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and now onto the show. From Data Reels, this is FPNA today.
Hello everyone, welcome to FPNA today. I am your host Paul Barnhurst, aka the FPNA guy.
FPNA today is brought to you by Data Reels, the financial planning and analysis platform for
Excel users. Every week we welcome a leader from the world of financial planning and analysis.
Today we are delighted to welcome to the show Andy Lynch. Andy, thanks for joining us.
Thank you very much Paul. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me on.
And we're really excited to have you. Let me just give a little bit of information about Andy
and we'll give him an opportunity to share more about himself here shortly. He's coming to us from
the UK. He's currently head of FPNA at Blue Light Card. He is a prolific writer with his own
website. He writes quite a few articles, both some personal as well, some business ones,
and he earned a degree in economics. We're going to start with a question we'd like to ask everybody.
What's the worst budgeting experience you've ever had in your career?
Well, this is quite a timely question because it's entirely possible the answer is the budget
experience I'm going through right now. And that is no slight on the organisation at all.
It's a phenomenal company. Everyone's working incredibly hard with a quite valuable mission.
Like I say, the company is Blue Light Card. So we provide a discount card for emergency services,
workers, NHS staff, police, fire, ambulance and a few other member groups here in the UK.
So it's only open to those in those important professions. And through becoming a Blue Light
Card holder, they can get discounts at various retailers, online stores and things like that.
So it's really good helping the people who look after us save a few pounds and helping the retail
partners as well connect with that audience and ultimately drive more revenue. But the FPNA team
itself is new. So there's a couple of us who are new in the team and we are dealing with all of
the standard Excel problems. And separately, we can talk about how data rails might be able to
solve this. There's budget version over here. There's a different one over here. Someone's
copied and pasted some numbers into a different SharePoint dock over here. We did some re-targeting
midway through the financial year. So now some people are kind of calling that the re-forecast
or some people calling it target. Which one do we want to benchmark to? How do we flow that through
into next year's targets? And we're trying to do all this and start off this budget process now
while also because the FPNA team is fairly new, build out all of the modeling and forecasting
tools that we need. So we're not just picking up a model that someone else built refining it,
adjusting the assumptions and taking it forward. We're rebuilding it all completely from scratch
with me who's been in the organization for two months and my team have been there for a month and a
half. So it's fun. It's really good fun. But it is challenging going through the budget and
process itself while also building out all of the tooling at the same time and all of those models
from scratch. It's a lot of work, but it is really good fun. In terms of slightly less positive
experiences or slightly less positive challenges, I do remember a couple of times where I was working
for a company that did outsourced services. So we had contracts with various different customers
of ours. So we agreed to provide a certain level of services to them, like cleaning,
reception, security, that kind of thing. And they'd give us a fix fee for that. And all of those
were kind of costed on a tender model basis. And part of that tender model, you have to submit to
them how much you're actually adding as a profit margin. And also the game is to keep that number
very low. So the potential customer thinks you're not making a tremendous amount of profit and
you look good. And the plus in the cost plus contract is quite low. And that looks positive.
But hidden within that is a bunch of other costs that kind of bump up the price of it that may
may not actually be reflected in that thing. So when we came time to budget, we had a couple of
contract managers who asked them, how much do you think you're going to generate in
gross profit on this contract this year? And they were so, well, the cost model says it's
50 grand a year. So we should be at around 50 grand a year. And I had to point out to them that,
you know, year to date, only nine months into the year they had already generated 80 grand or
100 grand. So you're coming at me and telling me that you're going to generate half the amount
of profit next year. And they were going, well, that's what's in the model. I'm like, yes, but
you know, and I know that the model doesn't exactly reflect how we account for it internally.
So what are you going to do? How are you going to close that gap? What's realistic? And they came
at it with the point of view of, well, you know, your finance, so you're going to tell me a high
number. And I'll tell you a loan number and we'll negotiate and meet somewhere in the middle,
won't we? At which point the owner of the company, jump did and said, stop, that's nonsense.
What are you talking about? We know what the performance of this looks like. We're reporting it
in the same way. Now as we will in the future. So we're actually just going to start with this year's
actual as a base and go, is it going to go up or down from this year? And he was like, well, a little
bit about the same, but trying to negotiate with and push the like business partners towards
recognizing how we were thinking about and how we would report on the performance rather than
just picking a number out of a model that frankly they know to be curious, but they're using it as a
kind of negotiation and debating tool ultimately because they're, you know, comp and performance
reviews and bonuses depend on how much profit they generate off these contracts. So dealing with
those kind of to a certain degree conflicts of interest, but as with any budget process, you know,
trying to arrive at a target number that is both realistic, but also a bit challenging,
you know, just challenging enough to push the organization, not so challenging that you get
one quarter in and your miles behind target already and everyone gets to solution.
Playing around with that tension is always fun. But yeah, that was a particularly challenging
experience trying to get those business partners on board with that idea. Yeah, I can still remember
one time we were trying to get, you know, the profit on different programs we had and one of the
guys said, Hey, I think the number will be X like throughout like a hundred thousand and it ended
up being like two or three million and I pointed that out when he gave me a low number the next time
and you know, the head of the sales team is like, we're not sandbagging by chance. Are we, you know,
and so totally know what you're talking about because the incentives they want to exceed the
number and so you try to come in with something that isn't realistic and it's one of the big
challenges of budgeting is often you tying your targets to your budget process. And so it
leads to a lot of game playing as you mentioned, misaligned incentives and it can be a real challenge
to work through that. Yeah, and it's ultimately like part of the fun of being an FPNA right is that
you get to be in all of these conversations and you get to see like how does the sales team talk
to the ops team, talk to finance, talk to HR ultimately talk to the CEO or the leadership team.
