Achieving FP&A Excellence In Rapidly Expanding Enterprises
Show Notes
Welcome to FP&A Tomorrow, where we discuss financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects, with your host Paul Barnhurst.
The title sponsor for this week’s episode of FP&A Tomorrow is Abacum, the leading mid-market FP&A solution trusted by hundreds of companies to eliminate the spreadsheet struggle. https://www.abacum.io
In today’s episode, Paul engages in a conversation with Richard Tame, to discuss the essential elements that define excellent financial planning and analysis.
Richard, CFO of Coeus Institute, with over 25-plus years of experience in finance across various sectors, including his significant role at Aurora, brings a wealth of knowledge and a unique perspective to the evolving landscape of FP&A.
Key takeaways from this week's episode include: :
Here is a concise summary of the key points from the discussion:
FP&A is rooted in having the right team. The focus is on hiring the right people with the necessary skills and ensuring they work well together.
FP&A teams are not just about number crunching, they should also influence business decisions. The ability of FP&A to be involved in strategic discussions varies by company culture, from being central to decision-making to being viewed as a back-office function.
FP&A professionals adapt their strategies to fit the culture of the company, whether it's a traditional corporation or a fast-paced tech startup.
It is important to prepare an organization structurally and financially for potential public offerings or other major corporate transitions.
Quotes:
Here are a few relevant quotes from the episode about FP&A mastery:
"I've been in companies whereby finance has a really strong seat at the table and you know, you can't blow your nose unless finance is holding the handkerchief. Then I've been in companies where finance is seen as an inconvenience at best."
"You have to make the relationships not about you. You're there to partner with the business, and invariably the business knows more about the business. You need to have a relationship such that you can influence them. You're serving them."
"We had built the company in a way that we would have expected to go public at some point, and one of the things that I'd seen at Lyft, for example, I joined Lyft the day after the IPO, and it became clear that perhaps they hadn't built the infrastructure in the way that they could of to make life easier and that was very messy."
In today's episode:
[01:30] Introduction;
[00:02] What great FP&A looks like today;
[08:30] Richard’s background;
[19:55] How FP&A can serve businesses effectively;
[24:50] Company cultures and the role of FP&A;
[29:00] Strategic preparation for public offering;
[41:40] Rapid fire questions on personal preferences and professional tips;
[48:00] Final advice from Richard to become a better business partner;
Follow Richard:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardtame
Website - https://coeus.institute
Follow Paul:
Website - https://www.thefpandaguy.com
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/thefpandaguy
For CPE credit please go to earmarkcpe.com, listen to the episode, download the app, and answer a few questions. For AFP FPAC certification answer the questions and contact Paul Barnhurst for further details.
Full Show Transcript:
Host: Paul Barnhurst: What does great FP&A look like today?
Guest: Richard Tame: From my perspective, I think I would say it's all about the people. Great FP&A comes from having great people. Are you hiring the right people? Have they got the right skill sets and how do they blend together? Then once you've got a great team of people together, what I would say is how influential can you be in the business? It can vary depending on what the company needs. So I think a great FP&A today, to me, is the combination of great people.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Meet Richard Tame, the CFO of Coeus Institute, here at his Bachelor of Science in Statistics from Newcastle University, and recently left the position of CFO at Aurora, a Nasdaq-listed self-driving company. Being an analytical and insightful executive with 25-plus years of experience, Richard possesses an innate ability to lead fast-growing businesses. If you could offer advice to our audience to be a better business partner, what would that be?
Guest: Richard Tame: You have to make the relationships not about you. You're there to partner with the business, and invariably the business knows more about the business. You need to have a relationship such that you can influence them. You're serving them.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Abacum is the leading mid-market final solution trusted by hundreds of companies to eliminate the spreadsheet struggle. Visit abacum.io Today and multiply the impact of your finance team. Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Tomorrow, where we delve into the world of financial planning and analysis, examining its current state and future prospects. I'm your host, Paul Barnhurst, and I will be guiding you through the evolving landscape of FP&A. Each week, we'll be joined by thought leaders, industry experts, and practitioners who share their insights and experiences, helping us navigate today's complexities and tomorrow's uncertainties. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your journey in FP&A, this show has something for everyone. Before we introduce this week's guest, I want to take a moment and give a special thanks to our title sponsor for this episode, Abacum, whose support makes this podcast possible. Now let's dive into the world of FP&A. I'm thrilled to welcome our guest on the show today, Richard, welcome to the show.
Guest: Richard Tame: Hi, Paul, thanks very much for having me. Very nice to be here.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: I'm very excited to have you. So let me give a little bit of background about Richard Tame. Richard comes to us from Pittsburgh. He's currently working as a CFO for Coeus Institute. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Statistics from Newcastle University, and he was recently the CFO at Aurora from Series B through IPO and beyond. So there's a question we'd like to start every episode with. In your mind, what does great FP&A look like today?
