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And now, onto the show.
From Data Rails, this is FP&A Today.
Welcome to FP&A Today.
I'm your host, Glenn Hopper.
My guest today is David Minella, a growth executive who spent more than two decades scaling companies from startups to market leaders.
He was CRO at Ideally, where he helped grow the business past 100 million in revenue before it was acquired by Groupon.
He then took the CRO role at Fiverr, owning the top-line PL through a critical growth phase ahead of the company's IPO.
Today, he's co-founder of Violet Growth, a platform that helps CEOs, CMOs and CFOs get on the same page about where their next growth dollar should go.
Now, you might be wondering why we've got a marketing and growth guy on an FP&A Today podcast.
Here's why.
David has spent his entire career on the other side of the budget conversation from finance teams.
He's the person asking for spend defending ROI and trying to get the CFO's office to trust the numbers coming out of marketing.
He's watched that relationship work brilliantly and watched it fall apart.
So today we're flipping the script.
We're gonna find out what a revenue leader actually needs from FPA, where finance teams help and where they get in the way, and how both sides can build something that drives better growth decisions.
Whether you're partnering with a CMO right now or trying to figure out how to evaluate marketing spend, this one's for you.
David, welcome to the show.
Nice to see you.
I'm glad to be here.
This is great.
You know we're obviously the show is for FPA, but I really like talking to other departments and consultants and people that have a slightly different lens, because I think sometimes in finance we can get stuck in our lane and we're just trucking down our same path.
And I mean, I know the whole thing with business partnering.
We're supposed to get out of that mode, but really,
Sometimes you just you're going to default to the chain of command that you roll up to, I think.
So I'm super excited to have you on it and dive into this.
Same here.
So you spent your career in growth and marketing leadership and you started in audit.
I want to hear about that, too.
But could you walk us through? through your journey.
I mean you were doing direct mail in the late nineties and then scaling companies like ideally and Fiverr.
I mean, you've had a kind of a remarkable career.
So if you could walk us through that, just to kind of get everybody to understand where you're coming from.
Yeah, I started in... So I did my business school.
I don't come from Brooklyn.
I come from west of Brooklyn, a country called France.
And in France, after business school and a Master of History, I started in an audit firm called Coopers & Librants.
And if you put one and one together...
You know now that I've been doing that for much more than 20 years.
Okay, yeah.
So Coopers & Library, an auditing firm, then decided to take a break, went to the U.S., I had a great internship in a direct mail company, a direct-to-consumer company selling luxury goods through catalog in the late 90s.
And what I discovered there is that direct marketing was a number game.
Marketing was about understanding both the cost of acquiring a customer and the lifetime value of customer.
At that time, if you remember, when you send a direct mail piece, your cost of sending a piece, which was luxury, so it was three four, five dollars a piece to send out to prospect, even before acquiring the customer.
So very early on the marketing problem for me became a financial problem.
So that's how i attacked my journey that i'm still uh, that i'm still on.
So auditing direct marketing.
Then internet came along, started to be a CMO, CRO of venture-backed growth companies.
You know, the claim of fame of IDD is that we landed the number one spot in the Inc.
500 growth list.
I don't remember the year.
It's early 2010, something like this.
And why?
Because we were able to deploy marketing dollars in a very efficient way.
And then, you know, at IDD I both ran, which was very interesting, both the marketing team and the merchandising team.
So not only deploying the dollars to acquire the customer, but deploying the dollars to acquire the goods to sell to the customer.
So very strong learning school when it comes to margin and the importance of margin in your PL and the importance in discounting in your LTV, in your lifetime value behavior and what it can do to your PL but more importantly, to your balance sheet.
I will not talk about inventory.
As my career progressed, I became allergic to concepts.
I became allergic to paper because I did too much of direct mail.
I became allergic to inventory line because I spent too much time in retail.
And then I decided to go to Fiverr, which was a digital first product.
It's a freelance marketplace from the moment where we were in series A to right before they went public.
And all of that knowledge and experience I decided to bring it in building my own company Exactius, and then Violet Growth, where we now bring that depth of knowledge to companies that we work with.
