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And now onto the show.
From DataReels, this is FP &A Today.
Welcome to FP &A Today.
I'm your host, Glenn Hopper.
Today, I'm excited to welcome Craig Berry to the show.
Craig is a strategic finance consultant, fractional CFO, and startup advisor with nearly 20 years of experience helping companies scale, fund raise, and navigate M &A.
He's held senior finance roles at some of the most iconic companies in tech and entertainment, including LinkedIn, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Electronic Arts.
At LinkedIn, he led central forecasting, supported more than 10 acquisitions, and played a key role in the company's integration with Microsoft. At BioRender, he built the FP &A function from the ground up, helping the company scale ARR from 18 million to 50 million, and secure a major series A round with top -tier VCs.
Today, Craig runs ClearSight IQ, where he works with SaaS companies and startups on strategic finance, fundraising, and M &A readiness.
He joins us to share his incredible career journey how FP &A can evolve from reporting to value creation and what startups can do to truly understand their metrics and investor positioning.
Craig, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Glenn. Really happy to be here.
Really appreciate the invite for the show and happy to meet you and talk today.
Yeah, I just, you know, as we were talking before the episode, you know, LinkedIn, Pixar or Lucasfilm, Electronic Arts, you've had some cool gigs at some really exciting companies.
I think about, you know, me in a lot of service industries and kind of, you know, B2B kind of less cool companies.
I think that, you know, a lot of times we think in FP &A, it's like, well, whatever, we're just, it's FP &A.
It doesn't matter what the product we're selling.
But it seems like, you know, if you're at Pixar and Lucasfilm, It's a little cooler than, you know, business advisory services or whatever.
So I guess, you know, let's back up maybe even before that and start with your story.
With your non -traditional path into finance where you, you know, started in environmental studies and you were teaching abroad and you almost were pursuing accounting.
Kind of walk us through that sort of winding road that led you to a career in strategic finance.
Yeah, sure. So yes, as you mentioned, I started out by going and doing an undergraduate degree in environmental studies, which was almost by mistake as well.
I actually did my first year in pure math.
I'd always been a good math student in high school, and it seemed like the obvious choice.
I went to the University of Waterloo, I'm Canadian, so Waterloo, great math school, a great computer science school.
I went there to study pure mathematics.
What I discovered was that university math was very different from high school math.
One year was enough, I hated it.
I did a complete 180 and went into environmental studies, completed my degree there and then, you know, quickly learned that there's not a lot of need for people with undergraduate degrees in environmental studies and so rather than enter the job market or go back to school I actually decided to go and teach English in Korea as you mentioned.
So I did that for a couple years, about a year and a half, did a lot of traveling throughout Southeast Asia and southern Africa and then sort of realized I needed to, you know, get a real job.
So that's when I started looking at, okay what can I actually do?
So reaching out to some friends from university and just seeing what other people had done over the sort of three or four years that I was traveling.
And a couple people had gone through the accounting path and had joined CA firms. And so just talking to them, it seemed like an interesting career path.
I'd always loved math, so it felt like it was something that would fit with me, and so I sort of explored that and found a program back in Canada at the University of British Columbia.
And I moved back, moved back to Canada, moved to Vancouver, and then I did that program, which was sort of the best way to describe it as a bridging program for people with a non commerce background.
So if you want to become a CPA or it was a CAA at that time, you had to do this and then you could be eligible to go work in sort of Big 4 accounting.
So that was my career goal.
And so I went through that program was 12 month intensive program and, you know, I wanted to get hired by a big for accounting firm.
I got an offer from Deloitte, which was great.
The perfect I was going to be able to do the thing that I wanted to do.
But for whatever reason, I randomly had a resume in with Electronic Arts, and they called me for a junior FP &A analyst position.
Even though I had the offer from Deloitte, this was happening at the same time.
I went and interviewed with Electronic Arts.
I actually ended up getting the job despite having no experience, which was great.
I don't know if the guy that hired me, his name's Murray Kettle, he gave me my first career break and I'm always thankful to him for that.
Anyway, now I was faced with a decision, what do I do, do I follow my dream of becoming a CPA, Or do I actually go and work in, you know, a much cooler industry like video games?
And so I took the latter option.
I decided to sort of pass on the Deloitte option and go and work for electronic arts, knowing really nothing beyond sort of the academic piece of finance that I had learned over the prior 12 months.
So it was really a crash course in what FP &A did.
I had no idea walking in the door on my first day.
So I'm still, you know, surprised they hired me actually.
So you know, and and we can talk about them because they're not here, but um FPNA, the math you do is way cooler than accounting.
Accounting math is what?
Uh, you know, subtraction.
It's credit minus debit.
If that doesn't equal zero, it's a problem other than that, but you know, so that not as much math maybe in accounting as there is in FPNA.
Yeah, no totally. So based on you know, what I'd done in the 12 months prior to working at FPNA, I thought I'd spend a lot more time working on trial balances, but it's something that doesn't really come up in the world of FPNA.
And so it's something I've never really touched you know, since those 12 months at UBC, which was, you know, I graduated from there in 2005.
It's been a while. That's so it's got it's interesting that you say trial balance because I'm where I do see using trial balance in FPNA as an M &A activity sometimes, especially when you start getting into weird, adjusted EBITDOTS like, you know, what, don't give me your financial statements because I don't believe them.
Just give me your trial balance.
I'll put everything where it needs to go.
But that's the only time I've thought about a trial balance in F .P .N .A.
Man, but if I were looking at it at Deloitte, was it going to be in the audit group?
It was, yeah. So I would have joined as a first year audit student.
Most of my classmates I think when I was at UBC, I think probably there maybe the 100 of us in this program.
Everybody except me, I think went into audit.
So I'm well aware of what they went through over the next three years.
Because you're working and you're on a lot of different files.
at the same time, but you're studying as well because you're preparing to write, you know, that the exam at the end, right?
And so I think at the time it was like six modules.
So it's, it's, you know, you're working 60 hours per week and, you know, you're studying another 10 or 15 or something like that.
So it was, it was really quite intense and not to lean on those people too hard, but I mean, I had probably a little bit better work -life balance and I got paid more.
So we're definitely the right choice.
And I never do. I never do this, but I guess I'm just feeling like feisty today.
I want to just knock on the the straight accountants because I mean it's they're having a hard time bringing people into accounting, but so many people are, you know, there's a lot a lot of reasons for that, but so many people who maybe would have gone into accounting.
They look at Indeed or whatever, you know, or job postings and they see, wait a minute, first year finance people are making more than regular, you know, audit or tax or, you know, whatever you're doing in accounting, so it's makes sense that, you know, that that's drawing some people over too.
