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And now, onto the show.
From Data Reels, this is FPNA today.
Welcome to FPNA today. Today we have the pleasure of welcoming Greg Lopez to our show.
Greg is a seasoned financial leader with an impressive track record of driving growth and
profitability across a diverse range of industries. Currently, Greg works as a CFO and consultant
at Aventus Advisory Group, leveraging his expertise to help private equity firms,
venture capital investors, founders, and CEOs make data-driven financial and operational decisions.
His clients fan across media, e-commerce, professional services, consumer goods,
fintech, and software. Prior to his consulting role, Greg served as the CFO and VP of operations
at Futurism, a digital media company that covers breakthrough science and technology.
During his tenure, Greg played a pivotal role in launching gravity products,
a sleep wellness e-commerce brand that quickly grew to generate over 25 million in annual revenue.
Under his financial leadership, both Futurism and gravity products were successfully acquired.
Greg's career also includes his roles as VP of Finance and Operations at Wirecutter,
which was acquired by the New York Times, and head of finance at Gaukour Media,
which was acquired by Univision. With his deep understanding of financial strategies,
operational optimization, and data-driven decision-making, Greg has consistently delivered results
and navigated complex challenges throughout his career. In this episode, we'll dive into Greg's
wealth of experience, exploring his insights on scaling businesses, driving profitability,
managing risk, and adapting to the ever-changing landscape of media, e-commerce, and beyond.
Let's welcome Greg Lopez to the show and learn from his invaluable perspective on financial leadership
in today's dynamic business world.
Hey, Greg, welcome to the show.
Hey, Glenn. Thanks for having me.
Excited to be on.
Yeah. Well, I guess we got a lot to cover today. I want to go ahead and dive right in.
Looking at your background, your career has been across various industries,
including media, e-commerce, and finance. What initially drew you to the world of finance?
And how has your diverse experience shaped your approach to financial leadership?
Yeah, great question. So for me, I believe finance fits my personality. So growing up,
I was always someone who was very logical, rational, and intended to be pretty risk-averse.
So when the opportunity arose in college to pick a career trajectory, a career path,
I knew I wanted to go into business. And specifically within business, I studied
accounting and business administration. And I thought that was a great foundation for me.
And I really thrived during my studies at school. And when I got out of school,
it was basically the recovery. It was 2009 from the great financial crisis. So there wasn't a whole
lot of opportunities. But I was lucky enough to find the role at a public company that just spun
out of ADP. It's called Broadridge. And at the time there were about a $2 billion
company. And today I think it's about a over $10 billion market cap. And for me,
it was a great opportunity as my first role at her school because I was able to work in an
environment that had a corporate foundation being part of ADP prior, but also was trying to
carve its own path, being a new publicly listed company. The environment was incredibly collaborative.
Everyone was incredibly supportive to kind of pave Broadridge's own way. And Broadridge is a
FinTech company that powers a lot of the backend of trade settlements and mutual funds.
My first role there was in the finance department. Over the two-year, 10-year I had with Broadridge,
I got to essentially do rotations in a variety of different departments. So I was able to work in
treasury. I was able to work in corporate development. I was able to work at FPNA. I was able to work
in credit collections. And then most importantly, I was able to work in operations and be down
on the warehouse floor with the team and the operations. And you know, one of the things that they did
was if you, you know, at the time, if you buy a mutual fund, you would get perspectives in the
mail. Today a lot of it's digital. And they've kind of made that shift the digital. But at the time,
you were getting a paper prospectus. And that would have all the information about the fund you
were buying or the fund you maybe were considering. Same thing with annual reports. That was one piece
of their business in regards to many others. But sitting on the warehouse floor with the team
understanding the operations, how everything moves throughout the company. And you know, this is one
segment of the business. But there's a whole bunch of other segments of the business as well. It
just really great learning experience and spending time with business operations is key. So for me,
that's kind of my background of how I got started in finance. And second part of your question of
how my experience throughout my career has shaped my approach to financial leadership. So
the foundation at Broadridge, like I just said, you know, spending time with the business operations
is key. And that's something that I still feel really strongly with today. One of the things I like
to say to folks is, especially my clients, the financial statements, they're not reality. They
reflect reality. The reality is the operations of your business, right? And that's sales, marketing,
operations, technology team. And my belief is that finance should really act as an investigative
journalist for the business. And in that role, you're discovering the relationship between variables
at the business and uncovering what makes the business tick beyond just the financial statements.