And you know, you kind of see how the sausage gets made in terms of financial planning, target
setting, how that cascades down through the organization and then it's great to be a fly on the
wall in those and it also highlights just how important it is for FPNA to kind of play the
policeman role or kind of the neutral arbiter. So like, you know, we have a plan and we have a model
that says, you know, all being well and good and if all these assumptions hold like we should end
up at this number. It's up to you as the business to tell me like which of the assumptions in my
model are wrong or are going to change your what, you know, management action, are we going to take
that means the future is going to be different in terms of trends from the past and then working with
them to arrive at that. But but at FPNA, you do have a sort of good cop bad cop role sometimes where
you can either choose to be the good cop or the bad cop depending on, you know, how you CFL or
you CEO wants to play a particular meeting. But again, it's all it's always good fun ultimately
or trying to get to the right answer. Yeah, and I definitely it can be a lot of fun and it's
interesting to watch. So next question we have for you is can you just tell us a little bit about
yourself in your background? I know you're heading up FPNA for a company now, but maybe how you got
started in FPNA and it's a little bit of your journey. Yeah, sure. So like you mentioned earlier,
so I graduated from University of Leeds with an economics degree. I started that econ degree in
September 2008. So I think like the first like econ lecture we were just walking in and we saw
on the news about either like Lehman or Bersdund's collapsing just as I was, you know, heading off
into the world of economics. That was good fun. So it wasn't wasn't necessarily the best time in the
world to get into the market, but yeah, I didn't need a con degree for three years and then graduated
and joined an insurance company on their finance graduate scheme. So the idea was that over the three
years, you know, you rotate around in a number of different placements. So we do one in finance,
which is a mix of kind of accounting and FPNA, one in like regulatory compliance, one in governance
and risk management, and then one in internal audit and then ultimately like picking choose where
you wanted your career to go after that. So I started out in finance, really enjoyed the finance
placement, got my start, you know, posting journal feeds to our ERP, which was division back in
the day, the old Microsoft, the precursor to dynamics business central as it is now. So did that
for nine months? It was good for learnt a lot, got involved in a lot of things, moved on to my next
placement in regulatory compliance. And then while I was in that role, a permanent role became
available in that team, which was a bit more money and a chance to jump off the ground scheme. So I
took that and I did that for about two years, at which point I was still doing all of my accounting
exams in the background. So I'm now Cima qualified, the UK specific accounting qualification.
It's not quite the same as being a CPA, but it's not far off. It's definitely the best one if you
want to be an FPNA anyway. So I was doing all my accounting exams, but I was actually working a
completely non finance role and it's kind of regulatory like compliance advisory role. Got to
end all my accounting exams went great. I can be a qualified accountant now as long as I have the
relevant experience, which was three years requirement of experience with at least 18 months in
these core finance roles, which I went, oh damn, I'm nowhere near that. I only have nine months,
finance experience, that's not very good. So I started looking around for another finance role
to jump into, at which point out of left field, I had the opportunity to go and join a startup
over in the US. So I went to work as the first full-time hire for a company called Described Media,
which was then called Book in a Box, which helps people write and publish their own books. So it's
kind of a boutique professional, a boutique services company essentially. So we add writers and
book cover designers and people have that on staff. But yeah, it was a kind of once-in-a-lifetime
chance to just go and join a startup as the first full-time employee and help build something from
scratch. In a completely non finance role, there was very much kind of operations building up processes
from scratch, which was really good fun. I did that for about a year and then came back to the UK
and was looking for my next opportunity at which point I went, well, I was kind of good at finance.
This was like four years ago now, but when I was in that finance role four and a half years ago,
four years ago, I was pretty good at it. I quite enjoyed it. Maybe I should look around for another
finance role and actually like struggles to find somewhere that would take me because at that point
in my career, I was probably 26 and I was applying for management, accounting roles or finance,
analyst roles. And they would say, you know, tell us about your finance experience. And I would
say, I did nine months in finance four years ago and they would go, what? Why don't you want a
finance role now? So it was actually a bit of a struggle to get back into it. But I got a little
bit lucky and that I came across the guys now, became a mentor and a friend who was finance director
of a small company. This is the facilities management company that I mentioned. So it was a little
less, I mean, it was turning over about 20 million dollars a year and it had a finance team of four or
five people. He was brand new in as the finance director of the CFO essentially and needed a number
two. And for whatever reason, decided to take a chance on me, you know, the guy who had only nine months
of finance experience four years ago. So I was a bit green and new to it when I joined, when I joined,
but I learned a ton from him and he kind of quickly trained me up. I got qualified, got promoted
to be head of finance, started line managing, started doing everything from kind of treasury
management relationships with auditors, all the budgeting, all the forecasting, all the reporting,
kind of owning that soup to nuts in an SME environment, which is really good for, and did that
for three years. So over that time, we kind of doubled the revenue of the company and took it from
sort of break evenish place to a million pounds plus in net profit. Ultimately, that was a successful
exit for the founder as well. I think they existed about 18 months after I left. So at that point,
I was a qualified accountant, had a bit of line management experience, looking for the next challenge,
but her dough and the ever really worked in this SME, apart from my brief grad stint in a bigger
company. So I went to work for a big multinational. So I went to work for Capital One UK. So obviously,
everyone in the States and in the UK will know Capital One. In the States, obviously, they're a complete
set of financial services. So retail banking, credit cards, consumer and auto loans, small business
banking, business credit cards, it's a huge organisation in the US. The UK arms are a bit smaller,
so it's just like a monoline credit card business. There's no retail banking or anything like that.