Yeah, I think when I was in school, I think the way that it was being sold to us was if you wanted to have a successful career in finance and reach either the C suite or senior level, you needed to be a CA or a CPA, whereas you know with this sort of experience I have behind me, I don't think that's actually the case anymore.
I mean, I think a lot of people can be successful without an accounting background.
Yeah and I was actually just talking to another CFO about this last week and I want to see the actual hard data on it.
But anecdotally, what it feels like is the number of CFOs with CPAs as a percentage.
Seems like it's gone way down in recent years.
And I need to find some can't be saying this all the time without data.
I need to find some data to back that up.
So yeah. Yeah, I know.
I saw it firsthand at LinkedIn.
We had, you know, the initial CFO that was there is Steve Sordello, the guy that took the company public.
You know, he was a he was a CPA and then when he retired, it was actually our head of FPNA, the VP of FPNA that took the role and he did not have an accounting background.
He actually had an investment banking background.
And then, you know, about like eight years of experience at LinkedIn as well.
Gosh, but if I mean, an investment banking background, if you're doing a bunch of M &A, it's kind of that probably makes more.
I mean, you still have to know how to account for the transactions, but the kind of stuff you're working at, the strategic stuff is.
I think if you have a strong controller in place, I mean, they can, you can lean on them pretty heavily for, you know, the pieces that you don't understand.
I don't think any CFO really gets all of it all the time, you know, so you have to surround yourself with good people who are experts in their own domain.
And I think it's worked well for, you know, for this fellow at LinkedIn.
Yeah, I wanna peel Lucasfilm off because as a Star Wars fan from, you know, from the original movie, dating myself here, we'll talk about them separately, I guess, but so EA come into that instead of Deloitte.
That, you know, I sort of understand the sort of mental math that you did and looking at that.
And then, but EA and Pixar, it doesn't feel like it was that you were like, you didn't set out necessarily to work in creative entertainment heavy industries, but you ended up spending a lot of time there.
I'm wondering, and like I said, we'll look at Lucasfilm differently, but the kinds of metrics or things you looked at, is there anything, I mean, I guess first maybe if you want to talk a little bit about the types of metrics you looked at.
Then I'm always like when I'm talking to guests and trying to build this sort of career arc, is there anything that you took?
you know, because it seems like a big move to go from entertainment industry to somewhere like LinkedIn, but there is still social engagement with both and everything.
So I don't know. What did you kind of take away from it?
And was there stuff that you learned there that kind of carried over to subsequent positions?
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think what I was working in those creative roles or working in those creative companies, I was generally more cost -center -focused.
So what did it take to build these products?
not so focused on the marketing and the sales effort that went into actually bringing them to market and making sure that you're moving a lot of units or you're getting a lot of eyeballs on them.
So in the earlier part of my career working at those types of companies, we spent a lot of time focused on, how do we make these games more efficiently over time?
So it was really very much, what is our R &D spend, or our product spend as a percentage of our revenue?
How can we make this game better next year, but for a lower cost?
And so some of the things we looked at, I mean, it was pretty much, you know, a similar cycle.
You know, you introduced kind of like one major feature to minor features, you know, in the next iteration of, you know, MLB or NHL, whatever this sports game would be or whatever.
And so, you know, you kind of knew what you were going to do each year, and you would be in production on, you know, if you're printing out the 2010 version, you'd actually start production in 2008.
So it was kind of like a 24 month cycle to build these games.
So you're always looking at, OK, how can we make this more efficiently?
And so one of the things that we and one of the things that we ended up exploring and actually spending a lot of time on and a lot of effort on was outsourcing a lot of the artwork asset development.
So we moved those to Vietnam or Indonesia was a big one.
We did some work in India as well.
So having them build the assets for us at a much lower cost and this was all part of the overall theme of okay, how do we make these games for less money each year?
Were you part of, you can kind of back into it if you're, you know, spend less and the ROI gets easier to get, but were you, as you were sort of putting together sort of the project accounting, was ROI something that you were reporting on and accountable for, or was it, no, then it goes into, it just becomes a marketing project.
It was kind of, we're in the project of, you know, we're tracking all the projects spend and then trying to find ways to do it cheaper, and then we're handing it over and it's sort of tracked by another group?
Yeah, that's right.
So we had, so if you think of the video game business, so you can break it into kind of like two distinct buckets.
There's the studio business, so that's the people that make the games and then there's the publishing business so that's people that market and sell the games.
So we had two different arms at LinkedIn, so I was on the studio side.
So when I was there, I think we had probably like close to 20 studios around the world and then one major publishing arm which was based in San Francisco and so yeah I mean, we had sales offices in different countries around the world but most publishing work happened in San Francisco.
That makes sense. That makes sense.
All right, so Lucasfilm though, So that's obviously pre the sale to Disney.
And I guess, give me a little bit of background on when you were there and what you were doing because it was.
So Lucasfilm, privately owned by George Lucas and I'm wondering if it was different, like managing finances in the company where the primary stakeholder was an individual rather than shareholders.
Like is it, how much did, you know, and also an artist. So, well that said, you know, Lucas had some very smart business deals with the toys and the products that went along with the movies and stuff.
So I would imagine maybe more so then a lot of film directors, he probably had a pretty good handle on business and wanted to track that.
But tell me about that.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I never actually met George, but I did see him on campus once.
So that's the closest I ever got.
But it was very different.
I mean, you go from Electronic Arts, which, you know, a large public company.
And I think, you know, when I left there, we were doing around 3 billion a year in sales.
You know, so it's not a small company by any means.
And then you move to, essentially, what's a sole proprietorship.
So the focus shifts from how do you satisfy the public markets on what we're doing and what we're building and how do we deliver predictability around this so shareholders are happy.
Essentially it boiled down to managing George's personal tax situation.
So how do we structure all of these different businesses such that it benefits George and him paying the least amount of tax.
It's very complex as you can imagine because we had the video game business, there was the film business, there was a licensing business, there were studios in the UK, there were studios in Singapore and then studios in San Francisco.
So it was really managing that whole world.
So I wasn't in like a corporate type of role there.
I was in the video game piece of it because of my background at electronic cards.
I was sort of managing, you know, managing sort of like product PNLs with the development team similar to EA, it's sort of the studio side of the business.
But we worked a little bit more closely with the publishing arm there because we were based in the same office.
But very much a different world.
And it was really, as I mentioned, it's really, you know, how do you make this the most beneficial for at the end of the day.
It's funny because I work with a lot of, you know, some early -stage startups but a lot of SMBs and a lot of them, but, you know, especially on the consulting side, maybe they even haven't had an FPNA before.