I think that that's really interesting and I think it's valuable because it gives you a different perspective and way to think about it.
But the fact that you had PL responsibility for the top line.
I think that's not 100 common in companies.
And I'm wondering how did owning that PL, did it change the way that you thought about spending and forecasting?
I mean, when you're looking at not just...
This is our top line, but you're looking at the cost side as well?
Yeah.
So I'll say something that maybe will resonate with you which is on the other side, which is marketing is a capital allocation problem.
It's simple.
I'm putting $1 in.
I need to get a certain amount of dollars out.
Marketing is an investment.
It's not a cost.
If we agree on those premises you as a financial leader and me as a growth leader then we need to do our part to measure marketing correctly.
Then the problem becomes marketing is not.
What I see in my PL every month is what did I invest today and what I get tomorrow?
It means that every part needs to upgrade.
The marketing team needs to be able to speak your language.
Spending a dollar in marketing is no different than spending a dollar in infrastructure, in real estate, in a forklift that you might need for your warehouse.
You need a return.
You need a return on a specific schedule and you need a percentage of returns on that schedule.
Treat that dollars on marketing that way.
Marketing needs to understand it.
Don't start with campaign.
Start with a financial goal.
On the other hand, the financial team needs to agree and act on that premise.
Help me set up the goal.
Help me understand what kind of return I need to deliver to you, because if I do, then you'll give me more money.
What you don't want is in many companies sometimes the CFO has more power than the CMO to deploy the growth of the company.
Work together.
Why?
Because they have the budget and they have the power of the purse.
Work together, and together for the companies that are the most successful is not necessarily because they have a better stack.
It's not necessarily because you have a marketing genius or a CFO genius.
It's because all of those members work well together, have a clear financial goal.
Bring that financial goal into a business goal and from that business goal, execute towards that goal and go seek the next incremental dollar.
I could see CFOs loving you, because that is exactly crossing the table and completely understanding the way that we look at it.
And a lot of times from the finance office it can feel like are you just trying to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks?
But if you take...
Instead, if you take that analytical approach and look at it as it's an investment, you have to have a certain percentage of return.
What's your opportunity cost or what?
Yes, that's right.
And this is where there is a responsibility from the finance team.
As well.
There is a responsibility to agree on that premise and to work together on achieving that alignment.
I think a lot of the finance team are thinking that way.
But many authors do not.
It's the bridge between seeing it from a cost one investment, even from a finance team perspective.
It's a hard bridge, right?
It's a change of behavior.
And it's even in the label.
If you call it marketing spend versus marketing investment, then it feels it feels completely different.
That's exactly right.
And those require everyone to learn what's on the other side, right?
Understanding revenue is only a lagging indicator to cohort behavior from your customers, right?
So you can look at it in a flat way view.
Which is what was my average order value, my number of items per order, my average unit retail, and all of this will give me my number of orders and my revenue.
This is a flat way to look at it, but AOV, average order value, is also the product of a behavior of a cohort and a lot of cohorts stacking out on top of each other.
And the job of marketing is being able to understand the behavior of those goals, impact them.
So, in turn, the changes you might make on acquisition or monetization or engagement engagement with your CRM team, monetization with your product team, investment with your acquisition team result into the mix that the team, the management team, thinks it's the right mix for the business and where the CFO sets the goal for those particular targets.
I love that approach.
And I'm thinking now to something else that you said I think it was something you put on LinkedIn, but where CEOs and CMOs speak different languages when it comes to data.
And I'm wondering I know that you talk a lot there, But maybe even a third language is that finance team, the FPA team?
So where does that fit into the conversation?
And what role do finance teams play in?
Either They can bridge that gap or they can be a wedge and widen that gap.
So when you look at how CMOs and CEOs talk, and then finance interjecting itself in that, what does
What is that dynamic like and what should we be aspiring to?
Yeah, it's a typical situation where you arrive at the board meeting and slide one is, you know, a marketing manager presenting the result of marketing where the campaign shows incredible results.
And slide three, when we look at the financial, Our variable contribution margins are down.
We are not as good as we thought we would be on the year over year.
We have work to do.
And that disconnect that happens how many times you prepare for a board deck and that it's clear as day if you have, If you prepared it well, you catch it before the board meeting.