So it's just a lending business. But I joined them as the head of finance analytics, which is in the
FPN 18, but it was almost unique in FPNA roles in that I had almost no input into the regular
forecasting and no input into monthend and reporting and things. My team and I were just working
on long-term strategic scenario planning stuff. So five and ten-year financial modelling,
reporting on kind of big changes to strategy. And if we went after this customer segment or
that customer segment, what does that do to the PNL over the long term? It's a really, really good
grounding in FPNA. I learned a ton from a really, really good team there. And that was really
what kind of my first proper proper FPNA role with any kind of responsibility and activity.
It was really good fun. I did that for two years, then jumped over to join another NSEME as their
finance director again. Again, went back into the SME world and helped them put together proper
budgeting and forecasting variants and analysis. The right set of KPIs reporting them on the right
cadence and kind of driving that financial improvement there. Again, that was another sort of two-year
system and then you might be sent in a bit of a two-year pattern here. Got a call about another role
that came up, which is the blue light card role, which ultimately where I am now. So it's been a
kind of a bit of a secuitor's route, a very non-traditional finance route. I've had large
stretches of my career where I've been in non-finance roles and I've kind of jumped from
big company to start up to small company to big company to small company and now to sort of,
maybe I found my level at a medium sized company. So yeah, it's been quite a long and secuitor's
route, but FPNA is ultimately where I really enjoy spending my time. Like we said earlier,
you get to the every part of the business, you get to be involved in the important conversations
that happen in every level and for someone who's both curious and a bit nosy like me, as well as
very analytical and commercially focused, there's no better place to be than FPNA, my mum.
Thanks, appreciate sharing the background and I agree with you, FPNA is a great place to be,
you get to see the whole business, you get to be involved in things. It's a great role,
like you mentioned, for the analytical side, for the business partnering, for being involved.
You know kind of stepping back, you mentioned, you know, someone took a chance on you and when you
and I chatted, he talked about that mentor a little bit and the role they played. So maybe talk
a little bit why mentoring or mentors been so important to you in your career. Like I said,
the immediate importance of him was that at that time in my career, I was to certainly
struggling to find a financial and he was, I guess, happy to accept the risk that it may have
may not work out, but for whatever reason, he saw something in me and thought, you know,
like this guy and I can work with him and I can train him up in the way I need to. So first and
foremost, without him deciding to take on a chance on me, my career would probably look quite
different to where it is now. I also got very lucky in that, I guess this was, so this was pre-COVID,
so it was very much the era of five days in the office working and I was lucky enough that he
himself had a background in organisations of all sizes. So he'd worked in audit, he'd worked in
huge public companies in reporting and FPNA roles, private organisations, PE backed companies,
but the company that we found ourselves working in together was a sort of 300 person company
and the finance team was only five or six people and so for pretty much five days a week and for
three years, I was sat next to him and in every meeting that he was in and constantly kind of learning
and soaking up from this person at a very close level and I think when you're really on in your
career, that kind of learning bars most of us are like tacit learning and picking up how to act
and how to talk in a meeting, how to model something in Excel, how to deal with senior stakeholders,
like just by working closely with someone and observing them, you can kind of learn a lot of those
skills, you know, almost bars most of them by role modeling, by having a good role model that you
can learn from. It was just such an impactful time in my career on me, so being able to work with
someone of his calibre that closely forced a lot, a Mediterranean's difference. I think to
up on more generally in your career, there's always, you know, unless you're the CEO or the founder
or something, there's always someone who's a couple of steps ahead of where you are, maybe they're one
level above your two levels above you and you've got to think, okay, what what do they do differently,
how do they think differently, how do they act, how they talk, what issues are they thinking about
or what level are they thinking about things that's different to how I'm currently working and then
how can I, you know, turn myself more into that or have what can I pick up from them and what can I
learn from them and how do I need to be thinking about things as an FPNA manager versus a head of
FPNA or a VP or a CFO and more of the differences at all of those levels and you can cut if you
observe and smart about it, you can kind of see that while you're on the job, you don't necessarily
need someone to tell you in a performance career or a one-to-one, you know, if you want to go from
managers to VP, here's what you need to do. You can see how the VP is actually differently to the
managers of the senior managers, for example, and pick up on what those differences are and learn
from them as well as obviously you can just directly act to people. You know, when you were in my
shoes five years ago or two years ago, what did you do to get from this level to that level or what
did you do differently or what are the things that you were thinking about and how to manage your career,
you know, over the next five years and having people tell you that openly and honestly in a one-to-one
over a cup of coffee or a beer or something is invaluable, you know, it's the kind of stuff you just
can't read in books or blogs or see on YouTube, you have to be, you know, in it and you have to
not hear from the horses, not something. Yeah, so something you said there reminded me of,
you know, something as you mentioned, you know, watching and seeing how someone that's at a higher
level, you how they act, how they behave, how they do things, you know, I've once heard it said that
you should always act, behave for the role you want, not the role you have, right? Same kind of
idea. What are they doing that I can implement so I can get to the role I want? So, you know,
little follow-up question here around mentoring. So, what's your advice for someone to kind of
find a mentor or has a mentor, someone's listening and they're thinking, you know, I need a mentor,
I need someone to help me, any advice you can offer there? Yeah, it's a good question. I guess to
a certain degree, like the people I've found as mentors have ultimately ended up being people that
have been working with. Obviously, some companies offer slightly more formal and slightly more structured