And I come in, and a lot of times when I come to a business, it was basically the founder's tax accountant was the one that was doing their, you know, air quotes FPNA for them.
And so that, you know, and then thinking about the way you manage a business, they were doing things like as cash management it was, spend as much money as you can by the end of the year.
And then they were freaked out that they don't have any cash in Q1, you know, when it comes up because they had a tax accountant running their business for them.
So I imagine a little bit more sophisticated than that.
But you run things differently if you're trying to minimize your tax burden versus growing a business.
Totally. I was just going to add to what you're saying.
I mean, at Clear Sight IQ, I see the same thing as well.
People that are sort of you know, they're doing it themselves or they use their personal account who's doing their taxes and you know a similar kind of idea in that, They're not necessarily looking at it through the right lens, through the FP &A lens, they're really managing it from a different point of view completely than maybe what's best for the business.
Well, but it worked out pretty good for George.
What? He sold like $4 .5 billion, I think was the sale did.
Yeah, he did and I remember at the time he sold it, I was sorry, so I reported to the general manager at Pixar.
I remember at the time the business was sold when George sold it.
My manager said, this is a terrible deal for Disney, and he was convinced that it overpaid.
Here we are, it's got to be 10 or 12 or even 14 years later.
I think that investments worked out very well for Disney at the end of the day.
Disney, that franchise along with Marvel there, squeezing everything they can out of it.
They bought them both right around the same time and they paid about the same for both.
I think Disney had a long -term plan in place for what they were going to do with this fantastic IP that they got from both of these companies and they certainly monetized it the best that they can.
I guess I want to get to LinkedIn but before we do, so we talked about EA, we talked about Lucasfilm.
What was your role at Pixar?
At Pixar, I was the head of finance for Pixar's Canadian operations.
When I was with Electronic Arts, my first role with them was in Vancouver, and then I transferred to the head office in Redwood Shores, which is a suburb in the Bay Area.
I was actually recruited by Pixar to come back to Vancouver to head up their finance function.
So that was my role there.
I did everything. I had support from the head office for Pixar, which was in Emeryville, another suburb in the Bay Area, and they provided the back office, accounting and that type of stuff.
So I was really focused on production planning.
How do we make these films?
We were focused on short films. How do we make these short films?
How do we do it effectively?
Then one of my main roles there was, how do we keep everybody working all the time so that we could maximize our tax credits, which were paid up by the, both the federal and the provincial government in British Columbia?
So one of the things we tried to avoid was downtime.
So it was really slotting together all these different people that do all these different functions to make these short films, such that everybody was always working on something, because it was much more difficult to get the tax credits if they weren't actually working on an accredited production is what they sort of referred to as.
So even at Pixar, would you say that your focus was more kind of that cost center management again because you're more on that side and not on the distribution, the publishing and distribution side?
It was. And what we were making -we were making short films in sort of the Cars and the Toy Story universe and these would be anything from like 60 seconds to like 4 1⁄2 minutes.
You'd see these like interstitials on like the Disney Channel.
Instead of a commercial break, you might see one of these things.
So there was no direct revenue tie -in for these products it was sort of the general idea was to keep these characters sort of top of mind for new viewers as you know as they're being born and they're being exposed to sort of you know the Disney and the Pixar universe so that they would you know see these interstitials on Disney Channel and and then the idea was that it would drive sort of pieces of the consumer products business interesting OK gotcha gotcha so so you go from this you know creative area where you're really focused on projects and everything you know, kind of this tight world to
maybe a more traditional, you know, like revenue focused strategic finance when you move to LinkedIn.
But also that said, the intense focus that you had on these projects, probably that's a mindset that stays with you.
And a lot of times it's so easy to just think big picture and think forecast and budget to actuals versus getting down to the project level.
So I imagine that there was a lot of strong stuff that came with it.
But what were those mindset changes that you had to make and what advice would you have to FBNA leaders making a similar transition or, you know, if they haven't really been at that product or project level, sort of, cost accounting in management.
Like, what's the shift there and what'd you bring with it?
Yeah, it was a big shift because, as I mentioned before, you know, working in Electronic Arts and Pixar is a lot of cost center management.
It's really focused on, OK, how do we do things more efficiently here?
and then moving to LinkedIn high growth.
I started shortly after the IPO, a lot of expectations for what LinkedIn was going to deliver.
The focus was revenue, revenue, revenue at all costs.
How do we grow revenue here?
Not necessarily at all costs.
Of course, we're paying attention to the money that we're spending, but at the same time, it was really, the stock prices driven by how quickly the revenue is growing.
It took me a couple months or even a quarter to of adjusts to that, you know, different frame of mind because I walked in the door, and I, I knew some people there because I'd worked with them in other companies so that was good.
So I had good people like, you know, like no stupid questions, right?
I could ask a lot of stuff in the first quarter until I sort of learned what was going on.
But my first instinct and my first role there was sort of, okay, well, how do we manage headcount?
Because I spent so much time managing headcount at all the, you know, at these other companies and that being the biggest sort of cost item okay, how do we manage headcount?
And, and, you know, I sort of quickly learned it's not that important at the end of day because nobody is asking about this.
Everybody just keeps asking about bookings and revenue.
So let's let's you know, let's put our focus on that.
So it took a while to sort of adjust to that, but then once I sort of grasp that, hey, this is really the important thing that we do here, you know, it sort of changed where I put my focus.
And I would say I shifted to, you know, focusing like 80 or 90 percent on top line and sort of 10 percent on expenses at the end of the day.
Interesting. So yes, so at that point, I don't know where LinkedIn was on their sort of their profitability, but yeah, we weren't.
So I joined when the company was around $1 billion in revenue, and we were maybe just shy of 4 ,000 headcount.
So to put that in perspective, when we got bought by Microsoft, we were at around 20 ,000 people, and I think we were just short of $10 billion in revenue at that point.
Got you. Yeah. So the company grew quite a bit over my tenure there.
Yeah, fantastic experience.
I learned so much there's so many smart people working in a company like that.
Yeah, I mean and you got stretched into areas that you hadn't done before.
So you're doing central forecasting, you're doing M &A, and then the post acquisition work with Microsoft and I'm, I'm curious about that one in particular because you know, whenever there's a, an acquisition and you say, okay, well, there were 20 ,000 employees in this revenue, like what, what synergies are going to come from rolling it up under the Microsoft umbrella and what?
And then, then though you start to, maybe that's when you shift focus from, okay, this is our revenue target to.
Okay, now we need to come up with a profitability plan and figure out how it fits in the portfolio.
So walk me through kind of those shifts and what you were doing there.
Yeah, so the M &A is a good one because I supported our corporate development team from an FP &A point of view.