If you do not, you catch it during the meeting.
But I think the way we try to resolve that is everyone to agree on the framework that's common.
So one is CMOs needs to erase the campaign level reporting.
No one cares in the board of a cost per thousand impression about CTR click-through rate maybe leads visitations.
Those are tertiary metrics in your organization.
You need to know your revenue, ideally your margin, and you need to know your investments.
And I think for the CFO and for the finance team is to understand that an investment of today doesn't necessarily have a return on today.
And to simply adjust to aligning on that investment. time to impact.
And every businesses are different.
A financing might decide that an investment of today should have a return today.
Great.
If it's the case, maybe your growth opportunities are limited to that constraint.
But you can also build a plan where you just look at the investment and the time to impact.
And as soon as you agree on those principles, I believe You can close that wedge between the different executives in the room.
You can build a forecasting model that will serve everyone and KPIs.
That will be helpful to track months in and months out to make sure that your business is on track.
And I think that that KPI part is important because I think about that meeting.
So first off, looking at campaign economics versus what actually hits the P&L.
But even from the base KPI level, from a marketing campaign, it's like well, this was our cost per thousand impressions and this was our cost per click.
And as the finance guy sitting over there and I see, your cost per click was seven dollars or you know some crazy number or whatever.
And it's like you're just throwing our money out the out the door.
And I don't you know, I don't.
But then what does that translate to?
How many people click end up converting.
And so I think you can have a successful marketing campaign like look how many clicks we got, look how many impressions we got, but how many conversions was that?
And then talking about these successful marketing campaigns.
And then if I'm finance, I'm over here looking at my income statement and I'm trying to tie it the revenue that came from this campaign back to it.
I'm having a heart attack because i'm like i don't, i don't see where the results were for that and i know it's getting leads and it could be, you know, down the line there could be delay in it, but it is it's we really are.
We're seeing two different realities a lot of times.
That's exactly right.
And I think, if you look at the specific KPI, if you agree on number of new customers, number of existing customers, having the right investment level, your cost of acquisition, your cost of retention, those are already a good thing.
Move forward.
The next one would be, can I put my lifetime value on it?
How much that customer will be worth in 12 months?
I didn't bring 12,000 customers this month.
I brought $12 million for the next 12 months.
Oh, and I spent $2 million doing it at a 50% margin.
So now we are talking because...
If you start to elevate that conversation, your forecasting behavior might also change completely.
There is no reason why...
As a FP&A analyst, and depending on the type of business you are in, obviously, it depends, right?
But let's take a complex business.
What's the most represented industry, Glenn, in FP&A today?
Of our listeners, we're talking cost per click.
Let's stay on e-commerce just to keep it simple, something everybody can relate to.
Let's say you have e-commerce, you're a retail organization.
Ideally, you have three forecasts.
You have a forecast that comes from the finance team, of course, right, using their methodology.
You might have a forecast that comes from the merchandising team right at the product level, at the division level, at the category level.
And you are going to have a forecast that should come from the marketing team, that comes from your cohorts.
Behavior based on lifetime value behavior.
And if you do those three things, then suddenly the finance team is equipped with the strategic view finance, The product view merchandising, the customer view.
And how do we reconcile those three together to understand where the gaps are?
And I think there's another wrinkle of complexity, when you were at Fiverr thinking about the marketplace, where you have to have the people that want the service and the people that are providing it.
I mean, I think the KPIs around that, how different was that?
And how tough was that to figure out who are we going after here?
Are we going after the doers or the buyers?
I love that.
You know, when I discovered the world of marketplaces, for me, it was e-commerce square.
It means that everything was doubled.
And the KPI trees and hierarchy became one for the seller side or supplier side and one for the buyer side.
So that was a discovery.
The way we sold for that was to being very clear as to which side does what.
And if you look at your business from a engagement monetization, acquisition lens, We made decisions.
And I think it's very hard.
For example, in acquisition, the way to drive volume was about the buyers.
Because there was an effect, a marketplace effect, where the more buyers we got, we got more sellers, more sellers, more buyers.