mentorship schemes and I've done a couple of them in my time that are hugely valuable, particularly if
they partner you with, you know, a mentor who maybe works in a different line of business or works
in a different function or something like that just to get kind of an outside perspective. So,
if there are any more structured mentor schemes like that that your company offers, 100% take them
up on it. Some professional organisations also do this as well. So, I mentioned Seema, the
Child Institute of Management Accounting here in the UK, have a mentorship scheme where you can,
you know, as a qualified accountant, you can opt to be a mentor to people who are studying or part
qualified or you can, you know, grab a mentor who might be a CFO or, you know, 20 years experience
to your turn or something like that. It's slightly more like informal basis as you've got to be
observant to the people in your organisation. So, if I think about, say, you know, an FPNA team of
sort of 40 or 50 people at a big company. So, within that, if you're an FPNA analyst who's,
you know, relatively June, you sort of three, four years experience, in that department of 40,
there's probably four or five people here at sort of manager level and then another couple that's
sort of direct level and maybe a head of FPNA or VP or something. So, within that set of kind of
six to seven people, one of them's probably a direct line manager, which is great. Maybe they're
a mentor, you can ask them that advice, hopefully they're open to giving you, you know, career development
advice. But if there's also someone else in that manager set that you admire or that you think
is incredibly helpful or open, those people are super happy and super receptive to, you know,
you put them aside or just saying, hey, can I just grab like 20 minutes with you to talk through
them, something I'm thinking about or, you know, some career advice or things like that. I'd be
more than happy to do that for anyone. I've done it a number of times in the past and most people
who are at the sort of manager or senior manager level or even VP level are more than happy to pay
it forward. So, first and foremost, you just got to ask for it. And then secondly, if someone does
give you some advice or says, you know, go and think about this or think about this. The follow-up
is incredibly important. So, being able to go back to them in three months time and say, oh, thanks
for that advice. You know, you said A, B and C would be good. I did them in here are the results
incredibly useful. Great. Thanks for that. I'm thinking about this now. What do you think
and kind of keeping that loose connection going over time ultimately is kind of how you form the
really, really strong mental relationship. But I would say most people are more than happy to provide
a bit of advice if you want to, as long as you make it a little bit easier for them. Don't walk
up to someone and go, hi, I've been watching you from afar and I would like you to be in my mentor.
I need 90 minutes, once a month for you, you know, from now for the next five years. They'll probably
say no. But if you start to fall slightly more informal based and kind of build it slowly over time
from now, that's kind of what I'd recommend. Good advice. Yeah, I agree with you. I wouldn't
recommend going up and asking for a five year commitment at 90, 90 minutes a month might not work
out in your favor. If it does, I guess more power to you, but I wouldn't expect it to. No, or if
it does, you'll probably get an invoice from them for their time because people like that are quite busy.
Exactly. Here's the bill. That will be 400 a month or whatever.
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There's a term you and I talked about before this interview that you're a fan of, the concept of
skill stacking. So can maybe talk a little bit about that concept, what that is? Yeah, sure. So skill
stacking refers to the idea that it's usually both easier and if you're trying to generate a living
or be good at your job or do something, it's usually easier to try and be sort of top 25% in the world
at maybe four or five different related things than it is to try and be the best in the world at one
specific thing. So like take a non-work for example first. So if you're like chess, if you want to be
the best chess player in the world and make $2 million a year or something, you probably have to be
the best chess player in the world. Which is incredibly difficult, incredibly competitive,
guys like Magnus Carlson have been playing chess since they were two years old. If you suddenly
decided you want to try and beat them, that's very, very, very difficult and it's going to be
incredibly hard to make a living as a chess player unless you're the top 0.01% in the world. But
what if you're a top 20% chess player in the world and you're also quite good at public speaking
and you're quite good at internet marketing, well you could probably make a pretty good living
live streaming chess on Twitch and doing YouTube tutorials and stuff like that, which a number of
people do pretty well. So the idea that like being the best in the world at chess is incredibly hard,
being top 20% in the world at that and also being a very good video editor and communicator is
probably easier or is definitely easier than trying to be the best chess player in the world, but
it's just as likely to lead to positive outcome or at least a good way to earn a living. So I think
about this in terms of you know, my career. I'm pretty good at Excel but I'm not the best in the
world. That's for sure. I've watched the Excel world championships. Those guys are a lot better than
I am. And I'm not the best accountant in the world. You know, I've never worked in audio. I don't
know accounting standards like the back of my hand. I don't really care that much about the
specifics of you know, tax whatever or tax optimisation strategies, that kind of thing. I'm not the
best but I'm pretty good. You know, I'm qualified. I'm quite good at communicating. I'm happy presenting
in front of an audience and I'm a reasonable writer. And if you combine all those skills together,
actually what you get is a pretty good head of FB and I don't need to be the best in the world
and know everything there is to know about tax because someone else does that. Someone who's
a specialty in tax. I don't need to know how to do you know, everything to the
end degree in Excel, but I know enough to do a pretty down good model and I can speak well
and eloquently enough in front of an audience that I'm comfortable yet I'm presenting that analysis
or a forecast or something to a board and set a senior stakeholders. So I'm not knowing
near the best in the world in any of these specific skills, but combining a bunch of them on
top of each other and it's been a pretty good place. That's kind of broadly the idea of skills
stacking. It makes sense, right? Taking three or four things you're good at and using them to
make yourself unique and stand out. Right. Like for example, you could be really good at FB and A,
but also pretty good at conversing and interviewing people and pretty good at writing content.