So I worked with them on a lot of the modeling on any of the acquisitions we did, sort of, you know, we had some pre -acquisition by Microsoft and some after, so I worked on probably about 10 different acquisitions there, and that was a new world for me.
That was really interesting.
I really enjoyed that, actually.
You ran in the due diligence phase?
Exactly. Yeah, so they bring me in pretty early on these deals.
I mean, Corpded was always looking for, OK, what do we need?
What are we going to bring in?
What kind of what tech do we need?
Or are we going to do an acquire?
What is it that we're going to do here?
So Corpded was always working on those types of things, and then when it looked like they had sort of a bit of a green light, like this might be a good fit for us, then they'd usually loop in the FPNA team.
That would be our head of FPNA and then myself, and then I had an analyst on my team that would help me with this stuff.
Totally different world.
I never worked on MNA on the first one.
Then what I learned on the very first one we did, which actually went through and was a successful deal, was it's go time all the time when MNA is happening.
It was some late nights.
I don't know, probably got up to version 65 on the model.
right? It was just constantly changing everything all the time to see how this was gonna fit into our business.
So super good experience really enjoyed that.
Really enjoyed that a lot.
Actually it was it's some long nights and some hard work in there but really interesting stuff to work on because things are changing so quickly.
So really enjoyed that.
And then with the acquisition by Microsoft, that was different.
Now we were being bought.
And so it was really interesting because there is only a certain handful of people that were in on what was going on in the very beginning.
So our FP &A team, the people that got looped in that weren't told exactly what was going on, we were told that we were under audit and we had to produce a certain set of documents for this.
So that was the first six or eight weeks of it before we were drawn in and told, okay, you're now in the circle of trust. Microsoft is interested in buying us, there's other potential buyers out there as well.
First of all, getting to the deal, getting done.
So that was phase one and then we spent probably like six months in the regulatory period and going through due diligence and having all of those things sort of like wrapped up to sort of finish the deal, which was also a tremendous amount of work.
I remember the day it was announced, it was it was super cool, actually.
Everybody got pulled into the boardroom that we had in our sort of FPNA area and big announcement.
And I was already public at that point because, you know, it was announced at the opening market.
But very cool thing to go through.
Yeah. And, you know, thinking about if you're building kind of the perfect FP &A foundation, you know, so starting with your, your accounting training, the intensive program you had there.
And then, you know, several years of focusing on cost, you know, project accounting and, you know, looking at that and then, and then coming into M &A.
My first, um, FP &A role was in telecom and this was in the early 2000s, where, you know, very, uh, our company was very acquisitive and there was a lot of consolidation in the industry and, um, we were doing one to two, like merger of equal size mergers every year, and then multiple tuck -ins, you know, bring everything from very small, like almost acquire can, you know, maybe a little more than that, but you know, bringing in these deals just to try to grow that revenue line.
But if getting that M and A experience, both on the buy and the sell side, where you sort of understand, like you understand on a more tangible level business valuation and why they're looking at certain things and it helps you kind of.
For me it seemed like those were the kind of things that, and then I was in private equity bank businesses beyond that, but it trains you to look at what are the metrics that are meaningful that actually are a lever that can drive something?
I mean did you find a lot of your learnings through the MNA activity were around, oh this is what businesses value and this is why did it kind of beyond?
Yeah, it was, I mean, I'd had some exposure to business valuation through my education, but it's, you know, in the real world, it's, it doesn't hold up anymore.
Everything changes very much when you're actually looking at, you know, a real business that you're gonna fold into a different business.
So it was really interesting.
Everyone was different.
I mean, sometimes we were buying the company because you know, the biggest one we did at LinkedIn was lynda .com, which became LinkedIn learning, you know, and that was a billion and a half dollar acquisition.
So huge company created a whole new product line for LinkedIn.
an so that was a big deal.
You know you're obviously going to spend a billion and a half dollars.
You can work very hard and make sure you understand how that's going to fit into the company, but then even smaller ones like acqui hires of you know, six people or something like that.
Right? You know they they all take on their own different flavor as you're working through them.
Yeah, because you've got you know something that you've got for the customer base or for a new segment and you know the different reasons, the strategic acquisition.
So it is fun to see how those businesses are valued.
I think it perhaps.
I mean it's probably good prep for what you're doing now.
I know maybe a lot of your businesses are much smaller scale, but they're building to sell or whatever they're doing and you've already got that mindset and thinking, yeah.
It's fantastic experience for the things I offer to my clients today because a lot of them are exactly, as you said, they're either looking for that strategic acquisition or perhaps a private equity buyer but they all have some exit plan in place.
Being able to help them figure out what's the appropriate valuation here, which it's honestly a little bit more art than science at the end of the day because no two companies are the same.
You can do all the benchmarking you want, but you can never find that situation that fits exactly with your current client that you're trying to do.
That's why it turns into a negotiation, I suppose.
Everybody's got their number that they want.
So also at LinkedIn, one of your key projects was creating the virtual P &Ls we talked about before the show.
And I'm wondering, how did that change the way that the leaders made decisions and kind of walk me through what you were building there and how other companies and maybe if that's something you apply to your clients now or walk me through that.
Yeah. So virtual P &L.
So this is something that was you know, the concept of this was brought to us post acquisition by Microsoft. And so the way that they look at all of their businesses is through something called the unit of accountability.
So they break all their businesses down into their own separate P &Ls and then everything becomes fully allocated.
So you got you know you can tie it every last dollar and it ties back to your P &L.
So you know after we were acquired we were talking to them about you know how to manage these different businesses and so they said oh when you take a crack at something like this.
So I spearheaded that project and built out the virtual P &Ls across our sort of four main businesses and then our consumer business as well.
The same idea, so the top line piece super easy because you know you know you know where the money's coming from when you get into the engineering and the product effort you have a pretty good idea of what's being spent, but there is this whole layer you know that needs to be allocated.
So there was a lot of effort went into.
Okay, how do we figure out how to allocate these costs properly?
And then of course, you have your overhead after the fact, which we, you know you can talk about that.
You know how you want to allocate that?
But we tended to look at it without the overhead allocated, and then with the overhead allocated, because it really was kind of it's whatever allocation methodology you choose for the overhead doesn't really have anything to do with the underlying business.
So we tended to look at it before the overhead was allocated and the idea behind this was to give autonomy to each of the owners in these business lines, almost like a general manager type structure.
So we had a sales leader and a product leader for each one and the idea was to move some of the decision -making away from the CEO and the CFO and put the decision -making on the general managers of these businesses.
So if you know, if they were over performing on revenue, we had a deal.