Guest: Richard Tame: That's a great question to start off there. You could probably spend the whole time talking about what great FP&A looks like. But from my perspective, I think I would say it's all about the people. Great FP&A comes from having great people. So are you hiring the right people? Have they got the right skill sets and how do they blend together? So that would be the first thing. Then once you've got a great team of people together, what I would say is how influential can you be in the business? That again, can vary depending on what the company needs. So I've been in companies whereby finance has a really strong seat at the table and you know, you can't blow your nose unless finance is holding the handkerchief. Then I've been in companies where finance is it's seen as an inconvenience at best. Then in both of those worlds, the company still needs FP&A. A great FP&A team is able to use their skills or experience and their soft skills in particular to build those relationships, to be able to be influential, to get invited to the right meetings, and to provide the right information that gets the business to value what they're doing. So I think a great FP&A today, to me, is a combination of great people being at the right tables, being in the right decisions, and being people that the rest of the business looks to for guidance and believes that they're adding value.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Two things I liked about that answer there. One, you start with people right at the end of the day, it almost always comes back to people. But the second, I like how you distinguish between those companies that want FP&A at the table and those that we've all been at where it's like, okay, you're back, office, just leave me alone, approve my budget and let me make money and do my job. You're just a nuisance, almost, so to speak. How do you influence both of those environments? Because that can be very different.
Guest: Richard Tame: It's a lot easier in the first environment where the company's culture or structure is being built, maybe because it had a strong finance leadership team in the past, or maybe it's in one of those industries whereby finance is very important, take airlines for example. So there were never any issues at British Airways or American Airlines in terms of needing finance involved in any decision that you wanted to make, same with Amazon. But some of the later tech companies I've been at, like Aurora or Lyft, are very different situations. They're focused on the product, they're focused on building, they're focused on the company going forward. Some of the leadership there hasn't had that corporate experience. They haven't had to deal with finance in the way that the airline industry has. So nothing exists. You come in and you're taking over something where nothing exists. People have been around a kitchen table, in a garage or in the first office, and the company's succeeded. They've spent money, they've bought stuff, and they've made progress without this finance infrastructure. So when you come in and say, well that's not the way that the business world needs to be, we've taken VC money, for example, we now need to grow up, we need to professionalize, we need to grow up, that contrasts with the freedom that they had just maybe weeks earlier.
Guest: Richard Tame: They don't like the friction. It's easy for people in that position to say, well, look you're just introducing friction. You're going to put a budget on us, you're going to put an FP&A partner with us, that's just friction, you're going to slow us down. If you're aware of that and you've seen that before and again, you've got good relationship-building skills and you can pass that on to your team, then you can learn, the people on the other side can learn that you're partners. But a lot of it comes down to "Can you deliver on stuff that's useful for them?" So if I go back to my British Airways days, I had a very interesting conversation. I got put in this new role which was supporting the director of commercial planning, and I sat there in the meeting room with my manager and this director of commercial planning, who reported to the CEO of British Airways. He was a very senior person. The first thing he said was, I don't know why we've created this role, I don't know who this guy is, I don't know how he's going to help us. So that's in my mid-20s, it is not I'm very happy that I got this new role.
Guest: Richard Tame: This doesn't seem like a great start. Fast forward a year later I left, I got married, and I moved to the US, but I had a leaving do and he came to it and he was sad to see me go. So what happened in that year? Well, what I did is we just did the work behind the scenes. Everything he asked us to do, I made sure that it was done well and it can have added value. Over time, it just built that trust, and then you get invited and included in more meetings and more interesting decisions. So I think that's the best way to deal with it. In a world where perhaps finance hasn't earned its seat at the table yet or isn't valued as much, it's like you provide that value and then make it so obvious that you're doing a good job, and your team's doing a great job, that you do get invited to these things, not complain about it, not sit back and cry, not be upset, not storm into the CEO's office and demand to be taken seriously. Earn your way to that seat at the table is probably the best strategy.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: I Agree. I still remember someone who told me on an episode he was in a meeting and there were a bunch of people and they're talking about how does finance get a seat at the table? One of the guys pounded his fist on the table and said, we just demand it. He was like, no, that's not how it works. I have a totally different view here. His was similar to yours. That always stuck with me. We have to earn it. It's just like anything in life you have to earn that trust. So next question I have for you is can you tell our audience a little bit about yourself, and give us a little more of your background and what you're doing today?
Guest: Richard Tame: For sure. I don't necessarily look it, but I'm old enough to have had 25-plus years of solid finance experience and came from England originally. So did what all English people do, worked after university. You go to one of the big four firms, I went to Deloitte. You pass your chart accounts exams, I also did my chartered tax exams, and decided I didn't want to be a partner, so I moved into airlines, went down to British Airways, got married, moved to the US, worked at American Airlines and then later got into tech. In tech, I had the privilege of working at Amazon AWS when it was much smaller, then went to Microsoft, spent four years at Facebook, then went to Lyft, and then the most recent permanent role that I had was at Aurora where I joined them just after Series B, and in three and a half years did everything that you could do as a CFO. We acquired Uber's self-driving business, so we added 900 people to our 400, 500 people that we had at the time overnight in the middle of COVID-19, which was super interesting from a cultural perspective as well as a business perspective. We then needed to raise a bunch of money. So we ultimately raised $1 billion ourselves in a pipe, added that to what turned out to be $200 million in the trust, and we went public in November 2021, 18 months after I joined, on the Nasdaq, then we were a public company, which was a very good experience.