And you could create a pretty good career as the FB and A guy. No, it's not something that stands
out or something that immediately comes from mind, but when you combine a few different skills,
you end up in a pretty good spot. Yeah, I definitely just put me in a unique spot and it's fun. I
enjoy interviewing people and I was okay at FB and A. So I combined the two together and it works.
We won't say how okay I was. We won't go there, but no. I think it's a good point. I think for
anyone out there who's thinking, Hey, how do I go about this is ask others what you're good at.
Think about what you're good at. Try new things and over time you'll figure out what that right
combination is for you and that can change sometimes, right? What that combination is that one point
in your career can be different at another, but try to make yourself unique and stand out. It always
helps with moving up the food chain, so to speak, and it helps with your compensation. The more
unique you can make yourself. 100% and just to build on the point you mentioned there, like asking
other people what they think you're good at is so important. Like I know, like the years I didn't
think of myself as a particularly good writer because to a certain degree, it comes kind of naturally
to me and we all have this terrible bias towards undervaluing our own skills and undervaluing
that which comes easily to us. So if it comes naturally to you kind of assume, oh, this is just
easy. I wouldn't say I'm good at brushing my teeth or putting my shoes on, I just do it. I wouldn't
say I'm good at writing, you just sort of do it. Everyone does, don't they? And when you ask other
people and they say, I know we think you're really good at that. And you go, oh, right, yeah, you
can't do that as easily as I can or that doesn't come naturally to you. This feels like play to me,
but it feels like work to you. That's interesting. And you know, be observant of those and take note of
those because they can be really good hints for where you should start to spend your time and start
to meet your career towards. That's really good advice. I appreciate that. And yes, asking others
is really important. And like you said, you often realize, oh, I'm good at something that you don't
think you're good at. So speaking of writing, you know, I know that's something you do quite a bit.
You wrote previously about how you were fired by Tucker Maxx the day before Chris Maseve.
Can you tell our audience for those who don't know who Tucker Maxx is, who he is? And then maybe
tell us a little bit about that story and what you learn from it. Sure. So yeah, for those who don't
know, so Tucker Maxx is, I think, a four times New York Times bestselling author. This may
may not be true anymore, but I remember at one time said there were there are three writers that
have only ever had that have had three books on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time.
There's Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell and Tucker Maxx. Those are the three. Not bad company is
what you're telling me. It's pretty esteemed company as a fan as a fan of all three of those.
So Tucker had a bunch of books in the sort of, I think, Midnauties to Late Naughties,
a genre of book that sort of broadly called Frattire. And it was essentially comedy stories about
him and his friends in college and in law school getting drunk, going to parties, doing the things
that you do when you're 23 and, you know, haven't got tremendous amount of real work to do.
hilarious books, sold millions of copies, made him incredibly successful, ultimately turned more
of them into a movie as well. And kind of after he'd retired to a certain degree from writing, he
had a few different entrepreneurial adventures and then started a company that was then called
Booking a Box and then became scribe media, which is essentially like a gold plated professional
publishing service. So if you had an idea, you know, take yourself as an example, you're you're
running the FBNA guy. You have a ton of really good ideas about, you know, how to make it in the
world of FBNA, but you don't have the time or necessarily the expertise to actually sit down and
write, you know, 65,000 words into a book, but you're well aware that a book might be a really
good marketing tool. It'd be great for your career. It's something you can sell. You can own
the rights to it, all that kind of good stuff. Scribe media would help you write and publish that book
essentially. So do a bunch of interviews with you just like this, turn all that into a manuscript,
help you edit it, help you design a really good cover, publish it on Amazon to the world. So
that was a company that was the company that I joined as the first full-time employee in January
2015. So Tucker and his co-founders act started it in I think like 2014. I joined in early 2015
as the first full-time employee throughout Austin, Texas and the three of us sat around a coffee
table kind of figuring out how to build this company, which was really, really good fun to start with
because I enjoyed the, you know, kind of greenfield space, chance to build out a company, build out
some processes. What do we think this looks like? What should the customer journey look like? How
do we make all these different systems interact? So the proofreaders get what they need at the right
time. The cover designers get what they need at the right time and it's a great client experience
from end to end and also it's profitable for everyone involved. So that was really good fun for
about the first six months and then in the second six months we kind of did most of that to
certain degree. My role shifted into more of a kind of, I guess like client management or account
management kind of role. It's just kind of making sure everything was happening, you know, keeping
in touch with all the different authors and clients that we're working with, keeping in touch with
done different freelancers. I was essentially kind of living in my email inbox from 8 a.m. in the
morning till 8 p.m. at night and I was doing this while working remotely. So I was the only
employee in the UK. No one else in the company was even kind of logging on onto Slack
or onto emails or anything until about 1 p.m. in the afternoon. You know, I'd finished work at
sort of 6 or 7 but then constantly be pinged with emails and slacks throughout the night.
