In this episode of FP&A Tomorrow, host Paul Barnhurst talks with Andrew Hull, a seasoned finance leader in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. They explore the role of FP&A professionals in driving business results, navigating inflation, and transitioning from traditional budgeting to impactful analytics.

Andrew Hull is a financial executive with over two decades of experience in CPG. Currently the Vice President of Finance at UNFI Canada, Andrew has a proven track record of partnering with business leaders to deliver results through strategic insights and principled financial analysis. With a competitive spirit and passion for team leadership, Andrew shares his unique approach to FP&A, analytics, and the importance of actionable storytelling.

Expect to Learn:

• The three pillars of great FP&A: technical skills, storytelling, and actionable decisions.

• Why Andrew advocates for changing FP&A to “FA&P” and focusing more on analytics.

• Lessons learned from leading finance during the pandemic.

• Key metrics for success in the distribution industry, including variable margin and truck utilization.

• Practical advice for accelerating budget processes and focusing on analytics that drive results.

Here are a few relevant quotes from the episode:

• "The most value FP&A can add is when we take complex data and distill it into actionable insights." - Andrew Hull

• "Variable margin is the backbone of understanding financial performance in a distribution business."- Andrew Hull

• "A one-page visual with clear recommendations is the best way to communicate with executives."- Andrew Hull

In this episode, Andrew Hull shared a wealth of knowledge for FP&A professionals including rethinking the role of analytics to the importance of actionable storytelling. His practical advice on managing inflation, leading during a crisis, and accelerating the budgeting process offers valuable lessons.

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In Today’s Episode
[01:59] - Meet Andrew Hull

[02:50] - Redefining Great FP&A

[06:46] - Career Highlights in CPG
[10:35] - Leading Finance at UNFI Canada
[18:55] - Managing Inflation with Analytics
[22:24] - The Art of Storytelling in FP&A
[35:47] - Revolutionizing the Budget Process
[51:20] - Beyond Work: Hobbies and Passions
[58:07] - Closing Thoughts


Full Show Transcript
[00:01:29] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Hello everyone! Welcome to FP&A Tomorrow, where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects. I'm your host, Paul Bathurst, aka the FP&A guy, and I'll be guiding you through the evolving landscape of FP&A. Each week we're joined by thought leaders, industry experts and practitioners who share their insights and experiences, helping us navigate today's complexities and tomorrow's uncertainties. This week I'm thrilled to be joined by Andrew Hull. Andrew, welcome to the show.

[00:02:04] Guest: Andrew Hull: Thanks a lot. Looking forward to our conversation.

[00:02:07] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, 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 UNFI 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 a 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 give. In your mind what does great FP&A look like? What is great FP&A?

[00:03:01] Guest: Andrew Hull: That first saw 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 into marketing sales. There's so many podcasts and information out there, but to own the FP&A space is amazing, so congratulations! Looking forward to it. Thank you. I love doing it. There's a couple things. I mean, one thing I'd say about great FP&A I would love to change FP&A to be FA 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 80 over 20 rule. I think back in my career I've probably done more 80 budgeting, planning, forecasting and 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 and FP&A specifically, I've always thought there's kind of three elements of FP&A. And what good looks 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.

[00:04:03] Guest: Andrew Hull: 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 fact, you're faced with enormous amounts of information. How do you ultimately bring it back to business owners and explain a story? What are 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 FP&A.

[00:05:01] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I really like that. I love the three levels example. I totally believe you, right? 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? Yeah, that's where that storytelling and influencing skills are so important.

[00:05:22] Guest: Andrew Hull: That's often where finance people fall off. Or he's a great analytic, great excel. They can storytell a little, but they leave the meeting 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.

[00:05:36] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And the other thing I love that you said is, you know, you wish it was f a and p. Remember having CFO on the podcast CJ Gustavsson and he referred to he goes all too often the P is fat and the A is skinny. It's like we need to reverse that. Which is exactly what you were talking about. I really think that's 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.

[00:06:06] Guest: Andrew Hull: 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 100 and probably the classic 10,000 hours. And how many of those have they really added value? And if I'd implemented the 80 over 20 through my career and somehow forced the budget down and the analytics up, how much more I could have impacted companies. So I think it's the 80 over 20 of FP&A, and FA and P doesn't have the ring that FP&A does. But I still think if people put that in the back of their heads, how do I impact analytics more than budgeting?