Guest: Richard Tame: I enjoyed that. The last thing I did before I left Aurora was contribute to them raising another $800 million to get the self-driving dream towards fruition. In that role, I did everything you needed on finance, and built a team, both accounting and FP&A investor relations insurance, which was important in the self-driving industry and internal audit once we went public. Then I also had the chance to build out my team. So I ended up looking after real estate and facilities, corporate IT, corporate strategy, and corporate security, which often happens in companies where they're spending a lot of money on back-office stuff. It's helpful if that rolls up to the CFO because they can keep an eye on all of that stuff. But I enjoy taking responsibility for some of those more operating factors as well. So I left Aurora, and after that, I took a nice break because guess what? When you do all of those things in three and a half years and go from Series B to public and beyond, you probably forget to take a vacation or you just don't take a vacation.
Guest: Richard Tame: You know you should, but you don't. So it was nice to have a little break. Then you have the chance to talk to a bunch of different people about what you might want to do next. So where can you best place your experience? One of the things that I picked up along the way, as well as some other smaller consulting opportunities, was to go on board and essentially be a CFO of a company called Coeus Institute, which is a data analysis pattern matching company. It's not like one of these ones that wants to be a unicorn, that wants to get big. It's a small group of people very good at what they do, trying to package something together to perhaps sell rather than do software as a service licensing. So super interesting to help them from nothing to where they are today and hopefully where they want to go in the future. But we will see. Always on the lookout, having conversations with people about what might come next on a permanent basis or something like that too.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Great. Thank you for sharing a little bit about your background. So next question I have for you is you spent nearly a decade working in the airline industry and then you transitioned to tech. I think you had Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Meta, and Lyft, for big-name tech companies. How did you make that switch from airlines to tech?
Guest: Richard Tame: It's a good one. I liked the airlines. You can see the Concorde wireframe above me there. I had the chance to go on Concorde when I worked at British Airways, which was fantastic, as good as you can imagine. So it was hard to leave the airline industry. If I'd been a British Airways, I'd been very successful at British Airways. I was getting promoted, and getting a lot of opportunities, but I was naive maybe, especially that early in my career. So when I got married, I moved to the US. I did get a job at American Airlines, and I just thought things would continue as they had done at British Airways, a very different company, a very different culture, and a very different state of the company. This is still 2005, 2006 time. So still suffering the effects of September 11th and have very little opportunity. That took me out of the direct airline industry. I went to a subsidiary of American Airlines and I helped them be sold. It was about 80 people, it was an investment management company. We sold that to private equity. but I realized that I didn't want to do that. It wasn't very complicated. It didn't capture my attention well enough. So I spent 18 months looking after our son. After we had a baby, my wife went back to work. In that time I assumed I'd end up back in the airline business.
Guest: Richard Tame: I flew to the Middle East multiple times and talked to Qatar Airways, Etihad, and Emirates and assumed that that's where we would end up next because that sounded like it would be interesting, sounded like it'd be fun. These airlines were certainly growing at the time. Nothing worked out. It's an interesting place to have job interviews. I don't know if you're familiar with it yourself, but it's not necessarily straightforward, things change very quickly. So I didn't ultimately get a job there, so I was in Texas, doing some consulting, and I talked to my wife, figuring out what we wanted to do next. We always liked Seattle. So we're like, oh, well, Seattle is cool. It's got Boeing, it's got Starbucks. Maybe we should move up to Seattle. As we were thinking about that, we hadn't made the move. a job came up at Amazon and the job at Amazon was working for CloudFront, which was their content delivery network. and what that content delivery network does, is it makes people's websites work better, it means Netflix works better, and all websites work better. The interesting thing about this is if you take a step up, it looks very similar to an airline, you're putting stuff on the ground and there's a network that connects it and you're essentially selling capacity on that network. So I think part of the ability to explain how an airline worked made sense with how the content delivery network works, and that allowed my entree into the wonderful world of tech.
Guest: Richard Tame: Then, of course, once you get into the world of tech, especially in a company like Amazon, you learn so much and then you become valuable to other tech companies. Then it becomes I'm at Amazon, I don't want to do Amazon anymore. Microsoft's calling up saying, hey, come to come to Microsoft, then you're at Microsoft for a year and then you get the Facebook call in saying, come to Facebook, you're like, okay, cool. Then when I had done Facebook for four years, I was able at that point to look around and look at various tech companies. Do you want to potentially join Google? Do you want to join a tiny startup? Ultimately, I settled on Lyft, but I think that if I look back on it, the ability to tell people the story about what I did, what I learned in the aviation business, and how that applied to the CloudFront, cloud computing business, was probably the thing that helped me get the job at Amazon. Then once you're successful in one of these companies, I think it becomes a lot easier to build your career in that space, especially when it was growing so fast as it was when I was lucky enough to be there.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: I agree with you. Once you get into the first, you're in the industry or in the boys club or whatever you want to call it, and it's much easier to move to the next tech company. It sounds like for you, it was showing that what you did was transferable, that, hey, this network I'm doing airlines is very similar to the network I'm going to do here is just different technology, different industry, but many of the same principles.
