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And now, onto the show.
From Data Reels, this is FPNA Today.
Hello and welcome to FPNA Today, brought to you by Data Reels.
I am Glenn Hopper and I'm excited to be your new host.
Today, we're joined by Tory Bellman,
Tory is a CPA who serves as the vice president of FPNA at ZEO,
a global telecom and internet backbone provider.
Anytime you've sent a message or made a phone call,
it likely involves ZEO network.
There are 6.8 million miles of fiber spans an impressive 141,000 route miles.
Tory started her career as an auditor at KPMG.
And actually, Tory, it's probably better if I let you tell your story than me reading your bio here.
Can you walk us through your career and tell us how you got to your current role?
Sure, as you mentioned, you know, an accountant by education.
I graduated from the University of Denver and went to work at KPMG as an auditor in the Denver office.
I spent only a couple of years there in their TMT sectors of telecom media and tech.
I worked on some clients that a lot of people may recognize stars,
the TV show producing company, Liberty Global, Liberty Media.
ZEO was also a large client of ZEOs.
And I saw that they were doing a lot of exciting things there.
They were highly acquisitive back in the late 2000s and 2010s.
So that means a lot of debt raises, the auditors are very involved in those requirements in the reporting.
So I actually requested me on that team, a place like stars,
the audits can get pretty mundane.
You have your number of subscribers and your cost per subscriber,
that they're paying for the service and that equals your revenue.
So the audit was not super complex.
And I thought, ZEO, maybe a good experience for me.
At the time, I thought I wanted to go into transaction advisory at either a big four or
one of the large advisory firms.
And I thought it would be a good segue.
But ultimately, I was on the ZEO audit, went through their initial IPO actually in 2014 as an auditor.
And then about a year later, I jumped ship and went to work for ZEO.
So a little bit of a change in what I thought I would be doing after my short career in audit.
But glad I made that move.
Yeah, so you and I have that in common.
My first finance job was at a C-Lec back in the early 2000s.
Like ZEO, we were highly acquisitive.
I think in the four years or so that I worked in finance there, I think we did seven transactions.
And they were all kind of mergers of equals.
And it was really just the M&A became a full-time job.
So I guess coming out of the audit background and going in straight into M&A as you were there,
did you find were you involved in the due diligence early on?
Were you involved in the M&A process?
Yeah, my first role with ZEO was a manager of SEC reporting.
As part of that, we worked closely with technical accounting on the
valuations post-close, the purchase of counting valuations.
And so I wasn't necessarily involved in the front end right away while I was at ZEO.
But kind of once the deal was signed, figuring out how are we going to account for this transaction,
what's the person's purchase of counting valuation, what do we need to report to the SEC?
So I got a lot of experience there.
And in ZEO is a really exciting company to be out and to follow.
It's a malgumation of 47 acquisitions, pre-go private.
And so it's really special, you know, taking 47 essentially fiber network companies
and putting them all together is a no small feat.
It's not something that can be replicated today.
There's not 47 fiber companies out there that could be rolled up to create this network.
So it's been a pretty unique story and it's been fun to be a part of
after I was in SEC reporting and a little bit in technical accounting.
I actually moved into an operational accounting role.
I was the assistant controller of one of our business segments.
And so that comes with the monthly close and analysis there on the accounting side.
But also every time we do an acquisition figuring out how we're going to integrate
that new company's data in TARs, how are we going to get their AP, entire AP system and things like that.
So I've gotten to see that acquisition piece kind of from all angles between accounting
and finance, which has been nice.
Moving into the finance team, you know, it's definitely getting involved a little bit more
on the front end before acquisition close, you know.
Does this make sense?
How much do we think we should be paying for this acquisition?
And looking at their contracts and things like that,
trying to figure out what synergies we can achieve once they come on board.
It's a big component kind of on the finance side that was a little bit different than what I had started in
over at accounting.
Absolutely.
And that's my first real exposure in my career journey to really identifying metrics and
understanding maybe on a deeper level what they mean is when you're trying to integrate the
metrics because different companies may measure the same thing in different ways.
So really learning what those metrics are.
And that kind of leads me to my next question, which is here at FPNA today, we're very practical.