And our job is finance leaders to keep stakeholders informed across the business, across different
departments with the latest data and guidance. I love to hear you say that because that is,
I think about, you know, maybe 20 years ago as CFO, you could just kind of be in this
ivory tower of finance and accounting. And it didn't matter what the widget the company was selling,
you were just doing the financial statements. You were just, you know, get that trial balance,
get the financial statements out and do the reporting and have your annual budget and just operate
from the place of I'm the subject matter expert on finance and accounting. And I think that that
it's really shifted over the past 20 years. So when I come in, whether I'm as a consultant or as a
full-time CFO, when I come into a company, the first thing I want to do is look at, I think of it
like an audit of the entire back office process. I want to see everything from the CRM, you know,
your sales pipeline, your leads, your prospects, wind deals or one, how data is passed from the CRM
into the GL or the project management system or whatever other software is. And look at that
flow, it's the customer life cycle, but it's also the flow of data across because all the data
that you have is going to be imperative to your reporting and your metrics and your forecasting
and all that. So if you don't understand where the data is coming from, you don't have the
identified source of truth and you don't know how you're defining the metrics and understand
really what's coming in. So I think, I mean, would you say, if you kind of see the same thing,
do you take the same approach when you come on with a new client or a new company?
Yeah, for sure. I'll talk about later. I have kind of a concept of having a commercial mindset as
a CFO. That is going to be what excels you and makes you stand out from other finance leaders.
And having that commercial mindset gives you the framework to be that partner and that trusted
advisor to other stakeholders at the business, whether it's the board, whether it's the CEO or
whether it's other department leads or your peers. And thinking about, it's interesting that you
had those opportunities being at a large company because normally you think it's at a big enterprise
level or mid market company, you are really kind of forced to stay in your lane just because of
the size and redundancy. Whereas in startups, it's very different. You have to wear a lot of hats.
So I'm thinking about you getting those opportunities in a larger company and then being able to
take it and apply it to smaller companies. So what did you take away from your experience there
that definitely applies to smaller companies as well? Yeah. So the one thing I'll say that big
companies typically do well is they create a great job at creating structure and process.
Because at the end of the day, your business is just a bunch of smaller processes that need to be
repeatable and need to be similar in how they're done. You could take the best examples of those
and apply them to a smaller business. But in a smaller business, you can keep the creativity and
innovation. A great example is first impressions matter in my opinion. And that could be whether
you're fundraising or you're selling to customers or launching new products or even just your website.
That's usually the first touch point that someone gets familiar with your business. I'll remember
always when I received my internship offer from PricewaterhouseCoopers, it was like they rolled out
the red carpet. It was so impressive. I had a folder. I had day one, everything was laid out perfectly,
everything was structured. There was an agenda. It wasn't just, hey, you're here. No one knows who
you are. Get an ID tag. Go to some random floor. Try and find someone who's your manager. Ask
around. Everything was really done well. And that always stuck with me. And those are small things.
