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And now, onto the show.
From Data Reels, this is FPA Today.
Welcome to FPA Today.
I'm your host, Glenn Hopper.
And today, I'm thrilled to welcome Anna Talarico, CEO of Corporate Finance Institute and Mac Abacus.
Anna is a seasoned entrepreneur and investor with over two decades of experience leading high growth startups across finance, education, and software.
Known for her expertise in go -to -market strategies, people development, and building positive organizational cultures, Anna is passionate about leveraging technology to democratize education.
At CFI, she's driving the mission to deliver world -class financial education to professionals around the globe, and as leadership and vision have positioned her as a key voice in transforming how finance professionals upskill and grow.
Anna, welcome to the show.
Glenn, thank you so much for having me.
I'm such a big fan of the podcast and of your work.
I mean, you know, I gobble everything up that you write and your courses and your work, so I'm excited to be here and thanks for having me.
So thanks so much. And I love how much you and I have gotten to talk lately because I think, you know, when we first talked well before we knew each other, I went and got the FMVA certification myself.
So I'm a long -time fan of CFI, so excited to finally have you on the show.
I love it. And I have to use this moment then to share the story of how we got first connected.
I was looking at an AI panel, thinking about attending it.
I was looking at who's speaking.
You were speaking on the panel, and I said, wow, here's this AI and finance expert.
And he's in my home state of Tennessee.
That's really random.
So I just reached out to connect with you and then you said, wait, I've got the FMVA from CFI.
So that was very serendipitous and I did start a great friendship and relationship.
That's great. And I'm going to say one thing on the FMVA because we, you know, all of our listeners, you know, there's all kinds of certifications out there.
When I went and got the certification, I'd already been a CFO for over a decade.
And for me, it was, I came up through the FPNA ranks.
And for me, when I was early in my career, I sort of prided myself on how, as we all do it and how well we can maneuver around Excel and all the stuff we could do.
And I realized the longer I'd been the CFO, the more I'd been removed from it.
And I was so excited to dive back in.
And I loved the way that the material was presented and getting back deep in it.
And it made me feel like, all right, I got hands -on experience again.
I can get back into these spreadsheets.
So it was really, really enjoyed doing that certifications.
Thank you. And, you know, I love all of our members, but I will say my favorite stories are the CFOs that come and take the FMBA because they're the unlikely, right?
You've been sitting in the seat, you've been having a successful career.
But I think it just shows everybody's got new skills to develop or brush up on.
And so those are always my favorite stories.
So I guess let's start with Corporate Finance Institute with the core mission of the organization and how it's evolved to meet today's finance professionals.
And we talked a little bit, before we came on about Excel is changing and sort of the technology that we're using, but kind of let's go back to the basics here though with CFOs core mission.
Yeah. So we were founded in 2016 with this core mission originally that anyone could be a world class financial analyst.
So we were really just focused on analysts and this idea of democratizing access to world class training historically in finance, you know, firms that were hiring were providing all the training.
And that's still done today on Wall Street and everything, obviously, you get the role and you go through training.
And one of our co -founders had been doing that training with, you know, all of the largest banks and Wall Street and really throughout the world.
And, you know, I think there's just this idea that, well, what about people who need to start with the skills already.
And we started to see that trend even back in the mid 2000s, you know, 2015 -16 when we were founded that banks and firms and, you know, organizations that were hiring finance professionals shifted from we're going to train you on everything you know, to we expect you to have the skills.
So it was really great timing in that we started to see this trend shift anyway.
But really started with you want to be a world class financial analyst, you can be.
And then over 2019 -2020, we started to introduce a lot more programs to serve just like a broader audience across finance.
So today, our mission is to help finance professionals advance their careers, it all comes back to, you know, advancing your career, working more effectively in the role that you're in, maybe shifting from one part of, you know, finance into another.
But it's really about helping finance professionals advance their career, because our kind of guiding purpose, like our core belief is that anyone who wants to have a successful career in finance can if they have the right support and knowledge and training.
So that's really kind of the core of CFI and why we were founded and what we believe in.
