How FP&A Teams can Influence CEOs and CFOs and drive the business forward with Glenn Snyder

Show Notes
In this episode of FP&A Tomorrow, host Paul Barnhurst (aka the FP&A Guy) welcomes Glenn Snyder, a seasoned FP&A leader with over 20 years of experience. Glenn shares insights on financial planning and analysis, leadership strategies, and building effective business partnerships. He discusses the keys to driving business impact, managing teams, and navigating career growth in FP&A.

Glenn Snyder is a Senior Director at Riverrun Consulting, specializing in interim financial leadership. With a career spanning financial services, fintech, SaaS, private equity, and more, he has held leadership roles at Franklin Templeton, Visa, Charles Schwab, and Digital Realty. Glenn is also an author, educator, and board member, passionate about mentoring finance professionals and improving FP&A effectiveness.

Expect to Learn:

• The key elements of great FP&A and how it drives executive decisions

• How to balance company goals with employee career development

• Strategies for building strong business partnerships in FP&A

• The role of automation and efficiency in FP&A reporting and analysis

• How to successfully transition into a new leadership role

• Overcoming resistance from business leaders and earning trust in finance

• The importance of storytelling and data visualization in financial reporting

Here are a few relevant quotes from the episode:

• “The best leaders give credit to their teams and create opportunities for them to shine.” - Glenn Snyder

• Your career growth is your responsibility. Stay curious, stay connected, and keep learning.” - Glenn Snyder

• “You don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, but you must be the most adaptable.” - Glenn Snyder

In this episode, Glenn Snyder shared his expertise on what makes FP&A impactful, how to lead finance teams, and the importance of strong business partnerships. He emphasized that great FP&A professionals don’t just report numbers, they drive decisions, build trust, and continuously improve processes. Being proactive, investing in relationships, and focusing on delivering insights, not just reports, are key. Success in FP&A comes from adapting, influencing, and always adding value.

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Earn Your CPE Credit
For CPE credit please go to earmarkcpe.com, listen to the episode, download the app, and answer a few questions and earn your CPE certification. To earn education credits for FPAC Certificate, take the quiz on earmark and contact Paul Barnhurst for further details.

In Today’s Episode
[01:39] - Introduction to the Episode

[04:12] - What Great FP&A Looks Like

[09:17] - Transitioning to Leadership

[14:49] - Balancing Change in a New Role

[18:20] - Early Leadership Challenges

[23:36] - Flexibility in FP&A

[27:03] - Playing Sponge
[34:16] - Managing Career Growth

[46:51] - The #1 Technical Skill for FP&A

[59:32] - Great Advice for FP&A

Full Show Transcript

[00:01:39] 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 Barnhurst, 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. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just starting your journey in FP&A , this show has something for everyone. This week, I'm thrilled to welcome Glenn Snyder on the show. Glenn, welcome to the show.

[00:02:24] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Thanks, Paul. Great to be here.

[00:02:25] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I'm really excited to have you. I think last time we talked, I was doing a different show. I was doing the one with data.

[00:02:31] Guest: Glenn Snyder : So thank you. I love being back. Love the conversation we had before and am looking forward to today's topics.

[00:02:37] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. And just so everybody knows, Glenn and I had a good 15 minute conversation about FP&A  before we even started, and I joked with him, I should have recorded it. So it could be a behind the scenes of, you know, what happens before the interview. But let me give a little bit of background about Glenn and we'll jump into the conversation. So Glenn is currently a senior director with Riverrun and consulting in the interim management practice. Glenn has worked across seven industries: financial services, fintech, data center, REITs, private equity, consumer goods, e-commerce, telecom, SaaS, hospitality and e-commerce. So he's covered just about everything. He has over 20 years of FP&A  experience and eight years in corporate strategy at firms like Franklin Templeton, visa, Charles Schwab Digital Realty, MobileMe, and Vacasa. Additionally, Glenn has published a novel, One Moment in Time. He's taught at San Francisco State University and UCLA, and has been on the board of Redwood City Child Development Program, a nonprofit preschool for underprivileged children. He earned his bachelor's degree in international economics from UCLA and an MBA from the University of San Francisco. How did that sound for you, Glenn? Was that a good bio?

[00:03:59] Guest:Glenn Snyder : Yeah. Make you feel old? Yeah.

[00:04:02] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: People, either they say it makes me feel old or it makes me feel more accomplished than I realized, right? It's usually one of the two.

[00:04:09] Guest: Glenn Snyder : I never realized how long my bio actually was.

[00:04:12] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Oh, good. I've had longer, and I've had shorter. Totally fine. All right. What does great FP&A  look like? You know, we like to start there.

[00:04:20] Guest: Glenn Snyder : So, you know, to me, the great FP&A is about engagement with the business, being able to influence executive decisions. And when I've seen great FP&A , it's when the FP&A  team sits on the leadership teams of all the different executives around the company, that they have engagement with business leaders, that where it's not just FP&A  providing information to the business, but it's a true partnership and the business is providing data back to and information back to FP&A . And when you bring those two together, the FP&A  team can really help ensure that the company is making the best decisions possible.

[00:04:57] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I love at the end making sure you know the company makes the best decision possible. And I really like how you mentioned it's a two way partnership. It's not just us giving them information, but it's them returning and also giving us information. It's a true partnership, not a one way street. Can you maybe share an example from your career of what happened when you had great FP&A  going? Maybe, you know, some were really benefited the company?

[00:05:23] Guest:Glenn Snyder : Yeah.You know, I think the best example is probably when I was at Digital Realty. So I was the vice president of corporate FP&A . I had a very small team in Digital Realty in the S&P 500. One of the largest data center REIT's in the world. And what we were able to do with a small team. And when I say small team, it was me and two other people. We were on every executives leadership team meetings. We went over and met with every call center manager every month to go through their budgets and variances, but also to learn about what they were doing, but the impact that we had on the business, I think about my three and a half years there, and we completely changed the way the company budgeted and forecasted. We helped the company manage to, within their corporate expenses for the first time in company history, and they were published for 14 years before I joined. We were able to automate things in such a way that we were only spending 2 to 3 days a month on monthly reporting, which meant the rest of the time we were out there in the business and engaging and, you know, making an impact. And to me, when you go over and you're able to put all of that stuff together and you look back and you can say, wow, I really could see where the company was when I first started and how we're doing things in a much better, more efficient, more effective way now. I love that. So to me, that's probably the best example of really outstanding team.

[00:06:43] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I appreciate that great example. And I love the focus on hey, we only spend three days on reporting. We spent the time with the business because as you said, it's partnership. That's where the great FP&A  comes from. I mean, nobody says, hey, I want you to spend more time on reporting. They may ask for more reports, but nobody says spend more time on reporting.

[00:07:03] Guest: Glenn Snyder : No, that's absolutely right. And in fact, when I first started, we were probably spending 5 to 6 days a month doing reporting. But as we were working with the systems that we went over and implemented, our focus was to get that down. And by the way, it wasn't just the system generating reports that 2 to 3 days a month included full bullet point analysis of understanding what's going on and writing that up for the, you know, for the call center managers and executives, whoever we're giving the reports to. But the idea being minimize the amount of time you're doing repetitive functions so you could maximize the time where you're going over and you're really making doing that value added impact. And whether that's engaging with the business and just meeting with them and learning about them, or it's about going and working on a project or cleaning up data so that the data connects in a better way so that you could do a better job forecasting whatever it happens to be. The more you focus on things that are not repetitive, the bigger the impact I think you're going to have.

[00:08:04] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I'd agree with that, I like that. So you recently started a new role. You got a new opportunity coming. Tell us about that.

[00:08:11] Guest:Glenn Snyder : Yeah.

[00:08:12] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Two weeks ago I'm on I'm on day ten right now. I think, you know, you're still a newbie when you could count all your your days on your fingers, right? But I started two weeks ago at River Run Consulting. It's a financial consulting and advisory firm. I'm part of the interim management practice, and that is a group where if you happen to need a CFO or head of FP&A  or corporate controller, because either you, you know, the old one left and you have, you know, it's going to take a while before you, you fill that role or you want to go over and make changes and you need someone to come in and manage that process. That's kind of what interim management does. So. I've been here ten days. I haven't got my first project yet. I'm certainly looking forward to it. But I'm very excited to be with Reverend.

[00:08:58] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Well, great. Sounds like it will be a great opportunity for you. I know you and I touch base on that a little bit. Before we started recording and you were sharing some of the things you'll be doing. So again, congratulations on that and love to hear how that goes in the future. Yeah. Next question I want to ask is new role. How do you approach a new role when you're going into a new company, especially in leadership positions? How do you think about that yourself, Glenn? Like what do you do?

[00:09:25] Guest:Glenn Snyder : Well, the first.

[00:09:26] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Thing to recognize is you have a lot to learn, right? No matter what you come in with, whatever your experiences are, you don't know that company. You don't know its processes. You don't know its people. You don't know its systems, you don't know its data. So to me, I always like to go over and start learning and asking questions. And, you know, you get that grace period of, you know, maybe the first month or so that you get to ask any question. Because I'm new, I'm trying to figure this out, right, and take advantage of that. One of the things that I always like whenever I go into a company is to meet with all the top executives, all your key business partners for a 30 minute meeting and go over. And I like to ask three questions. Number one, what are we doing that you absolutely love and say, don't touch this, I love it, right. Number two, what do we do? What are we producing or giving to you that you don't use at all. And number that you know, maybe and maybe those things you can get rid of. And then number three, what are we not doing at all that you would like to see? And when you go over and you have those meetings with 15 or 20 different people around the company, all of a sudden certain things start to bubble up.

[00:10:37] Guest: Glenn Snyder : And now you know how you can make that impact, where that low hanging fruit is or where the biggest demand is. So you're able to focus a little bit more in your first 90 days on, Hey, look, this seems really to be the issue. Let's go over and solve some of those things. And oftentimes it's something very simple. I've gone into companies where I was told, you know, chief legal officer said, I don't even know where I stand with the budget. No one showed me a report. And you're like in April. And so I was like, well, okay, that's something we could resolve really quick, right? And now all of a sudden that chief legal officer says, wow, this guy came in and solved a problem for me pretty quick. And you start building up that trust. And so to me, that's really what it's about, is going over and having those discussions, figuring out where that low hanging fruit is and start getting some early wins so you can start building the confidence of both the team and the trust from the business part.

[00:11:31] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I love the trust. Early wins. I have a question. If you run across a business partner that's kind of adversarial, you can tell I don't really want to deal with finance. They give you a very kind of short answers or no real value. Any recommendations of how you break through? What do you typically do when you run into those where you're just like, okay, this is not what I expected. There's there's something going on here.

[00:11:55] Guest:Glenn Snyder : You know.

[00:11:55] Guest: Glenn Snyder : The funny thing is, is when I first started at Charles Schwab, the one person I was supporting, he was the senior VP of product management. And I go over, you know, first week there, I'm introducing myself to him. And I said, you know, I'd like to set up a monthly one on one with you just to make sure we're connected. And he says to me, no, I think I'm good. And that's all he said. Well, okay. I'm like, you know, I do think that there's value. I kept on trying to get in there. He absolutely refused. So I was like, okay, something is is up. And what I learned was he was one of those people who was like his inner circle was very special to him. He trusted those people implicitly. So I had to figure out, how else can I get in there? And what I started to do was I went out and had one on ones with each of his direct reports, and then I started helping his direct reports manage their businesses in a better way. And within probably the first 4 or 5 months, his direct reports were all saying to him, oh my God, Glenn's coming in, helping out with this and doing these different things. And then all of a sudden on his own, he comes back to me and says, hey, you know what? I hear you've been doing a great job with the team. Yeah. Why don't we set up a one on one? And that was the way. So sometimes you get somebody who's very, very resistant because you're new. They don't trust you. They don't know anything about you. So the way you could go over and earn trust is to get the trust of the people that they trust. And when you could do that, then you could start finding your way into that inner circle.