So when you're onboarding employees at your company, make it special. Make it feel like it's
serious and that you are appreciative that they chose to work with you and that they are lucky to
have the opportunity to work for you. And that's a small thing. That is a output of clearly defined
structure and process that was repeated because big four firms, they bring on, I don't know,
thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of interns and new associates annually. So they've got
that down and that really makes you feel a certain type of way. Yeah, it's thinking about that for
a startup environment where you're inventing processes as you go. So you mentioned onboarding,
but I imagine there's no back office process. Even provisioning customers has to be, depending
on which stage you are, and start up a very difficult. So I guess kind of a follow-up to thinking
about processes. I think a lot of times when people keep getting drawn back to the startup world
from corporate, it's a company reaches a size where it can be too rigid. You want to keep that
startup mentality, but you've got to start, if you're going to scale, you've got to start putting
those processes in place. How do you define that line between, we have to have processes and we
don't want to be too rigid because we have to be able to pivot while we're finding product
market fit while we're building out the new company. If you're in market and you're selling,
you have customers, there will be signs, no pre-market or pre-revenue or pre-product. That's a
completely different story and I'm not advocating for building processes in that regard. But once you're
in market, there will be signs, things like customers, not getting the attention that they once were
getting or balls being dropped or sales, cycle velocity slowing down or people frankly leaving the
company because there's just not enough there to keep the ball moving forward in a way that everyone
feels confident. There will be some signs as you continue down the path of scale, but yeah, early
stage, your superpower is the ability to be flexible and adaptable and to pivot frankly. So I'm not
advocating for rigid processes at that stage outside of maybe a couple in finance that are,
you know, I think are non-negotiable and we can talk about that later, but yeah, controls are
nice, right? Exactly. You're background and when you talk, you've been doing consulting and
fractional CFO work for a while and you've worked with businesses in all stages. I know you've done
a significant amount of startup work too, but thinking about just you work with so many types of
clients across so many industries. So you probably, I'm guessing in that, regardless of the industry,
you're seeing some similar challenges for each. What would you say are some of the most common
financial and, I guess, even operational challenges that your clients face and how do you help them
overcome these from your role as a fractional CFO and a consultant to the company? I see a lot
because I work with a variety of different businesses across different stages of growth. So I work
with the family-owned business doing $20 million. I work with the SaaS business doing $10 million
a year. I work with the private equity back business doing $500 million a year. So it really runs
the gamut in terms of the experiences and what I see. But there are, especially on the earlier
stage side, pretty common items that I continuously see. I'll start with one, I think, is the most
important. Define your metrics and I say define in all caps. There's a tendency to change your metrics
or change how you calculate them when it doesn't fit the narrative. But the first exercise I like to
do when we're talking about metrics is literally define them. Understand your data mapping. What is
the source data? What's the numerator? What's the denominator? How are we calculating this?
You got to get buy-in from your peers and your counterparts on how the data is reported and
ingested and interpreted. That really rolls until developing your company's operating system.
It could happen at all stages, but it's very common in early stage. That's a problem that can easily
be fixed once you get everyone in a room that's a stakeholder for those metrics. And finance should
lead that conversation and act as the referee to a certain extent. But also listen and understand
some of the challenges that might come up from listening to the feedback from maybe the sales
team and the marketing team on why that might not be or maybe the right way to do things.
I'm thinking about across industries, there's commonalities and there's probably, I think also
because of the different stages where you've worked at companies from those pre-revenue
to established businesses, how do you see that the financial priorities and the challenges differ
between each of those stages? And what advice would you give to the founders and maybe a new
CFO or a CFO at a later stage company? What advice would you have for them for navigating each of
those phases? I'll be real with you, right? If you're pre-revenue, you don't really need a CFO.
You need someone keeping track of a couple of high level metrics like burn,
headcount, and you need a good firm that's bookkeeping and keeping a QuickBooks file for you.
If you use QuickBooks or zero or whatever, something basic, not a spreadsheet, right? At a certain
point, you have to, as a founder, embrace that finances beyond just backwards looking and record
keeping. I think that is a sometimes a tough mind shift because you're so used to your accountant
giving you or your bookkeeper giving you financial statements 20 days after the month's over,
and there's really not that much activity, so you don't really put a lot of value there. But as the
business grows, it becomes incredibly important to keep accurate books and records and have a strategic
finance partner that helps you look around the corner and helps really steer your ship and provide
guidance. What I would say the way you get that buy-in from a founder, from your peers, or if you're
joining a new company is you really, and I talked about this for you, really got an embrace of
commercial mindset. And what that means to me is understand that in most businesses, the sales team
and the business development team or whatever you want to call it, whoever's driving revenue,
they set the pace for the business. So you need to partner with them, understand the sales
velocity of their sales cycle. It could be marketing and e-commerce firm, it could be the sales team
in a B2B firm. Whoever's driving revenue, that is an ally and you need to work with them and
enable that growth mindset, that commercial mindset, and be that valuable partner to them.