So we always want to know like how your FPNA team is set up, what your main KPIs are that you're
tracking and kind of what are the metrics that your CFO wants to know on an ideally basis.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, this is not unique to many organizations, but we've been through a lot of
reorganizations within our business, not only with the way that our business units are structured,
but also the way our financing is structured, just to try to reach an optimal state,
how efficient can we be and how can we be best supporting the rest of the business.
So today we are organized largely by business units.
We have four major business units and there's leaders for each of those business units.
And so we measure them from kind of top line KPIs all the way down through contribution margin.
And then we've got our kind of other half of the FPNA team is focused on headcount and SGA by cost
center. So they're aligned to each cost center, each executive leader here at ZO, you know,
has a cost center budget. And so our analysts work with them on how they're going to achieve that
what that should look like. I think from a KPIC standpoint, you know, we're really focused on
driving top line growth. And so we have a couple key leading indicators that tell us how well we're
doing and how what we should expect from revenue growth standpoint. And we operate in the recurring
revenue model, right, which means when we sign out a customer, we get recurring monthly revenues
from them until they cancel service. And so we really focus on our sales bookings, which tells us
how much is our monthly recurring revenue going to increase. What new revenue is under contract
essentially that now is in our pipeline to go install. So once we have our booking, it sits in our
service activation pipeline and then we measure our installs. So that would be the day we turn out
service and we can start building the customer. So those are super important for growing that
top line revenue. And we also monitor our churn really closely. So how well are we doing from
our revenue retention standpoint? We'll report churn as soon as the customer says, hey, I want to
disconnect. A lot of times there's a 30 or 60 day novice period in there for them to let us know
how I want my service turned off. We live and breathe those every day. We're sending weekly forecast
updates on those metrics to our investors, our owners. Some other important metrics include cash flow.
So how are we doing from a cash flow standpoint on a weekly basis? The cost of capital has increased
over the last several years and cash flow and liquidity is definitely top of mind for a lot of
companies, especially in telecommunications. It's a highly capital intensive business. We need to
spend a lot of money to maintain and build new assets in order to grow top line revenue. So
cash flow is super important and capital allocation is really important. So are we being good stewards
over capital? Are we earning an appropriate return on that capital? You know, what's our return on
an invested capital is a huge metric that we look at to make sure that we are deploying capital
in the right places. I mean, we spend almost a billion dollars a year on capital investments
in our network. You're giving me flashbacks to my days in telecom and I'm thinking some of the
earliest more complicated models I've built in my career were on trying to predict
churn. Could you maybe talk a little bit about because that is an important part of the business.
What's your approach to without giving away any trade secrets or anything but your
approach to forecasting churn and how complex is that modeling? Yeah, it's a great question.
It's something that we spend a lot of time energy on because it is so important and we want
our customer retention to be as high as possible. It costs a lot more to sign up a new customer
and turn on their service than it does to just retain our existing customer base. We actually have
a whole team that's dedicated just to churn management and they run a predictive model that they've
built with the help of IT that kind of shows what products and services are most at risk, what
customers are at risk. It looks at the customer health index, the sales team helps manage to figure
out, are we at market pricing when their contract comes up? Are we going to see a re-rate where we
have to give them a discount on the service? Are they going to leave and go somewhere else that maybe
has a lower rate if the customer is really focused on price. That's something that their
monitoring on a daily basis, a lot of different factors and inputs go into that model.
Price is obviously one of them, the type of product they're on, the customer vertical that they're
in, the market they're in. It is something we spend a ton of time on and something that we've tried
to automate as well. That predictive churn model is really an AI-based model based on a lot of
different data feeds to try to predict where we're going to see our churn coming from.
Gotcha. Give me an overview of your team setup within FPNA.
Yeah, so we have kind of a middle management layer, that's essentially a director layer that sits
over the business units and the cost centers. Then we have an analyst layer one, two, and three
that kind of support that. Typically, we'd like to have an analyst dedicated per business unit
or per cost center. The owner of that spend kind of has one person to interface with. That person
can really understand that business unit and get really deep into what are the relevant KPIs
for that business unit? Is it a growing product or is it maybe a declining product?