We said, okay, 50 percent of that comes back to the company and the other 50 percent, you can reinvest in your own business line if you want to, you know, if you can find something that makes sense for you to invest in there.
Of course, FP &A would support the analysis to make sure that all made sense and everything else.
But it was kind of like, okay, we'll split the profits and then the rest of it goes into the, you know, the coffers of the CFO for sort of larger initiatives.
It took, as you can imagine, large business.
It took like a year to get this thing sort of built out and up and running and everybody sort of bought into the way that it was going to work and it was still running when I left so I left there in 2022.
I don't know if it's still going today, but it was still being used at the time that I left. Those allocations are interesting because I you know when I was spent that part of my career that with the P .E.
backed companies I would come in a lot of the time where pretty long in the tooth on the investment and they were looking to get out.
And you know a lot of times I'd come in and the accounting would be you know that maybe they had departments or divisions or whatever, but the way they were, you know, maybe they weren't allocating and software across the different departments especially if you have different business units or if you're trying to set it up so you could potentially do a spinoff or there's something there like trying to get those allocations straight.
A lot of times it felt like it was more art than science because you have to choose what methodology.
Is it percent of revenue?
Is it percent of total cost?
Is it based on the number of people we have?
The number of hours?
So doing those allocations and building those out and then it becomes the justification because as long as everything looks great, the way you've allocated that everybody is fine, but if somebody feels like, well, now my P &L doesn't look that good, then they want to push back on it.
Did you run into a lot of that as well or?
Every single day. Maybe that's an overstatement, but I can't tell you how many meetings we had on deciding how to allocate these things.
As you mentioned, you look at like a percentage of bookings or a percentage of revenue or headcount.
Those are all common drivers that you would use for this thing.
and there was always an argument for why this didn't make sense for me, whoever the person was that was going to be eating this cost at the end of the day.
Yeah, so it was hard to get everybody on the same page as far as doing that.
Because everybody would say, this hurts my profitability at the end.
It makes me look worse than the other guy.
What we would find happened actually, so we did quarterly business reviews like a lot of companies do and this virtual P &L will be part of the QBR presentation materials.
There will be an FP &A team for each of these five business lines.
What we found is they would take the stock P &L, which we would give them their virtual P &L.
Then they would discuss after the fact, maybe some adjustments that will be made in there.
So they would try to highlight, hey, maybe we're a little bit more profitable than it looks because of A, B, and C.
So we didn't necessarily get involved and say, hey, you can't do that.
We said you have to start with the real view and then if you want to talk a little bit about why, you know, maybe you're being allocated something that doesn't make sense.
That's okay. You can include that in the discussion.
And I didn't see any of these QBRs go completely sideways on any of those types of discussions, right?
I think everybody caught it.
It's funny. You're giving me I'm just having flashbacks to some board meetings where being in there presenting in another, you know, whether CRO, COO, or whatever being deciding that's the moment that they want to talk about why these allocations don't work and why their number is really the right number and isn't that so frustrating?
I mean, I've been in lots of those scenarios as well, and you almost feel like you're blindsided and you're thinking, why did you pick now to bring this up?
Because I've run into this with different folks and people I have a good relationship with, and we could've discussed this ahead of time and come up with a better way to do it rather than put me on my back foot in the meeting and have to justify this in front of a group of people that probably don't even really care a whole lot about this and it's really a distraction at the end of the day.
Yeah. That sounds like someone who's been through the battles.
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So you've gone through at these big companies and then you go to biorender where you're brought in and this, I love this kind of assignment because you're brought in to build FPNA from the ground up.
And, you know, I'd much rather if I've got to do an ERP installation, I'd rather be starting from the beginning, then trying to come in and inherit somebody's bad implementation and take that over or whatever.
And kind of with FPNA, like they depending on the data maturity and the, you know, where the company is, if you're coming in, and it's bad, you know, if there's data issues or data governance, or don't have a good, you know, everybody's using kind of their own KPIs, it can be a mess to clean it up.
Because then you've got sort of a change management thing.
But if you come in and you're doing FPNA the first person to do it, you become it, you know, if you do it right, you're a hero.
And everybody's like, oh, my God, you're giving me such a great insight into my business that we never had before.
So, you know, it's a as you know, it's a lot of work, but it seems it's much more rewarding than fixing bad FPNA.
So walk me through and maybe really focus on because it's all when you come in there, it's like that first three months or that first hundred days, whatever it is like, how did you kind of breakdown the project?
What did you prioritize first?
What were what were those first three months like?
Yeah, a great question and and I think you nailed it.
When you said rewarding it is really rewarding to come in with sort of a blank slate and able to build it up into something that makes sense.
So I really it was fantastic work.
I really enjoyed doing it.
Was great so first thing first was, you know, I spent my first week sort of sifting through data and just looking at what they had.
OK. Their CRM was on Hubspot.
The data in there was a mess.
They had just hired a director of rev ops prior to me joining.
Thankfully, actually, she also came from LinkedIn.
So we were speaking the same language, which was great.
So that was a great partner to have on that.
There was a lot of effort went into working with her to clean up CRM data and get that into a point where we could say, okay, this is what's happened.
Let's start using this to build out some models and look at what's going to happen in the future.
So first thing was to build out field sales model because we were making a big investment in a sales -led motion.
So that was where the growth was going to come from.
So we had a consumer business as well, but that was secondary.
It was going to keep running and it was going to be fine, but the real growth was going to come from the enterprise side.
So the first thing was to build that out and then I focused next on the consumer business and then folding that all into a P &L that was showing adjusted EBITDA and then regular EBITDA as well after that.
That really caught my manager was actually a guy who had come up through the controllership side.
And so it was really interesting.
I think he was a little bit blindsided that I did this adjusted EBITDA thing and then you don't broke it down to EBITDA after that and he was like, what are you doing?
And I'm like, no, no, we need to talk about what's actually going on in the business.
And so we ended up sort of chatting with one of the founders about it.
He's like, I agree, adjusted EBITDA is the right way to look at it because some of these things just don't make sense to include in there.
So that was when I sort of first knew, I'm working with someone who's much more on the accounting side as my manager, I really was going to be the FP &A expert.
We started with that and then we went to reporting and then building out quota models.
We know what we're going to do with our salespeople because quotas had been set willy -nilly prior to that.
As I mentioned, we were investing pretty heavily in a sales led motion.
We're hiring BDRs, we were hiring AEs.
We had A1 through 4 depending on the market that you were focused on, and we had sales managers and the sales director and the head of sales.
so we had to build it all these different comp plants, so that everybody knew what was going on.
Then same thing on the customer success side, we had renewable targets and things like that, but there was not a lot of thought really being put into it.