And that can be performing ad hoc analysis. That could be, like I said before,
having them define metrics and keeping them accountable to those metrics, explaining to them how
if we hit a sales target, if we miss a sales target, if we exceed a sales target, what does that
mean for us as a business? What is that unlock? Is that if we exceed a target by 20%, does that give
us more capital to potentially invest in the next product or make additional hires to accelerate
product development? If we miss the target, does that put us in jeopardy of raising our next round
of funding and devolve into a downward spiral of layoffs, being a clear communicator and partnering
with the business team is a piece of advice that I think is essential for the modern CFO or
whatever we want to call it. And it kind of gets you out of that analogy that you mentioned before,
of the CFO who's separated from everyone in an ivory tower, preparing financial statements and
talking numbers. Yeah. And I guess I really think about that difference in the mindset that you
have to have in that startup early stage business versus an established business where you have all
the processes and everything. And the kinds of things you're looking at are very different when you're
looking at your cash flow in a going concern versus the burn rate in a startup. So coming in,
if someone is making that shift as you did from a bigger company to a startup, just thinking about
from a financial perspective, we've talked about process and kind of across the company,
but really digging in on the finance perspective, what is the kind of mindset and what advice would
you have for someone coming into that position? So another common trope is when you're joining a startup,
obviously you have constraints and you need to understand them. Most typical constraint is just cash
and you're access to cash, but it could also be talent acquisition ability to hire and retain talent.
It could be your product distribution, it could be your brand recognition. So really understanding
what those constraints are and how that affects the plans for growth and the plans for the future.
Building a business in general just takes time and it's rare that there's an instant gratification
or instantaneous feedback, but especially early stage, you have to do what you can to increase that
that feedback loop or the speed of feedback, whether that's shipping new product or reaching out
to customers or getting out in the market, all those things will help you accelerate the odds and
chances that you're going to find product market fit and be able to scale revenue. One of the other
things I see is once you bring in a finance leader and you understand that there's potentially
constraints like cash, there's now this expectation to start tracking every single dollar. And yes,
we want to be a fiduciary for the business and we want to be mindful of how much we're spending.
But no, we don't have to have a meeting with six leaders at the company to talk about a $500
vendor that we want to bring on. I see that happen a lot and I think we need to, again,
going back to that commercial mindset. It might feel comfortable to be like, yes, we need to be
really rigid about what we're spending, but also when we have five people in a room who are making
six figures, talking about bringing on a $500,000 expense for an hour, we just spent more money
in wages, talking about that specific vendor than if we just made the decision to move forward.
So I would also offer the advice of trust other department heads, your peers, essentially,
to make small ticket decisions. Obviously, if anything is going to materially impact your burn
rate, that should be a bigger discussion. But if we want to swipe a credit card for $100 to get a
new license for some tool that might make prospecting easier, go for it, I trust that you're
making to make the right choice here. And then as the CFO coming into an early stage company
or a company that just entered the market, we really need to understand the market and the customer
profile. And that's where, again, going back to that commercial mindset, spending time with sales,
understanding the voice of the customer, selling solutions, not necessarily the features of your
product. All of those things are really helpful as a financial leader when you're talking and
trying to build that bridge and partnership with your sales team or your marketing team to get
the trust so that you're getting accurate pipeline reports or accurate forecasting and
and able to ask the tough questions without coming across accusatory or blaming or just taking
whatever they're telling you at face value. And then a couple other things that you really need
to hone in on, there's a common one for startups. And sometimes it works out a lot of times it
doesn't. Don't mistake unsustainable underpricing for product market fit. We all love a deal as a
consumer and B2B even better. If we're getting a deal that we feel like is underpriced and there's
so much value being extracted, but in reality, whoever's offering us that service or that product
is using venture capital or underpricing to gain market share is going to have a big issue when
they have to create a viable business model. So you need to understand on the flip side,
is that your business? Is revenue growing because you have an unsustainable pricing model?