Guest: Richard Tame: I think that's important for people to pay attention to as well. it's easy but there's a bad side to once you're in tech you can stay in tech people just think the same or they just take what they did at the last company and try to apply it to the next one. I don't think that that's always successful. Certainly, when I try to hire people, I would prefer to have a mix of people who have done tech before, but also maybe have come in from another industry to make sure you don't get stuck in the brain drain or the echo chambers. So I think that ability to abstract yourself out and say this is business, these are the transactions that happen and this is how cash is flowing, and the ability to communicate that to people is very, very important. I would go back to my accounting experience, I think, sets you up very well for that. So in England, you do try to currency, you have to do audits of various companies, and being able to pick up how companies work, and how cash moves around through audits is helpful for the rest of your career.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: I agree, I've had a lot of people tell me that the audit background in accounting was great for the rest of their career. Very few of them wanted to do it for their whole career, but they appreciated that deep understanding of financial statements and having that framework to help guide you as you move forward.
Guest: Richard Tame: You understand that many companies are the same. I mean, what are you trying to do in a business? You're trying to sell something for more than it costs you to make, and make sure that you have enough cash to pay your bills before you get your revenue in. So accounting for the win.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Now a word from our sponsor. The FP&A process is broken. You know it is and I know it is. Putting together management reports takes forever. There is a growing demand for operational insights and running scenarios are preparing budgets will inevitably break your spreadsheets. It doesn't have to be this way. Abacum is the leading mid-market, FP&A solution, empowering hundreds of finance teams to eliminate their spreadsheet struggle with automated reporting and forecasting. With Abachum, finance teams can see every financial and operational KPI in real-time, forecast revenue more accurately, build headcount plans, budget their spending more effectively, and run any scenario with just one click. Abacum is the most scalable FP&A solution for finance teams. If you want to double your output half your reporting time, forecast your performance, and become a strategic partner to your business, visit abacum.io today. You summed it up with two things, revenue more than cost and cash to continue. If you could stay with those two things, you can generally stay in business, pretty simple at the end of the day. So have one more question on tech. Then I'd love to get into Aurora and just learn more about how you built out a finance organization, in particular FP&A, and what it was like at those different stages and how you thought about it. So you spent some time in tech, Amazon, and Microsoft, at a time when Cloud was just starting to grow. I know you did a little bit of Cloud work. What did you learn from that experience? What was it like watching you know that explode and see the growth in the Cloud?
Guest: Richard Tame: I mean, it was crazy. It's just continued as well. The size of AWS versus what it was when I was there. It's mind-boggling and now with AI, you know what's going to happen in the future. Maybe it's going to get even bigger. So, it was fantastic to be there and see how these things grow, especially in a company like Amazon, that is very focused on that growth and growing AWS. They were really the first company to do Cloud in that way sensibly. So, what did you learn from that part of it? You have learned it relies heavily on the people that you have, both on the technology side and then also on the finance side. You learn at Amazon the value of data and the value of having principles that are stuck to, and you learn the way that they do people management. Now, you can like it or you can not like it, but you have to respect the fact that they have built a structure whereby they can bring people in and they can be successful, then they chew you up and spit you out maybe. But the system is designed to perpetuate even when that happens.
Guest: Richard Tame: I think you learn a whole lot of things from how to manage it, how to manage a team, how to grow people, how to get the most work out of people, and how to structure data and reporting in a way that drives business outcomes. So you'd have like a weekly metrics meeting people might be familiar with Amazon's weekly metrics meeting. So you had like decks that over time got bigger and bigger and bigger because they added more products and like every number and tiny font that you could imagine about your product, CloudFront, and everybody else's product, and you never knew who the CEO would call on to answer. There was an expectation that the leaders of the business understood what all of those numbers were. So, if you have that as a structure, it drives all of the behavior behind, because the people need to be able to deliver on this metrics package. You need to be able to understand why their metrics are moving in the way that they're moving. That sort of forces everything that happens underneath. You also get to learn what it looks like as a challenger. So CloudFront was going up against some big companies, Akamai being one of them, who'd been there for a long time and were dominant.
Guest: Richard Tame: How do you win a deal versus Akamai? Because Akamai has got so many customers, they could lowball it if they wanted to. If you're a new company, how low are you prepared to go before it's not cost-effective to even take that business? So, it's just a bunch of things that get learned along the way. But maybe the biggest takeaway is the actual output that you can get, the impact that you can have. If you have a bunch of people who are working really hard and they have a clear mission about where they want to go. If you go to Microsoft, very different. It's cool to go to Amazon and then go to Microsoft or maybe vice versa because Microsoft's like a gigantic government bureaucracy to a certain extent, which doesn't do them a good service, probably and isn't maybe very nice, but that's how they're structured. They're so big, they have so much money. Their jobs are very different or they were when I was there, and I would consider them to be quite chunked down. So it's almost like, "Hey, Richard, here are ten things that we need you to do and that's it." Amazon is like you need to do these 100 things, then that's like the basics, and go do everything else.