To your point, you know, I have an MBA and a master's in finance, and in both of those, we used Excel and we use different tools in different courses as well.
But we didn't talk a lot about sort of the mechanics of the formulas in Excel and everything.
So it was, for me, and for a lot of people, it's you come to that first job.
And like you said, there's training there, but there's also sort of the informal training that goes on when you you're just working with a lot of other people that are using the same tools, and they teach you those shortcuts and everything.
But that that's a shortcoming, I think, in the educational programs is not giving you but maybe they try to think of a reason of why there wouldn't be more of a focus on that.
But it is great that you guys are able to come in and focus that.
And I think, as sort of the technology has changed, you can't train people on every tool that's out there, but the shifting requirements and what people do.
And I'm thinking of all the sort of traditional historic courses that you've done in a new era of maybe Python being incorporated into Excel and co -pilot, maybe getting more and more powerful, as you would expect in the in the coming years, it's gonna be interesting to see how those very same courses
change to meet the new technology.
And I would imagine that, yeah, maybe there are some things that are automated, but there's also going to be so many more powerful things that you can do so I can see a whole new slew of courses coming around that totally because we have to train on the tools that people need when they hit the desk.
I use this phrase to your point about like you learn certain things in school, but maybe they're not the most practical or applicable things.
We use this phrase desk ready skills.
So when you sit down, you are ready because it is different than the theory that you learn in school or might learn.
I think the other thing to your point of things that you learn on the job, the world's so different now.
So many people are working hybrid, even in finance that maybe 10 years ago, you could turn to the person sitting next to you and tap them on the shoulder and ask them where they might give you feedback in the moment.
And now with everybody distributed, you get less of that.
So how do we fill that gap that you don't have somebody to turn to and tap them on the shoulder and ask them for help or advice on how to do something?
So we think a lot about that kind of like desk ready skills and knowledge.
My secret is when I can't sleep at night, I'm on Reddit.
And you always see somebody every day is like, I have to build a model.
And it's my first job and I've never done it.
And I don't even know where to start.
And it's like we want to fill that gap for people for sure.
So there's another certification you guys do, which is near and dear to my heart as well.
So there's the building the model and there's the FMBA and the basic stuff.
But as the landscape has changed, and I'm thinking in particular about data and automation and technology out there, but you guys have also expanded.
So it's not just the the sort of excel and sort of basic model building skills, but you guys have some other offerings.
Now, can you tell me a little bit about some of the other programs that CFI offers?
We started with that flagship FMBA.
And then again, about three or four years after we found it, we started introducing new programs.
So we've now today got six certifications.
And our business intelligence data analytics is probably our second most popular because that core FMBA customer really is interested in what we call the beta skills and needs those skills too.
But we have, you know, programs and commercial banking and capital markets, so really a wide swath.
And then we have 12 specializations, which are the secret sauce like learning something super concentrated and specific that will help advance your career.
We think about those as kind of career accelerators.
And we've got 12 today, but a whole bunch coming in the new year that I'm super excited about.
So if you look at something like our beta certification, that business intelligence data analytics, we also have specializations.
So maybe if you don't have a few months to, you know, over the course of a few months to tackle something like the certification, well, you can spend a month getting really deep into a sub segment of that beta certification and learning something really specific.
So I love the specializations because they're shorter, super specific and concentrated, but kind of view it as there's a wide swath of skills that people need today, right?
It's not enough to just kind of know those evergreen things that you need to know.
You need to know about AI and finance and the new tools, like any new evolution of things like Python, but you also might need to know about cryptocurrency, or you might need to know about ESG.
And so we want to kind of fill all of that knowledge gap because the one thing that we do now is you can't just rely on those fundamental skills.
You've got to kind of push your own knowledge and skillset.
Yeah. So I know you guys just rolled out, and I guess this would be an example of one of the specializations, but the new risk assessment.
Yeah. Risk management.
Yeah. We actually just launched that this week and that will probably turn into a certification as well at some point because risk management is a really good example of, yes, there are risk management roles and finance across everything from banking to FP &A, but today everybody needs to know the core
concepts of risk management.