And then how do we address that and get ahead of it? And it's not a bad strategy. We just have to
have a plan for when we need to flip the switch to becoming viable. We don't lose our entire
customer base or we don't piss off everybody so bad that they start writing LinkedIn Rants.
As a CFO, that's our job to figure that out and keep everyone aware of that. And then really
understanding from a financial perspective, cash flow, how much cash is needed to achieve the next
next milestone, especially when you're out raising investors like to invest in companies that have
a plan. They don't like to invest maybe some do, but my opinion most don't like to invest in
companies that give you a range of fundraising. Oh, we're looking to raise five to 10 million
to do kind of these things. It's like, no, tell me exactly what the plan is. I want to raise five
million. And if I do, I'm going to hire these people and those people are going to work on this
product and we're going to launch it on this date, right? That just gives you even if it's
not entirely or very aggressive in terms of the plan, not entirely true or really aggressive,
it just gives that confidence. It goes back to my point of, you know, it's like a first impression.
It matters when you come to the table with an investor and you're asking them to invest in you,
you need to lay out exactly what the plan is. You can't be wishy-washy. Here and you talk about
that. I'm kind of thinking about war stories from my own past and startups and I'm thinking about
in those early stages where everybody's wearing a lot of hats and I'm thinking about, you know,
sales and marketing has their plan and, you know, kind of what their forecast that they're doing
on their own. I think typical sales leaders, you know, have an idea of what they think is going to
happen. And then there's the financial model and everyone has their inputs and, you know, the
operational costs and everything. I'm thinking about those conversations where, you know, sort of the
blue sky startup model where everybody's going to have the hockey stick, exponential growth. How hard
is it to get sort of that cooperation and buy-in among, you know, what the founder CEO, what his
vision is or her vision is and what the salesperson's vision is and finance and all that.
When you're coming up with that model, is there potential conflict between what sales thinks is
going to happen, what finance is going to happen and how do you smooth that over? Yeah, listen,
we've all done the business model where in five years we're now working at a billion-dollar unicorn
and we close the file, go to bed and kind of just sit there rolling our eyes. Like that's actually
not going to happen. But that's natural as a finance leader. Our job is to balance risk and growth.
And if we can grow that fast and we know where our next fundraising is coming from and we have
an infinite line of capital to draw on, yeah, you know, possibly. But the reality is there are
constraints. Constraints and when we have to make decisions on can we afford this higher or can we
afford invested into this new product, you know, again, cash is the constraint. So you have to know
what those milestones are to unlock that next round of financing. You have to know what the
plan is and what the trigger points are and you've got to clearly communicate that. In early stage
business, you know, we're going to wear a lot of different hats as the finance leader. And,
you know, one of the most important things is to really ensure that there's a support system and
the other leaders are aligned with you. And if there's not a culture of being data driven or
being realistic or if the culture is always just, you know, always optimistic all the time,
always ra ra, it definitely can wear on you. And there is a balance, right? I'm someone who
again, likes to have that commercial mindset to a point, right? But my job as the finance leader
is to make sure that the business sees tomorrow and that the business lives to see another day. And
it's my responsibility to, you know, articulate that to my peers and raise my hand when I feel that
we're not going in that direction or I need cooperation.
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As FPNA people and financial modelers and the kind of work that we love to do, we love to make
these models data-driven and not just based on, you know, in startup it's easy to start just like
stacking one assumption on another and that's how you get to the hockey stick of exponential growth.
So, I mean, I know your background in data-driven decision making is a core part of your approach.
And I'm thinking, I guess I want to think about this in two ways. One, if you've got an example of
how you've used data at a company before to drive significant improvements in their financial
or operational performance. But then also thinking about how much of your time you've spent in
the startup space where you just don't have a lot of data. So, what advice would you have for
companies who are still in that early stage and don't have a lot of data yet? I'm going to be
honest, right? Entering an environment that does not have a data-first culture is difficult.