[00:06:36] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I might have to see how my podcast does if I change the name to FA&P tomorrow.

[00:06:41] Guest: Andrew Hull: I don't know if it has the same ring, but hopefully people get the point.

[00:06:45] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I'm sure they would. So you spent most of your, I think, your whole career in CPG. What have you found so interesting about that industry or what kind of attracts you to CPG?

[00:06:55] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah, I fell into it. My career started at a Canadian university. Wilfrid Laurier and I got an internship at Procter and Gamble Food Company, and I worked at Tide and 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 in 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 Kraft Dinner. You could get involved in the whole thing, which is, I always think very different than if you're in banking, 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 it'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 in 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 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 amazing. I've had an amazing career. I just love the food consumer packaged goods industry.

[00:08:16] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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.

[00:08:24] Guest: Andrew Hull: I worked at thousands. I really love Delissio Pizza. It was a US brand. It was rebranded and 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 disagreements and back and forth on what sort of advertising we should do and price points and competitive landscape. We sold the business. I actually worked at Kraft most of my career. We sold it to Nestle and my career went to Nestle. So I got to see 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 everything. So, an incredibly tasty pizza rising crust pizza at the same time. So I never thought about that before, but maybe that would be my top one.

[00:09:19] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Sounds like you got to see that entire life cycle. Was there a part in that, like during the life cycle that 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?

[00:09:36] Guest: Andrew Hull: I mean, the divestiture is always fun getting into the math and everything that comes around with divestiture, but I think probably where we added the most value for an FP&A standpoint was when the brand was starting to mature. So it kind of got to got to 170, $180 million and really start 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 that that made 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 and trying to get the right trade promotion management mix.

[00:10:32] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 packaged good. Tell us about the company and what you're doing today.

[00:10:44] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah. So unifies the largest food distributor in North America. So we do about $30 billion in sales. So it's a great organization. Like I said, I've started my whole career has been in CPG. 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 a great company. Really good people. Different being in a distributor and 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&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 the leadership team, a great leadership team in Canada, and a great organization in the US. Some companies I've worked for, we haven't had the best relationship back and forth, but we've got great leaders in the US. Great strategy. I really enjoyed the company. It's been fantastic. And I really get to use my whole finance degree on the whole gamut of beyond FP&A, accounting, Treasury, everything as well.

[00:11:57] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So the first role where you've owned everything, where you've had all the different functions.

[00:12:02] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah. So at Kraft, I moved through kind of strategy. I've been a corporate marketing and brand FP&A operations. So I've owned plants and distribution centers and 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.

[00:12:26] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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?

[00:12:39] Guest: Andrew Hull: I don't know if I had big surprises, because I think the way my career was set up, Kraft and Nestlé were really good at Rotating through. So I think if you're starting, I think it was starting your own career. 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 get some people often they're trying to rush their way up there, the learning curve and the 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. I've been a big change, moving to distribution, a lot different sort of financial model where we add value than what Nestlé had crafted, 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.

[00:13:44] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, that's great because 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.

[00:14:01] Guest: Andrew Hull: More money. How do I go to the top like this? 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 they had some great examples of 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 may be under another brand. Okay. But can you get a lateral into another function. Can 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 it's amazing, I find with, you know, I used to think FP&A was kind of the core of finance, but you really realized 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 is certainly the core of it, but really important to get some lateral moves for your career to be able to do that as well.

[00:14:59] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. As I've heard someone put it, we had a guy on they call it the finance passport.

[00:15:04] Guest: Andrew Hull: Oh that's. I love it.

[00:15:06] Host: Paul Barnhurst: You want to move up to CFO? There are certain things you need to stamp, whether it's taking a role or working on a special project. 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 comfortable will say, yeah, you can run my finance function.

[00:15:20] Guest: Andrew Hull: I'm going to steal that. Is that a wrong idea or. I don't know. Someone else?

[00:15:24] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 company, and they talked about how there's finance athletes and finance specialists. And depending on the role you wanted, you needed to 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 really, really cool framework they 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.