We've got dark fiber and waves. Those are huge growth products for us. Whereas maybe Ethernet has
seen a lot of price compression. We still think we can grow the volume, but we're competing on price
a lot of the times. As the price works down, we need to exceed our sales from a volume standpoint
to maintain that revenue. It's really important for us to align the analysts in a way that they can
get super familiar with the business that they're responsible for doing the planning and analysis
for and really get ingrained in the business. It also helps from a retention standpoint and a
development standpoint we've found. We've been in a model before where we've been aligned by
P&L bucket. We've had revenue analysts and expense analysts. It's really hard for them to grasp
the concept of how the business is working and why we're doing what we're doing. They tend to get
really stuck on kind of just the P times Q reporting the weather versus really digging down into
what's driving the variance. I think it's a lot more exciting for an analyst to get into a business
unit, really understand how it operates both from a revenue and a cost standpoint and doing
the analysis that way to help them understand really what the drivers are. It makes for a better
analysis and a happier team. That's been my experience completely. It really by embedding
your team members within the certain groups that really drives the business partnering, but it also,
you know, whether it's its BI or FPNA or data science teams having, so they've got the central
report that they go up to and they report to a domain expert in finance and accounting,
but they really understand the team better and that model, it sounds like you've seen the
exact same thing. We're having them embedded and the team really helps with business partnering
with that business partnering and with the embedding and seeing that the level of understanding
that your team gets by being embedded in there, what would you say is your best secret to finance
business partnering? What are you saying they're embedded in there and what else are you saying
that really enhances that partnership? Yeah, that's a good question. I think if you asked me a few
years ago, I would say communication, but I think what it really actually is is alignment and what
I mean by that is you know, you could be communicating well and often you have a good relationship
with your business partner, but we've found that sometimes you can be saying the same thing,
but mean something totally different and so making sure that you're getting to the point of
alignment where you know, both parties are interpreting the mandate or the ask the same way,
aligning on it and then moving forward. You don't always have to agree on it and a lot of times
you're not going to get agreement between finance and the business units, but you have to get
alignment on it before you can go try to execute it. Anyone in finance or anyone in business who
works with a finance team has been pushed on targets and has said that I can't hit that target,
you know, that's a that's a stretch for me that's I don't want to put that in my budget and
at the end of the day whether it's your owners or your CEO or your CFO a lot of times,
teams will get stretched and that that additional target will go into your budget and so
making sure that you're aligned on what the target is, if you don't agree on what it is,
but at least you both teams know that this is the target and then okay what are we going to go to
to hit that target and how it can finance support the business unit and that to move forward and execute.
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at datareels.com. So walk me through annual budget process and how frequently you're
redoing forecasts and sort of how you go about doing that with and I would imagine with the
business partnering it's a lot of bottoms up kind of stuff. Walk me through that process.
Yeah, so from an annual budgeting standpoint, you know we start that kind of early in the
fourth quarter. We work with the business unit leaders, the cost center owners, what's the strategy
for next year and where do we think the business should be going? What resources do we think we
need to support that growth and then doing a bottoms up to figure out where the gaps are if
there are any. That process does take basically the whole quarter towards the end of the quarter
we go to our equity sponsors and our board for a budget approval. Sometimes there's back and forth
on what the target should be or we'll get stretched on some of the targets which I think is very
common especially if you're in a private equity act company and then from a forecast perspective,
we do a forecast refresh once a quarter. Once we close the books on a quarter we'll look at hey
what are our gaps to our budget? Where do we need you know what initiatives do we have in place to
close those gaps? Is there any pivot and strategy that's based on maybe macro tailwinds that we
need to consider to update the forecast and we look at an 18 month rolling view so every time
we're updating that forecast we're going out 18 months and so by the second quarter of any given
year you already have a full annual you following year which sets you up well when you get to that
fourth quarter you know you've already been paying attention to the to the next year people aren't
surprised you know by what the targets are they already have a kind of a sense based on our long
term plan what they're going to be expected to do the following year and what the trajectory of
the business is so I think outside of just the annual budgeting and forecasting process it's
been really important for us to work on that kind of five year strategic plan with our investors
and our board to make sure you know we're aligned down what the strategy is and we're aligned
