I think it would be the manual data wrangling, dealing with data integrity issues, reconciling numbers across sources that don't tie, even transforming data. You know, sometimes you get a file and it's all text and you have to convert it to numbers or date values, whatever it is, to be able to work with it. And it's important, but it steals time from the real job of FP&A, which is providing clarity and foresight and influencing. So I don't like that part. The good news though, is that fpa, that AI, is really starting to help in this area. I'm excited about using Copilot for finance in Excel, being able to use those tools to automate manual processes to reconcile data sets. I think really the less time we spend wrangling with data, the more we can influence the business. But what's important to keep in mind when we think about AI and how it can help us is that it's not a substitute for human judgment. It's, it complements it. And so I don't think that AI is going to replace FP and A, but I do think it will replace the parts of FP and A that we really don't like.

So, Rosemary, that was going to be mine as well, but I would use a term called data governance. You know, I have found that FP&A is so critical to data governance because FP&A touches so many different aspects of data data all around the company. And I agree with you. The last thing that I want to be doing is trying to go over and create mapping files for data to go over and connect just so I could start my analysis right. I want the data to be there. Now, technology is solving a lot of those issues, but it is one of those things that I think can be solved through basically creating a data governance council where you have the different leaders from the company who manage different systems meeting on a regular basis to make sure their data stays aligned. And I think that's one of the best practices out there that a lot of smaller companies in particular think, oh, that's you're adding bureaucracy, but you're not. You're actually building out your data infrastructure in a way that the company can scale as you grow and you're not spending a lot of time doing manual data manipulation just to go over and get to the point where you could scale start your analysis. So I 100% agree with you there.

Right. That Data Governance Council is so important. You know, having cross functional people throughout the company being participating in that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I can't relate to this one because I never had dirty data.

Right. I don't believe that.

I heard it said once. How would you describe an FP and a professional's job? They spend 80% of their time cleaning data and 20% complaining about the 80% of their time spent cleaning data.

Oh, is that the 8020 rule for data governance? That makes pretty much the 8020 rule.

Of FP and a 80% cleaning, 20% complaining.

Yes.

Well in the one thing I would add to that is without data governance. I don't know about you guys, but I had this throughout my career. All of a sudden like accounting goes over and creates a new GL account and they don't tell anybody. And so now you're running your regular reports and nothing ties out and you're like what the heck it balanced before what's going on and you know, you're spending all the time going back and forth and the thing is communicated. All they had to do is send out an email. By the way, we're adding these accounts this month. And not only that, you should. If anyone's even thinking about doing this in their own company, any of our listeners send it out before it actually goes into place because sometimes another group or FP and A in particular might come back and say, you know what, don't add another account because redundant with this other thing over here. And you know, to make sure that it's your what you're doing fits right within the company, not just with your. You're solving the problem for your team only. So I mean that now we're getting more into my pet peeves of things where things I want to get rid of. But you know, it's, it's. I think it's all that we could.

Have a whole future episode on pet peeves of FP&A. We could.

We might need longer than an hour though.

We would need definitely longer than an hour.

Yeah, that's the problem. Would anyone really want to listen to the whole thing or would we have to have a tldr?

Yeah, I mean basically that would be my big thing. Too though I think it's around data. Paul, I want to go back to one of the things that you said though about the budgeting rounds. One thing that I have found that really helps is if you start with working with the CFO around what you need your earnings to be or your EBITDA or whatever your, your bottom line number needs to be and you know what your revenue forecast is or you know where you've kind of come to agreement once you have that expense piece, fpa, before anyone else gets involved, should create targets for each of the different areas so that you go over and you say to the business leaders, look, I don't care how you spend the money within your costume, but this is the number you got to hit. So if you want to go and put more money into travel and take it out of your, your, you know, your, your data systems, fine. You want to go and add more people and you want to take it out of this area, fine. Now maybe not so much people because recurring expense, but you get the idea is that you go in with a particular target and what I've done one typically, unless the CFO comes back and like something major happened that says, oh my God, we just lost our biggest client, now revenues can be 10% less unless something like that comes up. You generally don't have a lot of iteration. So just one of the things I want to throw out.

Yeah, no, I agree. It gets back to the targets upfront. And when I've been able to do that, I have sometimes, you know, you're at the, you're in a position where you don't have that ability depending on the size of the company and your role. So unfortunately I've seen a few where they've definitely gone a few more rounds than I think they should have. You know, nine months into the new year, you're finally closing the number, or we closed it by the end of Q1, but we are so far ahead of the budget. At mid year, corporate decided to adjust everybody's numbers and didn't even ask us. They just took the first half. I literally at one point on a variance commentary said, you changed all my numbers. I can't even tell you what's causing the variance. Fortunately, I had a lot of respect in the company at that point because I'm sure that wasn't received well by the PE or by leadership, but I literally, I couldn't make heads of it. It's like, I'm sorry, I can't tell you what the variance is. You guys have changed the Numbers so much, I don't even recognize them anymore, by the way.