But we decided to focus on more buyers, also because it's easier to track a unit economics of acquisition and somebody bought something.
If you need to do that on the seller side, more complex.
So the buyer.
But retention and monetization is really the seller side.
Retention and monetization is going to come from the people selling the product, which is no different than e-commerce.
In many ways, I built one of the takeaways of those 20 plus years of experience where the product and the brand are really strategic levers right.
Because it's about the engagement and the monetization.
Growth is a more tactical lever. you can bring more people into that engine.
But first you need to have a great engine.
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So I'm trying to remember timing on Fiverr.
You were there for three and a half or so years.
So I think about those early stage where it's growth at all costs.
And then suddenly when you're preparing for an IPO, things change a little bit.
You've got to streamline the financials and all that.
And I'm wondering the relationship how that changed from sort of the early days where it's just we're deploying capital, we're trying to build out the marketplace and then suddenly We need to get controls in place.
We need to, you know, everything gets, tightens up a lot.
How did the relationship between the growth team and finance team evolve as those stakes got higher and as you went through all the processes for the IPO?
One is I give a shout out to Ofer Katz, which was a CFO when I was there and was there also after I left and became president.
Amazing.
One of the best CFO I've worked with.
So I miss your offer.
That's one.
That's the most important message.
But what you said is, you know, it's true for going public, but it's also true when you raise money.
The same unit, economics focus is really, really critical to the success of the business or to have a successful raise with the next set of investors.
So we set up that language very, very early on.
And the language we set up was really around.
We started with a payback period as a unifying component of the forecast forecast for finance growth and as an operating North Star right.
So the time to get our money back.
And, depending on the stage of where you are, I would get a call from the CFO on quarter one saying I'm going to give you more runway.
Another quarter, he might say, no, I'm going to give you a stricter one way.
Why?
Because he's aware of the capital constraints that are happening or the capital availability that he wants to seek, or the strategic imperative of the company to show growth or profitability.
So the context conversation would be that together.
And the takeaway would be a very simple time to be profitable on each of those cohorts.
So that's what we did.
And for me, that's what an earlier stage company would do.
As you start to spend more and more money, the problem is not the payback period.
It's not optimizing for the first X months.
As you scale as a late-stage company, or you could call it mid-sized businesses and enterprise, I would say then you look at your long-term profit.
And really what you want to deliver is a 12-month or 24-month target that hits the capital constraints that you are under.
So if you are a private equity-backed company, you have a very clear timeline as to how long it will take.
What is the return on capital timeline that you need to deliver to satisfy your board?
This becomes really a critical data point to set up the right goal and to shift your operating matrix, maybe not to a payback period but to an LTV, lifetime value and the cost of acquisition view at a specific at 18 months, at 24 months, at 22 months.
And I believe one of the things which is important is that ratio is good, but there is one thing I learned in my merchandising days is that you don't bring the percentage to the bank.
You can have a great margin, but if the margin is too high, that's not what's going to bring to the bank.
You bring your dollars to the bank, right?
Another way to do it is really looking at that ratio as an operating matrix.
But really what matters is how much life camp value dollar did I bring this month minus?
How much cost?
Because what we all care about is not the percentage, it's the sheer volume of net profit you will deliver in 24 months from now, based on what you do.
And in order to deliver that, you build a growth system to measure, track, improve those metrics.
As just saying all this, it's given me flashbacks to when I was working as a CFO.
It was for private equity-backed companies.
And I'm picturing now when you make the model, you know, okay, the money came in.
This is what our target is.
We have to have sort of an exit timeline here.
This is the growth rate we need to hit.
You know, you get your actuals and then you start doing your modeling out to say okay, we need to grow.
Our, you know, compound annual growth rate needs to be this.
And you start penciling it in and you say well, last year we spent this much on marketing and it was this percentage of revenue.
And you kind of... build that out and you say, well, but we need to bump it up.
Can we just bump marketing spend by this?
And you start doing this sort of top-down modeling and then you try to shoehorn.
I mean this is a default and I know I mean that's hopefully not the way most operators are budgeting, but I'll tell you from the PE side that's what they're looking at.
They're like, you need to hold your costs steady or have it all be in lockstep as it goes up.