It's hard to be really successful, but it's also our job to usher in that change management
of the firm. There is kind of like this misconception I feel, especially as a consultant of what data is
and I imagine many of the listeners and myself included have been in a position where we're
expected to just be mine readers or know the insights about a business. So, that customer
doesn't belong to that seller. Well, why is that not in Salesforce? Why is that not in bite-sized
that way? You might know it as the CEO, but you haven't removed that from your brain and created
some kind of process to capture it, which is further to my point that actual data, it's a by-product
of routine processes. And it needs to be enforced by the culture from the top down. And if we are
working in an environment that doesn't really value doing things in a routine process, you know,
a pipeline CRM is a perfect example of that. If you have a bunch of different sellers doing
things their own way, some folks not putting it into, you know, not putting in their data until
the end of the week, some people putting it in real time, someone who is thinking that
they're at 90% close when it's really 50% close because they're just more optimistic than the
other seller who might be underweighting their pipeline. Right? Our job is finances to come in and
be like, hey, I'm not getting what I need here. I don't think this is being done sufficiently.
Let's set up a process. The only way you're going to be successful there is if you get the buy-in
from the team. And it's not always easy, but it needs to be emphasized how important it is to get
good data on key areas of the business. So thinking about that, when you come in, it's, you know,
if the company was kind of scattered in a lot of process, they know maybe they're at their A-round
and they realize, okay, now we have to have true financial leadership and you come in and you're
tasked with gathering up all this data and getting this information from different systems.
It feels like sometimes there's an expectation that this CFO incoming head of finance just has
this understanding of where and how to get data. And like it's almost like an expectation that
you have development IT skills know how to hook up APIs and build a data lake and data warehouse.
I mean, when you come in with that, what is something that as finance people that we need to keep
in mind and to level set expectations and really the team around us to move them to a data-driven
culture where it can't just be finance because, you know, trying to write SQL queries and pull
this out. I mean, what is, what's the ideal setup when you come in and you are trying to establish
this data-driven background? What do you need to do it? Who needs to be involved? Yeah, it goes back to
my previous comment. It's kind of like we feel like as finance professionals, we have to pick up
the pieces, right? Sales book that deal and then tell anybody and we want to know why we didn't
invoice it about wasn't in the CRM. We didn't get a notification. We didn't get a heads up that
this deal was closed. We'd never got a copy of the contract, right? And it's again, it's raising
your hand and laying it out and saying, hey, this is a team sport. It's a team effort and
explain how person A not doing their job in sales marketing operations trickles down into
finance, which then trickles down into inaccurate financial statements, which then trickles down
into lack of confidence in the finance department. But it's kind of like advocating for your own
career. If you don't say anything, everyone's just going to assume you're fine. So you have to be
an advocate for yourself in the finance department. And again, I'm going to go back to it again.
But having that commercial mindset gives you that that credibility. You've already built the bridge.
You've partnered with those teams for what? Well, when you're asking them, hey, you guys really
got to get this in. They feel like they're letting you down rather than feeling like, oh,
here's Greg again asking me to get my expenses in or here's Greg again asking me to
to wait my pipeline properly. I'll do it when I want to. That doesn't really fly, but you have
to have the accountability. So as finance leaders, we have to hold everyone to account. But the
reality is we can't be accountable for everything. We don't manage the pipeline. We just don't. We
don't know what you spend on your credit cards. You do. And that has to again come from the top
down as a business as a business leader or CFO or the CEO or founder. Yeah. And I think about all
this data. And of course, the data leads to FPNA people's next favorite words in terms of metrics
and KPIs. And you have to track, identify, label the data that you have so that you can build
these metrics and KPIs thinking about all the industries you've been in what you've seen.
Are there some KPIs kind of across the board that you would say that companies should focus on
to drive growth and profitability? And how do they vary across industries as well, I guess?