So here's some good advice for any of our listeners out there. As you are going through your, your own careers, take note of the things that don't work well so that when you get in the position of leadership now, you know what you need to change and how you need to go over and do something new. One of the things is every time I went to a new company and I went into a leadership role, I tried to take the best practices from the companies that I was at and bring them over and very specifically not bring over the things that did not work. So just even if you're a financial analyst and you're just starting your career out, make note of these things, because down the road, you're probably going to get to a point where you might be driving or managing a budget process and you might think, hey, you know what, let's do those budget, let's do those targets up front so we don't have to go through so many different iterations. Or let's go and create a data governance council so that we don't have to go in and spend so much time cleaning up data all the time. I just think those things would, you know, really benefit anybody who's just starting their career out just to take note of where you'd want to improve.

That's a great idea. Create a cheat sheet for the future.

Exactly. All right, so I think that we have one more question here. So can you share a moment that made a difference to the strategy or, bottom line, to the company you work at? Rosemary, why don't we start with you?

Yeah, I really like this question. One of my favorite parts of my work, working with clients to build FP&A teams or to level up their existing teams, is really being able to see the impact of, of our partnership together. So, fun fact, the story I'm about to tell is about a client that reached out to me after hearing me on the last podcast that I was on with Paul. So thank you, Paul. You know, a client came out of that, and they're just delightful. But when I started working with them, I started with a financial health check. And what I really diagnosed is that they did not have an FP and a function. And this was really holding them back with raising capital, satisfying the board, satisfying the needs of the people within the company. They had no real reporting strategy. Reports were inconsistent, they were cluttered. Sometimes they had colors all over the place where you couldn't really tell what you were supposed to be looking at. And importantly, I think the board had lost a little bit of confidence in the numbers that they were seeing and the way it was presented. So I went in and created a reporting strategy that set satisfied the needs of a lot of different audiences, from the executives in the company that had varying levels of financial expertise to the investors to the board. We also looked at a collaborative planning process. They had a budget in the past, but it was kind of done by finance. And when finance does the budget in a vacuum, the leaders in the business don't feel ownership of it. So it was really important that we put this collaborative process in place for the first time for the 2025 budget. And now we're in the middle of the 2026 budgeting process, and it's going a lot more smoothly. People know what to expect. Another thing that we've partnered together on at that company is establishing a regular forecasting cadence. We're now reforecasting every quarter. We're providing information to the investors that need this, and everything is more routine. There is a process now. So while implementing foundational FP and A isn't the most technically difficult or maybe as glamorous as some other things in finance, it can be really transformational. And I like to think that all of this work that I partnered with them on was a factor in them being able to raise $100 million in capital and really move forward with strength into the future.

Great story. It really underscores the value that FPA can bring, especially when it's done right. Paul, how about you?

I want to raise a hundred million dollars in capital.

That's a lot.

I get a LinkedIn message almost every week of somebody wanting to invest in my vertical. Maybe I should ask him for a hundred million.

Oh, my gosh.

Maybe. Smart. Start out small with 10 million, see where it goes.

All right, I'll.

I'm gonna do that next time, saying, well, yeah, I'll give you 10 for $10 million, and we'll see what they say. No, I think for me, when it comes to strategy one or just making a difference to the bottom line is I worked in a company where we had really high churn. We had had some product issues of rolling out a new product, and the churn had got really high. And what I did is there's a couple things. One, I built a special report that went out every single day to our general manager of everything that was in the pipeline. And then I also got all the directors of our account because we had account managers. For pretty much every single store, either virtual or they'd visit them quarterly and got all the directors together, and every single week we went through on what efforts they were doing to remediate and to try to prevent from losing that customer. And we did see a decline in Churn. And it was like, okay, why, you know, why wasn't something like this happening? But I took the initiative and we did it for probably about a year. And then as things got better, we. We had other meetings and things and, you know, still continue to monitor it, but didn't put the same kind of level of effort. And it was just that reminder of what. Where your focus is and what you measure and spend time on is where you get action. You can make a difference. Even though there was a product problem and there was reasons for. For Churn and it didn't eliminate, it was still higher than we liked. It still made a material difference. So is that real reminder of just the. Where you put your time is where you're gonna. You're gonna get results?

No, I think that. And you know what? That's not an FPNA thing. I think that just kind of goes across the board for anything agreed in life in general.