I essentially ended up in a place where like I was doing a role that I wasn't very good at.
I'm not particularly suited to it. My skill sets don't suit trying to do, you know, a thousand
little things in a day. And I know we told earlier about potentially hiring the A's and things
like that. That would be the worst possible job in the world for me. I'm terrible at it. I like having
large chunks of unbroken time to sit and analyze some data and pull together a model or a report
or something. I don't like answering a thousand emails a day on one little things.
So ultimately it was fairly apparent to everyone in the company I wasn't doing a very good job.
And so Tucker and Zach quite rightly made the decision to let me go on December 23rd. I think
it was on the 22nd of the 23rd to 2015. And it was one of those where I was kind of surprised
and shocked when it happened. But the overwhelming emotion I felt when they said, you know,
sorry mate, we have to let you go. Was relief when you when you in a role where you're not doing
a very good job, you know you're not doing a very good job. And everyone around you knows you're
not doing a very good job. Which why they took the difficult decision, which is like say absolutely
the right decision for them and for me to say, look, this isn't working this has to stop. So like I said,
the first thing I felt was relief. Ultimately, I'm incredibly grateful for that because that meant I
sort of took stock of my career at that point where I was sort of 25, 26 and said, you know what,
I should probably go back into finance. I was pretty good at that actually. That does seem to suit
my skill set. It seems to suit what I like doing the way I like to work. And so went from there
and kind of ultimately like said, I struggled to find a role for a while. But then after a couple
of months when my old mentor took a chance on me and from that point on my career is just taken off
and accelerated and I love what I do today. It's great and it couldn't be more different from how I
felt back then when they fired me. So I'll always be incredibly grateful that it was a great learning
experience to go and do that role and join a startup. And it was also very good experience for me
going forward and also for me as a manager going forward to realize kind of what a situation looks
like when it's not a good fit for you or for the company or whoever and kind of the value of taking
that hard decision. Even if it wasn't me who took the hard decision ultimately it was them.
Perfect. Thanks for sharing that story. I appreciate it. So got a few more questions we're
going to run through for you. This one we're going to have a little bit of a fun question then
we'll get back to F P and A. I'm going to do one or two here. So I know you're a big fan of comedy.
Obviously Tucker Maxx as you mentioned that frat tire type stuff. And so I know you've done a comedy
stand up routine. So the first question is do you have any good jokes you could tell us that you
might use in our routines? Let me get to our audience. Nothing comes to mind. The person that comes
to mind when I think about this is if you ever watched parks and recreation the character in that
Ben Wyatt is played by Adam Scott. He's what I described as like an outgoing accountant. So he
strolls into this very straight up tight laced accounting firm and he says something like formulas
my formula, Femula and kind of rubs his fingers together. And all these accounts just fall over
themselves laughing because it's the funniest thing they've ever heard because there's not a
tremendous amount of comedy that happens in an accounting firm. Yes there's definitely a stereo
type for accountants whether it's true or not it's out there. And I know I have a little fun with
it from time to time as well. And I think we all do kind of the jokes and different things that you
see at the accountants expense. Yeah exactly like I've got a pen I've got a pen or a notebook on
it that says like it's a cruel world but a cruel ACC I you are I've got a notebook here that says
I was into pivot tables before they were cool either former boss used to say like you can tell
him an outgoing accountant because he looks at your shoes rather than their own when they're talking
to things like that. So I know the stereo type I don't believe it but. Yeah exactly now I have a
few stickers down here that embrace some of those and I even have a book here in front of me that
has Excel jokes. So I I totally get it you know so it's like the one of what does a data analyst
you could say an accountant but what does a data analyst put in their hair? Some product nice.
I now I need I need the laugh button right so I get my courtesy laugh. Yeah I don't know where
to do with the live studio audience for the FPNA guys the obvious next step man. I'll work on that.
So I know in addition to comedy you've been quite a prolific writer you have your personal blog
and a work blog. One of the articles you wrote is you kind of shared some lessons you learned from
helping a company increase their revenue and profit. You talked a little bit earlier about that
but maybe could you talk about what the key lessons were you learned. I think you boiled it down
if I remember right there were four or five kind of key lessons could you just talk a little bit
about that. Yeah sure so that was the company I mentioned earlier it was a company called Anabas
that was a facilities management company. So essentially they do cleaning reception you know
maintenance security all that kind of stuff for companies who rent large boutique office space.