[00:15:57] Guest: Andrew Hull: But yeah, Kraft was great at giving you the opportunity 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 role, I've touched all this, maybe not an expert, maybe I forget some of it. Certainly my Excel skills are not what they were ten years ago when I was doing modeling, but I've got a good passport to go with it.

[00:16:18] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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.

[00:16:25] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah, a 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. They were making fun of me even back at Kraft and Nestle at my weakening Excel skills over time.

[00:16:58] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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. As 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 unify 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.

[00:17:33] Guest: Andrew Hull: Was amazing experience personally, because I had to learn sort of the leadership role of 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 colleagues that I made the transition really smooth, so that was really good. The big thing for unifying 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 were stealing from restaurant chains. What I say a lot of is this was in my career where I've seen FP&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 or our brand's doing well, or is this simply because we've got to 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 driving? 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 learned a lot going through that. So great experience. Definitely a time for FP to shine. I saw my team and other teams in our company do a ton of analytics and really help kind of guide the company on where we were going.

[00:18:55] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 lessons learned from going through that?

[00:19:17] Guest: Andrew Hull: Definitely a lot of raw analytics. We try 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 skew levels on what's driving pricing. So really good tools and modeling. I think in business and finance, you really need to know when you need to do an A+ job and get something really good. And when you can kind of float. I 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 had 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 game theories. What will competitors do? Will other people do. How will everyone reacts. So a lot of things I love about FP&A and math is the transition out of the analytic onto the whiteboard. So I love getting together with cross-functional leaders or 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 is 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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[00:22:02] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 and 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 or 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?

[00:22:43] Guest: Andrew Hull: Well, plug for Fred, Ron Monteiro 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 on a one page? Everyone goes to PowerPoint, get on one page on PowerPoint. And this is my 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, would understand or how do you think to yourself, I've spent 100 hours looking at this. That other person hasn't. So how do I explain it to them in English?

[00:23:54] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I love that. So I'm hearing the advice is and one of the big things is really boil it down and 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.

[00:24:26] Guest: Andrew Hull: That's perfect. And I think we tend to start that. You need the call to action. There's no point doing analysis to tell a story if it doesn't come with a record. That also gets implemented. It 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 record that doesn't tie back to what your leaders have told you is a strategy for the company.

[00:24:49] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I love that you mentioned it. Tying back to the strategy, because often, you see, that's where you kind of get off the rails. Sometimes someone comes with an idea and has nothing to do with strategy, and you get distracted and try implementing it. You're looking back, going, why did we do that? It 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?

[00:25:26] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like any business, you're always looking at profit and sales trends and growth, that would be anywhere. But I would say fundamentally, and this crosses just about any business, certainly in manufacturing, one of the main things we're looking at is variable margin. And for an FP&A professional, being able to truly split your PNL that comes into lines into drivers and really get at a PNL that has fixed costs and variable costs. So taking that PNL 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 our 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 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. On the end of the day we want our truck to be full.

[00:26:36] Guest: Andrew Hull: 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 FP&A 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 FP&A professional is you should be looking for benchmarks. So the fact that our SGA percent is up or down is nice. But what does good look like? What are our competitors like that 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, finances a percentage of total revenue and you say it's x percent, is that good or is that bad? Is that sideways? How does the industry compare? What are 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 forward on what we should be doing. I agree.

[00:27:38] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 10-q or 10-K. You know, use it to ask some questions and get yourself started and may not get you 100% of the way there. But what if it gets you 80% and saves you a day?

[00:27:59] Guest: Andrew Hull: 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 and 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. I said, okay, I just saved myself ten hours and it probably has one little mistake in it I can fix. So what about you and your side? Are you using it a lot?

[00:28:35] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I definitely use it quite a bit. I mean, I have a subscription to copilot, to ChatGPT and to Claude, so, you know, 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 him to write my post and 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, and 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 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.

[00:29:39] Guest: Andrew Hull: I will not be using it for Excel formulas, but I use it for so many other things.

[00:29:45] Guest: Andrew Hull: My team would laugh at me if I pulled out ChatGPT and start asking Excel formulas.

[00:29:49] Host: Paul Barnhurst: But well, you know, you should do that just to see what they do, you know, like, wait, is it April 1st?

[00:29:53] Guest: Andrew Hull: Now you say it, maybe I'll wow them and get some new funky formula and say, hey, your H lookup looks like you forgot to put the index formula inside it, so.