on maybe what the exit target is five years from now where do they expect us to be from
around the new even see a point how much capital do we have available to spend to kind of drive
that growth and fit all those pieces together to make sure that you know we're doing the right
things today to achieve that five years down the road are there certain levers when you say so you
have you know what Mike Tyson said you know that you everybody has a plan till they get punched in
the mouth you know you've got your 18 month view of where you want to go and then you know as
life happens and the budget numbers you know reality meets the model and you'll have your your
puts and takes do you guys talk a lot about I would imagine so with the with the forecast refresh
every quarter do you talk a lot about the levers that you need to pull to change things if you're
if you're off and how much is fpna involved in those conversations yeah absolutely we are very
involved in those conversations we lead a lot of those conversations with our business unit leaders
our executive leadership team anyone who really is responsible for spend as I am obviously a goal
of ours is to grow our top line organically right if we don't achieve some of those growth
targets it definitely puts a squeeze on how much we can then go spend and so we meet on a weekly
basis with you know our cfo or cto our chief sales officer of president on just you know what are
big deals in the funnel and what's kind of our capital envelope that's available what returns
are we expecting and so as we get deep into the year and we're you know comparing our top
line girls to the budget our capital spend to the budget you know expensive versus budget what
is the even looking like we're having those conversations during those meetings to say hey if we
sign this customer we're committing to spend another hundred million dollars of the next 18
months on this project is that something that fits into the plan or doesn't do we need to adjust
our pricing we need to walk away from some deals that maybe aren't the best return you know we either
price ourselves out on purpose or we just back away from the deal because it's self-right fit
for Rosario at the time and we're lucky enough to have the opportunity to do that we do that
today and we're still able to grow our top line so I think you know there's enough
addressable market out there for us to go get I think in telecom today a lot of our competitors
face challenges that Zio doesn't necessarily have we don't have declining revenue streams like
legacy MPLS services or voice products that you know people don't necessarily use today so I
think we're set up in a position to be able to do that and and make those tough choices and pull
those levers and and we've had to do that in the past you know things don't always go according
to plan they almost never go according to plan and so kind of knowing what those levers are knowing
that we'll have to pull them is something that we talk to the business about a lot you know we
give them signaling ahead of time to say hey you know if this happens or we don't hit this metric
this is the lever that we're gonna have to pull so they understand what the mandate is from a
girl standpoint and kind of what the consequences really if we don't hit that what that
castings to the rest of the business so no one is surprised when we get to that point
and that you know thinking about your budgeting and the forecasting and a unique thing about Zio
is formerly public taken private so I'm sure different budget demands and requirements
whether it's from the PE sponsors or the public markets but I would imagine having seen
both sides of that at the same company that you've probably had quite a few challenging I guess
that for lack of a better word budget experiences is there one that really stands out to you as the
most painful the most that you learned the most from that was really tough to get through yeah absolutely
just a couple years ago we were at a point where our CFO had actually resigned our senior vice
president and finance and resigned and it was you know November to summertime frame peak of
annual budgeting you know all the numbers are starting to come together we're starting to look for
approval from our board and our investors and you know as we're getting the bottoms up
budgets from a lot of our business units and cost centers and we're looking at our cash flows
we really we're in a spot 18 months in the future where we didn't want to be from a liquidity
standpoint and so there's a lot of work where we have to go back and figure out if we continue
at our current course and speed we will not like where we are at 18 months or now so first messaging
that to leadership team and the board and the investors can be tough you know you don't want to
be the person with your hair on fire you know getting everybody excited about something that
needs a little bit more work but it did kick off a lot of work streams in terms in terms of evaluating
you know how much capital are you really spending and what are those returns looking like and where
can we come back on that capital spend while still growing revenue we also looked at kind of our
operating expense buckets you know where can we optimize our expenses can we grew our network
to get out of some pie releases from an SG&A standpoint not everyone is going into the office
anymore we work in a hybrid environment can we subly some of our space and then the final
lever for us a lot of times is headcount I think that's true for most companies and so we did a
pretty extensive benchmarking analysis within our industry to see where are we at from a headcount
perspective versus some of our peers and what does that look like even just versus the 50th
percentile of our benchmark not even best in class and we found that we were definitely behind