[00:13:23] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I love that idea of getting the trust of the people they trust, right? It's like, you know, your significant other spouse, whatever. If they trust someone, you're much more likely to implicitly trust them, right? You say, hey, this is a good friend. Your parents, whatever people you value, and they tell you, hey, this is a good person. You can trust them. You put your guard down to a certain level. Is it easier to have that relationship? So I, I love that approach. It totally makes sense to work, go to those people that are important to them and find out how to add value. And they'll go back and talk about you, and it will break down that barrier over time.

[00:13:58] Guest:Glenn Snyder : That's right. And you have to.

[00:13:58] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Also remember that it's not just about the head of the group. I mean, if you're an FP&A , you're supporting the entire group. You should have a relationship with their direct reports anyway, and maybe even one level below that, because maybe they're going to help give you context or information that will allow you to do better job forecasting or analyzing whatever it happens to be. So you should have those relationships regardless. The difference is, if you had someone at the top who's really hard to get in with, you got to be thinking, well, how do you get in there? And the best way to do is to talk to the people who are in that inner circle. And, you know, they all told me, said, yeah, you know what? He unless he really trusts you, he doesn't really let you in. And he's got to trust his direct reports. Right. And so that's that's kind of the approach that I took and it worked out. It worked out really well.

[00:14:47] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I really appreciate that. What kind of building on this whole of starting a new role? You mentioned, you know, kind of that first month asking a lot of questions, but what other things do you do to try to make an impact? Right. We all want to come in and feel like we're adding value as quick as we can, but we also don't want to rock the boat. I think we've all been there where someone comes in and you're all walking on eggshells because they start disrupting everything without knowing what's going on. So how do you kind of balance and manage that?

[00:15:15] Guest: Glenn Snyder : You know, it's it's a fine line and it's one that I've tripped over many times in my career, to be honest with you. But what I try and do is identify the areas where the team can start getting some good wins. And this is one of the things that you have to recognize if you're coming in as a director or VP or SVP of FP&A , a lot of attention is going to be on you. You lead the group, but it's the people who are working for you who are going to make you successful. So don't go in there and try and say, I'm going to show them what I can do. Go over and say, let's go and get the team to start making a bigger impact. So as I mentioned, you go out, you have those conversations with people and they say, you know what, we'd really like to start seeing more metrics being incorporated into our reports. Let's just say that's one of the themes that comes up. Go back to your team and say, hey guys, you know what? Let's let's figure out how do we source some of this stuff. What are those key metrics? And you work with them and you let your team put the solution together and give them credit. So they, you know, those executives who might have said, I want to see more metrics in those reports. They know that conversation was with you, but the result is coming from the people who are supporting them on your team. They know that you had that influence because they see that change, but it's your team that is hearing directly from the business saying, wow, this is great. I love this great job. And now your team is feeling a lot better. So to me it's it's about removing your ego. It's not about you taking credit and letting you know, moving your team to a higher level so that they are feeling that success and that will naturally come back to you as well.

[00:16:58] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I really like that. So focusing on kind of helping that team get to a higher level, getting those wins, those success based on the things you learned that you know need to be done, changes you need to make, do it in such a way that they get the credit and everybody looks better at the end of the day.

[00:17:14] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Right. The way that you would trip over yourself here is if you go over and let's say you're meeting with, you know, your chief operations officer and they say, yeah, you know what, I get my financial data, but I get my business metrics somewhere else. I'd love to have it incorporated. Well, okay, I know I have the skill set. I could go back to my office and go pull it together and send it over to them. But they have a finance business partner within the FP&A  team. Why would I want to step in between them Instead, go back to that finance business partner and say, hey, here are some of the feedback. Let's talk and work together so that you could be more successful with that business partner.

[00:17:50] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I like that it's about empowering your employees to be successful.

[00:17:56] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Yeah, and showing them the path that they can go on and to say, look, you're doing a great job today, but here's what's really going to be expected of you. Let's get you moving in that direction so that you could go and look even better to your business partners.

[00:18:13] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I like that. So, you know, we've talked a lot about what to do, kind of how to how to handle that early period work with your team. Can you talk about maybe an experience where in the early days, you mentioned you've tripped over yourself a few times, where it didn't go well or well, where you're like, wow, I that wasn't what I expected. And maybe what you learned from that experience. Yeah.

[00:18:35] Guest: Glenn Snyder : So I'm going to give you two examples. One where it was completely on me, where I screwed up, and the other one where it was more of a business thing. The one that was on me. I went into a company very clear. I had to go over and change processes around and get the FP&A  team to be much more efficient, and in doing so, without even thinking, I was doing a little kind of comparing to hey, here's where we are, here's what we're really trying to do. And in that process, I was told, because, again, this was not what I was trying to do at all, but I was told I was coming off as saying, these guys aren't doing a good job today because this is much better. And that was not at all what I wanted to do. And it was one of those things that I had to go over and, you know, just take my foot out of my mouth with my team and say, guys, this was a mistake. I didn't mean to do it like this, you know, and so on. And so you kind of, you know, initially people felt like I was coming in and just putting them down and saying they weren't doing a good job, which is not what I wanted to do. So as I said, it's very easy to trip over that when you go and say, well, here's what we're doing today, but we're going to move over to this because, you know, you have that mandate, but you got to go over and not I wasn't trashing what they were doing, but I was going over and showing how the new stuff was going to be significantly better. And people felt like it was like, oh, so what we're doing isn't good.

[00:19:57] Guest: Glenn Snyder : And so that was one area that I needed to improve on. And so now I'm much more aware of that. The other situation was I came into a company, the FP&A  team. They had lost a ton of people. There were there were a lot of really good processes. And I was told, okay, hey, you need to go and fix this. You need to start putting together, you know, a more stable FP&A  team that can make an impact. And within my first week, it was a private equity owned company. I got a call from one of the board members who told me, we think the company is going to go bankrupt. The cash flow forecasts are all over the map. We need to get a handle on what's going on, and all of a sudden, everything that I thought I would be working on just got derailed, because now I got to go figure out how the company is earning and spending cash and put together a forecast so that we could really understand. Hey, wait a second, are we going to need to go and borrow money on a line of credit? Are we going to be okay with our cash position? And all of a sudden, within my first week, all my priorities got thrown up in the air. And the lesson there is just to understand, when you go in, you're going to naturally be thinking about, okay, what am I going to be working on? What am I going to be doing? But you have to recognize that there could be other things going on in the business that you're not aware of, and you're going to have to pivot to make sure you're prioritizing things in the right way.

[00:21:21] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: And now a message from our title sponsor. Being an operator is not for the faint of heart. It often feels like you're jumping out of an airplane and building the parachute on the way down. CEOs, CFOs, COOs, and leaders can relate. That is why I joined Operators Guild. It's home to more than 1000 of the most elite, high growth operators in the world. Think the Special Forces for Business Scaling members have access to over 150 in-person events across all 25 global chapters. The modern startup founder, CFO and COO are really just multidisciplinary problem solvers, which is why having the best problem solvers together has created the ultimate diversity intelligence of any operator group in the world. Operators Guild gave me the chance to meet my own personal board of directors. People I can bounce ideas off, and their online form allows you to get answers from your peers as questions pop up, like how do I run an employee secondary? Or what should I pay as a base commission rate on SAS deals? I've made great friends through attending the highly acclaimed OG summit, join Operators Guild and access the Navy Seals of high growth business.Scaling a group by operators for operators. Learn more and apply at operators-guild.com. That's operators-guild.com. and tell them the FP&A guy sent you.

[00:22:52] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: You know and you remind me of an example someone shared. They worked for a subsidiary of Bayer. You know and their first week Silicon Valley bank collapses. And that's where the subsidiary had all their money. So she remembers being on a flight, you know, talking to someone, which you're not supposed to do because they had to have the authorization and trying to get bear to take the money back so it would get out of Silicon Valley Bank was like $100 million or something, you know, huge number. And that was her first week on the job. And priorities change like you would have never expected, you know, on day two that you're going to have a collapse of the bank where all your money sits and you're trying to pay the parent company a bunch of money, and they didn't even know how to take it because they weren't used to that. You know, it took a while to figure it out, that type of thing.

[00:23:35] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Absolutely. And the one thing about FP&A  is you might have, you know, FP&A  has its core functions, you do budgets, you do forecast do variance reporting, you do business partnering, but you also have to be flexible because the business is constantly changing. And for all you know, there could be an M&A project that's out there. It could be a cash forecasting thing. It could be a debt refinancing thing. Who knows what it could be going into a new market and you could be pulled into something. And now your priorities shift. So you always want to try and be as flexible as possible and recognize that sometimes you just need to pivot. The other thing I would say is if you're managing a team, make sure that your team can go and cover for you. If you're being pulled onto a big project that might be confidential and you can't bring them along, you might need that support from your team to make sure they're covering the stuff you were doing. So don't go over and try and say, nope, I do this over here and you do that over there. Instead, you want to go and make sure that people are well informed with what's going on so that they can operate when you might be pulled somewhere else.

[00:24:43] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I know that's so common in FP&A , right? And M&A. A fear of bankruptcy, whatever. There's those big, huge things that all of a sudden you're like, all your time is spent on this and your team has to figure out how to make sure other things don't drop while you're spending all your time on that priority that the CEO or CFO or whoever just dropped in your lap.

[00:25:05] Guest: Glenn Snyder : That's right, that's right. And, you know, there's the expression of, you know, uh, hey, I'm trying to change the wheel while we're driving 60 miles an hour down the freeway. And, you know, because the business is still moving. Yep. But you have to recognize that there are some times that you need to step back. And that's why you want to make sure that you are training and informing your team to be able to cover that. You know, there used to be and I knew a lot of people and I saw this more early in my career that people would say, well, I want to show the company they need to know how valuable I am. So when I take my two week vacation, they really feel my absence. Why would you want to do that? Right. The idea is to help the company. And so make sure that you know what, you have some good people who you're training. And you know what? Sometimes you can't always go and promote people and get them to where they want to be. And you lose people. Fine. That happens. But your job is to go over and maintain that level of excellence for the company, whether you are there or not. And so you've got to make sure that, again, it comes back to making sure you're setting your teams up for success.

[00:26:14] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. I've never understood the territory. And this is mine. And I want to make it difficult. So, you know, if they fire me, nobody will be able to figure it out or they'll have to suffer the pain. It's like, that's no way to live life for one, but two just to advance into a career. I mean, the whole idea is you're there. You're there to serve the business, they're paying you for it. And, you know, as long as you're there, you should be doing everything you can to make sure it's a smooth process for when you're gone, whether that's because you got laid off, you found a new job, whatever the reason.

[00:26:49] Guest: Glenn Snyder : That's right. 100% agree.

[00:26:51] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: So I'm with you. I've never understood that mentality. I've seen it a lot and it always frustrates me. So any other advice or anything you'd like to say that you'd give to someone when they're starting a new role? You shared a few things, the questions and other stuff, but anything else you want to add to that before we move on?

[00:27:08] Guest: Glenn Snyder : You know, I just like to say play sponge. You know, think of if you go over under the puddle of water and you drop a sponge into it, it just absorbs what's around it. And that's the thing is, don't go in there with your own ego and saying, well, this is I've done this before and I was really good at it. So we're going to do this again. Just listen and absorb what's going on around you. Because the more you can connect dots and not only connect dots with people, but sometimes also data. The more you can be thinking about, hey, wait a second, maybe we should be getting access to this data warehouse over here or pulling in different types of metrics, because now we could tell a different type of story. You never know where that's going to come from. So just be aware of of what's going on around you. Listen to the people who work for you, who you are supporting, but also who support your team. That's another. That's a constituency that most people forget about. Everyone thinks about, okay, hey, I support these business leaders or within finance, this is our group. But you know what? Hr provides data to you. It provides data to you. The accounting team provides data to you so that you can do your job well. Listen to them as well. Understand what's going on with them because they might give you insights into that data of of what's going on and how it's moving. That will really help you structure where you need to go. So that's like play sponge.

[00:28:28] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I like it.

[00:28:30] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Spongebob or Sponge Fred or Sponge Paul, or whoever he is.

[00:28:35] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Sponge, I like it. All right, so I want to move a little bit more toward managing people and some questions around there. I know you've had a lot of leadership roles. You know, as a people leader. The first question is how do you manage individual goals of employees versus company goals because they're not always aligned. Ideally, they should be. In an ideal world, they'd all be aligned to be easy. But how do you manage that and ensure you're keeping that balance? Right.