[00:30:02] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Well good luck. Let me know how that treats you. I'll be curious to see what you end up with.

[00:30:05] Guest: Andrew Hull: Oh probably not. Well.

[00:30:08] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So you had mentioned in your LinkedIn bio that you love setting visions and strategy, but those are two of the things you love doing. What is it you love about that? Why those elements?

[00:30:21] Guest: Andrew Hull: I think the heart of it, 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 reading to that side. And you, you just it's incredible to see something come together and it's neat and you're doing analytics, bringing recommendation on certain parts of a business. But if you can 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 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 in corporate strategy in. I used to challenge my teams, even if they had a team of 2 or 3 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 going to have to build a vision for a team of 40, a team of 100. 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, Pestel and Porter whiteboarding it. Any thoughts down. And then taking all these thoughts and saying, how do I get this down into 2 or 3 sentences that we're going to get out to our organization in a simple message?

[00:32:00] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Well, I love that. And I love the examples you gave for your 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.

[00:32:19] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I challenge people all the time. Practice on junior stuff. I mean, I think I talk to people a lot about is one way to practice that is let's say you're in a, you know, a bank or a big multinational company or a food industry and you're more junior, so it's a little harder to get involved. Sure. What I did early in my career was I got on boards. Board work outside of my company, generally in non for profit. When you're starting out, what's amazing. And that could be anything from your daycare, your church, your sports organization or volunteer other sort of volunteer organization is you go from being a junior analyst on a massive company to being a board chair, a treasurer on maybe $100,000 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, maybe the budgets, you know, $1 million, you're like, But I'm setting the corporate strategy. I'm building the exact 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 to get volunteer board work because you're doing this in your day job when you're early in your career and find a way to practice this. So as you move up, you can steal those experiences along the way.

[00:33:33] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 competitions and it was a lot of fun as a team. I loved doing that, although I remember, you know, you didn't get to bed till 3 or 4 in the morning, then you're back up at seven and you're just like, okay, can I do a good presentation on two hours of sleep?

[00:33:52] Guest: Andrew Hull: But I 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 Porter's 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. Oh, that was amazing experience, team building and everything. So love that.

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[00:35:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, no, they were a lot of fun. I love doing them and agree the team aspect, the collaboration, the learning. But 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.

[00:35:44] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah, yeah, I love those experiences.

[00:35:47] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 spend 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 opinion to shorten that time frame, to get to be able to spend more time on analytics?

[00:36:12] Guest: Andrew Hull: Great question. I asked so many of my industry peers that question and there's just no gold standard model. I found all my years Pepsi seemed to do it the best. A couple examples of some stuff they did, but some concrete advice or things I like saying to people is and this is, I don't wanna say controversial, but not everyone agrees. I love really condensing the timeframe because I find you use the example earlier with 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. Nestlé 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 two x cash flow y. Here's the constraints a couple key assumptions. We want inflation play here this plan there. 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.

[00:37:44] Guest: Andrew Hull: 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 is involved or 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 got a couple tough meetings in the middle where you've got to push some teams a little more and do things a little differently, but those are probably some of the big things. Compressed 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 rows. You're three months into your year going to Excel doing row 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 buy SKU. 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 RNO and get it plus or minus in Excel, and then free up everyone's time to do analytics to drive the business.

[00:39:03] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I like that.

[00:39:03] Guest: Andrew Hull: So that's a couple a couple ideas on budgeting.

[00:39:06] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah I appreciate the advice. Yeah. Everybody's gonna 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.

[00:39:20] Guest: Andrew Hull: No. Never. Ever.

[00:39:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: That's the dream for all of us, right. To get that bottoms up done. And the board. Yep. Looks good. All done.

[00:39:30] Guest: Andrew Hull: 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 playing 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 two. 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, tweak.

[00:40:06] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 a nightmare. It always is when that happens.

[00:40:31] Guest: Andrew Hull: 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. It works everywhere to say, okay, let's, let's put all of our brands. Or if you're in the banking industry or 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.

[00:41:28] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. 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.

[00:41:43] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah, that should be strategy along with the strategy department and marketing putting that together. Agreed.

[00:41:50] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. So we're going to move into our FP&A section. This we have a couple questions around FP&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?