It was like everybody was doing a little bit of their own thing and the business was going very well.
There's a company that had product market fit very early, and they've been cashflow positive very early so that a great story, which allowed them to maybe not be as buttoned up as other companies might be if they really needed to pay more attention to how much cash was coming in the door.
I still remember one of the things after I built out the first bottles, going back to one of the founders and saying, ''Okay, now do you mind sharing your model or whatever you have?
I'm just curious, are we in the same ballpark here ?'' He said, ''Oh no, no, we don't have anything.
This is why we hired you.
This is what you're here for.
We don't know what's happening in the future.
and that's kind of your job to figure out where this business is going.
So that was really eye opening because they really had nothing, absolutely nothing when I got there, it was like a blank workbook for me, and I could do whatever I wanted with it.
So the autonomy was great.
And you know, I think they hired me because I could draw on my experience from, you know, all those different companies and have the ability to sort of like build out something that made sense.
You know, I understood SAS metrics and the SAS business model and everything else, you know.
So I think you know, I think that's probably why I got the job at the end of the day.
Remind me what BioRender does.
The easiest way to describe it is they make a Cloud -based PowerPoint type product for visualizing science.
So if you work in either academia or in big pharma, you're doing R &D, and so they give you all the icons and templates to visualize the science that you do, so it's much easier to communicate.
In the past, people would use PowerPoint, and there be all these ugly shapes and stuff like that.
And so they sort of, you know, streamline the whole process, you know, like, you know, you get like a canvas and then, you know, by the time I left, I think they were up to like, you know, 12 ,000 icons that you could use, you know, like T cells and, you know, different connectors and all this kind of stuff or whatever.
So you'd use it to visualize your science.
Gotcha. And when they brought you in, so they were revenue, revenue and cashflow positive they'd been and they were kind of just bootstrapped, founder led.
Yeah, exactly. And they, you know, they've done quite well Up to that point and they were really like okay, this thing is working let's like go full speed ahead everything.
And so to do that they wanted to do a.
A fund raise and so part of my job was to get everything in place you know so that we could go through the series a process.
At that point I mean was their accounting pretty solid like they were audit ready and they were good to go there.
It was just they'd never done FPNA.
Yeah the accounting side was good.
So I joined like I mentioned that the head of finance was you know, who comes from sort of a controllership type background.
So you know, very strong, very good.
And under him, there was a controller in place as well.
And she was also very strong.
So as far as their historical financial data and their closed processes and stuff like that, it was all buttoned up.
They were very good at that.
So that made it easy for me because I didn't have to worry about the quality of that data.
At least I knew I could rely on that.
CRM was a little different because there was no RevOps in place until I mentioned the woman that came from LinkedIn and so you had reps just going in there and plugging in whatever they wanted.
Yeah, the pipeline is massive but the win, Yeah, so you couldn't make sense of anything.
So we did do a massive cleanup on that.
We eventually moved from HubSpot to Salesforce, we hired a Salesforce admin and as you grow as a company, these things all make sense and so we brought some structure and some rigor to that, which made it a lot better over time but at least the financial data was reliable I have one huge benefit, I think, which was I inherited, I think his title was senior accountant, and they moved him over to FPA when I joined as an FP &A analyst. He'd been there for three years already, and so he'd seen everything that had happened, and so he was such a great resource for me.
He'd worked through everything, he knew all the numbers inside and out, he knew the consumer business well, he had a pretty good understanding of how the sales lab motion was going to work.
Um, so he, you know, he was very, very beneficial to have as sort of my first hire.
I mean, I didn't hire him, I got him.
But he was, you know, he was super -strong, very buttoned up.
So they were, they were doing a Series A when you joined, and they had good accounting, which is funny.
I think about like in the VC world, the idea of a Series A company actually having good accounting.
It's like, no, that's - that just doesn't happen, it's just a mess.
And so like they're in QuickBooks or Zero or something, and everything is just kind of, you know, they're a blend of like cash and accrual at the same time and they don't know.
It's funny though, because there's, you know, head of finance at a startup, you know, at those, the early stage startups, they, everybody wants to draw the chart that has the hockey stick and they've got whatever model they're basing on, you know, has so many assumptions and, and assumes that assumes this inflection point, but I guess, you know, they, they had a business track record at that point and, and good accounting and everything, but what do you think it was that they knew they needed FP &A to do that Series A?
What did they think that investors were going to be asking or looking for that they weren't providing just with solid accounting and trends?
I think it was really having the forecast but what was going to happen next, right?
Because, you know, VCs, it's great to look at what has happened, but that's not necessarily what you're buying.
You're buying what's going to happen next.
And so I think that was the thing where they realized, okay, we need somebody in here with like very strong modeling skills to be able to put together forecasts and models and make relatively bulletproof so that we can talk about, okay, what's expected to happen over the next two to five years, sort of thing.
Yeah. That makes sense.
And I also find I think with, like accountants are great at accounting for sure, and they're great at tying out financial statements, but they don't necessarily have that similar sort of business acumen.
So when it came to things like metrics and stuff like that, it's almost like a different world for them because it's not part of their gap training.
You know what I mean?
Like it's not something that they think about on a regular basis.
So being, you know, having to do, you know, bring some flexibility into like a CAC calculation, right?
They would they would want to do it like a very structured way.
And whereas you're like that's maybe a little bit more nuanced than that.
Maybe we should look at this a little bit differently.
So I think it's bringing that little bit different lens to be able to sort of tell up maybe a bit more of a compelling story to potential investors.
So it's interesting.
So you had this long background of working for these big, cool companies that everybody knows and all that.
And then you make the decision and then bio render you're setting up FPNA.
And I'm wondering in that transition, I want to move into like you go from this corporate world where you have all these resources and all this data and all these great things to use to now your own business and this working with maybe smaller companies less data mature companies and everything.
So first off, tell me a little bit about ClearSide IQ, what you guys do.
It's a fractional CFO consulting firm, and so I focused on four pillars, strategic finance, something I call FPA as a service, fundraising support, and then M &A readiness.
Those are the four pillars that I offer.
Working with my clients are pre -revenue up to about 25 million in ARR, that's the sweet spot.
I think anybody beyond that has someone like me already on staff, right.
So they don't necessarily need extra support.
So it's, it's sort of helping those companies, whether it's founders or they might have some kind of finance function in place, helping those people, you know, sort of realize what they can get from an FP &A type function.
Yeah. And it's so it's interesting.
I talked to a lot of fractional CFOs and people that go out on their own.
And it's, it's interesting, but I think that that your focus that 25 million in lower, they're not going to hire they don't have the, you know, resources to hire a full time CFO. But they, you know, a lot of them, like I said, their, you know, tax guy has been doing doing their books and doing, you know, air quote, FP &A forums. So I think there is a there is a demand there.