[00:29:04] Guest: Glenn Snyder : So a couple of things. First of all, you have to remember, even though you might be leading the team, you have been in those positions where you were the analyst or the manager or the senior director or whatever it happens to be, and you had your own things that you wanted to achieve. So make sure that you are giving that opportunity to your employees. And so to me, if you have, let's say, 4 or 5 goals from the company and says, here are the things you need to do. I always tell my team I want an additional goal in there. That's all about you as a person. Where do you personally want to build and grow? Because I want that insight to help you achieve what you need to do in your career. I had a boss early on in my career and he said he knows he's successful. When the people who reported to him are higher level than he is. And and that's you know, I love that idea. So I would go over and just make sure that there's a personal goal and that you as their, as their manager is aware of it. I'll give you a really good example. I was managing this woman who she said she she would love. She's an Asian woman. She would love to work in Asia. At some point in her career, her role was supporting the back office functions of the company. So HR, finance, legal, the IT executives and so and so on. But the back office functions. And so, you know, she came to me and she said, you know, I'd really love the opportunity to work in Asia someday.

[00:30:32] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Well, the company did have operations in Asia. It was in a different area. So I knew, okay, if that's what she wanted to do, if I had a project that came over that touched Asia and allowed her to engage with some of those people, that she could start building that relationship, she would really appreciate it. So that gave me better insight on how to manage her, to help her get to where she wanted to be. And in doing so, she appreciated that because now she was getting the exposure she wanted. So now I had a happier, more engaged, more productive employee. And so to me, that's the way you want to look at it is you want to say yes, you got to do the things that the corporation's asking you to do, because they're the ones that are paying you, after all, but your employees are going to leave you if they don't feel like they're they're growing their career the way they want to. So if you don't know how they want to grow their career, you got to ask them. And that's why I always like to say, what do you want to achieve in the next year? Do you want to learn more about a particular line of business? Do you want to get better at creating PowerPoint presentations or public speaking? Whatever it is. And now you understand how you can coach them going forward.

[00:31:39] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: And I'm curious. Let's say their goal is just something that's not realistic in that role or for the business, right. Some of them will be very I want this and you know, that's probably not something you can help them achieve, at least in the short term. How do you manage that conversation?

[00:31:56] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Honestly, you've got to be honest. And you got to say, look, I hear what you're saying. And yeah, that would be great. But that's not something that is within my control. And and you've got to let them know. There's also sometimes you got to level set with people I was interviewing, I was at Charles Schwab and I had a position that was like a senior analyst role. So it was, you know, relatively junior on the scale. And one of the questions I would like to ask in an interview is, what are your top three goals for the next five years? And the guy I'm interviewing says, I want to be CFO. And I just kind of paused and said of Charles Schwab. And he said, yeah. I said, do you understand that there's like 18,000 people at this company? The CFO is about 12 levels above where you are, and you're saying you want to be there in five years and you just say, yeah. Now, I didn't hire the guy because he clearly didn't understand how corporations worked. He thought he would be getting promoted every three months, which doesn't happen. But you got to go over and be direct and honest. And I did tell him, I said, look, realistically, the first time you're really going to be looked at for a promotion is probably 18 months to two years, because you got to show you can do your job first.

[00:33:12] Guest: Glenn Snyder : So there's no way you're going up 12 levels in five years. It's just not going to happen. And so I was honest with him. But I think that's what you need to know. So you need to make sure that you you're direct and make sure that they have the right level setting for what they what's actually achievable. But there are times I had one of the best conversations I ever had, which was one that didn't go my way. I was on a visa and I was a director, and I said I wanted to get up to the senior director level, and I was talking to my senior VP and he said, Glenn, you do a great job. We love what you're doing, but I don't see the role that you're in being a senior director. So that means if you really want to be a senior director, we got to help you find a job somewhere else in the company. And that wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear, but I really appreciated the honesty. And so then, you know, now I knew where I stood so I could make the choice. Do I want to stay here as a director, or do I want to try and find something somewhere else as a senior director? And now it's my option because I knew where my boss.

[00:34:16] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I still remember one of the early in my career. Some advice I got from a boss that was very unvarnished as he looked at me and he goes, Paul, you're doing yourself a disservice if you're not always taking those calls and looking at those opportunities for different reasons. The company could let go of you tomorrow. You're doing great work right now, and I don't want to lose you. But that's the reality is something could happen. You could be let go tomorrow. So make sure you're always looking beyond just the company to protect yourself. And I just appreciate that honesty. It wasn't like, hey, I want to lose you or you know, that I'm planning on letting you go, but let me just tell you the reality how the corporate world works today so you can make the best decisions for you.

[00:34:58] Guest: Glenn Snyder : 100% agree. In fact, I've been mentoring students at UCLA since 2007, and one of the things I always tell them when they're looking for an internship or a job, you want to give yourself as many options as possible, because if you have the options, you get to choose. If you only have one, if you are not looking for a job, for example, and the company says, well, we're going to eliminate your role, but we can move you into this other role. You have one option. Well, technically, you have two. You could be unemployed, or you could say, fine, I'm going to take that role even if it's something you don't want to do. So if you're out there and you know you're doing a good job, it's not a bad idea to just understand and network with people because you never know what could come up that could be even better and help you really get to your ultimate goals of where you want to be. So I'm not saying go, go, you know, constantly be job hunting and, you know, go out and jump through a bunch of recruiters but have an open mind to it. Don't turn it away. I mean, it's a conversation, right? So give yourself the option because you never know where that next great opportunity could come from.

[00:36:03] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: FP&A guy here today. I'm super excited to talk to you about the FP&A Hub community, the online community that you can go to to get answers. Early in my career, I wish I had a place I could have went to where I didn't have to talk to somebody in the company, go to my boss again, or Google that I knew I could get answers from. That's what you can get at thefpahub.com. You can make friends, you can learn from others, you can attend events, put discussions and posts out there. You don't have to worry about all the selling and cheat sheets and stuff you get on LinkedIn. This is real conversations by real FP&A professionals. We have over 100 people in the community and it's absolutely free. That's the best thing. So please go ahead and join today thefpahub.com. You can join for free at thefpahub.com. And the FP&A guy looks forward to seeing you in this free community. Join today.

[00:37:22-00:37:38] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Well, that's just it. That's a huge part of the network. Just have the conversation. Doesn't mean you have to take the job. Never does. Unless you're 100% positive. Maybe you've heard horrible things about the company, and, you know, there's zero chance I get that. But most of the time, you know, talk is cheap, so to speak. Have the conversation.

[00:37:38] Guest: Glenn Snyder : That's right. Even if the company goes, you go all the way to get an offer. It's an offer. It doesn't mean you have to accept it. Exactly.

[00:37:46] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I'm totally with you. So I'm curious, talking to you about people, and you've mentioned how you really focus on their goals and making sure you're doing what you can to help align them. Maybe. Can you share a favorite experience with somebody you manage where you feel like, wow, just they came so far, you really watched them advance or just be able to play that role where you're like, that was rewarding. I know you really love managing people.

[00:38:10] Guest: Glenn Snyder : I do. It's actually one of my favorite things. You know, I think about I hired a woman to come to FP&A  as a manager level. She never really worked in. True corporate espionage. A background in accounting and in private equity. And when she came in, she had such a fantastic attitude and she was super sharp and had great technical skills. I had to teach her how FP&A  worked. I had to, you know, hey, here's how we do a budget, here's why. And we had a lot of our one on ones that were more about basic stuff that people would work in that for most of their career would be like, oh no, the second nature, right? So to me, what really made me proud and watching her develop was how not only did she embrace these concepts, but she took them and ran with them and she constantly was challenging me. Well, could I go over and do this? What if I did this? What if I did that? And there are times, as her manager, I would tell her I'm like, well, I'm not sure if that's really the direction we want to go or if that's really going to work out.

[00:39:15] Guest: Glenn Snyder : And she's like, no, no, no, I really think we should do this. Or I would tell her. Okay, you go put that together. Come back to me in a week and tell me what you think. When I knew there was a flaw in what she was doing, but it helped her learn. You know, when she made the mistake on her own, she learned a lot better. And she came back, like, a week later. She's like, oh, now I understand. Like you knew that beforehand. Well, yeah. And so, you know, but it was one of those things that, you know, seeing her connect those dots and, you know, not only did she do a fantastic job working for me after I left the firm, she left shortly after. And, you know, and she's been incredibly successful in her new role in FP&A . So I kind of, you know, I one I'm still good friends with her. She's fantastic. But I love the idea that we got somebody who was interested and had the right makeup for FP&A , but never had that experience. And just to see her blossom and, and, you know, really make an impact and see her career grow has been fantastic.

[00:40:12] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, I hired someone and it turned out she had very little experience in budgeting. She got in and she said she'd done a little bit. She's like, what we were doing at our company wasn't really budgeting. She was just a fabulous employee that worked very hard, you know, very dedicated, and it was very rewarding to watch her grow. I can appreciate that it's you. You love seeing somebody develop.

[00:40:32] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Yeah. And, you know, I would also just add to that, that I think when you have that kind of impact on somebody, I mean, think about people in your own career that have had that kind of impact on you. Right. And how much you value them? Um, one of the things that I am most proud of in my career is since 2016, I have hired 14 people. I am, I think, still in touch with at least ten of them, and almost every single one was internally promoted, not always by me. And so I love that the fact that I'm not only feeling like I've been hiring outstanding people, but they appreciate the relationship that we've had, that we've become friends again continued on beyond after after the company we both worked at.

[00:41:18] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I love that. Thank you for sharing that. And so I want to ask a question around that. How do you adjust your management style to meet the needs of different employees? Because obviously if you're developing that type of relationship, you have to be able to connect with each of them individually, and that requires different approaches with everybody. So how do you think about that?

[00:41:37] Guest: Glenn Snyder : You know, I think it comes down to what the person's actually doing. Because if you are an expert at something as a manager, you should say, hey, look, you know what? You know, you got it. I'm just going to point you in a direction and let you go. But if they're new, they're going to need more hands on, you know, more kind of a heavy, heavy touch where you can say, let me walk you through this process. Okay. Now you try. Right. So you got to you got to adjust. It could be the exact same person, but they might be, for example, a finance business partner, and they really know the IT organization. But now you're asking them to go over and support marketing as well. They might not know marketing, so they might be the expert on the IT side, but you need to go over and manage them a little differently when it comes to marketing. You need to be a little more, you know, handholding in the process. But then once they get up and they start showing that they've got a better sense of it, you start letting go a little bit more. So to me, it's you adjust your style based on the experience and knowledge that the employee has in that area.

[00:42:44] Guest: Glenn Snyder : If they're an expert, you're hands off. You can kind of point them to where you want to go and say, come back to me with questions. If they are new, you're going to be more hands on. And then there's always that in-between spot where it's okay, why don't you take a shot at it before you send it on to the business partner, and it goes outside our group? Why don't you send it over to me for review? And once you review a couple of them, it's like, oh, yeah, you got it. You say, you know, I don't need to review it anymore. You can kind of let go. So you go over and you have to kind of go through that progression to make sure that not only you're setting your employee up for success, but you're going to make sure that the employee only looks good to people that they're supporting outside the group because they're like, you know, they're putting that good product out there, and maybe you're just having to review it a little bit more at the beginning.

[00:43:28] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Thanks. Great, great advice. And I took a leadership course and there was an acronym they used that I think covers what you're talking about. They called it the edge principle. Explain. Demonstrate. Guide. Enable. The goal is on different projects. You want to get to the point where you enable them, but sometimes you have to explain or sometimes demonstrate are often guide before they're ready. You got to know each situation and where they're at to be able to know how you adjust your style.