benchmark we had more headcount costs than a lot of our peers and a lot of that has to do with
lack of automation I think when you pull together you know most 50 acquisitions over a 15 year period
it can be tough to get all that data cleaned up and automated and have streamlined processes
and so that's something we took a hard look at and said okay well if we're going to get to these
benchmark targets we're going to need to make some investments in our systems and really upgrade
you know add automation and so we can get there it's I think you know going through budgeting
processes like that we're pulling together forecast and you don't get an answer you like and
you kind of have to go back to the business and say hey we need to pivot we really need to hone in
on you know these three things it's challenging and then it's even more challenging when you get to
that last headcount lever you know no one wants to do it it's always hard conversations but a lot
of businesses have pulled that lever in the last 12 months we've seen a lot of layoffs intact and
even other industries and so ultimately we we did end up doing some small headcount actions
as part of you know getting to our budget that year and setting us up to be in a place of good
liquidity and you know going concern a place where we have enough capital to invest for growth
and things like that yeah I think a lot of our audience is locked in and they can 100% relate to
what you're talking about here and it's making me think about so you started out in audit and then
operational accounting and thinking about what you dealt with there versus coming to FPNA and what
you're looking at here so you know and when you recount this you know a lot of it sounds like it
could be very stressful and certainly audit and accounting can as well but to make that move what
was it about FPNA that made you drawn to the finance side and how would you describe it to someone
you know who didn't know what FPNA is yeah I think on the accounting side you know it was a really
great foundation for my career and for any career in finance you all learning how to read financial
statements how they all relate together learning kind of the ins and outs of the business from an
operational standpoint understanding how decisions you make you know what what is the actual impact
on your financial statements how does that hit the P&L or the balance sheet or your cash flow I
think what was exciting for me the movement to finance was you kind of get to be more forward
looking a lot of times accounting you're accounting for things that have already happened right I
think my favorite part about being in finances being able to kind of look at what's coming next
and advise the business on what you're seeing being able to communicate with the leadership team
understanding what they want to do strategically versus you know what you think financially the
business will look like a year or two years from now and kind of working together a better decision
making for the business today to set ourselves up well for the future that's definitely what drew me
into finance was kind of the more forward looking aspect of it I think if I was going to explain
an FPNA role to someone who didn't know what that was I would I would kind of lean that way and say
yeah we work with business leaders to predict you know what the financials of the business will look
like and this really the success of the business will look like based on leadership's strategy
and their goals and we we set financial targets for them based on what that strategy and those goals
are and we'll measure them on a monthly quarterly annual basis and let them know you know how they're
doing against those targets how close are they getting to you know what they've defined this success
and if there's gaps we help them close those gaps if there's a shift in the strategy because of
something that happened internally or or externally in the market has shifted you know what pivots
do the does the business need to make in order to set new targets or new goals and really just
aligning the financial targets to really what the business wants to achieve and I guess you know
thinking about and hearing you describe the way your your team is set up and thinking about the
the data that you have and that you're already using predictive analytics telecom companies are
generally going to be a little more advanced than a lot of other companies I think it's just because
of the the tech nature of it but maybe backing up and as you talked industry peers and maybe these
are as they relate to you but I think about where we are right now with kind of at the cusp of
whatever is going to come next with generative AI but even you know you know AI in general has been
used for years in machine learning and you know predictive analytics and and BI and all that but
we're kind of on the cusp of another shift looking at whether it's there or in general what's your
sense of what the biggest challenges are right now for just fpna as a field maybe the biggest
challenges and opportunities as we're sitting at this right on the brink of I mean obviously we've
had all kinds of tools that have increased automation over the years and we've been able to do more
and more with data but it feels like that's about to shift even more what do you say in what are
your thoughts about where we are today and where fpna baby headed in the near future yeah that's
a really good question I think right now it's a little bit hard to tell but we definitely are
trying to keep right thumb on the pulse we've kicked off initiatives with our internal IT team to
help us from a finance perspective with predictive warning signs or you know early warning signs
from a finance perspective so understanding you know what some of our price times quantity drivers are
like what really drives the outcomes of our business what drives a stance or revenue and
