Planning Aces

Are you tired of sitting through unproductive monthly meetings that turn into show-and-tell sessions? Do you want to shift your focus to key metrics that matter and move away from storytelling to a more data-driven approach?

In this episode of the Planning Aces podcast, Cohosts Jack Sweeney and Brett Knowles feature the commentary and insights of three finance leaders who don't mind displacing the status quo as they seek to optimize their business metrics and drive performance.

Episode #23 kicks off with the hosts featuring recent commentary from Dayton Kellenberger, CFO of Vendavo, who shares his experience with implementing a metrics-based approach to monthly business unit reviews. He explains that they shifted their focus to key metrics that matter and moved away from storytelling to a more data-driven approach. Dayton also discusses the importance of optimizing SAS gross margins, which is a cross-functional effort that involves finance, sales, cloud ops teams, and customer success teams.

Later in the episode, Celeste Ackert and Jason Quinn share their insights on creating cross-functional dashboards and raising the profile of metrics within an organization. Brett emphasizes the importance of using planning tools to build cross-functional dashboards, as it allows for better integration between the planning and operational cycles. He also highlights the significance of customer contribution analysis in optimizing resources and identifying areas of sub-optimization.

Jason Quinn also discusses the importance of cultural norms in achieving desired outcomes. He emphasizes the need for fairness, transparency, kindness as a service, pursuit of truth, and trust through transparency. Brett summarizes Quinn's points into three categories of measures for FP&A professionals: the overall scoreboard, success potential (leading indicators), and experiences.

Overall, the episode aims to highlight the takeaways and provoke listeners to think about other ways of monitoring how their businesses are performing.

Related Episode Content

Planning Ace's guest host Brett Knowles suggests that GPT can be used as an extra member at the planning table, providing a catalyst for exploring ideas and expanding horizons. By generating scenarios and validating strategies against them, planners can identify environmental and situational factors that need to be true for a strategy to work.

But the true power of GPT lies in its ability to test a plan through the eyes of different stakeholders, such as investors, regulators, competitors, and employees, before presenting it to the executive committee. This allows planners to pretest their plan against a vast knowledge base, beyond the limited experience of the leadership team.

In this Planning Aces episode, host Jack Sweeney and guest host Ben Murray discuss the collaborative organizational effort behind generating business intelligence (BI) and the different places BI resources may reside within a business, with reference to an episode featuring Gary Zyla, CFO of AssetMark. The hosts also discuss the role of finance in enabling sales, the challenges faced by sales teams, and the importance of financial discipline and visibility in a company's financials, regardless of market conditions. The episode features insights from other finance leaders, including Teodora Gouneva, CFO of Next Insurance, and Wailun Chan, CFO of Grafana Labs.

Featuring Special Guest Co Host Ben Murray

As more businesses track customer product usage ever more closely, finance leaders are busy fine tuning the collaborative approaches that allow their organizations to identify and pursue expansion opportunities. Ben and Jack discuss the collaborative organizational teams that are putting their companies on the path to greater net dollar retention as they seek to glean more customer insights and better expose customer intent.

This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Jonathan Carr of Armis, CFO Kevin Rubin of Alteryx, and CFO Patrick McClymont of Hagerty.

About Ben Murray

Over the course of his finance career Ben Murray has occupied the CFO office at a number of different companies. In addition to having a multichapter CFO career, he is today known as "The SaaS CFO," a brand he established while creating and hosting the popular SaaS CFO podcast. What's more, the TheSaaSCFO.com is today a source of Ben's blogs, research, courses and templates based on his more than 25 years running finance teams . He is frequently hired by SaaS companies: from small, private technology firms to global multi-billion dollar public companies. Find out more about Ben @thesaascfo.com

It's no secret, professionals from various departments must work together to correctly calculate Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Customer acquisition cost (CAC) or Lead-to-customer ratios. This episode we explore how collaboration and communication is always essential to ensure these calculations and others take into account all relevant factors.

This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Thomas Fennimore of Luminar Technologies, CFO Jared Poff of Designer Brands, and CFO John McCauley of Calendly.