So I think you get this top-down sort of pushing of.
You know you need to figure out how to maximize your marketing spend and reduce churn and whatever all the goals are that you have with that.
So then, by the time the budget numbers the first round of them even get to marketing, they've already been shaped.
So I'm wondering, being on the other side of the table, what that feels like, where I think I've just highlighted some mistakes.
Yeah.
It feels like, really?
And how many CMOs I've talked to who are in that situation, which is, really?
And I really think, and this is, look, the simplicity...
For me, the most successful relationship, the most successful CFO and FPA leaders I've worked with, came across by being very simple.
And I love that.
And I learn from it.
That simplicity, what you said, you know, you don't, that's not rocket science.
I'll take some numbers.
I'll see, I know what the market wants.
I know what the board wants.
This is what we need to deliver.
And let's, this is a goal setting.
Ideally, That paper napkin exercise, it's done with the CMO in the room, not only the CEO and CFO.
Ideally this is a conversation because, not because you need to be in the room, not because, just because they might have an idea say hey, what if we were to do it that way?
I think the CMO is trained the right CMO are trained to understand the long-term impact and the curve of investment for every dollar that are coming out.
If they are there, then they should be in that conversation, because you might create a lever you didn't think about by having that conversation with the CEO.
That would be my.
The only thing that should change is that, and if you build that trust in that moment, then when you operate, the difference between being there when this is decided and not being there, it's like you know, when you come home and the dinner, it's like somebody ordered for me, but can I order for myself?
I think this idea of being in there together and being seen as a growth agent would make A huge difference.
And when we implement that behavior with partners or company or in my personal experience as an executive, this is more fun and more effective.
So I have firsthand perspective of how that happens, where it gets just pushed, everything jammed from the top down.
But I'm wondering if, instead of just getting that number and say this is a situation where it's not collaborative, if you know the metrics that you're going to look at from the go-to-market side of okay, this is our current base, this is our growth rate, this is our marketing spend, this is our lifetime value.
All the factors that you look at in marketing and said Build a plan that gets us to this revenue run rate by X date or whatever.
I mean yes, collaboration is good, but do you feel like if marketing just did that on their own, that they would be able to come up with a clearer plan?
Where you've got your own metrics, you're not factoring in all the other metrics non-marketing things that impact at the?
You know the cost to serve and things that come outside of you know once the customer is one and provisioned, and all that?
Is there, I guess, my long way of saying it is could there be an advantage to if you're coming to those collaborative meetings, if everybody gets the same goals to begin with, goes off, meets with their teams, comes up with a plan and then merges there?
Or do you think it all has to really come out together, with everybody sitting at the same table around wine?
So I tried a lot of forecasting mechanism, being the P&L.
I think you need an order of things, and it's good to have a sheriff, and the sheriff being the CFO.
I like it.
I think it's helpful.
You need somebody.
The CEO is doing something else.
Maybe CEO shows up after.
But the CFO needs to own that process.
They are responsible for the way to get there.
I think that you can count on a marketing team if you do it the right way.
So if a marketing team comes with campaign-level data conversion rates CTR AOV, visitation it's not helpful.
But if they come with number of new customer, lifetime value and lifetime value curve and output of my revenue, This is extremely useful.
Why?
Because everything is connected.
When you look at a customer cohort, everything is connected.
If you're the CFO or the FPA and say oh, I forgot to tell you we're going to increase our pricing by 200 basis points.
You could have promised that just before submitting, so my retention maybe is going to be a little bit lower.
Maybe my AOV is going to increase.
Great.
But you know what's going to happen is that your retention will go down.
My lifetime value might be, maybe it's a net positive impact, but maybe it's a net negative impact.
Let me look at the history to see what happened with the behavior of our customer in price elasticity.
Oh, wait a second.
No, I lost 300 basis points last time in retention.
You want to do it great.
Like, is it now a margin problem or is it a growth problem?
And now together we have a great conversation. about where to bring the company.
Are we going to do priority one or priority two?
And let's solve the problem now before it shows up in six months from now.
I love everything you're saying and it really is when people come with that sort of collaborative thing.
But I do.