[00:44:00] Guest: Glenn Snyder : That's right. And I've I've worked for manager and I'm sure most people have as well where my manager just dropped me into a situation, gave me no context, no idea what's going on. And it was like, hey, you know what? I'm just going to drop you in the water and see if you can swim to shore. Not telling me, you know, what direction the shore was or where the sharks are or anything like that. And it's like, wait a second. Aren't we on the same team? Shouldn't you be helping me succeed? Because I'm going to help you succeed. Why would you want to go over and do that to an employee? Because. And it was the most frustrating thing for me because it wasn't that I couldn't do the job. It's that I needed a little more guidance to make sure I was going in the direction that I needed to go. And because I was either like a new employee or it was a new area or whatever. And so, you know, to me, it's you got to go over and recognize and make sure that you're not dropping your employee out in shark infested water to say, I'm just going to see if you can swim, because if they can't, that's bad for the employee and it's bad for you and it's bad for the company. Why risk all that?

[00:45:05] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. You've said if they can't, you've set them up for failure. And you set yourself up for failure because you're the man. Yeah, I agree with you. So one more question before we move into kind of some of the standard questions a little bit that we'd like to have and get to know you section. So if you could go back and give your younger self, say, you know, when you were 20, 25, starting your career, advice about managing people. If you give yourself one piece of advice, what would you give yourself?

[00:45:32] Guest: Glenn Snyder : It's not about you. That's the thing. It is about the team. When I first started out in my career as an analyst, I wanted to be the guy who came up with the great solution and presented it. As you start managing people, you got to give your team that opportunity. And I've been saying you got to set your team up for success. So it's not about you and you getting credit for your team's work. If your team is great, everyone's going to know that you manage that team and you will naturally get credit. You don't need to go over and put yourself in that spot. So I would go over and just make sure that I know. Look, you know what? If you do a great job, you will be recognized. You don't need to go over and start going after credit for things, you know? And I probably did that a little bit early on when I was first managing people. And then as I started to develop, I started to recognize that, you know what? It's not about me. It's I want to go over if I can. If my team makes an impact on the company, I will naturally get good credit for it. And I always tell my people, if they are incredibly successful, I get to ride their coattails. And so that's what that's what really, I would I would say to my, my younger self, great advice.

[00:46:48] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: It's not about you. So focus on others. All right. So we have a few standard FP questions we'd like to ask. If I asked you what's the number one technical skill that FP professionals need to master. What are you going to say?

[00:47:02] Guest: Glenn Snyder : I would probably say and this is FP, people would hate me for saying this, but I'm actually going to say understand accounting, because I think throughout my career, the times that I've had the biggest impact is when I would go toe to toe with someone in the accounting group saying, wait a second, I don't know if we should be capitalizing it in that way, or I don't know if we should go over and recognize the revenue like this and to be able to challenge them, because sometimes, I mean, our accounting partners are fantastic. They're great people. We we can't do FP&A  without them. But there are times that they're just going through the motions and not really thinking about the impact on the business. And if you are a finance person, if you're an FP&A  person and you are trying to go over and create a solution for the business, and you don't understand how that solution is really put together on the financial side, you end up being a glorified go between because their business is going to ask a question. You can't answer it. You got to go to the accounting group, ask them the question, go back to the business and say, well, here's what the accounting group said, and you're going back and forth rather than going over and being proactive. So to me, if you could at least understand the value and how that data that you're using is put together, in particular accounting, you will just pay huge dividends down the road.

[00:48:19] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Got it. I appreciate you're not the first that said accounting, just so you know. So your company with a few others I've heard it 3 or 4 times. So it is one that comes up. There's definitely some that have it and I understand the reasoning behind it. But what about some. Go ahead.

[00:48:34] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Sorry I'm going to add one other thing. So that might be my one A. And let me give you a quick one B data visualization. And you might like that one a little bit better because at the end of the day it's your job. I always like to say 50% of your job in FP&A  is to do the analysis and get it right and get the numbers right. The other 50% of your job is to make it look pretty, so someone will read it right. I've been in situations where I've seen people take data dumps in Excel and give it to a chief marketing officer, and they're like, what am I supposed to do with this? Right. It's how you could go and tell the story with the data. So whether it be in PowerPoint or Excel or Word or whatever you have, well, it's just that you happen to be using that to me is the second most important technical skill. Because if you don't, if you're not able to tell the story with the data, you're not going to get your message across.

[00:49:20] Speaker5: I like it, but both.

[00:49:21] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Very valuable skills. I mean, whether they're one, two, three, wherever they fit, you need to understand accounting. You need to know data visualization. What about software? Human skill by.

[00:49:31] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Far not even close. For you know, number two is not even going to be close. Empathy. You got to be able to see through someone else's eyes. If you're supporting a business partner, they are. That business partner is trying to manage their business. How are you going to come up with ideas and solutions to help them manage their business? If you're not thinking about them and the situation they're in? One of the things I tell my teams all the time, if you're going to go and have a one on one with, you know, chief operations officer or whoever, you know, VP in ops or whatever role the person has to be in. You might have things that you need to do. Oh, I need them to fill out this template or I need this information from them. If the entire meeting is about that, guess what? They feel like they are now working for finance. And you're asking a non-finance person to do finance work. Go in there with 15% of the time, probably 50% of the time saying, here's what I need from you. The other 50%, what can I do to help you? How can I help you manage your business better? That's how you create a partnership. And so having that empathy to be able to recognize that you in finance and fcna, although what we do is incredibly important to the company, we don't drive revenue and we don't interact with customers and we don't develop products. So if we're supporting the people who are, you got to recognize that your stuff might not be their most important thing, and you've got to be able to see things through their eyes. So to me, without a doubt, it's empathy.

[00:50:59] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: You know, I've had that answer a number of times, and I love that answer because I think it's so important to have that empathy. So I hear you and I love the other thing you said. Look, we don't finance does not create revenue. Whenever I hear someone say finance is a revenue center, I say, no, it's not. We might be a value creation center versus back office where we help create value with the business, but we don't create revenue. If they let us all go tomorrow, they can still get revenue in accounting, can recognize it in DNA. Now are they going to get as much? Hopefully not because we were doing a good job in the sense that they'll see the value of us, but we're not a revenue center. So that's one that's always bothered me when I hear people say that.

[00:51:38] Guest: Glenn Snyder : I go over and do you know, other, you know, public events and stuff on webinars or speaking at conferences or whatever? I always tell people the reason why FEMA is here. The number one reason influenced decision making that tells you that finance is not the decision maker. You are trying to influence the people who are making those decisions by providing the insight and the analysis and the data. So understand if that's your role. You don't want to have your chief marketing officer filling out budget templates so that they can send back to you. You could do that better than they can. Let's get them focused on what they do best, which is marketing. And you focus on what you do best, which is finance.

[00:52:19] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Love it. Great. So we're going to move into the get to know you section. I have just a couple questions that we're going to ask. And I'm going to guess the first one is about a favorite hobby or passion, given all the baseballs behind you in the last conversation we had. I'm going to guess baseball is definitely a passion of yours.

[00:52:36] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Yeah, just a little bit. You know, what you see behind me is my my collection of autographed baseballs from Hall of Famers. So, you know, that's that's a big thing. I've collected baseball cards most of my life. I've been to a home game of all 30 baseball teams. Great way to see the country. And from 1997 to 2022, I was a partial season ticket holder of the Oakland A's, which is a hard thing now because they're no longer in Oakland and like, oh, it's tough. That means if I go to a baseball game, I have to go watch the Giants. And I don't like the Giants, so I'm always gonna be rooting for the visitor. But, um, so yeah. So baseball is a big thing with me?

[00:53:14] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. I was gonna say it had to be really hard for you. The Oakland A's moving to to Vegas. I'm sure that was not.

[00:53:19] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Not even Vegas. Next three years they're in Sacramento. They're there. So, um, my buddies and I will probably go up for a game or two, but, you know, Sacramento from where we are, it's an hour and a half, two hour drive. So we're certainly not going to be going to the 15 to 20 games like we used to.

[00:53:35] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Sure. Yeah. you're not going to get season tickets or something like that to go up to Sacramento. Understood. One more because I'm curious, what is your favorite baseball signature you have? Who who is it?

[00:53:47] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Who? That's tough. There are some that are worth more than others and so on. But I would say it would. It would either be Bob Feller or Willie Mays because I got to I mean, I would say about a third of the bottles behind me. I had signed in person, so I got to meet them, and I got to talk to Bob feller for like 15 minutes. When it was it was a weird kind of encounter, but it was Bob feller. It was. And it's so amazing. Um, and then Willie Mays was one of the most gracious people I've ever met in my life. I got to meet him twice. Once I was in an elevator when I got to go to a luxury box at, you know, at the giant Stadium Pachel AT&T, they call it now. They keep on changing name a few years or no Oracle sorry, now it's Oracle Park. Anyway, uh, but we were in the elevator together, coming down from the luxury boxes. So I got to talk to Willie for a few minutes, but also when I just got him to sign a baseball for me, and just the way he shook my hand and was just so focused on me when he was signing, I'm like, I'm like, You're Willie Mays. You're like the greatest player ever. And even though I haven't been a Giants fan, I'm just a huge Willie Mays fan. Such a wonderful human being and just a tragic loss last year that we lost him.

[00:54:59] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Fabulous story. I appreciate you sharing that. And there's nothing better than when you meet someone that's an idol and they live up to it right when you they're gracious. You're just like, oh, they're so nice to me. I, I don't know what to say.

[00:55:13] Guest: Glenn Snyder : You know, and that is one of the things there have been many players that I've gotten a chance to meet. Rickey Henderson probably. I probably met him about a dozen times throughout my life. Always the nicest guy. Another guy we just lost last year. And but despite his reputation in media, he was always so down to earth and thoughtful and and he appreciated when fans would go over and talk to him. And it's memories like that I got to have the people who I grew up collecting their cards and rooting for them. And when you get that opportunity and you see God, you know, you're such a nice guy. And it's it really does create that memory you're going to remember for the rest of your life.

[00:55:53] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. Totally agree. All right. So I think I have an inkling of where you might go with this one, given your hobby. But when you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

[00:56:04] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Yeah, it's kind of along the same theme. I grew up actually as a as a Yankee fan. And so starting pitcher for the Yankees.

[00:56:10] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: All right. We got to end the show now Yankee.

[00:56:13] Guest: Glenn Snyder : You know, the funny thing is, is my family is all from the Bronx, and they're all diehard Yankee fans, but that had nothing to do with it. It was the first baseball game I ever watched was the 1981 World Series between the Yankees and the Dodgers. So Reggie Jackson became my favorite player growing up, and the Yankees were my American League team. The Dodgers were my National League team. It's kind of how it worked out.

[00:56:31] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, see, I grew up as the Dodgers, Dodgers and Twins were my two teams. So I'm in Utah and I can remember listening to the World Series with Orel Hershiser and Kirk Gibson on the radio. I'd sit by the heater in our living room and turn on the radio low. It was like late at night. And I remember listening to, you know, Vin Scully and some of the Dodgers fan.

[00:56:51] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Yeah. I mean, Vin Scully was so phenomenal to listen to. And, you know, I also remember in the 88 World Series, you know, because the A's were there. So it was. I grew up here in the Bay area. Even though I wasn't a big A's fan, I was rooting for the Dodgers. I still remember that, you know, Kirk Gibson home run and the I you know, the improbable, you know, when was it the something about being improbable versus impossible or whatever colors this line was. But you know, it's just, again, one of those iconic moments in baseball history.

[00:57:23] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Yeah. If you're a baseball fan, everybody can remember the moment where he hit that home run and limped around the base. It's a it's a moment that will live in baseball history forever. So thank you for sharing that. I'm sure some of our guests will love this. Others be like, what's all this baseball talk? But I've enjoyed it. You could do a podcast.

[00:57:41] Guest: Glenn Snyder : I'm all in.

[00:57:42] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I'll keep that in mind.

[00:57:43] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I would just be facilitating. I'll let you, uh, be all over that one last get to know you question before we wrap up, if you could switch jobs with any person in the world for one week. Who are you going to switch with and why?

[00:57:59] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Okay, so it's going to I think we're going to continue the baseball theme here.

[00:58:03] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I was wondering if you'd go baseball again.

[00:58:05] Guest: Glenn Snyder : I would love to be the general manager of the Dodgers, to be able to go over and have that kind of facilities that, you know, you could go out, you could go out and get anyone. But to put the best team possible out there on the field, and I'm in a baseball fantasy league and it's all about I don't care about whether I win or lose. It's it's I just want to go over and put the best team I can out there and beat my friends, of course. But it's more about outsmarting them and, you know, using that strategy aspect. So I get to pull my FP&A  and strategy experience, but apply it to baseball.