Guest: Richard Tame: When we don't know what we need to do, but go figure it out, Microsoft's like, okay, you do these ten things, pass it to somebody else. They get to consolidate your ten things with three other people's ten things, and it goes up the chain like that. Maybe it's different now, but that certainly was my experience there. That was just an interest in learning in terms of how to manage something that big. You look at the CFO of Microsoft and you're like, well, they've got the same number of hours in the day as you or I have, but they're managing this like gigantic company. How do they do that? Of course, it's what they choose to focus on, what they prioritize. So whilst I was there, there was a monthly CapEx review where relatively small dollar expenditures, especially in the context of Microsoft, they all had to be presented to the CFO on the infrastructure side for them to sign off on it. And you're like, why are you doing that? That makes no sense. Of course, it sets the tone, it makes sure that you don't waste in an area that would be very easy to overspend on. So those are the probably the key lessons in those two experiences.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thank you for that answer on the kind of differences between Microsoft and Amazon and how they work. It is fascinating to hear that. I really like the way you explain that and the different lessons you learned from each of them. You know, I know from there you went to some other companies, Facebook and Lyft, and then you got the opportunity to be a CFO at Aurora. As you mentioned before, you joined the company as a series B, you were there to IPO and beyond. You did some big mergers and some fundraising. So talk a little bit about that experience. In particular, I would love to know, how you scaled the FP&A team and what you thought about it along the way as you grew this company from series B to public.
Guest: Richard Tame: For sure. I was having a good time at Lyft and then I got approached by the CEO, founder of Aurora, who said, come here. We've just raised $630 million-ish in series B and we need someone to come professionalize finance. So it's a really good opportunity, to take the reins of a finance department. These don't come along very often. So it's hard to say 'No' when you get them. When I joined, there were six people in finance, four people were doing accounting and there were a couple of people who were doing FP&A. It was kind of cool strategic finance. But it wasn't very well established in the company. We talked about this a bit before as well, how they hadn't earned their seat at the table yet. They were doing some reporting, the bare minimum, I would say. But there certainly wasn't anything like a true budget forecast holding people accountable, and certainly not like the finance business partnership that I think is very important to a successful FP&A team. So you join, and you recognize that this is an issue. You recognize this is something that you need to get better at. But you're in a tech company and an early-stage tech company. So you're fighting for resources. Finance is not going to get flooded with headcount, especially that early in the company's life, and rightly so, I think. Part of the challenge is how you build the team knowing that you can't just flood people into the situation. So how do you hire the right people? So the way that I approached it and I would encourage people to think about this the same if they have the same problems.
Guest: Richard Tame: I would do it again, is and it's much harder to do it like this. But you try to find people who can do both things. They can see the future, they can understand the strategic nature of where you're trying to get to and what good looks like on a larger scale. But today they're willing to get their hands dirty. they're willing to do journal entries, they're willing to do reporting. They're not just sitting there trying to direct other people around. They're involved in the details. As I said, hard to find these people because they're few and far between, but they're very valuable. I was able to bring some people that I worked with in prior companies along and mix them in with brand-new talent over time, which was a very nice mix. Once you start getting the talent in place, you're able to set them off on the tasks of building those key relationships, become true finance business partners, and then also have people who are focused on the reporting and the consolidation is the chart of accounts. Are we working well enough with accounting to get the books closed on time so we can get reporting pumped out, whether it be to the board, whether it be to the CEO myself, or other executives? That's what we focused on in the early years, getting the budget together, getting a forecast together, and getting finance, and business partnership relationships established.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: It makes a lot of sense. I like the part you said about trying to find somebody who can see the big picture but can also do the detailed work that needs to be done, those day-to-day tasks. Because it's often hard to find someone who can be that leader but is also comfortable doing the day-to-day work. Once you have those people in place, then as you scale, you have those people to become leaders and can manage other people, I'm assuming and help take that more prominent role as the company scales. You need more and more of that strategic thinking and other things beyond just those kinds of day-to-day tasks that are often urgent early on.
Guest: Richard Tame: It's understandable. If you've climbed the ranks and you've made it to a director level or above, you know, in many companies, like at that level you are, the title tells you what the job is. It's like to direct. At that point, you might have less need to put your hands on what's going on on a day-to-day basis. But I don't think that that applies to these quick startup companies and where people come, sometimes people come from bigger companies into these smaller companies, and I don't think that they understand the the variations.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: It makes sense. What was it like going public? What was that experience like? I know you said you did it via a SPAC. You had to raise a pipe, but maybe talk a little bit about that experience and what that was like.
Guest: Richard Tame: It's one of those ones where you can look back on it and say like, wow, like it's a lot of work. But as we went through it on a day-by-day basis, it didn't seem like it was a lot of work, much more than a regular day. We did it via SPAC, so we went very quickly. But we had built the company in a way that we would have expected to go public at some point, and one of the things that I'd seen at Lyft, for example, I joined Lyft the day after the IPO, and it became clear that perhaps they hadn't built the infrastructure in the way that they could of to make life easier and that was very messy. So when I went to Aurora, it's like, I don't know what's going to happen in the future, but let's build the infrastructure. Let's get the accounts audited, let's get NetSuite in place, let's get Cooper in place. Let's get the tools, the systems, and the processes in place so that we're ready to go public, we're ready to get sold, whatever that future might be. So I think that made our IPO process, the SPAC process, go smoothly because we've done a lot of the groundwork in advance.