I'm always curious on the show and I ask, and a lot of times people can't say, and without naming names or anything people love war stories because we've all got them.
The thing where okay, I might be in the wrong profession because I've just messed up so badly or something has gone so horribly wrong.
But I'm thinking about in your career.
Can you think back to any time you were at a company where there was a real disconnect between marketing data, financial reporting and the way that they communicated and how that led things awry?
Yeah, I tell you a very expensive mistake.
Like one of the reasons why I continue on that road, which was with iDeally.
IDeally was scaling extremely, extremely fast.
Top position in the Inc.
500.
Bring inventory at the same time, right?
We changed our model from consigned to paid in own inventory, which was in itself it was a bad move, but besides that, so it's also a bad move we did.
What we did is that, as you brought inventory in, we started to liquidate the inventory, which was a financial requirement and the right requirement and a merchandising need.
We started to decrease the prices.
As soon as you start to decrease the prices, you start to mess up with your perceived value of your offering.
So if your inventory cadence changes, we started to have that major, those major conversations, that in the room it would be the merchants pushing for discounts under the pressure of finance and marketing needed to execute those campaigns.
And the feeling was, are we doing a mistake?
Are we not doing it?
Like the feeling that we are really impacting the perception of the brand, the value of the brand and the perception of our products.
We realized the impact of those changes three months too late for better cohorts, where we started to see the retention going down.
And one of the takeaways on this was that if...
The entire team finance merchandising, marketing were looking at the same data, which is early signal of retention from those groups of customers which doesn't appear on the PL.
It doesn't, right?
It doesn't depend on your cash flow either.
Then we would have changed our behavior.
And I think one of my takeaways the marketing expense is as much as of a balance sheet builder than it is a PL item.
And it's a balance sheet builder.
Why?
Because it's a driver of your customer file value.
And the customer file value in a lot of companies is probably one of the most important assets that you have as a company.
So so this was a when you realize this and you realize that you were not quick enough to act on this we were in the early 2000 or mid 2010 it's a you're like I made a mistake.
But you made the mistake and you realized too late, because when the customer is gone to bring them back, good luck.
Yeah.
Look at the cost of keeping a customer versus getting a new one, versus getting someone back who's already decided they're gone.
That's the problem.
Yeah.
And, you know, I would say scaling too fast is a story.
You know it sounds odd to say that where now you can go from zero to 100 million in about 15 days.
Right, right.
But scaling too fast, you can get caught in this.
And those are board-level conversations.
And having the perspective of the customer cohort, the customer behavior which is a responsibility of the marketing leaders to bring, is really, really important.
We could probably sit down at a bar with a glass of wine or a beer and have a And tell war stories for three hours.
You know I want to pivot a little bit to the work you're doing with Violet Growth, because this is very similar to a lot of the FBA kind of work too.
And regular listeners to the show will probably.
I have a frequent horror story about the idea of data marts and the idea of a self-serve data mart where everybody it sounds brilliant.
Everybody can just go get their data, but you end up people are building their own dashboards, their own KPIs.
And then you go into that management meeting and everybody's presenting a different number.
But similar to that.
You've talked about the problem of every department having their own dashboard and their own definition of success.
And it's, we're all speaking different languages.
We're all measuring different things.
And so, as CFO, I always felt like, and created conflict from this too, but I always felt like well, I'm reporting the numbers, the financial numbers.
I should probably be the arbiter of which KPIs, not in a vacuum, but you know what I mean.
But so I would try to take the responsibility for that, just to try to get everybody on the same page.
I mean, from your experience, Whose job is it to fix that?
And how do you actually get marketing and finance to agree on a shared set of metrics?
I mean I picture everyone that we've talked about, or even pipeline, you know, coming in on the on the sales side, like getting everybody aligned on that and not having their own sheet of music that they're singing from.
It's funny what you're saying, because often when you enter a company or my experience has always been the data team should they report to the CFO or should they report to the CMO?
Yeah.
I know my stance.
I always wanted him.
I was like, please give me the data team.
But I'm sure the CMO, the same way.
It's like, you don't have big data.
You've got general ledger.