"The way I think about it is that FP&A really needs to design the questions we're trying to answer. The data analytics team needs to be able to write the queries to answer those questions. And our data and engineering team has to put the data in a structure that we can query and get value out of it."

—John McCauley, CFO, Calendly.

About our Guest Host: Soufyan Hamid

FP&A troubleshooter Soufyan Hamid helps finance teams primarily in two ways:

First, he works as an FP&A project leader or team member on mid to long term assignments

Second, he helps finance professionals take their presentation skills to the next level

Visit Soufyan's website or connect with Soufyan via his LinkedIn page

When consultant Steve Player died last month at the age of 64, the business function that he had tormented, ridiculed, and war-hammered for more than two decades stood quivering in the shadows.

Still breathing, the beast of a business process known as budgetary control had withstood its most notorious assailant's heaviest blows—in itself a resounding tribute to those industry high priests who had given the process life in the first half of the 20th century.

However, many agree that it's only a matter of time before budgetary control succumbs to its many injuries and a proper warrant is issued certifying the death of a business function that may have served all of industry better had it lived only half as long.

It's just such an acknowledgment that makes Steve Player and others of his ilk appear to be as worthy of our acclaim as those who helped to institutionalize this business function in the first place. Perhaps it's no surprise that both groups have been made up mainly of management consultants, a clan that I know only too well. Or so I thought, until I met Steve. NOW LISTEN

To grow efficiently businesses must have legibility across the organization, explains Airtable CFO Ambereen Toubassy, who tells us legibility can only be achieved by having everyone throughout the business using the same metrics. Along the way, Toubassy says finance leaders must ensure their organization's data capture is being conducted correctly and consistently. It may sound easy, but as this episode's three Planning Aces reveal achieving legibility is a growing business presents daily challenges to those residing inside the FP&A realm.

With Guest Host Glenn Hopper

This episode features the FP&A insights and commentary of CFO Anat Ashkenazi of Eli Lilly, CFO Ambereen Toubassy of Airtable, and CFO Evan Goldstein of Seismic.

GUEST HOST: Glenn Hopper, CFO, Sandline Global, Author of Deep Finance

A former Navy journalist, filmmaker, and business founder, Glenn Hopper has spent the past two decades helping startups transition to going concerns, operate at scale, and prepare for funding and/or acquisition. He is passionate about transforming the role of chief financial officer from historical reporter to forward-looking strategist. He has served as a finance leader in a variety of industries including telecommunications, retail, internet, and legal technology. He has a master's degree in finance with a graduate certificate in business analytics from Harvard University, and a master's degree in business administration from Regis University. Glenn is married with three children, two goldendoodles, and a neurotic cat. Glenn is also a member of American Mensa and volunteers his time for the Analytics Foundation, helping nonprofits to digitally transform their organizations. In his free time, Glenn is an avid runner and cyclist.

Steve and Jack discuss the data tsunami that many organizations are now facing and what steps finance executives can take to replace their historical, backward-looking, "batch mode" thinking with more proactive approaches that will allow finance teams to achieve more predictive outcomes. This episode's distinguished Planning Aces reveal the leadership mindsets and approaches now driving the shift away from batch mode. Featuring FP&A insights and commentary from CFO Claire Bramley of Teradata, CFO Sandra Rowland of Xylem, CFO Anna King of Mesh Payments and CFO Pat Dillon of Flock Freight.

Steve and Jack discuss how FP&A is becoming a world beyond finance - where data expertise and insights are becoming as widely sought after as traditional accounting skills. Meanwhile, Steve urges finance professionals to take an enlightened view of robotic process automation (RPA). Rather than replace the work of humans, the adoption of RPA offers finance professionals the opportunity to pursue new roles and opportunities ideal for developing future leaders, explains Steve. Featuring commentary and FP&A insights from Planning Aces: CFO Glenn Hopper of Sandline Global, CFO Adam Swiecicki of Brex, CFO Peter Walker of Sterling and CFO David Bedell of Lendio.