[00:58:39] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: I love it, so.

[00:58:40] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Let me know if you get that opportunity. And I'm hoping for another Dodgers World Series. I was quite happy last year. I was in New York when they won. I didn't, I wasn't at the game, but I was there that week for travel and so it was quite rewarding to watch them win that World Series.

[00:58:56] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Apparently, I've heard they have the best odds of winning the World Series of any team in the last 30 years.

[00:59:02] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Doesn't shock me when you spend money and you spend it wisely. Which is the key, right? It's easier to win. Absolutely.

[00:59:10] Guest: Glenn Snyder : By the way, same thing applies in business. When you love it, when you spend the money wisely, it is more likely you are going to succeed.

[00:59:18] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Nobody cuts their way to success. You need to make cuts to fix things and to rebaseline. And we all understand cost cutting. But cost cutting does not lead to success. It's spending the money wisely.

[00:59:31] Guest: Glenn Snyder : That's right.

[00:59:32] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Great. Great advice there. Great way to bring it all back. So we've had our baseball moment. So let's wrap up here. If you could offer our audience advice to be a better business partner, better find a business partner today. What's the advice you'd give them.

[00:59:48] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Be proactive. That's simple. If you go over and you're just waiting for someone to give you work to do. You're not doing your job. You want to go over, be thinking about the people that you support. Be thinking about the processes that you run. How do you improve them? How do you go and add greater insight? Bring in additional business metrics, create ways that can influence people in the way that they're making the decisions. Be proactive and just don't be afraid of getting it wrong. It's a great way to learn, but I promise you that even if you go over and you propose like a new report, or you put some metrics in a in your existing reports a certain way, you present it to your business partner and they come back and say, well, we don't really look at things in that way. Guess what? You just learn more about the business. But I promise you, that business partner is still saying, wow. But you know, I really appreciate the fact that you're thinking about me without me having to ask. And that's how I think he could really succeed and make an impact in that period.

[01:00:45] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Great advice. So I end with that. Be proactive. Glenn, it was a pleasure having you on the show. We'll put your LinkedIn profile in the show notes. So if somebody wants to reach out to you, they can do that. And if there's any other links you want us to share, just let me know. But thank you so much for carving out an hour. I've really enjoyed chatting with you.

[01:01:04] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Oh, this has been fantastic, Paul.

[01:01:05] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Thanks for having.

[01:01:06] Guest: Glenn Snyder : Me.

[01:01:06] Host:  Paul Barnhurst: Thank you. 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.

Expect to Learn:

• How AI is transforming financial planning, reducing manual work, and improving decision-making.

• Why integrating external data is essential for more accurate forecasting and risk management.

• Why traditional budgeting cycles are outdated and how real-time, agile forecasting is becoming the new norm.

• How CEOs and finance leaders rely on FP&A teams for strategic decision-making.

• How finance professionals can improve their skills and become more valuable business partners.

Here are a few relevant quotes from the episode:

• “AI is revolutionizing FP&A by reducing manual work and improving time-to-value.” - Rich Wagner

• “The companies that embrace continuous planning will be the winners in their industries.” - Jeff Casale

• “External data helps FP&A teams anticipate risks, not just react to them.” - Rich Wagner

This episode reinforced the idea that FP&A is evolving into a strategic powerhouse. AI, external economic data, and real-time forecasting are changing how companies plan, react, and make decisions. FP&A professionals must develop both technical and strategic skills to stay relevant.

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Follow Jeff:
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Follow Rich:
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Planning in BI Showcase:
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Earn Your CPE Credit
For CPE credit please go to earmarkcpe.com, listen to the episode, download the app, and answer a few questions and earn your CPE certification. To earn education credits for FPAC Certificate, take the quiz on earmark and contact Paul Barnhurst for further details.

In Today’s Episode
[01:49] - Welcome & Guest Introductions
[03:53] - What Does Great FP&A Look Like?
[06:22] - Why Enter the FP&A Software Space?
[08:05] - Acquiring Prevedere: The Strategy Behind It
[14:28] - How External Data Improves Forecasting
[18:54] - How AI is Changing FP&A
[24:29] - How FP&A Teams Can Start Using External Data
[33:57] - The Shift to Continuous Planning
[41:50] - FP&A’s Role in Leadership & Decision-Making
[47:48] - The #1 Skill for FP&A Professionals
[56:33] - Who Would You Swap Jobs With?
[59:53] - Final Thoughts & Where to Learn More

Full Show Transcript

[00:01:49] 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 Barnhurst, 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 uncertainty. This week, I'm thrilled to be joined by two guests. I have Jeff Casale and Rich Wagner with me. Welcome to the show.

[00:02:27] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Thank you. Happy to be here.

[00:02:30] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Really excited to have you, Jeff and welcome Rich. We're excited to have you.

[00:02:33] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Thank you.

[00:02:34] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right.

[00:02:35] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So let me give a little bit of background on both of these gentlemen. And then we'll jump into some questions and have a great chat here. So Jeff serves as Board's chief executive officer. Prior to that he served as CEO of Marklogic, where he delivered significant profitable growth and an acquisition by Progress software. Previously, Jeff was a president at Dell Technologies, where he created and led the DTS Group into a global multi-million dollar business and held senior executive roles at VMware and EMC. Rich Wagner serves as Board's field CTO. He is the former CEO and founder of Prevedere, a predictive analytics company that helps enterprises create highly accurate forecast models by incorporating the global economic leading indicators. Prior to Prevedere, Rich was director of IT Innovation and Strategies for Momentive, a global leader in specialty chemicals. He brings over 20 years of technology, innovation and leadership experience from big four consulting and Fortune 500 companies. So again, thanks for joining me, both of you. I like to start every interview with this question and we'll go to you first. Rich, what does great FP&A look like? What does great FP&A to you?

[00:04:01] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Yeah. You know, great FP&A to me is really about helping FP&A become, you know, a better strategic partner to the business, someone that's not just about accounting and back office numbers, but someone that actually helps kind of steer the ship and is thought of as a a real key input to all major strategic and all the way down to operational decisions. Somebody that's data driven, fact based, unbiased and really there to support the operations of the business.

[00:04:31] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thanks. Appreciate that. Rich Jeff, what's your thoughts?

[00:04:34] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Yeah, I would say a lot of the same similar themes as rich as a CEO. I think there are very few decisions that impact the company, where you don't want to have FP&A with a very loud voice at the table. You know, the reality is, you know, to start to think about whether or not its defensive moves based on competition, whether it's expansion, whether it's certain global markets that you want to move into, you know, to do any of those things without really having a very strong FP&A capability and mindset at the table, just puts you at a huge disadvantage. And so to me, it's really a critical element to how we do business.

[00:05:17] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Fully agree. I'm glad to hear that. I'd be a little worried if it wasn't critical, given you're an FP&A software.

[00:05:23] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Absolutely.

[00:05:24] Host: Paul Barnhurst: All right. So I want to start with you, Jeff. You've been CEO of Board for a little over a year now. Talk to us what that experience has been like. How has it been at Board?

[00:05:35] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: It's been a fantastic experience. Incredibly fortunate to be getting involved with Board. It's an incredibly exciting company. Several thousand customers has a rich history in Europe as really sort of the preeminent FP&A platform in many of the countries in Europe, and we've seen an opportunity to expand that beyond continuing to invest in Europe. But there's clearly an enormous market opportunity, obviously, in places like the US. And so we've been taking advantage of that and just having a lot of fun, you know, sharing the story of what we've done with customers, the transformations and really expanding that growth into other markets. So it's not just us. We're really a global company.

[00:06:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I'm curious what attracted you to the FP&A software space? Most of your experience was in other industries and areas. Dell. And you figure out Marklogic what interested you in FP&A software and Board particularly?

[00:06:34] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Well, I think it goes back to my earlier comments. I mean, I really don't think that you can be running a company or in a leadership position without effective, at least do those and be successful at them without really leveraging the FP&A function. So it's something that I'm obviously very familiar with. I enjoy working with FP&A counterparts and understanding how far to take that, and this is an industry that's going through an incredible amount of transformation. I've watched the evolution of a lot of the CFOs that I've worked with become CEOs. Many of them have moved on to become CEOs. And so there's not just a transformation in the technology. I think there's a transformation in terms of how much can be done by really combining the core FP&A capabilities with the strategy of your business. And so as I started looking to to my next company to get involved with, I just couldn't be more excited when I saw a Board and the opportunity to get engaged in a company with something as exciting as being on the forefront of the evolution of that.

[00:07:45] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And I know I love being on the forefront of it and getting to talk to people in different companies. And it's an exciting time for FP&A. It's become much more strategic. As you talked about. It's much more important that we serve as almost like a consultant, a business partner. We're not just running reports or back office. And so I really appreciate that answer. We'll have to ask you one more question and then we'll come back to you Rich here. But Jeff, last November you guys acquired Prevedere. Can you walk me through the reasoning? Why? Why was that the right acquisition to, you know, help carry you forward in this changing times for FP&A?

[00:08:19] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: So private area was really an incredibly exciting journey. And it's been exciting to get involved with Private Area. And it's been even more exciting now that Rich and I have gotten to know each other. And he's part of the team and the private area organization has come together. But, you know, to answer your question, a lot of what I do comes from customers. I'm a very customer facing executive. That's the way I started. That's my DNA. Having worked at companies like EMC and VMware. And, you know, the more I talk to customers, it just became very apparent I would focus on what do you need from an FP&A partner? Like what? What do you need to be more capable in terms of running your business? And what I heard over and over again was, hey, you know, there's different levels of improvement that they can do in their overall FP&A capability, but they were all running into challenges with what I would call a closed strategic planning process that was designed within the walls of their building. And then you get out into the realities of business and all the external things that can sort of punch you in the face and throw your plan out the window. And they were looking for ways to be more proactive, to look around the corner and to be, you know, to plan better for the unexpected coming out of Covid.

[00:09:40] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: I think everybody appreciates more our need to be prepared to plan for the unexpected. And so I think it came from those conversations. First of all, really frankly, from a defensive standpoint where these companies were looking, you know, how do we not get surprised? And then I think many of them started to realize this is the competitive advantage, right? If we can foresee some of these things and other companies are not doing it, how do we get a better view of all of the external factors and integrate that in with our planning? And there's a lot of sort of, I would say, inefficient ways and manual ways to do that. And you can throw a lot of bodies at it and put people in the room. But I hadn't, you know, these companies, including myself, who just had not found a way to do it elegantly. That's what led us on our search. We thought about building the capability internally, which was going to be an incredible effort and a multi-year effort. And then we stumbled on to private air, and I was really sort of shocked that the capability was available and how far Rich had gone with it. And that's probably a good, good segue to Back to You and to Rich.

[00:10:47] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Perfect. Thanks, Jeff. And I know for me, I was really excited when I saw the acquisition. It made a lot of sense because that external data is an area that I know throughout my career, I didn't utilize anywhere near the level I should have, and in general, it's an area I think we need to get a lot better at. Like you said, you know, kind of peek around corners and help bring in those external factors to better think about things. Because as you mentioned, you get punched in the mouth from the outside world, Covid wars, whatever it might be. If you've never thought about that or brought some of that in, it makes it even harder to, you know, be able to forecast accurately for sure. All right. So, Rich, why was Board the right company to acquire Prevedere? What kind of led you to go, hey, Board is the right fit for us?

[00:11:34] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Yeah. So in my career, I kind of saw an evolution of software like what Board was already doing over in Europe kind of come to fruition. You know, when I first started my IT career, I implemented SAP and ERP systems, and then we'd bring in Treasury like Hyperion and financial consolidation tools in all these functional applications. So it was really more the ERP space than business intelligence and data warehousing.