And you know and it's interesting because I went through this conversation and my take on this is that it depends where the company is in its growth stage.
I believe that the best guardian of a data team at scale, right, is the CFO.
In the long run, for sure.
But developing the KPI hierarchy, the leading indicator of success when you get started, when you are between the, I would say, I would even say the zero to 500 million dollars in revenue.
Sorry to be to extend that way, because Because you are going through different gates of growth for the business where your investment strategy might be different.
Your investment zero to 30, 30 to 100, 100 to 300 or 400.
At 100 million plus, or companies that are 100 200 million.
Some things that they are mature.
They are not mature.
Like to go to the 500 million or a billion.
You need the next layer of investment, the next layer of reporting, the next layer of measurements.
And all of those numbers stack up on your P&L and they become a big part of your expense slide.
In general, the way I like to solve it is that the marketing team is the one deploying the dollars and therefore they need to be empowered to have the system and develop the leading indicator of success to bring the return on investment that they have agreed upon with the CFO.
And for that, you need to enable them to do that.
It's not the CFO's responsibility to invest the dollars.
He's not the stockbroker behind the screen deciding where to invest.
The marketing team is.
The CMO is.
Maybe they do a good job and fantastic.
Maybe they do a terrible job and they should not be here.
But that's their job.
So, on this idea of whose responsibility, I think it really has to do with the stage of the business, i totally get that and i think that that would be a that's a fun debate, because it's that's a debate that i had often in real world environment.
But i do in the interest of time.
We've got a couple of closing questions that i'm going to ask in a couple of minutes, but i've got two more questions i really want to ask you and i hope this first one isn't too convoluted or vague, but I'm a marketer, so it's okay.
I can do this.
And my English is also, so it's okay.
I will go with computer.
Okay.
So we talk all the time about generative AI, machine learning, you know, just with a whole basket of AI, about how that's impacting financial planning, and we talk in our little vacuum here.
But I know marketing analytics, who I referenced earlier.
Marketing has a lot more data than finance does usually.
I mean, depending on what we have access to and all that.
But if you think about marketing data every transaction, every click through, every you know It truly is big data more.
But I'm wondering if there's ways that AI is helping marketing analytics right now.
If you're looking in the future and the types of reporting that's going in, the types of communication that are happening, see what I mean.
This is a convoluted question, but I'm looking for this magic rainbow of connecting the two that AI opening up things and letting us maybe shift focus as we automate things.
Are you seeing anything in AI that you're saying huh, I couldn't do this in marketing analytics just a couple of years ago and now I can't.
Oh, I could not do it two months ago, and now I can't, right?
Or one month ago, right?
So the answer is a big yes.
So today, what is still true is that you need a source of truth, right?
Either you are okay by connecting data sources that don't really talk to each other, but you have the layer to bring it together in a way that builds enough of a source of truth.
And you need to build a true source of truth.
So that's data engineering firepower, infrastructure of your data mark, infrastructure of your data warehouse, deciding the dimension and KPIs you need, which is more the enterprise grade of this right.
So I think you still need that as a foundation.
So maybe you go to route A, route B. The compression to insights went from months to minutes.
Insights become table stakes.
If you know what you are asking, maybe that's the only thing where asking the right questions.
And now I think the next level is insights to actions, which is how to make sure that that entire loop works well.
And AI is great for workflows, workflow management.
It's great for creative.
It's great for I think there was an anthropic test on the Meta account recently.
Like, all of that is correct.
I know Google and Meta use AI for their algorithm. but they spend someone else's money.
Right.
So I totally get why they do it.
I would not yet lean on AI to make the investment decision, at least not as a solo pilot.
For sure with a co-pilot that takes responsibility because you can spend a lot of money.
So I think this, so yes, it has transformed the analytics side.
It creates still a need for strong data foundations.
It collapsed the inside side.
And now I think it moves the edge to the speed of experimentation that you can do, based on now, the insight that you have right away.
And I see, at the same time, being able to bring a greater context into whether it's bringing more financial context into marketing decisions or marketing context into financial decisions.
When you can like, there's some of these new ERPs out there that actually, instead of just having the GL level data, you could actually drill down and get transaction like Stripe data directly within your ERP.