Guest: Richard Tame: It wasn't like someone told us, "Oh, we're going public and we're starting from scratch." So instead of having to get their accounts audited by a big, full firm, completely from scratch for the first time, they'd already been done to like PC to AICPA standards, so it was just a case of uplifting them to PCAOB standards. You know, it's not it's work. It's not easy necessarily, but it's certainly quicker and easier than starting from scratch. So I think we benefited from a lot of that prior work. When you're doing it, some people in the finance team, maybe some people in the rest of the company might be, "Well, why are you spending your time and energy in some of this, like back-office infrastructure stuff because you don't know when it's going to pay off or if it's even going to pay off?" But it certainly was valuable and it gave us the optionality. I recommend people not going over the top in terms of preparation before they need to. But certainly, there are ways to make decisions and ways to build things whereby it does give you that optionality going forward.
Guest: Richard Tame: Then once you get into the process, we're not the first company that's done it. There are a lot of companies that have gone public. A lot of people have helped people go public. So you can leverage some of those experts who've done it before, then it becomes like a project management issue, like given the tasks that need to get done to the right people, holding them accountable for actually performing them when they need to perform them, then quarterbacking that and making sure that it all works. If everybody does their part, then the little pieces of work and the big pieces of work will add up and suddenly it's like, "Oh, you're standing at the Nasdaq and the bells being rung." So it's one of these weird things where when you're in it, it's just do the next thing, do the next thing, do the next thing. Then when you take a step back, you're like, wow, that was a lot of work. We did that well and good on us for doing some of the dirty work way in advance of when we were called on to do some of this stuff.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: It sounds like the experience at Lyft helped prepare you for what may happen, whether it was a transaction of being sold or going public, knowing the importance of systems data, those things that you have to have when you're public that you don't necessarily have to have when you're private.
Guest: Richard Tame: For sure. Again, having people who have been on both sides of the spectrum is helpful in the team as well, because they can help guide us with what's necessary today versus what's going to be necessary in the future and make sure that you have a seamless transition. Even some of the Facebook experience, a very big company but when you're in there and it's been public for a while, there's still things that need to be fixed, and you get the sense that it would have been easier and it probably would have been better had different decisions being made earlier, because now they have to get fixed when you're a public company, when you're a bigger company, when you've got other things going on and you hear a lot of these like finance transformation projects and they can often be sprawling messes with millions of dollars being spent, hundreds of people working on it. You sit there and you say, could you have not done something different? Could you have not done this better? I think those are some of the lessons that you take to Aurora and say like, "Okay, I'm in charge now. I get to set the tone and make some of these decisions." Fortunately, I think it worked out well.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Do you need to level up your FP&A game then join us on April 23rd for the FP&A guys. Best practice FP&A course. Imagine working smarter, gaining greater visibility, and becoming a top-flight FP&A Pro. During the four sessions, we will teach practical frameworks and share real-world examples that will make you a better FP&A professional. Visit thefpandaguy.com/fpandacourse to learn more and become the FP&A expert your company cannot do without. It's good. I'm curious if you could do the process over again. Is there anything you'd do differently, or any key takeaways that you can share from going through that process?
Guest: Richard Tame: I guess from the IPO process, I think once you've done it before, you'd be very capable of doing it again, but you have to have the right team on board. So often and I'm sure this happens a lot, at the end of the day, we're all people and everything's a people problem. So having the right team who are prepared to work hard, who are capable, competent, that's what's going to make the difference. There's nothing that I would think the going public process that I really would do very much differently, except perhaps we went through a SPAC, SPACs happen much quicker than the traditional IPO, and you also don't know for sure how successful it's going to be if it's going to be successful until the very last minute. So we deferred hiring a head of IR, a head of investor relations until basically when we right when we went public. I think they joined either the week before or probably after we'd already gone public right around that time. I think, in a subsequent process, I would pay more attention to whether or not it was worthwhile getting the head of investor relations on board ahead of the IPO so that they could marinate more in the story that you were telling people as you went public and you could take advantage of their expertise in some of that pre IPO messaging. As you go through the IPO, they would be very included in that and could help with that messaging. That would probably make their job easier after you go public as well.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: I appreciate that. I think that makes a lot of sense, having the IR person there, particularly from the story standpoint, having some time to understand the business because they're going to get asked a lot of questions about the story, and it's not something you learn overnight.
Guest: Richard Tame: Investor Relations is cool. It's storytelling and there's a financial aspect. Then the company is also trying to tell a more commercial or more media-focused story. Those two things need to be in sync for it to be successful as a public company. and I think the more time that those two groups have to work together and align on what they're saying, it can only be helpful.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Agreed. Give a shift gears here a little bit and just get your take on the autonomous driving industry. You spent some time in that obvious with the Aurora. I'm sure Lyft was involved in that. You've been to some different companies. So where do you see that going? How close do you think we are for that to get adoption at scale, where companies can start rolling that out?