[00:42:05] Guest: Andrew Hull: I'm going to I love to hear your answer. 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, 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 source side and probably storytelling other stuff. But you have to start with Excel. Tell me, what are other people saying? Is there a dream system that's going to replace Excel?

[00:42:39] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Spreadsheets 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 professional has to have spreadsheet skills and those are preferably going to be Excel. 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. Couples say accounting. But definitely the most common answers for sure are some combination of spreadsheets and modeling.

[00:43:09] Guest: Andrew Hull: I don't know how. It's not. I mean, I'm sure everyone's mad at a genius Excel modeler that can't get themselves out of it and present it. And that's where the soft skills come in. But 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.

[00:43:24] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. As I've often heard it said, your technical skills get you your first job. Generally, your soft skills get you promoted.

[00:43:30] Guest: Andrew Hull: That's good. Yeah, it's a good analogy for sure.

[00:43:33] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So what's the number one? Soft, softer human skill we need?

[00:43:37] Guest: Andrew Hull: I mean, I don't know how it's not storytelling. We talked a little bit before, but ultimately your technical skills generally have 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 D. And here's potentially a visual of what that looks like. 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 don't care. How do you bring simple answers in for management to take action? I was talking about that earlier. Then beyond the story, tell 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. It makes money. It's solid. It's you know, it's doable. So it has to be storytelling with a, you know, a bias for action.

[00:44:47] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I really love the bias for action. And yeah, storytelling is one we hear a ton. Now 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.

[00:45:10] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah, those are the.

[00:45:11] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Most common.

[00:45:12] Guest: Andrew Hull: Persuasions. A good one. You have the insights and the knowledge. How do you persuade your leaders to take action?

[00:45:20] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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.

[00:45:28] Guest: Andrew Hull: I was 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.

[00:45:49] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 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 you get. If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about fashion, what would you change?

[00:46:17] Guest: Andrew Hull: I mean, I think it's back to that f a f a and p I mean, I could.

[00:46:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I figured you were gonna go there. That's what I was expecting.

[00:46:24] Guest: Andrew Hull: I mean, the backup one would be 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 100% perfect forecast? Because if you six months of forecast, by the time you get to the end, you've 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+ and I got the company on the right direction, I'd much rather have someone who has a couple of errors and doesn't have a perfect budget, but 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 think a FA&P mentality.

[00:47:18] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I like it so that we're going to change it to FA&P and, you know, when it comes to shortening the budget and be able to focus on analytics being a business of one, it's great. Now you know my budget spend a few hours. I got good enough. Let's just go start doing stuff.

[00:47:32] Guest: Andrew Hull: It's probably a lot easier without a boss who wants to, you know, doesn't always agree with not wanting a perfect budget.

[00:47:38] Host: Paul Barnhurst: But yep, I just gotta 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. Want to get your thought is, you know, as you look out at the business and look at your career, do you believe the profession gets the credit it deserves from the business? Kind of end of the respect that it should have.

[00:48:05] Guest: Andrew Hull: That's interesting. I mean, I'd say I'd say it all depends on the group. I mean, I've been part of some really strong FP&A functions and some not so strong. Obviously you have more credit with better functions. I use craft as an example. Craft had FP at the heart of what it was doing. I mean, philosophically, you were a business partner. You were 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 the center, we brought everything and got with it, got the right people. So I would say 100%. There were awards for finance professionals. There was always cross-functional 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, been in a couple other places where FP is more of an afterthought and a little more, you know, reporting and back shop.

[00:49:08] Guest: Andrew Hull: And so do they get credit? No. Now, is that a circular reference because you're doing reporting. Maybe you don't get the best people in and you don't get the best people, and they're not bringing analysis and request 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 FP&A teams. I got a great FP&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.

[00:49:57] Host: Paul Barnhurst: It makes a lot of sense and I agree with that as I look back at my career as 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. And so there's a cultural aspect to it, but there's also that. How do 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 until you go to a new company.

[00:50:33] Guest: Andrew Hull: I think some of the best people that have worked in FP&A for me are 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 can 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?

[00:51:05] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 make your life so much easier as a manager.

[00:51:19] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:51:20] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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?