And when you're seeing that bigger context than it, you get another layer or more.
You know multiple, more layers of why, when you're, when you're doing that analysis and you can ask why and when, you can see across both universes.
That's that's going to unlock a lot of potential in the future.
Oh, totally.
And this is when the data team can stay in finance.
Yeah.
Well, there you go.
Okay, well, we're getting close to the end of time here.
So I know you're not a regular listener of the show.
You confessed that before, but I'll give you a pass since you don't work in FP&A.
But on every episode, we have two questions that we ask at the end.
And the first one, and I'll see if you have an answer on this.
If you don't have an answer, I'll have a follow-up question to it.
But the first one is, What is something that not many people know about you?
Something that's not on your social media or LinkedIn profile?
What people don't know?
I mean, there's so much they don't know about me.
Look, here we go.
So which is, you know, the fact that I was an auditor at Coopers and Library.
There you go.
And so here was my follow-up question was going to be.
You mentioned it earlier and I saw it on your LinkedIn.
I love the combination of an MBA in corporate finance and a master's in European history.
I'm wondering, is there any way that those two lenses shape how you approach business and life?
You know maybe maybe, which is, I strongly believe, that the history repeats itself, and it repeats itself because of human behavior.
You know when you lose great generations and you feel these days we are in this period of losing great people around us.
We are losing human memory.
And it's not because we have access to all the information we now have that we get smarter as humans.
We get it from the people that are around us and remind us what to do. and what not to do.
And I really believe that the world history is so much defined by the previous generation and the previous two generations and the previous two generations three, four generations right.
But when those are gone, you don't know how to work for the future.
And I think data, all of this is a little bit the same thing.
Like your predictive LTV is only as good as what happened in the last two or three years.
Your financial forecast is only as good as... my track record in the last eight quarters.
We are all defined by what came before us.
And being a student of history I think was always a good, I think has maybe helped me, or I don't know if it's.
I was interested in history because I strongly believed in that, or the other way around.
Somewhere behind me is a copy of the book The Fourth Turning which, when you mentioned four generations, I thought oh, you know.
I know academics could have problems with it for a lot of things, but it made a lot of sense to me though, the repetition of it.
So, yeah, I love that.
And I think that studying history, whether it is in life and what we're doing in the world or what we're doing in our companies, goes a long way.
So, yeah, so that's great.
And really our fate as citizens, and it's you know we're in a hot place today compared to where it was 10 years ago, let's say, or at least in the Western side.
Our fate is really defined by a couple of people.
And decisions.
Okay, last question.
And this is going to come out of left field for you.
But Data Rails, big on Excel.
And so we ask every guest, what is your favorite Excel function and why?
Oh, I think I don't remember which one we how it's called, but it's the one where you can do the scenarios, the table.
Oh, like goal seek or?
Not goal seek.
The one where you can do four entries through columns, five entries through rows, and it can give the output.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
I know.
Yeah.
So I'm drawing a blank too because, as I was a CFO for 15 years and you don't do a lot of modeling as a CFO, but I know exactly what you're talking about
I just cannot remember it.
I hadn't even thought about that function in a while.
That was great.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think for me, you know, I used it a lot.
And I remember it because until very recently, it was not available through Google Sheet.
And I use a lot of Google Sheet as well.
Yeah, it's driving me crazy.
I'm sure there are listeners who are just rolling their eyes like this Glenn guy.
He's hosting FP&A today.
I'll tell you.
So the data tables in the what-if scenario analysis.
That's my favorite one.
Okay.
Uh, last question before I let you go how um, how can our listeners connect with you and learn more about your work and learn about valid growth?
And exactee, and and and uh follow your uh your your, your thinking.
That's great.
Yes.
Follow me on LinkedIn.
I'm there.
I'm trying to talk.
I talk a lot about how finance and marketing should work together.
So a lot of good content there.
And then you can also find me at exactee.us.
Perfect.
Well David, really appreciate you coming on the show and being a good sport, coming to the other side of the table and sharing your insights and wisdom.
I really, really enjoyed hearing your thoughts.
Yeah, I appreciate you having me and see you around.
See you at the bar.