So if you think about if you have a you know a hundred thousand square feet of office space in
downtown Manhattan because you're a law firm your expertise is in you know writing memos and
arguing and court and whatever it is it is lawyers do you probably can't be bothered to figure out
you know how many times a year do I need to get the windows washed or clean out the air vents or
how do I get someone on security you just outsource all that to a third-party company Anabas was one
of those third-party companies. Yeah so when I joined it was doing about ten million pounds a year
in annual revenue and kind of breaking even because it's at all outsource services they're all
super thin margin contracts so we would always we were tendering out and bidding on contracts at
about a sort of 10-ish percent gross margin so you can imagine how important it is to kind of
control your costs and to also kind of bid those accurately. So when I joined the financial
financial reporting was pretty high level and it wasn't necessarily grand your own to an app
to allow the company to make proper decisions there's also just a ton of issues with things like
costs being coded in different you know GL codes and nominal codes every month so if you're trying
to look at a trend of like how much am I spending on you know third-party labor for my security
you have no idea because one month it's in this GL code then it's up here and then it's down here
so doing any kind of that trend in us is absolutely horrendous. So first and foremost is trying
I clean up the books a bit and kind of can we just get an accurate picture of our financial
performance on a month-to-month basis because all these contracts are basically the same you know we
do the same amount of cleaning every month the same amount of man hours on reception and security
and things like that and the clients patterns are fixed for like every month our gross profit
should be basically the same and it wasn't it was all over the place so there's a bit of
investigating why that was going on and somebody that had to do with like the cruelled and pre-payments
for things like you know a quarterly deep clean of your carpet in your big meeting room you know
are we accruing for that properly once every three months then the invoice hits then you start
accruing for it again it's kind of getting the nuts and bolts and the basic try that so
firstly getting the basic try in terms of the financial and performance of the reporting we did
that that took a few months and once we had that you can then level set for a budget and forecast
for next year I think okay I know what steady state looks like I can get an accurate budget I can
set it like we said just at the level where it's challenging enough that people got to strive to
try and achieve that budget it's not so unrealistic that we'll never get there so we're put in
place proper budgets then we started doing regular you know finance review meetings with people who
owned each of those contracts and so there was ultimately someone who was responsible for delivering
the right amount of gross profit on each of those outsource contracts sitting down with them
every month and going okay your budget was here and you'll hear that's better because of A, B and C reasons
it's worse because of this and this what are we going to do about it okay great I'm going to write
that down I'm going to follow up with you next month okay next month comes around you said you
were going to do this did you do it yes you did it's had an impact on the numbers doing that
constantly and getting the organization in the habit of that regular finance reviews first he
just making sure people aren't actually paying attention to it and secondly making sure they know
we're looking at it they need to be looking at it their boss is going to ask them about it so they
need to be closer to the numbers kind of driving that cultural change over time and then ultimately
and being confident enough at our numbers that firstly the CEO could stop worrying about all this
all the time and focus on you know driving new business and having a good enough picture of how
our contractor performing that we feel confident and aggressively bidding for new business and then
ultimately winning that new business managing it in just the same way rigorous regular everyone's
bought in everyone's tired on the performance and doing that for three years in our own you know
completely transformed that business so we went from yeah 10 million year and revenue and sort of
I think it was about eight grand in profit to 23 million year in revenue and probably 1.3 million
in profit after tax and ultimately the the founder then exited a couple years later for probably
somewhere in the you know five to ten million pounds range something like that I don't know for sure
off the top there just taking a random guess at multiple and but it just it was a really eye-opening
example of the power of basically you know the regular FPNA cycle reporting actions reforcast report
actions reforcast and driving that performance and driving that FPNA cycle through the business
but ultimately the the thing that really drives results the cultural change and people are actually
changing their behaviors it's not mine and was on a spreadsheet that made the business perform better
is pushing those conversations and pushing that ultimately the mindset in front of or throughout
all the people who own the performance the atmosphere was a really really good example of just the power
of you know clean books and proper budgets was great yeah as I listened to you talk you know there
a couple thoughts that came to mind but I almost want to sum it up is you know creating that culture
of accountability with the basics of finance it starts with having clean data from there it's okay
creating challenging budgets learning to hold people accountable by having regular meetings and
creating a culture that says look I got the finances taken care of your job is to make sure we
deliver on those finances I'm here to help you to discuss the numbers to challenge you and ultimately
you know creating that culture and that trust so that everybody could do their job from the CEO to
the sales team to increase the business and they're and he's not worried is this month that going to
show I got zero profit on my contracts and so he's digging into it trying to figure out why because
the accounting wasn't correct or whatever the reason might be so that that all makes a lot of
sense to me and I really appreciate that it's like great reminder that often you know the things that
make the biggest difference are the basics it's the simple things it's the old Charlie Munger
quote about take a simple idea and then take it seriously you know that's the key to success so
I think you know like say if you get your transaction reporting right your PNL is correct you drive
in a budget and a target and then the accountability piece but it all starts with like are we getting
the basics right and are we doing the basics very very well and if you do the basics very well
for a long time you know it really pulls off it's very true it's amazing how much that can make
a difference of just doing the basics so we have one more question then we're going to move into our
get to know you section and wrap up here so you had an article that was picked up by business insider
called the reason billionaires keep working so I'm curious what was that experience like having
an article picked up by business insider it was weird I think that was in it was in the kind of