So it's a really good example of something we think every finance professional should be taking that specialization, not just risk management professionals.
So it's a really good example of that type of content where as things evolve and adapt, you've got to know these things.
I mean, the AI courses are a really good example of you can't even if you're not going to adopt AI, which I think is foolish at this point, you've got to at least understand what are people doing in your roles with this.
So you understand what the new normal is and how you can, you know, yes, of course, you and I think we should be leveraging these things.
But even if you're not going to, you've got to understand what's happening.
Yeah, yeah. And I want to come back to that.
But this is when I was looking at the questions I'd prepared for this episode, I could tell where my head was when we talked the first time because I think I only recently realized that not only are you the CEO of CFI, but there's also the Mac Abacus piece.
And to me, while they're complementary, they're two very distinct businesses.
So to my mind, I just can't get over this feels like two full -time jobs.
So I guess I want to talk a little bit about first from sort of CFI's approach here.
So walk me through the rationale of CFI acquiring Mac Abacus and how it sort of complements CFI's offerings.
Yeah. Oh, I love this one.
Because Mac Abacus is like I have two children, CFI and Mac Abacus, right?
So we acquired Mac Abacus, I think it was in, I want to say 2020.
But Mac Abacus is a Microsoft add -in for productivity and brand compliance.
And what it does fundamentally is for somebody that's like living in Excel all day, it's saving that person hours a week.
I mean, at a minimum, our customers are telling us that saving them, you know, four to six hours a week, and drastically reduces errors and mistakes and things like that.
So Mac Abacus is an enterprise product today, but it got its start as a tool that individuals use, right?
Like Mac Abacus started because our founder of Mac Abacus who's still with us at CFI today, he was working in banking, he was using a product called dealmaven, it got acquired, he didn't have access to it at work anymore.
So he said, I have to build this, I can't work without this.
So he started it as like a replacement tool for something he was using.
And then it just, you know, he started sharing it, it got wildly popular with individuals who needed it.
So it started as an individual product.
And then, you know, over the last few years, we really just continue to focus on serving the needs of the enterprise and organizations.
But our poor audience, our financial analysts and aspiring financial analysts, so the audience of people who know and passionately love Mac Abacus is a big portion of our CFI audience.
And so that was a big part of why did we want to bring Mac Abacus into our family was that in thinking about, you know, training financial analysts, we believe that analysts should be using tools like Mac Abacus.
And we think that Mac Abacus is the best product on the market, of course.
So a big part of it was, you know, we're training on the tools that are best in class, and Mac Abacus is that and we can make you a financial model, a great financial modeler, without any tools.
But why wouldn't you want to amplify your productivity and be even better?
So that was a big part of why did we acquire Mac Abacus and it is, to your point, as you mentioned, like a separate brand, but I think there's a lot of overlap, we do a lot of just, you know, bringing the brands into the shared customer base.
But at its core, we're focused on financial modeling is like our core audience at CFI.
And although it's an enterprise product today, you know, you can still go get Mac Abacus today a free trial online, you can buy it as an individual, and there's just so much overlap there with the two, the two companies in the two audiences.
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I can't figure out if this is a personal question or a CFI question because I'm thinking of like, you as CEO, how you manage it, but also, I mean, it's important for the company, but how do you balance maintaining brand integrity for CFI and Mac Abacus as distinct entities, but there's also those opportunities
where you've got the cross promotion and integration to kind of serve the shared finance focused clientele.
I mean, that's got to be an interesting balance system there.
It is. On the personal side of the start of your question, I'll say that balancing it has definitely been a challenge.
It's taken me a few years to get the balance just right.
I use the analogy of children a lot in that just like, it's sort of like having two kids.
You love them both, you love them equally, but they're different and they need different things.
And the good thing, though, is one kid's usually needy when the other is not, and vice versa.
So I would say my attention and where I focus has definitely ebbed and flowed.
And I've often struggled with finding just the right balance.
But this past year has been great.
We have a fantastic team for both brands.
And they really run like product and go -to -market or run separately.
So I think today the reason I'm able to strike the balance is just because of the fantastic teams we have for each of the brands.