understanding earlier in the month you know ahead of accounting close or anything else what can we
expect our cost to be one example of that it's an account for us it's hard to forecast its emergency
repair on our network that's driven by you know there's a lot of construction which there's been a
ton of investment and government funding for infrastructure around the US and when there's
crews you know repairing roads we're digging up sidewalks a lot of times they'll inadvertently
cut our network and we have to go out and repair it and that's expensive sometimes we can go
after the person who cut it but a lot of times you know it could even be like a squirrel chew on
a telephone pole and so we measure that by number of events versus cost per event and in the winter
months it tends to be slower because there's less construction there's less cuts on the network
and the summer tends to spike and it's a big deal for us and so something we're trying to do is
implement you know how many events that we have on the network what do we think the cost per
event is some can be more expensive than others it's it's a really wide range but getting insight
into that you know on a daily or weekly basis versus waiting for after counting close to understand
what that expense looks like it's really helpful for us the sooner we can identify that the sooner
we can implement initiatives to mitigate that spend like one would be internally locating our
network for companies so you know people usually you're supposed to call before you dig tell them
where our network is so they don't hit it that's just one very specific small example but going
really deep into our financials understanding what the drivers are so we can work with IT and say
hey can you implement a model for us that will pull from these three data sources and then tell
us what we can expect from a finance standpoint whenever we want you know pull up a dashboard and
see where we're at and all these data sources you're talking about there are internal data yeah
primarily internal data network downtime you know all of our network status is in a different
system than maybe our the system where people are putting in PRs or reporting events things like
that so I always think about external factors so you you know you can you can track your historical
information and you know things like construction and seasonality around that and I think of as
machine learning models are able to process a lot more than what we used to do in Excel do you ever
look at factoring in external data whether it's you know new construction or macroeconomic factors
do you try to incorporate any of that and any of your models yeah that's definitely something we do
more on the pricing side right now anyways we do look at some of those macro factors on the
expense side there's no specific data source that we've been using to pull from it's kind of an
assumption that we make internally but AI is really interesting not only our businesses trying
to figure out how to use and harness that but it's actually a huge opportunity for you to think
about AI you've seen the proof points and Nvidia the chips you know their results have just
skyrocketed and then well you need a data center to the house those chips right and so you see
all the hyper scalars building these huge data center campuses across the United States but if
you build a data center and it's not connected to a network it's just a box with a bunch of
stuff in it and so that's where Zio comes in to provide that network connectivity and the bandwidth
for the hyper scalars to actually transmit the data between their data center campuses corporate
headquarters and the amount of data that's used to run these AI models and machine learning models
isn't all housed in one data center one data center campus right so data is going between multiple
data center campuses multiple sources and so all of that rise on a fiber network essentially
and so we're actually trying to figure out how do we capture these kind of macro tailwinds of AI
from a top line standpoint and Zio you know how do we how do we capture that demand and we're
definitely seeing it in discussions that we're having with some of the hyper scalars if you think
about a fiber network you you have fiber strands and maybe back in the day a customer wanted
one fiber pair or four fiber pairs now some of these customers who move tons of data around
they want 144 fiber pairs it's just insane how much that's grown how much more data people are
transmitting it's just an indicator where they think this is going to go and how much data they
think they're going to need to be moving between data centers and campuses it's funny as you say
that I'm picturing like the Moore's Law the scale of of you know the growth and compute power and
that picture as you're talking about the increased network traffic around AI in these data centers
I feel like you're actually seeing like a chart that is showing the growth of AI with that and
thinking about you know everything you've said about what Zio's doing and Telecom tends to be
technology leaders in their in their reporting and what they're doing back office because
certainly they've been using machine learning for years for traffic routing and all that and that
sort of can bleed over into the other departments into into financial modeling and all that so I
imagine you guys are probably talking a lot about Gen AI as I guess we all are how are you guys
in finance using AI today and are you doing any sort of experimentation how are you looking at
generative AI and how it made change what you do in FBNA yeah it's something we're definitely
looking at you know how can we get more accurate how can we be faster in our reporting I think
you know we have analysts that do work that a machine could learn how to do or we could you know