Yeah, sure. So if you're selling physical goods, consumer goods or B2B or whatever,
if it's a physical good, I'm a big proponent of looking at the contribution margin and the
contribution profit for those items and really honing in on what your margins are. It's really hard
to remove costs from physical products. And everyone who's worked in e-commerce built a model
five years ago that said, once they hit some scale, magically your fulfillment costs are going to
go down. And your cost of goods sold are going to go down. Your shipping costs out are going to go
down. Your shipping costs in are going to go down. And the reality is all that stuff is gotten
more expensive. And you don't have the amount of levers you thought you potentially had. So if you
mispriced your product, it can come back to haunt you. So going back to the theme prior, don't
mistake underpricing insane value for product market fit because it's going to create a situation
where you have to make a choice. Do we become a viable business or can we continue to
fund raise or figure out financing to keep the unviable business going? Which it could be a strategy.
I mean, look at someone like Uber, right? They got such a big market share. We all love paying
five, ten bucks for a taxi ride. Now it's 25 to 50 bucks. I personally don't use it as much
as I once did. But maybe some people are still, you know, just in the habit and just like whatever.
And clearly, you know, something like that's worked for them. But it takes many years,
you got to get to a certain level of scale and not all companies will get to that point. So the
more realistic reality is that they just won't be able to close their next round of financing. And
unfortunately, have to either change their business model so drastically if they turn customers
or something else. And then for B2B software businesses, you know, sales cycle velocity is
a huge metric to track. And what that is essentially just how fast from open to close, we get on a
sale and then figuring out where deals are getting stuck and figuring out within that bottleneck,
are there any threads that finance via an analytical mindset could partner with sales and figure out
how we speed things up to close more deals. And then the most important, just for any businesses,
is customer feedback. Sometimes startups are a little hesitant to ask for feedback. They don't want
to seem too needy or nascent or they don't want to bother their customer because they have a good
relationship and it's a paying customer. We don't want to bother them. But think about Amazon.
Every product you buy they're asking for feedback was good. Was your experience good?
Yeah. And I think going back to the ethos that Jeff Bezos has put in Amazon like their customer
first and they've kind of built their business on the backs of customer feedback and pleasing the
customer. So I don't think anyone's going to look at you strangely if you're asking for feedback
or hey, if we build this feature, would you use it or I personally do surveys all the time for
when companies ask to do surveys and they pay me even better. And then the final piece in just
tracking these metrics, we got to define them like I said earlier, figure out what the source
data and data mapping is. But when you're using those metrics and informing your financial model,
I'm a big believer of not over complicating things. I like to keep my variables focused on 80,
20 figure out exactly what's a driver here for the business. And then again, it goes back to my
other point. It's like the financial statements, your models, they're a reflection of reality.
You're not going to get bonus points because your forecast was like right on the money. You're not
going to get a promotion because you know some really fancy Excel model. You're going to get a
promotion. You're going to get noticed because you are someone who can partner with the business
and business leaders, provide value, be a trusted advisor, provide some level of accurate forecasting.
Right. And do it in a manner that is timely and efficient. I feel like we could go down this
the startup road and thinking about the metrics and KPIs on it all day. But I want to shift.
There's a couple of questions I wanted to ask you just because I'm curious. I think you're a
technology-minded CFO and are you know keeping up with the latest what's out there. Software-wise,
technology-wise. And certainly working with so many clients, you're kind of seeing the trends
and the direction of things. But if you think of where we are now in this age of AI and
everything that's going on with fewer people coming into accounting, for example. So with technology
and with sort of the state of the profession right now, what do you think will be the biggest
financial and operational challenges that companies will face in the next five to 10 years? And
how can they prepare themselves to overcome with these challenges?
Yeah. So I do think one of the bigger challenges that firms are going to face in the next
couple of years is just retaining and developing talent, which leads into as an individual,
you should be staying on top of the latest tools and technology. And I know it's hard
because we all have day jobs. But really playing around with these tools and to go on, I know you've
done a ton of tinkering yourself. But rescaling and upskilling, these tools will level the playing
field for most folks. So like I said before, knowing some fancy Excel formula in probably six
months from now, I'll be able to just explain English, explain what I want to do in an Excel
model and co-pilot will be able to output the assumptions and now put the formula for me.