[00:12:01] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: I really thought about what I was building in that area and thought, you know, that's probably the end point solution is I'm going to be acquired by or we're going to be acquired by one of those solutions. And then lo and behold, tools came around that did this consolidation and things around integrated business planning. And there I knew, hey, we even fit there better. But at that time I didn't know a Board. You know, being in the US primarily, it was something that I hadn't heard of until, you know, maybe several years ago, where I started seeing some even employees and things tell me about it. And people transition their careers to it or from it. And I started looking into it and I realized, well, Board does the internal right. It consolidates all these functions and this data in a great way. We can complement that with the external and the predictive. And I started engaging with them. I really became a partner first and integrated our solution to theirs and really a matter of hours and got on the phone with their chief operating officer, who was very new as a lot of the leadership team is, and says, hey, I think there's something bigger here. I've worked with all the other tools, the competitors. I haven't found one as elegant and it is easy to integrate with is I had it Board.

[00:13:21] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: And as I researched, they hit the same target verticals manufacturing, CPG, retail primary focus. That was our primary focus and experience. They loved enterprise customers where we had great enterprise customers in the US. They serve functions like finance and was their primary use case that was ours, but also supply chain, marketing, sales. Everybody needs this across the org, and we have customers that fit all those functional profiles as well. And then lastly technology. We built our cloud computing environment on Azure. And lo and behold Board is on Azure as well. So very easy for us to integrate understand. And it just became the people, right. The energy to grow in North America. The new leadership team is exciting. It almost feels like a startup here in North America, you know? So for me it was, hey, this is a great place for our energy as a company, our innovative product and really the complete us now.

[00:14:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thank you. Thank you for sharing. I appreciate hearing that and starting as a partner in building and how you felt. It was a natural fit. What I want to talk a little bit now is I want to switch more from the acquisition to the actual software and what you're doing, right.

[00:14:35] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I know you use a lot of what we'll call it external economic intelligence, you know, bringing that data in. So walk us through how you bring that in, how that improves forecasting. And then if you could share a real world example from a client. We'd love to hear one.

[00:14:50] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: So for us it starts with data. Certainly. Right. There's data of course, inside your organization. But this data outside your four walls more of what's becoming readily available every day. Our whole world is digital. What we do, what we want to do, what we're searching for, what you know, geopolitical crisis is happening. We get those signals all the time. And what we found is if we look at not only macro microeconomic, consumer behavior, alternative data, and we marry that with your historical results, we can find things that truly are leading indicators of changes in demand or volume and quantity of your products, your financial performance that sometimes are not just weeks or days, but months and quarters in advance. We'll see these signals change. And that's really the genesis of our, our, our product is to take this global data, this 5.5 million things we collect from almost every country in the world. Marry that technically with companies data to find those leading indicators, or at the very least related indicators, so that we can inform companies of what's coming next.

[00:16:02] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: And then what we've done is we've found that we used to, by hand, try to build econometric models. We would take inflation and interest rates and employment, and then we would try to build a model that to shape our demand right. And see what it's telling us. Well, AI has sped that up so much, and it's so powerful that we can do that at scale for companies. So it's really about identifying what you should pay attention to, quantifying it not only in how much it impacts the timing of when it impacts months quarters in advance, and then using that to inform your forecast. So what companies do? There's large CPG manufacturing companies. Great case studies out there will actually take their volume and quantity. Let's say you're a chemical manufacturing business. What they've always told us is, hey, 90 days. We kind of understand demand, right? That's our order cycle. We know what we're going to produce and what we can produce and what our customers wanting 90 days in advance. But lo and behold, 4 to 6 months out, something always happens that we didn't expect and it cost us millions. So what we do there is we'll say, okay, let's take a look at that. Major product categories major shift to induce markets will marry that with the external.

[00:17:20] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Let's build an econometric model to see if we can find what's shaping demand for six, 12, 18 months in advance. And we certainly can't. It's much better than just guesswork. It serves as an input into the planning process when your business unit comes or your sales team and says, hey, we're going to grow by 10%. Well, now you know, well, based on market conditions, you're history. That's never happened. Right. So you can kind of challenge the business and say, I know we want to grow 10%, but there are some headwinds. Not only do we not see growth, but we see a decline coming. What are we going to do? What do we think our consensus forecast should be? That's what we call kind of real world planning, right? It's not biased. It's not unbridled optimism from the sales team. It's not sandbagging. It's really quantifying factors in the way you performed in the market and what's going to happen next.

[00:18:12] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I appreciate that, and I like you said, it's not, you know, not sandbagging but really quantifying, right. We probably all dealt with that a little bit. Both sides the overly optimistic and come on I know you have more than that. Where are you hiding it? Is he Jeff, laugh a little bit. You never dealt with that, right?

[00:18:30] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: It's coming. Coming from a sales background. Let's just say I might be happy that there were times in my past where people my boss did not have private area. It was a little bit of crystal balling going on there, I'm sure.

[00:18:44] Host: Paul Barnhurst: One thing I'd love to get both of your thoughts on. Just. You made me think of this. You know, Rich, as you talked about how AI has sped things up a lot and made them a lot easier. So I'd love to get both of your thoughts on how you see AI impacting FP&A, and maybe what you're seeing today and how you think about it in the future, because that's the topic seems like everybody's talking about. You're probably like not AI again, but I'd love to get both of your thoughts. Maybe we'll start with you, Jeff.

[00:19:13] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Sure. Yeah. I'll take maybe a different perspective, because I think I know where where Rich is going to go. There's so much that we can do in leveraging the, you know, enormous complexity of and just the volume of the macroeconomic data that we have in something like proprietary. You know, what I think is probably the area that we could tap into the most. With AI, that's going to be the fastest time to value, which is one of the things I focus on a lot whenever I look at some of these investments is that there's still a movement in FP&A, where the executive leadership team is relying on a level down or two levels down, and there's there's a delay. So you've got people that are comfortable with these systems. They're comfortable in accessing it. But but maybe when you get into the leadership they're more they're they're more accustomed to going and having those second level conversations. And there's so much power and information that is available today, whether or not it's what we're talking about with things like promontory or just the overall real time information that is available when you pull together, instead of all these disparate Excel spreadsheets, you have everything in one real time system. It gives you the ability to do some what if planning that, that gives you a real competitive advantage, but it can be overwhelming and I think it can be intimidating. And if we can start to leverage AI to simplify that, to allow interfaces where executive teams can do some very easy modeling, right? Just asking questions around, hey, what if we went ahead and we decided to go move, you know, 10% of our excess utilization of resources into some of these high growth markets? What would be the flow through implications in terms of, you know, margin and expansion? And and, you know, what do we see as some of the markets that are really trending more higher growth on on some of the verticals that we're very strong in? And what would it look like if we sort of did some reutilization of excess capacity into those areas? And in some cases it'll work.

[00:21:27] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: In some cases it won't. But I think leveraging AI, you can run these models at such a speed and get such quick feedback. And the accuracy is increasing so significantly, partially because you can now take in all these external factors and all this other data. So I think one of the areas that is not talked about enough is how AI is going to improve the level of adoption and interaction of executive teams with their FP&A team, and with that data and the power of the data. And I think it's a very natural flow towards the role of the office of the CFO becoming far more strategic, because it's going to get to a point where I don't think you're going to have many CEOs that are going to want to do very much without having that group at the table.

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[00:23:50] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thank you for sharing that. And as you're talking about that I was thinking about, you know, meetings I've been in with executives and they ask a question. It's like, can I come back to you in a week to after I've rebuilt the model or whatever, you know, sometimes maybe you could do some on the fly, but I agree with you.

[00:24:05] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I think AI and where we're heading will make a lot of that easier and be able to have those real conversations with executives where you're often not like, well, I'd be guessing at this point, let me get back to you. Or best I can do is really high level. There's a lot of excitement there. See? Rich nodding his head. He's waiting patiently for his turn. So your thoughts, Rich?

[00:24:27] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Yeah. No, your example hit home. You know, we used that in my company. Come back from a Board meeting and it'd be a fire. We'd have to go figure out, well, what happened over here. You know, maybe it was in Europe. We had a miss by the time we could get answers back. It was a new fire, right? That wasn't even the question anymore. We just couldn't get it back to them soon enough. So I also see that the time to value is much, much faster. The time to insight is much faster. It really reduces the routine and mundane. You don't have to do that as a human right. We don't have to do 24 statistical tests by hand. Write or select 50 different variables and try and plot them out. Let's do that so we can be more strategic. So I think that's a huge part of it. Time to value, time to insights.

[00:25:16] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Amount of data we can process. Certainly Jeff is exactly right. The thing that I think makes what we build at private area now on Board what we call signals and foresight so valuable with AI is it now also brings the context? Does it just do the math for us? I actually explains models like a team of our internal data scientists and economists could do. And it does it in seconds. Right. So this is giving an answer of okay, you're down 10%. Not only that, but why. And it sounds very educated. It understands what drivers it makes sense. Business leaders need to adopt technology to adopt things like AI. They need the context. This makes a naive person an FP&A sound like an economist. Sound like a data scientist, right? Sound like an industry expert in minutes. And I think that's where this is now becoming mainstream. Right? We actually bring the context, not just the numbers.

[00:26:14] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I would have loved to have that. So I could have sounded good when I was working with our FP&A. You know, it kind of speaking to that. I'd love to get both your thoughts, you know, bringing in external data just in general. So not talking Prevedere or Board but just, you know, FP&A departments. It's an area we've struggle with. I'd say very few have brought it into forecasting. So someone's listening to the show and they're like, well, where do I start? How do I think about this? Because sometimes you think data science, econometrics, you know, statistics.

[00:26:45] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And the head just goes, yeah, I'm out. No thanks. I got my spreadsheet and I'm good. So where should people start? And I think we'll start with you on this. Rich, I'd love to get your thoughts on what advice you could give to the average kind of FP&A team out there that's trying to do a better job of bringing this type of data in?

[00:27:03] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Yeah, there are two really good examples of what I learned. You know, certainly as a technologist, you start getting really into the weeds quickly when you start talking about data and modeling and statistics. But what I learned is listening to CEOs, one of them came to us and actually we were in a meeting with him and his executive team and he said CPG companies said, hey, you know, guys, I know that you guys know in this case, demand 30 days out. Wasn't it three months like a chemical company. He said also, you know, there's always something around the corner that we didn't see coming cost us a fortune. And that's really what private is about. So what he was trying to do is just really get ahead of some big disruptions, right? Some, some events that would happen that they didn't see, that maybe they could have. And it's not every single indicator, every factor they should look at. It's these big things. Hey ink prices are going up. When's that going to affect us? Right. It's a main ingredient, one of our products. How long is that going to take.

[00:28:04] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: So we don't just ignore it. Another CEO, large logistics company, one of the largest in the world, came to us after in Covid. We were getting Christmas presents in January, not December, because they didn't anticipate demand correctly, he said. We need an early warning dashBoard and to me, that's it. That's what these guys were looking for, right? Those early warning signals, they would tell them that there's some event that's going to impact them, that otherwise they would ignore. And it may be a big indicator like industrial production or raw material prices for key ingredients for them that they just were ignoring because they didn't have an automated, systematic or repeatable way to watch those signals. So I would start with that. I would get myself an early warning dashBoard. Things that keep the CEO and CFO up at night. Make sure you're not missing them. Then we can always get more granular. We can always get more statistical, add more horsepower, more data to it, and then start really getting granular models out there to the rest of the organization.

[00:29:07] Host: Paul Barnhurst: So if I'm hearing you right, kind of that early warning dashBoard, you know, example, what's happening with the ag industry, if that's one of your key products, maybe you're tracking what's happening to the supply. Right? Right now it's gone way up with all the issues they had with chickens and they had to put down because of the disease and stuff. And so if you were tracking that, you would see that at least a little bit before it flowed all the way through the market. And you could start preparing yourself. Is that the way to think about this?

[00:29:36] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Yeah, you're exactly right. You know, very rarely do things happen all at once, like maybe Covid, definitely in my history of my, you know, it career or my leadership career, Covid is the only time I saw immediately everything shut down and stop consumer spending. Then you would see reciprocal effects on pricing and supply chain disruption. Things happen over time. And those things like starting to see cases of bird flu rise, people searching for it online, good indicators that there will be something happening or something coming maybe months in advance. So that's what I would do. I'd look for those key things that impact your business, do some discovery in a system to see what's impacted the last time you had a big miss, and then make sure you're paying attention to that.