[00:51:30] Guest: Andrew Hull: I love to golf, but I'll say on an FP&A podcast, one of my favorite things is to play poker. And 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 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 know, see me out playing golf or playing poker with my friends.

[00:52:17] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So favorite type of poker? Do you have a certain game you like to play?

[00:52:21] Guest: Andrew Hull: Texas. Hold em. I don't think. We used to play goofy games years ago. It's all we play now, so.

[00:52:28] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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?

[00:52:36] Guest: Andrew Hull: I'll give you two quick ones. If you're looking for strategy books, this is my favorite. It's always on my desk playing to win. It was written by one of the old executives of Procter and Gamble, and it's kind of a must read. So if your manager or boss says to you, I want you to build a strategy for this brand, this whatever, this division, this unit, this brand. You got to read that book. It's, you know, it's not a huge read. It dumps it down. It explains corporate strategy. And it's really about congruence. So it really 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 a great book on a personal level if someone's looking more for development. One of my favorite books is one called Strengthsfinder. I'll give you the 30s behind that one thing in my career . In a sort of development planning, I really used to emphasize a lot. These are the things you got to get better. These are the things I got to get better at. And I had this one employee who was so amazing at one thing, and I, 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.

[00:53:48] Guest: Andrew Hull: And what Strengthsfinder 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 you look up Strengthsfinder, 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 and 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, then spend all this time doing development plans on small things, you know, so development plans are important. But I just love Strengthsfinder really changed my mindset on. I'm going to really double down on what I'm good at.

[00:54:45] Host: Paul Barnhurst: That's great. And I've seen some other things about that. We'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, then 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.

[00:55:09] Guest: Andrew Hull: I think it's a perfect analogy and I really thought of it that way. But yeah, if you can 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 got to make sure you don't have a career stall. I like to talk to employees about like, listen, this is not only a development, it's a career. Like, you have a big problem. We got to address that. But if you don't have career scholars and they're just development needs and 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.

[00:56:02] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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?

[00:56:13] Guest: Andrew Hull: 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 kind of goofy one. And I love Sherlock Holmes. I love detective and analyzing and problem solving. And I used to 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 to solve problems. And, you know, not necessarily the business. We're all called bad people, but finding problems and, you know, the I guess it would be solving crimes on that side and the business world, you know, solving problems. So I you know, I always joke about wanting to be Sherlock Holmes, and I love and 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 don't even understand that formula, but that number coming out is not right. So go back and look at that. And that will sometimes say the Sherlock Holmes of my Excel templates.

[00:57:14] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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 to figure out why.

[00:57:27] Guest: Andrew Hull: Definitely one of my strengths.

[00:57:29] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I love it, and I love the Sherlock Holmes example because my wife loves Sherlock Holmes, the old British.

[00:57:34] Guest: Andrew Hull: So what do you think, Superman or Batman or the Hulk?

[00:57:40] Host: Paul Barnhurst: You know, I haven't asked that question very many times. 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, I have a Batman. Superman, you know, the normal ones. We get somebody one time, you know, wanted to be able to be invisible.

[00:58:00] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah, that'd be nice.

[00:58:02] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I wouldn't mind that one. Sometimes. Be a fly on the wall in some of those meetings.

[00:58:05] Guest: Andrew Hull: Yeah, exactly.

[00:58:07] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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?

[00:58:17] Guest: Andrew Hull: I mean, definitely through LinkedIn. I mean, I'm on LinkedIn every day looking at stuff I, you know, I love now, I don't know if you play it. Linkedin has added a bunch of games on there now, which are really fun little puzzles and games. Oh, I love it. 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 would be a way to reach me. My emails on that and all my contact information. So if anyone's ever interested in talking or whatever that would be the place to get Ahold of me.

[00:58:49] Host: Paul Barnhurst: 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.

[00:59:00] Guest: Andrew Hull: Thanks a lot. That was amazing. Appreciate it.

[00:59:03] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thanks for listening to FP&A tomorrow. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us a five star rating and a review on your podcast platform of choice. This allows us to continue to bring you great guests from around the globe. As a reminder, you can earn CPE credit by going to earmarkcpe.com, downloading the app, taking a short quiz, and getting your CPE certificate to earn continuing education credits for the FPAC certification. Take the quiz on earmark and contact me the show host for further details.