And then alternatively, the threat of cyberattacks, the more digital businesses become,
the more of a threat these new tools pose for cyberattacks or customer data breaches. And as a
finance person, making sure we have the right controls in place and the right insurance lines in
place to protect ourselves and our firm, it's just a big risk that I would be focused on,
especially for companies handling a lot of data, especially customer data.
Yeah, makes total sense. And also with cyberattacks, when you have algorithms kicking out
and kicking off more of these attacks, I mean, I think it is, it's that arms race between
security side and the hacker side. So definitely as everyone continues to be online and
the exposure out there, the need for security goes up proportional to the powers and abilities
of those who are doing the cyberattacks. So we're getting close to the end. So I'm going to go
three question lightning around. We always try to get these in at the end of the show so we can
get a little bit of the personal side of everyone. First off, what is something that not many people
know about you, something that maybe they couldn't find by googling you or looking you up on social
media? I'm a big junkie for pickup basketball. So I just moved from New York down to Atlanta,
but in New York, whenever the sun was out and it was decent weather above 65, I was down at
Brooklyn Bridge Park, trying to get a pickup game in. One of the first things I did down here,
now that I moved to the Atlanta area is find a couple courts where folks gathered and get games
going. And I think it's, it's just interesting because it's kind of like, it's kind of related to
like going into a startup and trying to figure out, you know, how I can work with these people
that I don't know and figure out what they're good at, what they're not good at, and how I can play
off of them and partner with them. I think it's definitely helped me professionally kind of roll
into a situation with strangers and then try and win a game against other strangers. And you have
to be really perceptive about kind of all things that are going on on the court. That's great.
And I love the idea of just, yeah, like you said, it's dropping into a new environment. You've got
to figure out what's going on with people. You've got to establish trust. You've got to learn who
you can trust there and who your go to people are and who people maybe, you know, maybe you don't
need to make that pass to them because they're going to jack it up from from 30 feet back and
it's also knowing and having self-awareness of where you you fit in, right? Do I have to take over
or am I not the, you know, the best player right now to take the shot and maybe give it up for a
better shot, right? I think that's important too because in a business sometimes you have to kind of
think about and run with yourself because you don't necessarily have that full trust or you've
given and handed off tasks prior and they haven't been done up to your standard, right? So it's like
it just really, it's just really interesting dynamic. That's great. That's great. All right. This is
the big one. If you've listened to FPNA today, you probably knew this was coming. What is your
favorite Excel function? Yeah. So I'm going to actually flip this one on you and I think we should
change the question to itself function or feature because for me recently I've been doing a lot of
scenario planning and modeling for my clients and one of the features that I came across,
which I didn't know about until recently, is this watch window. So you could just go into the search
bar on the top and type in watch window. And ultimately what it does is you can select one cell or
a handful of cells and you can even make them named ranges. So for example, EBITDA, you can click your
fiscal year EBITDA and then go onto another tab or change all your assumptions and this watch
window will change the EBITDA figure based on the assumption. So rather than flicking back and forth,
they're having multiple tabs open or multiple models open, you can kind of scenario plan on the fly
and you could do it with as many outputs as you'd like. So it's been really helpful, you know,
sitting with a CEO or sitting with a founder and saying, okay, well, here's what the baseline is.
And then if we change a couple of things here and there, here's what it looks like. If we make
a couple of hires sooner than we thought or we have a higher marketing cost or conversion cost or
whatever, it's just really, really powerful. See, and this is why we asked this question. I've been,
I've been using Excel since, you know, before the days of Clippy, you know, and I was not familiar
with the watch window, but now I'm excited to open up a model and gig out and watch that. So
what's the best way to get in touch with you? Probably LinkedIn, but I'm also on X, if we call it
X now, you can find me at G-LoP has tweets or you can email me at glopezadaventiceg.com. Great.
Okay, well Greg, I really appreciate your time and we'll put that contact info in the in the
show notes and just great having you on today and getting your insights and wish you the best of
work. Thanks, done. Appreciate you having me.