Right. It's not just fdna. I mean, most of these lessons apply to life.

Right? Right.

What about you, Glenn? Let's turn it on you.

So this was kind of hard when I was thinking about, you know, as we discussed this question previously, and I was thinking, well, what's my example? Because I like to think that I made a strong strategic impact on every company I've been. That's kind of why I get hired and why I go in there. But I narrowed it down to one company in particular. So this is a company that was public for 14 years. They were in the S&P 500, about 3 billion in annual revenue in 30 countries, 2500 global employees. And they had no corporate FPA team whatsoever. And so they hired me to build one out. And that was one. First of all, going to a company that's in the S&P 500 and they have no FP and A team, it's kind of a unique experience. So I was. This was really something that was exciting for me to have that kind of an impact. But after I was there for a year, the CFO walks into my office and says, this is the first time in the company's history our corporate expenses have ever been under budget. And he was really giving me credit for that, which I appreciated. But I immediately turned around and said, look, All I did is put the information in front of all the Cost center managers. It was each manager who managed their budget. So I can't take credit for that. They're the ones who made the decisions. But one thing I noticed, I was at this company for about three and a half years. And from when I started to when I left, we changed the culture. And that was amazing for a company of that size, that we brought in a cost efficiency kind of culture. That was, you know what? It's not just about the top line. It's here's how you can manage your expenses to improve the bottom line and how people could work better together and, you know, really connecting the dots between accounting and HR and IT and finance, but also just how to manage the business in a better way. We put in so many new processes because it was a clean slate. There was no FP and a function at the company. And to have that kind of an impact on a company of that size, I thought was just one of the coolest things in my career. Because it's one thing to go over, I think, and say we made the company more efficient or, you know, we made the company more profitable. And certainly those are things that FPNA should be doing on a regular basis. But to change the culture of how the company was managed, I thought was pretty cool. So to me, I think that's. That would be the top one of my list.

That is a great story. And it is unusual that a company that size would not have FP&A. It relates back to my point about, you know, FP and A, even foundational FP and A just being truly transformational to a company. So I love that story.

Thank you. What I was going to say is, what's fascinating with this is all three of our examples, none of them are. I found this amazing insight. I analyzed the data or I proposed something that allowed us to change our strategy. They're really all basic kind of blocking and tackling type things. Yes, one of them helped change culture. Did they make big impact on the company? But I think the lesson there is, yes, there are times when things can be transformational that we give or they're big or they're out of the box. But often the biggest impact we can make is do is helping companies do the basics really well.

That's right. Because I mean, at FP&A, you know, it's funny, I go over, I talk to a lot of people and they'll say, you know, is what you're doing mission critical? You know, that's what people would ask that question either of a system or of the function of FP and A. And my answer is always yes, because we're the ones who are influencing how companies make decisions. And I don't care what you know, if there's nothing else that goes on, all your, you know, FP and A is all about that next decision and trying to make the company make the best decision possible. If that's not impacting a company, I don't know what is.

That's true. That's really our role is to help leaders make smart, really well informed, data driven decisions.

As I heard one former CFO put it, former CFO Grammerly. He said finance's job is to help the business make better, faster decisions.

That's completely right.

All right, so before we wrap up here, you know, Rosemary, we got you a customer last time, so now you get to give your pitch. If someone wants to learn more about the services you offer or what you do, you know, maybe tell them a little bit about that and the best way for them to contact you.

Yeah. Thank you. So as Paul mentioned earlier, I'm the president of Momentum CFO and this is a financial consulting firm that provides fractional CFO services to smaller organizations and FPA consulting to growing mid sized businesses. So if you'd like to learn more, feel free to head over to my website, momentum cfo.com if there are any potential clients out there listening to this, you can book a free introductory consultation and we'll figure out a way to move forward. So thank you Paul for that and for having me on the show. And again, thank you again for this delightful client that I'm working with that may not have materialized had it not been for your previous podcast.

Well, we love to hear the success stories and thank you, Glenn, for joining me again and being my co pilot. It's always great to have you on the show.

Always a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Paul.

All right, well, thank you everybody and until next time, I guess, do the basics, do them well. That's it for Today's episode of FP&A Unlocked. If you enjoy FP&A Unlocked, please take a moment to leave a five star rating and review. It's the best way to support the FP&A guy and help more FP&A professionals discover the show. Remember, you can earn CPE credit for this episode by visiting earmarkcpe.com downloading the app and completing the quiz. If you need continuing education credits for the FPAC certification, complete the quiz and reach out to me directly. Thanks for listening. I'm Paul Barnhurst, the FP and a guy. And I'll see you next time.