[00:30:22] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I love that, and I think it speaks a lot to scenario planning, which we haven't necessarily talked about, but I think so often people just do scenarios is worst case, base case, best case instead of what happens if there's regulation that impacts my key ingredient and how do I track that? So I know what changes I should make based on scenarios. I think that kind of feeds that. So I really appreciate that answer there. Thank you. Jeff, anything you'd like to add to that? Any thoughts on your end on what the department should be doing?

[00:30:54] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Maybe the one thing I would add to that is just the level of simplicity at which that can be done. I think oftentimes organizations sometimes don't appreciate the number of sort of factors that could externally impact their organization or their business. And when they realize how easy it can be to literally go pick off a menu and go choose and then, you know, after 30 or 60 or 90 days. If you feel like, hey, some of these are not really materially affecting it, but maybe there is another set of factors that would, I think, just again, applying the same what if methodology that you do to any great for business, do the same thing when you think about external forecasting. Right. What’s going to work for you? And I think you know, what Rich has probably seen a lot of times in his career is oftentimes it's not what you would expect. People are surprised. You know, sometimes it's the secondary or tertiary tertiary effects where there's leading indicators that maybe are very far off. And you just hadn't thought that those could potentially be impacting your business. So I do think, you know, as Rich explained, there's very little that happens all at once. Most of these things are a series of factors that are put in play in motion, and it be really becomes a bit of a map. And some people have that map. You know, I think of it a little bit of, like, night vision goggles. You know, some organizations have those and some don't. And, you know, wouldn't you rather be the organization that is able to sort of see through the dark a little bit, look around the corner. And so I would say, don't be afraid to go in and just start by pulling in some of the ones that seem like maybe they're obvious, and then adding other ones in as you go and do some modeling.

[00:32:47] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I love that it doesn't have to be difficult. Start simple with a couple couple things out there. Ask your leadership. They're probably going to have a good idea of what some of those things may be. You know, you could also look at external. You know what other companies are doing, what they list as their risks and things that they're concerned about in their annual statements or whatever, and get an idea of a couple of things. I really like that. It's a great point of, you know, start small and build. But one thing I think both of you have mentioned throughout and I think is really interesting. I'd love to get your thoughts is you've mentioned kind of, you know, being able to look out ahead or kind of look around the corner. So there's a CEO of a large company who started his career in FP&A, worked up a CFO, and he always says, I want FP&A to be able to peek around corners. And that's kind of what I hear in a little different words. And the other one is somebody once said, the top skill I want in FP&A person to have in the team is the ability to anticipate. I'd love to get your thoughts on that idea, and maybe Jeff will start with you. Just because I see it seems like it's been a little bit of a theme here and would love to get your take.

[00:33:54] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Yeah, I think it absolutely is a theme. And, you know, I just think of the way I leverage our FP&A group and the way we think about it. And, you know, when it comes to what we talked about with that forward sort of 90 day view, you get that through just interactions with your team. If you're talking to your CRO, how's the visibility. Oh, I just went out. I was on the road. I talked to my team. We're talking to these customers. Everybody has a generally good idea. Right? You go and you figure out, you know, how's it looking in inventory? We have an idea. I go to the developers. Right. Where are we at in terms of software releases? I mean, everyone is ultra confident on this 90 day window. So what I would say is the 90 day window is table stakes. Nobody is going to beat anybody based on what, you know over the next 90 days. So the true competitive advantage is beyond the 90 day window. And I would say some companies are pretty good at 90 to, you know, 120. And you start to but the further you push that out, I think what starts to happen is all of the major competitive differentiation or advantages that companies have, they all start to dissipate rapidly the further out you go, because just so few companies really make that a core competency and a core skill. And so I think that just becomes a huge differentiator.

[00:35:21] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: The other thing I would add, which we're seeing, you know, on our leading customers, I would say on a regular basis, is when we talked about it a little bit at the beginning, it's this, you know, hey, do I have to wait and go get an answer and come back? Well, the opposite to that is yes. You are trying to really be very forward thinking, but there's a time to value. We'll combine the two of those. Combine that desire to have an instant answer with looking around the corner. That's this whole idea of total agility and planning, right? Complete continuous planning. And I think for most organizations, whether it's just become, you know, the history where we came from, these batch based systems, and we're used to waiting for the new cycle to run and get the updates. And, you know, for whatever the reason, most organizations don't actually run with true continuous seven by 24 planning. And that is where, you know, I'd say where the puck has been going. And now we have a lot of companies that we work with that are already there. And that to me is nirvana, right? You want to be at a point where there is no daylight between the planning, between the questions. You're running real time, continuous planning all the time. And if you're doing that, it allows you when you leverage AI or some of these other capabilities. Now, as soon as an idea pops into someone's head, you're modeling out what that looks like.

[00:36:44] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: There's no delay. And that's where it gets super exciting. That's why I think you've mentioned on some of your podcasts, and I hear more and more we really are getting to sort of the next evolution of the strategic value of FP&A. And I think people have seen, you know, only small glimpses of it. But when this you get more organizations moving to continuous planning with a level of agility that I think is sort of game over, right? It's going to be the differences between companies. Doing that and not doing it is literally going to be winners and losers, and you're going to hear it on the earnings call when you get on an earnings call. And a CEO is like, whoops. Right. You know, I have to yeah, I'm going to have to surprise you. Even though I told you three months ago that the future was looking good. Now I got to tell you that it's not looking good. And the stock plummets on almost every one of those cases. You can go and look at the earnings call, and I can tell you which company does continuous planning and which one doesn't. You do continuous planning. That just doesn't happen, right? Unlike what Rich said, can a Covid happen? Okay. But there are signals and they're out there all the time. And I think that really is the exciting part of what's happening in FP&A is this continuous planning.

[00:38:03] Host: Paul Barnhurst: FP&A guy here. And I want to tell you about the planning and by showcase. Gone are the days of juggling multiple platforms. Now with business intelligence tools, you can integrate planning directly into your BI system, the same system your entire company already uses. Join me on March 20th for the planning and BI showcase, where industry leaders will demonstrate how top BI tools are reshaping strategic planning. See firsthand how modern FP&A solutions can drive real value across your enterprise. The event features live demos from leading BI solutions. Whether you're a CFO or an FP&A professional, you'll discover the tools that can help you deliver more value across your enterprise. Don't miss out! Register today at www.accelevents.com/e/Planning-in-BI-Showcase and take the first step towards smarter, data driven decision making.

[00:39:16] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I really like that term continuous planning. I've seen some use connected, you know, all different things, but I love that idea of hey, it should be connected and continuous. We need to move to a much more agile process. Six months for budget forecasting every quarter for the average company is just outdated. It's not sufficient nowadays. So I'm with you on that. I really like that. So thank you for you know, kind of sharing your thoughts there. I want to go to a next question here and we'll start with you on this one. Rich, both of you have served in leadership leadership positions.

[00:39:47] Host: Paul Barnhurst: You both been CEOs. You know, Rich, maybe talk a little bit about, you know, what do you look for from FP&A like maybe earlier in your career and as time went on, did it change much? How do you think about FP&A?

[00:40:01] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Yeah. You know, not only, you know, been part of it, the smaller organization and the software company that I started, but also in a large, you know, enterprise company that was a conglomerate, privately held, lots of companies, lots of M&A activity. What I saw through my career and then as I scaled my company was first its accounting and numbers. I've got to do this, you know, I've got to close my books, got to pay taxes, etc. so I need someone to help me with that. It really just an Excel jockey, right? When you're small. And then what I saw is actually the enterprise company we worked with, our CEO started really relying on our CFO as his right hand person. I mean, they essentially started even moving functions like it underneath them because they became more of a strategic partner, because it's so important. There are so many other things to do around finance, financial planning, working capital decisions. All those things take someone that really that's their day job. They've got teams of people.

[00:41:04] Host: Paul Barnhurst: That's their day job. They're looking at financial data. They're doing analysis they have access to actual numbers within the business across functions. That's when I think they became a partner. I saw it quite a bit. You know, even as I grew my company from from two people to maybe 50 people, it became more and more important that I had somebody kind of a right hand person looking out for me, because there's lots of things you have to do to operate a business, to manage people, to manage your Board of directors. There's lots of risk out there, and you've got to have somebody with a finance background, you know, a good planning analysis team that can actually identify those and kind of help protect you. So I see them as really a partner to the CEO more so than ever. Love it. And I'd love to I'll ask both of you this and see, can either of you maybe share an example where FP&A brought something forward in case where you worked with them, where it made a real difference? Maybe they brought an insight, an idea, kind of that strategic moment where like, oh, I'm really glad they, you know, helped guide me in this area. I'd love if either of you maybe have a kind of an example you could share. Yeah, I'll give you a customer example that I thought was really interesting.

[00:42:15] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: I smiled when you said it. One of our customers came to us. He's. He's a VP in finance, head of FP&A. And he came to us and said, hey, because of what we were able to show them that was coming in their forecast, it saved all their bonuses that year. He said, because the internal team came and they actually were projecting something that was completely unrealistic. They were able to see there are other elements to their business that were impacting their business, adjusted appropriately. So hey, we all got bonuses because of you. And for him it became one of our oldest customers. Been with us a long time. But to me that's pretty neat. He had the opportunity not only impact finance of his own career, but he really helped the whole organization meet a goal, a realistic goal, and that ended up paying off for the entire company.

[00:43:06] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I love that everybody likes their bonus, right? I still remember the first year I was in a new business and didn't have much help. I totally screwed up the forecast and after a month I pretty much had to tell the leadership there's zero chance we're getting a bonus. That was not fun. So I appreciate that example, Jeff, but what about you?

[00:43:23] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Yeah, I mean, we've had so many, I think, over the last couple of years. I mean, one of the ones that happened just the other day was, you know, we had a customer that felt the company was not being valued fairly because of the way that they were presenting their earnings on their earnings call and the way that they ran their business. And ultimately, part of the reason for that was, like many companies, they didn't have one comprehensive system. They had a number of different systems, and each of the business units had their sort of favorites of those systems. And so what would end up happening is there was a consolidation process that had to happen, and they each looked at their business in an individual light, and they rolled up the data. And then from a collaboration standpoint, it made it very hard for the executives to collaborate because by the time the information would be rolled up, you would then go right into your quarterly meeting with the executives, and everyone's very focused on their business and presenting how they did. And so they got into this loop where they just kept presenting information the same way. And when they got into being able to have all the data in one comprehensive system, and now you didn't have all of this excess time required just to massage the data across silos to present it instead. What ended up happening was the executive team now had visibility to everyone else's data. So they started having really interesting conversations.

[00:44:47] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: And as part of those conversations, what they realized was they had cash trapped in different parts of their businesses that basically was not being utilized. And they started to realize collectively they all had a shared bonus and they were like, hey, wait a second, why don't we pool this? And then why don't we all have direct visibility on how quickly we have the ability? And depending how the different businesses are doing, we can rapidly move that cash and deploy it. They ended up being able to move inventory quicker, getting faster returns, driving profitability. And it became directly measurable. They now were able to show that they were able to operate with a more efficient cash basis. They were able to show that they were able to operate with more efficient inventory, because in some cases, they had similar inventory in these different business units. And then the end result was they had higher earnings per share, and it was a direct result of the bottom line. And the other real benefit was the team was now collaborating together on how to help the company succeed. Whereas before they would go into those meetings very competitively trying to figure out, okay, which business unit did better. Like who's better or who's worse? And so getting to the point where everybody is looking at the same data, the data is real time. You have an opportunity to collaborate and talk about it. And because it's in real time and you're agile and how you do it, you can what if.

[00:46:11] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: And so you had executives say, hey, what if we did this? What if you guys helped us in this part of our business? And I think you just see that that amount of reducing friction, which is really what I think it is at the end of the day, these are non-value added tasks that are being eliminated. That to me is just friction. And what do you do with that excess productivity? It goes into forward thinking ideas, right? Hey, we have the extra time and we have the data. Why don't we go spend it thinking about what we could be doing? And those are, you know, and we have a lot of those direct customer examples. But I think the common theme is, Paul, what you said at the beginning of this. Right. There's just some of these things around. Yes. It makes sense to look around the corner, right? Yes. It makes sense to sort of do better planning. I think a lot of organizations would just tell you they don't have the time to do it, like they don't have the people, they don't have the bandwidth. And what I would tell you is they have all of it. If you just look at the amount of time in the day that they're spending on manual tasks, moving data, consolidating information, cleansing it, you know, getting 17 workbooks into one, I think people would be surprised how much time they have.