build an AI model and teach you how to do that and that's something that we want to do I mean as
an analyst it gives you actually a lot more opportunities to to figure out what's really going
out of the business anything where an analyst is you know just collecting data massaging the data
and then basically reporting the weather we would rather have a machine doing that and use that
that analyst to actually look at what's happening you know go talk to the business and figure out
how to make the business better how can we do something better how can we price these services
better how can we mitigate churn how can we eliminate our costs or shrink our technical space
in this market there's a lot that we can do to kind of use ML and AI to give us the weather
reporting we spend so much time doing that manually how can we teach a model to do that so that we
can go take what we learn from it and actually implement changes in the business to make us more
efficient that's great I mean I feel like we could talk you know FPNA and modeling all day but we do
like to share a little bit about the personal side with our guests and you know as FPNA professionals
talk about what our interests are and kind of what we're doing I'd like to spend the last few
minutes talking a bit about sort of your career trajectory and some of your other interests and I
know thinking about all the changes that are going on right now and seeing how you've moved you know
from audit to the operational accounting now to FPNA what's top of mind for you right now for your
career what are you trying to learn or master at this point yeah it's a good question I think
right now something that's very top of mind for me and something that I haven't had a ton of
experience in historically is capital markets here at Zaya we have nine billion dollars of public debt
and some of that you know mature in the next several years and so we're starting to look at
refinancing strategies there's been a couple fiber companies primarily fiber of the home companies
that have gone out and done an asset backstri organization in order to raise debt which is kind of
newer in our industry companies like Zaya you know we're not fiber to the home but haven't really
done it so we're figuring out you know can we go raise ABS debt to replace or or pay down some of
our traditional high yield debt can we refinance some of our capital stack doing that and so I think
that's been a good experience for me talking to banks and I'm learning about that side of finance
it's a little bit different than traditional FPNA has been really exciting and I think the other
thing too is just being in the position that I'm in now kind of taking on mentors honestly and
working with younger professionals in their career who have questions about you know what can
their trajectory look like what experiences should they be getting in order to be successful or
meet their goals and I think being a female and in a finance leadership position is you know a little
bit unique but I think being here being a role model mentoring young women in finance and young men
in finance who want to get to the next level is definitely something that's top of fine for me as well
that's great you're quite explicit as many of our list of listeners are about wanting to be a
CFO what is your approach to realizing this goal and that you talked about the mentoring and about
learning more what else are you doing in this vein I'm definitely not shy about it I've when I
started my career you know when people would ask you what do you want to be in five or ten years
you know what's your what are your career goals I would always just say CFO I kind of throw it out
there it's obviously a big goal and really in my career I didn't have a ton of experience but
it was something to help guide me through each role that I took on I know a lot of CFOs started out
in public accounting and so you know I thought what a good place to start and I think just letting
people know that there was a goal out there kept me kind of in the back of their mind as roles
start to open up you know I took that operational accounting role but at the time I told my CFO
who was my boss I said yeah I'll do this role but I actually want to be in finance you know I don't
want to be an accounting forever and sure enough about a year later something opened up finance and
he said oh I already know Tori wants to do that so I'm going to ask her if she wants this role and
so just having that out there keeps you top of mind for other people and for advocates or other
people in the business who are making those decisions you know if I would have never said that and
I kind of held it close to the chest that finance role would have opened and maybe he would have
never thought of me because he didn't know I wanted to be in finance and so I think it's really
important even if the goal seems you know so far out there and maybe even on the table at the time
you don't need to be shy about it if you don't get there in the end that's okay too if you change
your mind along the way but I think what's important for me now is working with my leadership team or
other mentors that I have to figure out where are the gaps in my experience and what do I need to
kind of get to that next level or get to this CFO level and I think you know for me six months ago
it was that capital market markets experience and so now that you know it's fortuitous that
Zio is coming up we need to start thinking about refinancing our debt maturities I'm now getting
that opportunity to work on that project and get some experience on the capital market side so I
think definitely voice you know what your goals are ask people you know where are my weak spots
and have them help you fill in those gaps too so hey I want to be in this project when this comes