And if you think just about the number of businesses that size versus the big logos, but what is it that made you I mean, you could have gone to another, you know, big fortune 100 company if you wanted, probably, and you know, continue there versus now come into this kind of messy startup world and doing instead of working for a big company, doing the solopreneur thing, walk us through that a little bit.
Yeah, that's a great question.
I think I was at this sort of 20 year mark in my career and really what I was looking for at that point was, like you said, I did some big company stuff, you know, private company stuff, the startup world, like all fantastic experience.
And really what I was after at the end of the day was not doing more of that, right?
So it's always about growing and doing different things.
And so I wanted to do something completely different.
And so I decided to sort of, you know, branch out and do my own thing with ClearSight IQ really as almost like a lifestyle business.
You know, I'm not trying to grow it into a, you know, a large consultancy where I'm going to have, you know, 20 employees or something like that.
I really just want to do my own thing and ideally, you know, build it up to like a 75 % capacity sort of thing.
You know, my kids are getting older, you know, I want to spend as much time with them before they go away to school and so it was really just a question of, okay, how do I keep working and do stuff that's interesting to me but still have the flexibility to spend time with my family.
Like in the startup world, burnout's a real thing there, so if I was gonna go to another startup, I'd be staring down more 60 or 70 hour weeks kinda thing and working very hard to help the company be successful, which is great, I enjoyed that work, But then when I sort of looked at it in terms of, OK, my whole life And how does this fit together?
Is this really what I want to look back on and say this is what I spent all these years doing?
So I love the work.
It's really interesting to me, but being able to do it and then also being able to have sort of the lifestyle piece of it as well.
You know, this seems like the best way to go about it.
So you know, when I was thinking about leaving Ballerinder, talking to my wife about it, sort of picture to this idea and she's been very supportive.
She was like, go for it, do whatever you think is going to be good and she said, try it for a couple of years.
If you don't like it, go back and do one of the things you do before.
Having that backing from my wife and the flexibility to figure out what I want to do myself has been fantastic.
Yeah. I'm very happy with how it's going.
I've given myself very reasonable targets for the first couple of years for this business and I'm on pace to achieve my first -year sales target.
So I'm really happy with how it's going.
I think it's been a good move.
It's funny, and maybe this isn't a fair stereotype, and especially with business partnering and all that and FP &A, it's different than sitting there with a 10 key and the green visor and going through and entering credits and debits.
But that said, for a finance person, biz dev and sales are hard. So you talked about hitting your sales targets, and now you have to spend a fair amount of your time.
I would imagine doing the biz dev part.
Did you find that was something that came naturally to you, or how do you approach it?
It did not come naturally at all.
I'm a finance person through and through.
I'm very much an introvert.
Throwing yourself out there and talking to people and trying to pitch what you're doing in a salesy but not salesy kind of way.
It's a learned skill.
It's not something that anybody is good at right out of the gate.
Before I decided to go down this path, They reached out to a you know number of peers that I worked with and just sort of said, Hey, I'm thinking about doing this.
What do you think? And they were like, Yeah, I think it's great idea.
You can totally do it.
Like go for it. And then the next step was to reach out to other fractional CFOs.
People I didn't know and just say, Hey, what's your experience been like?
This is my background.
Do you think I can be successful?
And so what I found was that sort of fractional CFO world is everybody's very helpful and very supportive.
And so people were, you know, even though you're, you're maybe even competing with them for clients, you know, everybody was kind of like yeah, you have the right background for this.
You're going to be successful for sure, you know, don't get stuck, right?
If you don't get, you know, if you don't doing a lot of work in the first, you know, three months don't give up like it's going to take some time to get some clients and stuff like that.
And I was very fortunate.
I, you know, I got a couple of small clients right away and then was able to, so I was sort of like, okay, this is easy.
It's not actually easy.
You give your phone up on the glass with the biz dev effort for sure to make sure you have, you know, more clients coming in, but it's gone well, but it has been, you know, taking me out of my comfort zone for sure to do that.
I go to networking events and I do you know I reach out to random people through LinkedIn that I think might be you know either could use my service or know someone who can use my service and so you know you sort of have to be ready for the rejection that comes along with that you know I've had a number of good introductory calls with potential clients that look like it's going somewhere and then they ghost me hurt me a little in the beginning and now I just realized that's just part of the game and so you know it doesn't affect me like it did you know even six months ago sort of thing when I
was trying to get this thing off the ground that's funny so not you know Not a lot of my time is spent on business development.
But when it does, like I'm still in that phase where when I do get ghosted, I thought we had this relationship, what's going on?
But then when I talk to the sales team in our company, and like I will, the other funny thing is that I could never make myself do.
They will just keep like pestering and driving.
There's like a salesperson out, like it doesn't have the sort of cringe factor that I do of like, I don't know, I've already emailed that person three times, and they haven't responded.
The fourth would be too much, and the sales guy is like, oh no, we're just getting started, we're going to hit him again.
And then it's crazy how many they'll actually end up converting after that.
Well, that's the funny thing.
One of the clients that I'm working with right now, I reached out to one of the first people I got a warm intro from somebody that I knew here in Victoria.
And we had a call and great conversation.
And he was like, maybe Sometime I might need some of your help or whatever and that was sort of it.
I said a couple of follow -ups with, you know, a couple months later.
Hey, how's it going?
Sort of thing and, you know, respond.
Yeah, everything's great.
And that was the end of it.
And then out of nowhere.
You know, three weeks ago, they're like, hey, I need a ton of help on this project I'm working on right now.
I need some help with, you know, putting together some board materials and I'm doing a pricing analysis and like, can you help?
And so you just never know where the, the business is gonna come from.
So I think, you know, the advice you're getting, which is to like, Just keep it warm, uh, you know, with with the people that you're dealing with, you never know when they're gonna come back to you again.
So, you know, I just try to stay top of mind with people that look like they could use my service at some point And and I guess we've drifted a bit astray from FP &A, but I just on that point, a client that I've been working with for a year and a half now, finally finally this Friday, we're kicking off kicking off our project and it's and it's the same thing.
If I in the sales guy that worked with me on it said, no's come quick.
So if you don't get that, no. You just keep going.
You know, that's a great point because you're talking about sending the follow -on emails three, too many, and then four, and you space these things out.
You try to stay top of mind.
So I had a great introductory call with a potential client and to the point where, I thought we were going to work together for sure, sign an NDA, set up a shared folder, moving some documents and stuff like that, and then nothing.
So I keep following up.
I keep not hearing no, so I'll just keep following up right.