[00:47:24] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Now, when you take out the non-value added tasks, it's amazing how much more time you have. I've been in roles where, you know, I had to spend a ton of time on dirty data and bad data and just amazing how it makes it difficult. You're either working 24 over seven or you don't have time for the strategic kind of one or the other. And as you express those as a company, it makes a huge difference. So we're going to move into a few kind of standard questions I like to ask guests. So we're going to move to that section here. And the first one I ask every guest this and Jeff will start with you. What is the number one technical skill that FP&A professionals need to master?

[00:48:04] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Yeah. So I think it's a great question. And I think in some ways I'm the least qualified to answer it because I didn't come up through the FP ranks. But I'll tell you when I'm on the other side of the table dealing with the FP team, I really like the critical thinking skills. I mean, one of the things I value enormously is, you know, oftentimes I'll go ask questions. And I think it's a great question and I'm in love with it. And, you know, I can't wait for people to sort of, you know, respond to my brilliant idea and and to have somebody on the other side of the table have the critical thinking to sort of poke a little bit and really make sure, you know, is that really what you're trying to ask? I mean, how, you know, with the understanding of how the company really runs, which I think is one of the unique values of FP&A like you want to go to, to talk to people who actually understand how a company runs. Follow the money. You're right where you know how it comes into the company and where it goes. And I think that critical thinking skill of being able to apply the knowledge that they have of that process, right, and then turn it around and make sure that people are even asking the right questions, because you can spend a lot of energy, not just me, but a leadership team can spend a lot of energy going down a path, and it's probably not the best use of their time. And how many times in organizations have people been at whatever level, and a request comes down from the Board or the executive team and they're like, here we go. We did this before. This is basically going to be a big error, and we're going to gather all this data and we're never going to hear anything again. And so I think oftentimes the FP&A team becomes the voice of reason. It's where the rubber meets the road. And I really think that critical thinking skill is fantastic.

[00:49:55] Host: Paul Barnhurst: And I love getting a perspective from someone who didn't come up from FP&A. It's good to see what they think versus what finance people think. So thank you. Appreciate that. Rich.

[00:50:06] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Yeah, I think, you know, for me in the FP&A it's the analytics. You know so there's there's lots of tools and technology that are available new ones every day. You know there's AI agents now. There's all kinds of things that you can just ask simple questions. It'll run a Python script for you. So I don't know if it's that really is the key thing that knowing that one technology because it's going to change. It's just the analytical mindset and being able to actually translate that into something that others that aren't as technical can understand. You know, maybe it's somebody that's got a day job that's not analytics, that's not in math, that doesn't understand modeling or what you mean by modeling versus an econometric model versus statistics and Python. How can I translate that, you know, to to my business leaders. So I think that it's not so much a technical skill, just analytical mindset that's got good communication skill because technology is going to change.

[00:51:04] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: You may have been great at Hyperion, Essbase 20 years ago, but it's not quite as relevant. Maybe today in your career, maybe there's another application, you know, another technology. Or maybe technology is becoming less of a barrier, right? With AI, if it's natural language. So I think it's being able to translate all that, you know, analytical thinking into something that others can understand.

[00:51:27] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Yeah, I appreciate that. And you made me think when you mentioned tools. I've seen some job descriptions sometimes that will list 15 different tools you need to know. And I'm like, shouldn't it be about critical thinking, analytics, understanding, modeling? Like, yes, I can get listing a couple tools, but in general it's not that hard to learn one tool over another. If you have the right mindset and you're curious and you're the type of person that would be a good FP&A professional. So I'm like, are you focusing on the right area? But I probably digress a little bit. But you know, sometimes I'm just like 15 different tools. Really. Good luck.

[00:52:02] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. Especially when you see, you know, these LLM models are going to start to do a lot of this stuff. And so what's the stuff that's not in the model. It's are we asking the right question. And have we framed the question in a way where we're going to get a useful response before we go spend a fortune to go fire up those GPUs to get us that answer? Because you know how you go about thinking about these questions and the skills that you have, the analytical skills, the critical critical thinking skills, there's plenty of horsepower now to go do the crunching, right. We're going to have to get commoditized. But where the value chain is going to be flipped is who are the people that actually have enough technical depth to understand these models, to figure out the intersection point between what the business is trying to achieve and what the models can do, the good and bad of the models, right? Because the models are, you know, they're going to drift and they're going to come back with answers that don't always make sense. And that's going to come back to the framing of the questions. And I think that's that creates a huge opportunity for people in FP&A. 

[00:53:17] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thank you for both those answers. I really enjoyed that. The next one is what's the soft skill or human skill that they should master? Rich, we'll start with you.

[00:53:26] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Yeah. You know, I think that collaboration is really key to success in my career. Even I worked a lot with CEOs and CFOs, business units and finance teams, supply chain teams. It was really the ability to kind of collaborate and put all the pieces together. So. So I think the personality, you can't be just behind a desk, you know, maybe at home in a dark room. It's really going to be about collaboration and being able to understand the business end to end. And just think of it, you know, hey, we're a chemical manufacturing business, right? We're not an FP&A business. I want to understand that business. And I want to be able to see how I can support all these different functions with the role that I have in the organization. So I think it's collaboration. Yeah.

[00:54:14] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: I think the FP&A talent that's going to really come to the surface are the ones that are moving more on the emotional intelligence curve, where that's not what you typically thought of with FP&A. Right? You thought of who really has these skills to be able to go through and has the accounting and has the analytics. And as you mentioned, Paul, you've got these 15 things you can list. And again, as more and more of this is able to be done by AI and other capabilities, and as you're going to see more and more companies on comprehensive systems where executives are collaborating all the time and talking, and it's continuous planning. I think you're going to need people that can sort of manage all that disparate activity, like, you know, personalities matter. Who are these people? Do they tend to be overly pessimistic? Do they tend to be overly aggressive or optimistic, or, you know, what are the other dynamics that are going into this? Because now it's not just going to be a spreadsheet. And what's the answer on the spreadsheet? Everybody can look at that now. It's going to be we have all the information in one place with all the econometrics in there and all these factors.

[00:55:27] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Now it's going to come back to the humans again, right? How are people interpreting this data and what decisions do they make. Because just because you have great insight around the corner that other people don't have, it doesn't mean that you then make great decisions with that data. And so I think that the folks in FP&A can really get to the other side of this and get some empathy and understanding who they're dealing with. I think that's where you're going to start to see many of these folks on the track of CFO running companies, because I think you really have the full skill set, right. You understand the full life cycle, you understand the strategy. And I would really implore folks that you're I think you're in probably one of the ideal positions that you can be in based on where technology is going. I don't think there's been another time where you're going to be more strategically relevant than over the next decade. The question now is just how do you differentiate right in that during that time?

[00:56:27] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I love that idea. How do you differentiate? Great advice for people I know we're pretty much near the end of our time, so we're going to ask each of you one question to kind of get to know you a little bit personally. Have a little bit of fun here. So we'll start with you, Jeff. If you could swap jobs with anyone in the world for one week, who are you going to swap jobs with and why?

[00:56:49] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Yeah. So that is actually really easy because I just finished a book on Elon Musk. And then I watched his press conference, and I'm trying to figure out if he's a real person or a cyborg because apparently he has, you know, I don't know, like a dozen children. And he's now up to, what, seven companies? And he's also uncovering, you know, billions. So I would just like to be him for a week to figure out, first of all, if he's real, if it's the first sign of alien life, you know, on the planet but just to sort of understand how he is able to do what he does, I think it's humbling for any CEO when you're struggling to run one company and you've got a guy out there who seems to have, you know, nine, nine personalities all operating at the same time at a high level, all, you know, most of these fortune 500 companies, right, at this point.

[00:57:47] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Yeah, it is pretty crazy to see how much he runs. You have to wonder. So would love to bring you back on after you've had that week. That's really an alien or not. So if that happens.

[00:57:58] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: I'll be able to come back. I think I would, I think I would, probably be my last role. I think it would self-combust within the week, but it would be fun while it lasted.

[00:58:05] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Well, then I guess this will be the only kind but rich. One quick question for you. If you could go back and give yourself your younger self one piece of advice, what advice would you give yourself?

[00:58:18] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: Lots of lessons learned, I tell you, so there'd be lots of advice I would be giving myself. But from a career standpoint and building a company and working with people, one thing I learned that culture wins out over talent, and what I mean by talent is maybe technical talent. And I had to learn that lesson because I think there's when you're starting a company, when you're in technology, when you use technology tools a lot usually go for that. That person that you think or people you think have the highest degree of talent and you think, oh, that's that's what really matters. The entire company is being the most technically talented or the best at my trade. But boy, you build a company. If that person can't fit into the culture of the company, it really is a a big issue, right? You're not going to be successful. So you may be guarded thinking, I've got to protect this talent that I've got. No one's going to replace it. But you can't let the culture of the company really deteriorate because of that.

[00:59:23] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: It mattered so much more. You can replace talent, you know, I think we all think we're pretty special and gifted. But honestly, there's a lot of people like us maybe even more talented than us out there and available. So don't be afraid of that. Culture matters. People matter. You'll find technical talent and you'll find people that are really gifted in marketing. The point they can't get along with the rest of the team that. And I think you'll really suffer from it. So that was something in my professional career I learned.

[00:59:53] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thank you. I really appreciate that. That was a great one. And thank you both for joining me. I mean, I've really enjoyed this hour, getting your perspectives, you know, learning more about Board, talking about external data and a number of different things. You know, we'll put a link to Board if people want to learn more about the software in the show notes, as well as both of your LinkedIn profiles. But to give you kind of one last thing, if there's anything you want to add before we go, Jeff, any any last words you want to say before we close?

[01:00:20] Guest 1: Jeff Casale: Yeah. First of all, I just want to thank you, Paul. I mean, this has been a great session. I think to be able to have a forum like this where anything that's long form, I think is so much more powerful, and you see a lot of snippets out there about FP&A and sound bites, and I think they have people on TikTok and everything else, and, you know, but to be able to have a place where it's very clear content. You actually get into the issues. You have these discussions. I've listened to a number of yours, and I think it's great to have this forum because it creates a community, and that is where people want to go to learn. They want to find like communities, and they want us just to get into real dialog with real people. So I think this is a great forum to do it. And then I would just say again, I think this is, you know, for all your listeners out there, it really is even more exciting and interesting and dynamic than I thought. When I joined Board. The amount of change that has taken place I know is pretty significant. And as I try to peek around the corner and I try to do the best I can to see where things are going from an industry perspective, you know, hold on, because it really is an exciting place to be and it really is moving the needle for companies. 

[01:01:40] Host: Paul Barnhurst: Thank You. Appreciate that. Rich, any last words from you?

[01:01:43] Guest 2: Rich Wagner: I think I echo. You know, the sentiment here is it's awesome to see people that are really interested in their professional career and share information and act as change agents. You know, so I think it's a great forum. And, you know, it's something that's interesting to me. I love the thought leadership. Appreciate that. On the selfish side, you know, for me, the future is already here, right? There's so much information about what's going to happen. It's now technically possible. So I just think that every company is going to plan with both internal and external data. It'll be unheard of in just a few years. So my whole goal and vision is to help as many companies as we possibly can. You know, no matter if we're bored or if we're private area for any other of our competitors, I just think there's a better way to plan for your business. And it's technically possible, and that's what I get excited about.

[01:02:35] Host: Paul Barnhurst: I love that Rich. I think you cringe a little when you said other competitors. You paused for a minute like, no, come to Board, please. Now I'm just a little bit. But thank you so much, both of you. It's been a real pleasure. I'm so excited for the future of FP&A. Love what you know you guys are doing and bringing that external data. So thanks again for joining me. Thank you, thank you. Thanks, Paul. Appreciate it. 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.