up and really advocate for yourself to get there yeah and it sounds like I mean you've got you've
got a clear plan and you see the path and you're able to advocate very well for yourself and I know
you mentioned that you'd mentioned to a former boss about wanting to move into finance is there
someone is it is it that person is there someone in your career I know it could be a person or a
training program or a book or something that has really had the biggest influence on your finance
career yeah I would say that boss has probably been one of my biggest mentors and advocates it
definitely helps to have someone within your organization that you can relate to you know that you
work well with who's in the room when you know bigger decisions are being made and can help get
you some of those bigger opportunities I've been part of other mentorship programs where I was
assigned a mentor and those were beneficial for me but I would say those people actually were
they didn't have the biggest impact on my career I think a lot of times those mentorship
relationships the ones that come naturally are the ones that work the best it's kind of hard just
to you know assign two people together at a company and go through the motions versus finding
someone that can really be your advocate and it's a two-way street right you know you gotta work hard
and keep the relationship going and help the mentor understand what you want to do and how they
can help you versus expecting someone to kind of just step into that role without really you know
understanding what you want to do and where you want to go so I think it's it's definitely a two-way
street there to kind of build those mentorship relationships and have advocates for you throughout
your career okay as we wind down this is always my favorite question whether I'm hosting or a guest
on a podcast because you you hear some interesting things along the ways so what is something that
maybe not many people know about you something that we can't easily find online or that not on your
LinkedIn page yeah actually I'm a big golfer today I'm a one handicap I actually played at the
University of Denver I love playing golf I play most weekends when the weather's nice when I was
younger actually I went to a tournament it's called the women's western junior for anyone
follows women's golf a lot of the big names on LPGA had won that some point in their career
it's a match play tournament and I was invited to the tournament I went it's a play in a 36th
whole plan and they get seeded into a bracket it's a match play from there on out and I actually
you know I thought I would get out of the 36th whole play and I did I made it into the bracket system
but I didn't think I was gonna go very far if you keep winning it's two matches a day and the
tournament if you get to last match it ends up being like a six or seven day tournament well I only
brought enough clothes to get to like the fourth day and I kept winning my matches and so you know
I got to the end and I won my last match my dad was with me it was like in the middle of nowhere in
Indiana we had to drive like 40 minutes to the nearest sporting good store so I could get more
clothes because it was like a hundred degrees out and all my clothes that I'd worn were sweaty and
gross and you know they asked me at the end of tournament like so and so it was on the LPGA
tour she she comes into every tournament expecting to win was that your mindset this week and I said
actually no it wasn't I didn't bring enough clothes to think into the championship round so I
actually think you know golf has helped me a ton of in my career and that specifically that
moment in my junior golf career really was a mindset shift for me that the sky's the limit and it
really blew the lid off like in all aspects of my life I think my golf game got a little better
but also my grades in school got better the goals that I set for myself were just a little bit higher
and so that was a real turning point for me and I think it's you know my my new goal of CFO someday
it's helped me just as kind of a guide post and a mindset really keep working towards that and
knowing that the sky's the limit okay Tori now is the question we ask everyone think I know what
the answer is going to be just based on how many people have heard it answer this but you may
surprise me what is your favorite Excel function and why well I don't know if you've gotten this
one before but I would say my favorite Excel function is actually not an Excel function at all it's
how do we get it out of Excel and automated into a system that would be my favorite outcome but I
think if we need to go with the next cell function we have kind of an inside joke here on the
on the ZO finance team with the index match match if anyone wants to get into the ZO group
March Vannis brackets or any other kind of login games the password will be index match match
you know what I love to your answer because I'm constantly preaching about automation and
and getting data into the places where we can do the most with it so I actually really liked your
first answer a whole lot better but the reality is I feel like it'll be 50 years from now and
we'll still be using Excel you know it'll be because it's sort of the base foundation of all of
it but as much as you can move out of it and yeah so index match V look up is the other really
popular one and actually when I was a guest on this show last year or whenever it was I couldn't
get beyond V look up it's just I thought about what I but I guess if you're doing index match too
that's a pretty similar but I was just thinking about what am I most frequently doing in Excel so
well Tori this has been great I've really appreciated you sharing your time and and being on and
wish you the best of luck and thank you for being on FBNA today yeah thank you for having me it's
running a great conversation