20 for maybe 2015 or so 2016 something like that and like back then I wasn't writing as much on
my blog but like I was writing a lot on Quora if you ever like remember when that was big pre you
know chat gbt it used to be the thing that you would ask transes and it would provide them for you
but in a matter of days and weeks rather than you know in seconds like chat gbt I think the question
was you know something like why doesn't Warren Buffett quit and you know um or like why do billionaires
keep working why don't they just enjoy their money and my point was which I wrote somewhat succinctly
is that um you know someone like Warren Buffett or Elon Musk I think with the two you know names I
picked up they're not you know striving to get to a number where they've got enough money in their
pension so that they can go and play gold for the rest of their life that's obviously not what they're
doing and if it was they were to quit years and years and years ago they're doing what they do
because they love doing it you know someone like Warren Buffett for example plans to give away the
vast majority of his wealth anyway he doesn't care about spending the money on himself that's not
what he's doing he's doing what he thinks he does best which is you know capital allocation
and the numbers are not really as net worth is really just a way of keeping score like but that's
the score of the game that he is playing and he likes playing the game so he's going to keep playing
the game the game happens to be going sitting in office somewhere and oh Mahana Brasger and
Reed and your reports and decide which companies to invest in which companies to buy but that's
what he loves doing and if you retired you would say what do you want to do with your time and you
would say I'm going to go and sit in an office and oh Mahana Brasger and read and your reports and
allocate money that's what I want to do with my time so I'm just going to do it and someone like
Elon's doing it because you know he feels a deep kind of responsibility to push for the change
he wants to see in the world again it's not about you know once I get Tesla to a market cap of this
and I'm worth 250 billion then I'll have enough to retire and you know by the you know private jet
and the yacht that I want to buy he feels a you know deep mission and that's how he wants to spend
his limited time so that was my thought and why billion is keep working speaking as someone who is
not a billionaire but speaking for them that was my answer so I put that on Quora and it just got
it got a ton of traffic for whatever reason I think it got sent out and one of their daily digested
end up being read something like four million times or five million times and at the time business
insider and the Huffington Post and other people would essentially just troll Quora for really
popular answers it was the you know the 2016 equivalent of accounts on Twitter that just find
really good memes just repost them over and over again for the traffic business insider saw me put
that on Quora and so I've got five million pages let's stick it on our website and hopefully it'll get
you know a few hundred thousand there and so they they DM me and said to me if we repost this on
um is this insurances are I'm sure no problem I don't get any money from it but it was you know
nice to see my name up in lights and take take the load and stick it on my my own personal website
and say as seen on nice thanks thanks for sharing I appreciate the answer and you know if I get the
250 billion I'm not sure I'll keep working I might just go do something else for fun but you know
it won't be the pension issue as you mentioned for sure yeah yeah exactly so this is the get to know
you section this is a short section you get no more than 30 seconds to answer each question the
goal here is to keep these succinct and we'll wrap run through them kind of almost like a rapid
fire type approach so what is something interesting about you that makes you unique that not many people
know I would bet there are very few people in the world who are accountants who have ever done
stand up comedy in front of a live audience I would agree with that I like it so if you could
meet one person in the world that are alive who are you going to meet and why and it can't be Tucker
Max yeah not Tucker Max so I think the two that came to mind were Charlie Munger and Alexander Hamilton
Hamilton because like prolific writer incredible mind what a period of history he saw in his life
and profoundly influenced and Charlie Munger just because he's you know one of the wisest people
I've ever come across someone I consider a mentor sort of from afar from reading his writing
yeah Charlie had a lot of great quotes he'd be a great one to me you got to love him
um so what is the last thing and we're going to say you use chat cheap you ask chat GPT
related to finance excel fpna or you can gendered of AI if you like a different platform
and it was SQL code so I was trying to pull some data from our data warehouse and this goes
back to the skill stacking thing I know a little bit of SQL not enough to be a proper data
analyst but enough to help out an fpna a little bit um but not enough that I didn't keep getting
an error message for some reason I had no idea how to solve it so I just copied a piece that
into chat GPT and said what else going on here um and chat GPT pointing me in the right direction
and help me out very nicely nice it's definitely good for those type of things so what's your
favorite feature function favorite thing about excel uh the one I use 50 times a day is x lookup
v lookup is old hat x lookup these days is the most useful thing in finance in excel by far
I I do like a good like x lookup that's a great one all right so someone's starting their career
today in fpna what advice do you have for them you know I think we've touched on a bunch of the
important key points already do like do the basics really well work hard figure out what you
boss wants and what the team needs deliver it have an eye on quality always be thinking about the
you know the quality of the materials that you put in front of someone always be looking a
couple of years ahead of you in terms of your career who's where I want to be in a couple of years what
can I learn from them how do they think about things can ask them for advice what do I need to do
to get to that next level and always have your eyes sort of you know six to eleven eighteen months
out in the future that's the those the main things from my mind great thank you appreciate that
answer thing is a lot of good advice there so last question before we let you go if someone wants
to learn more about you or get a hold of you what would be the best way for them to do that
sure the best way is probably Twitter or x i'm not sure what's supposed to call it these days
and i still call it Twitter because i'm old school um see find me a twitter i'm at Andrew G
Lynch a and d i e w g l y n c h you can check out my newsletter which is netincome.co you can find
me on the link in my personal website and your linch.net which i occasionally update and the
yeah twitter or net income are probably the two best places to find me great we'll put those in
the show notes and thanks for joining me today i'd appreciate it and appreciate getting the
opportunity to chat with you you know trying the future to not get fired right before Christmas if
you can and we'll chat with you again soon so thanks for being on the show awesome thanks Paul's
absolutely pleasure
