Episode 54 - Mikus Krams: Why We Scrapped Budgets At Chili Piper

Show Notes

Are you starting to think about your budget for the next year? Stop right now, argues Mikus Krams.

As a former senior director of strategy and finance at Chili Piper, he described budgets as a shackle — you’ll be held prisoner to the assumptions you make for the next year.

In this episode, Mikus Krams Krums, the B2B Saas finance leader turned co-founder of Trace.Space, says budgets are unlikely to be relevant for small agile companies. He tells Paul Barnhurst: “Let's say you're doing some activity, and it's yielded you some results. If halfway through the activity, you figured that it's not working, why would you still keep pushing it? But if you have a budget, that's exactly what you are doing…it just felt silly to be living that way.”

In this episode Mikus describes

• Bottoms-up planning as the most impactful strategy for agile B2B SaaS companies

• The reason that budgets are bad for business

• ROI mindset as core to his finance thinking

• Managing incentive structure through a Rev Ops approach

• How on target earnings are sometimes more mirage than reality

• Managers as “powderkegs” and “snipers”

• The path to moving to a continuous forecasting methodology

• His biggest failure in his FP&A career

• Banking as a powerful route to FP&A career success

• The importance of lunch with business leaders and individual contributors in a business

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