Guest: Richard Tame: It's a super interesting question worthy of a podcast of its own, most likely.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Say we could probably do an hour-long conversation on just data. I'm sure.
Guest: Richard Tame: Sure. But I think the quick answer would be it's here now. The other week, I was in LA and I was flying back from LA and I got stranded in Phoenix, which is interesting. So you're like, well, I'm stranded in Phoenix. What am I going to do? I go get some pizza. There's a good pizza place in Phoenix. but then I remembered that Waymo had their service. So I went on 6 or 7 Waymo rides fully autonomous. The car picks you up by itself. There is no human in the vehicle. So it's here and that was fantastic. And it was like oh wow. it's you know autonomy is here. But that's only in a handful of cities. I think they recently expanded it to more areas of California. but it's not mainstream widespread, but it's here now then I guess, for them, it's more of an operational scaling problem versus as much as a technological problem. Then you see a bunch of companies who have had issues. Some of them aren't here anymore. You saw Cruise who was probably the first person to say, oh, we need to expand this business. It's fine doing this development, but we do need to scale. Then they ran into problems and then their highly ambitious scaling got pulled back. So that's potentially a sign that scaling is difficult. And people in the industry and outside say Waymo has been doing this for a long time and look they haven't scaled very much.
Guest: Richard Tame: Why not? I think the difficulty of scaling and what happened to Cruise when they tried to accelerate scaling probably proves that Waymo's approach is the right approach right now. Then when you move on to the trucking side Aurora went public. A couple of other companies went public. Waymo was heavily involved in trying to do a trucking product. A lot of those companies aren't around anymore. They ran out of money or they had issues. So again, I've been in many Aurora trucks driving themselves under human supervision between Dallas and Houston. And the technology is there, it's close, but it's hard to tell when it's going to be ready and then when it's going to scale. So I don't think I could sensibly put a date on it. I think Aurora's strategy, what it said publicly was it would have the product commercially launched on its launch lane by the end of 2024, then it would scale from there. But you can see it in our filings and our stuff, we were always very conservative in terms of what scale it looked like. Because we didn't believe that you could have 10,000 trucks on the road in the first year like some of the competitors who are no longer around said. So I feel like Autonomy's got so many benefits. People have made a lot of progress on it, but I wouldn't want to put a date on when it would be the dominant form of transportation. I would love it if it was, but I can't see it happening any time soon.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: So we're not going to get a prediction of January 1st, 2030. I'm just kidding.
Guest: Richard Tame: No, no predictions.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: What you said makes a lot of sense. It sounds like the technology is there. Is the technology there to be mainstream yet by some things to work out? Then there's a scaling issue that also needs to take place.
Guest: Richard Tame: I think that's right and with a lot of these high-tech companies, the problem that people are focused on today primarily is the technological problem. Then when that technological problem gets solved, you'll move on to the operational scaling problem. Then that could be even harder to some extent than the technological problem. So it'll be interesting to see what happens and if you take a look at what Aurora wanted to do, with the strategy it was following, part of it is to again, like abstract that away and say, we're not going to own the fleet, we're going to provide the software and we're essentially going to look like a SaaS business. We're going to have a driver as a service product. We're going to have very high margins, but somebody else is going to own the asset and they're going to operate the freight network. So there's a lot of people who have to be involved, and there's a lot of people who have to to be able to scale for it to hit the value, the valuations, and the numbers of trucks driving around. So good luck to everyone involved in it. I'm sure, it's such a benefit to society on so many dimensions that it's going to happen, I'm sure. But when and how quickly, I'll leave that for somebody else to speculate on.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Well, we'll check back in later on that crystal ball. So this next section we call the rapid-fire section. So I have five questions I'm going to ask you on each question you get no more than 15,20s. So we're looking for quick quick answers, just your thoughts. Ready?
Guest: Richard Tame: All right.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: What is your least favorite thing about Excel?
Guest: Richard Tame: The design.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: What's your favorite thing about Excel?
Guest: Richard Tame: That it works.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: I love that. I may ask you about that design here in a minute, but we'll go to the next one. Are you currently using generative AI?
Guest: Richard Tame: Yes.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: How?
Guest: Richard Tame: Playing around with it, research.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Well, I like that. So next question. What is the number one technical skill that FP&A professionals need to master?
Guest: Richard Tame: Financial modeling.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: That's a good one, I like that. What is the number one soft skill that FP&A professionals need to master?
Guest: Richard Tame: Well, it's tough. Communication and relationship-building and they're both related. I guess it depends on the specific circumstances of the job that you're in, and which one you need to be better at.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Agreed. Then is there one of those answers you'd like to elaborate on? We'll give you an opportunity to elaborate on one.