It might turn into something at some point.
Well, that is good and also.
I mean just the if you like different challenges, I mean when you're doing the fractional you kind of get to do everything you did before, but sort of at scale and that you're just you're doing it at different companies and and all that, so I think that's right.
I think one of the things I really like and I know this is probably like my inner nerd coming out here is I really like building stuff in spreadsheets like I enjoy that kind of work and then you know if you look back to my time at LinkedIn, you know leading central forecasting I was managing a revenue forecasts of about 13 billion dollars.
When I left, I was not in spreadsheets doing anything.
I had a team of people working on that stuff.
You know I would be reviewing things, asking questions and saying, you know, is this how this really works and maybe we should dig into this and and that kind of so using a totally different skill set from you know that actually like banging on the keyboard and building stuff.
So going to buy a render was was great because there was nobody else so I had to go and do all that stuff and I really enjoy that kind of work and I got to a similar position with them that I had a team of six by the time that I left. Again, I moved out of doing that work.
So doing it for yourself.
I mean I'm right in the spreadsheets every single day and guys that maybe this is my like, you know, inner nerd coming out, but I really enjoy that kind of work.
I like building stuff in spreadsheets.
It's fun for me. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that because I've, you know, when I was CFO, I had moved so far away from and actually putting anything together, and I used to pride myself on my Excel skills.
But when you're more of a recipient than a builder, they tend to go down and I did, I'd been a CFO for I don't know a decade at this point.
And I decided I'm gonna go get my FMVA from the Corporate Finance Institute.
And when I did this intensive thing, just so I could get back in and build a three statement model again.
And I probably never actually built one all the way by myself again, but it was like, all right, I still got it.
I remember the keyboard shortcuts and you know, and and how to carry it through so uh, yeah, I I get you on that because it's, you know, at some point you stop doing and you start managing and it does feel good that satisfaction of actually building something and and seeing that part of it too.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean I like doing the analysis piece of it.
I had um, when I was at BioRender one of the analysts on my team was a CFA and he was a very good modeler and he sort of realized, oh, I've, I've kind of, I've lost some skill over time here and we actually did.
And Byron we did two way performance reviews.
I would give him a review and he would review me as his manager.
And I remember he put in my performance review that I was an OK modeler, and I was kind of stung a little bit because I thought I was pretty good.
I mean, he was night and day better than me and I'm not going to debate that.
But just that he said I was OK, it kind of was like, Oh, maybe we get a brush up on my skills here.
Yeah, that's funny.
So, well, we are we are getting to the point of the show where I'm supposed to start winding and winding it down, I think before I took over, I think these podcasts ran about 40 minutes.
I feel like I'm getting into, like Joe Rogan or the three and four hour podcast people out there.
As much as I love FP &A, I don't know who's going to commit to the three hour podcast. So as I wind it down, we've got our, you know, sort of switching over to the personal side questions.
And the one we ask all the guests is, what's something that not many people know about you maybe outside of your work interests and that we couldn't find from quickly googling you or whatever?
Yeah, at LinkedIn when we did introductions you would introduce yourself and you would say something that's not on my LinkedIn profile to sort of answer this question.
So something that's not on my LinkedIn profile, actually lived in Cambodia for a year at the time that I mentioned before I worked as an English teacher.
I lived in Cambodia for a year and I worked for the World Wildlife Fund there.
This is not all on my LinkedIn profile.
Not that many people know that about me.
I was hired to build a database for all of their library materials for researchers that were working in Cambodia.
It paid US $600 per month.
It doesn't sound like a lot of money, but in Cambodia, $600 goes a long way.
Yeah. So that's something that probably not a ton of people know about me.
Well, very cool. And since you are now getting back into Excel and you are in the models a lot, I'm curious and I'm going to...
So I'm going to ask you the question, but I wonder if maybe it has changed from back in your early days in Excel.
But what is your current favorite Excel function and why?
So I use a lot of index match to be able to sort of consolidate you know, a bunch of raw data into a way that I want to be able to work with it.
In the olden days, when I was sort of learning my chops and modeling, I was big on sumif and Dlookups.
And then Xlookup was a game changer when that came.
So, I mean, I could talk about this for hours, because I mean I'm in there doing all this stuff all the time.
Something I will say is, I rely on ChatGPT quite a bit now to help me write formulas.
it's very effective if you tell it what you want it to do.
Because in Excel, there's 15 different ways you can do it, and maybe you're going to do the thing that has six different functions tied together, and chat GPT can do it for you in one and make it a little bit more streamlined.
So I'm actually relying on that quite a bit when I'm building stuff these days.
Yeah. On that note, I use chat GPT occasionally for formulas, but you have to come out of Excel, and you have to say which cell and what you're referencing it.
So it's a little bit clunky, but I'm telling you, I mean, and you know, working for LinkedIn and as they rolled into Microsoft, Microsoft didn't spend $15 billion investing in AI so that people would have to come in.
I know co -pilot is getting there, but you know what they're picturing is Clippy's revenge, they're finally going to bring back.
So you can just be in Excel and all that stuff that those of us that been in the industry while that we prided ourselves on coming up, all the cool things that we could do in Excel and the models we could build and the some ifs and the nested if statements and just these super complex models.
Um, that's all going to be replaced when someone can just type in, Hey, build me a pivot table with slicers on this data and show it this way and then it's just going to spit it out.
So you know that's where it's going.
I think that's totally I think that's totally right.
I think that's where we're headed.
Um, I've tried using copilot within Excel and it never does the thing I want it to do.
So it's not there yet.
I have no doubt they're going to figure it out.
But if you go or if your listeners go and they look, they have to go back probably maybe 18 months and search. There's a 30 -minute presentation by Satya Nadella on what Copilot was going to do for PowerPoint and for Excel.
There's a fantastic example of what it could do or what they envision it doing there inside Excel, which is, you know, it's marketing material right now, but I do think that they'll get there.
Just the ability to sort of type in questions like, why did sales suffer in Q2 in this region?
And it's like, oh, these 3 customers turned and whatever it was, right?
Like it's able to sort of, it knows what you're looking for, it's able to figure it out for you.
Yeah, yeah, and it's, you know.
Again, $15 billion invested.
You know they're going to get there.
Yeah. Well, I really appreciate your time on the show.
I guess before we let you go, where can our listeners connect with you and learn more about the word, find out more about ClearSight?
You can find me on LinkedIn, obviously, so under Craig Berry, and then I have a website, ClearSightIQ .com, and you can reach out to me there.
There's links on the website, or you can just reach out directly info at ClearSightIQ .com.
Well, Craig, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Thanks, Glenn. I really enjoyed it.
Thanks for the time today.
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