Guest: Richard Tame: I think soft skills are super important. For FP&A professionals who want to get on in their careers, what's going to help them differentiate themselves versus their peers is less likely to be the technical skills and more likely to be those soft skills. Can you communicate your insights, your findings, and the data in a way that is relevant to people, especially people higher up who aren't going to be as close to the numbers and honestly don't have the time to wade through all of the details? Can you build relationships so that people want to work with you, they want to include you and they value your opinion? I think sometimes you see people who are very technical, but they don't have those soft skills, and they can get frustrated because they don't understand why they're not getting some of the opportunities, and maybe they're not getting promoted well enough. So I think that focus on practicing soft skills is super important and probably will get increasingly so over time. I think it's incumbent on managers and leaders to tell people this and help them and give them opportunities to develop these skills as well. You need a mix of technical people and you need a mix of good relationship people. But don't just let your technical stars be technical stars and run into a roadblock in their career. You've got to make sure that they're either comfortable with that or if they're not, that you give them opportunities to develop the other skills that they're going to need.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Great point. Soft skills communication, and relationship-building are huge. So thank you for elaborating on that one. So this next one is the get-to-know-your section. It's where we get to know a little bit more about you. You get about 30s here for each of these. We have four questions. So the first one is tell me about a favorite hobby or passion you have.
Guest: Richard Tame: Well, I'm from England and in England I'm from Newcastle, which is in the northeast, which is the richest football club in the world because they're owned and this is football with a round ball for the American audience.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: I was waiting for you to say something like that.
Guest: Richard Tame: Gotta make sure. So I used to have a season ticket. I used to go to all the matches. So I still, I still really like soccer. I don't watch it as much as I once did, but I like it. And the MLS is fun. It's doing well. You can see on Apple TV and the strips are better, as my son tells me. Then the quality of play is better. But yeah, football's probably the most obvious hobby, passion that I have.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Great. So soccer for us Americans, football for the rest of the world, I get it. What is one book you would recommend to our audience that they read?
Guest: Richard Tame: That's tough. I'm not going to say a book. I tend to read books, then I move on and I don't say like, oh, this is the best book, everybody should read it. But I do like there's a magazine called Monocle Magazine, which focuses on travel and it has a global outlook. That's always worth a read for all the things that you could do if you had enough money and time to be able to do it. It makes you think, do people get to do all these things on a day-to-day basis? So yeah, that's something that I like to read.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: I like it. What's your favorite travel destination? If you could go to one place in the world, where are you going?
Guest: Richard Tame: If you put a gun to my head, I would say Billund in Denmark. We were there earlier this year. It's the home of Lego. So it's got a nice Lego house museum. It's got Lego lands there. I think we've been there like three times in the past year. There's nothing there except the Lego. It's almost like a company town. But it's enjoyable. And yeah, we like Denmark. So let's say Billund in Denmark.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Well, Denmark. I'd love to go there. That's on my list. I have family from there. My father-in-law lived there for a couple of years.
Guest: Richard Tame: We would move there. I keep on trying to get a job at Lego, but I think it's one of those companies where if you have a job, you don't want to leave. So there are not that many senior roles open up at Lego. But if anybody's watching and can help out, you know where I am.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: There you go. Richard's putting his plug out there. If you're at Lego and you have a role open for them, reach out. If you could have dinner with one person in the world alive today, who are you going to have dinner with?
Guest: Richard Tame: I'm going to say the politically correct answer, my wife because I like having dinner with my wife. If she was busy, she does a lot of stuff, so if she was doing something on her own, I think Jose Mourinho, who is the special one, self-proclaimed special one, one of the greatest football managers in the world, super interesting guy, very successful everywhere he's been. I think he understands what football is. It's a game. It's a game of football but it's also a game about managing people. I think he would be fascinating to have dinner with.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Good job. On the politically correct answer. If your wife listens to this, you'll have passed.
Guest: Richard Tame: It's true as well which is even better.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Of course. Just have two questions left. The first is if you could offer advice to our audience to be a better business partner, if you could offer them one piece of advice to be a better business partner, what would that be?
Guest: Richard Tame: I think that I would say you have to make the relationship not about you. You're there to partner with the business and invariably the business knows more about the business. So you need to have a relationship such that you can influence them. But you understand that you're serving them, I think, would be the best advice I would give to people. Not focus on yourself, not focus on what you're necessarily trying to get out of the interactions, and more about how you're going to help them be more successful in whatever they're trying to do, whether it's building their infrastructure, whether it's selling more stuff. I think that's the best advice.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Got it. So focus on the needs of your business, not on your needs.
Guest: Richard Tame: Yes.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: Then the last question, if somebody wants to learn more about you or get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?
Guest: Richard Tame: Sure. LinkedIn is probably good. Well, I'm on LinkedIn, like all of us professionals, that's a good place to find me. I do some of these podcasts when people reach out to me, but LinkedIn is probably the best way to find me at the moment. Take it from there.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. Well, thank you, Richard. I enjoyed having you on the show. I appreciate you carving out some time for us and excited for the audience to get to listen to this. So thanks for joining us.
Guest: Richard Tame: No, thank you very much indeed. It's been awesome. I appreciate you having me on and I look forward to doing it again sometime maybe. Good luck.
Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. Sounds good. Thanks.
Guest: Richard Tame: Bye-bye.
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.