On the less personal side, I'm just kind of operating two brands.
I do think about it like a family that serves the same audiences.
So we do and we keep these brands separately.
And again, our product teams are separate, our go -to -market teams are separate.
We do a lot as a company.
We've got shared values and purpose and mission and things like that.
We do a lot of things together, but we do a lot separate as well.
And so what we do is we just look for opportunities where it makes sense to share and show the brands into the other customer bases.
And a really good example is we're the best trainers, we think, at CFI.
So when we acquired Macabicus, we created fantastic Macabicus training material because that's something that's so core to our wheelhouse.
But also, so it's great for Macabicus customers.
It's got a nice benefit that it exposes CFI to the Macabicus customer base, where they can see the quality of the training that we provide.
And then on the other side, we're always going to train a concept like in Excel, just straight up the way you need to know it.
But then if there's something that we're training in Excel that is made better by Macabicus, we're going to create a module about that.
So it's separate, that you opt into, you're not forced to learn the Macabicus way.
But we feel, if there's a better way, we want to show it to you.
So there's a lot of things like that where we're taking and leveraging, we want a financial analyst to know this great thing that they can do in Macabicus, even if we're going to show them the non -Macabicus way as well.
And then we're going to do the best training we can for all of the Macabicus customers.
So we do a lot of organic exposure between the two brands.
That's great. And I think about just the commonalities between them and the...
I feel like for both, you're watching the exact same technological advancements that are going on.
And I mentioned Copilot and Python and Excel.
And I'm sure those...
Whether it's CFI or Macabicus, they're both the same technologies that are going to have similar impacts across both companies.
But I was thinking with that, with all this tech advancing so rapidly, I mean, how do you see tools like Copilot and maybe in Python and AI just in general, changing the way that you teach and support finance professionals?
Yeah. What we're all is going to do, we're always going to come back to so that we don't get caught up on every single little trend or thing is we're always going to come back to this idea that what we do is teach the skills that people need on the job, the practical things that they have to have to sit
down and feel confident at work.
And I call those the sort of creating desk ready professionals or desk ready skills.
And so that's always going to drive our curriculum.
So we are very thoughtful and careful about, is there a need for training?
Like Python, so clearly there's a need for that and people are hungry for it.
And that's going to help people work more effectively.
It's kind of similar.
Again, you and I, I think share a lot of the same philosophies around that.
But if you look at something like Copilot, first, it's really still early days, like a lot of promises and big ideas that are just slowly coming to fruition.
So we don't look at that as a need today because first, not everybody even has access to it.
And then it is such early days that if we were trying to chase some training, well, you can really get that from the Microsoft ecosystem.
What need would we really be serving?
But we have to watch that carefully because there might be a need in the future.
There might be some training where there's a gap, but until everybody's got Copilot, until things are further along, it's a place where we sit back and we do a lot of like, let's watch and see before we kind of jump in.
This year, as you know, thanks to you, we did a lot of AI training and content, because that is clearly a need that people have to...
If we're going to create a desk -ready professional, they've got to know these, how to navigate, how to use it, how to leverage it as a tool that do it mindfully and correctly and thoughtfully.
So that was an example where maybe those first six months going back, if we talked about 18 months ago, we were dabbling.
We were doing a two or three -minute video here or there.
We were just watching and seeing.
And then coming into this year, it was like, let's go, get a pedal down on the gas because people need to know this.
I do a lot of courses that are just high -level that's talking the abstract, but what CFI does, it's that, like, to your point, it's desk -ready.
We're not going to talk high -level.
Yes, great. You need to understand that, but also how can you apply this today?
So what I've found in diving in and doing the courses for CFI at that deep level, and it's really changed how I talk to business people right now, because even if they're not going to pull...
If I'm talking to a CFO, the chances that a CFO is going to pull some spreadsheet out and go load it into an LLM and do all this stuff themselves, probably not super high.
Because one of the whole points of these chatbots is in conversing with them in natural languages, they can become like a partner that you're working with.
But while the CFO may not be the one who is actually doing that work, understanding what these LLMs can do and when to use them.
So even for a CFO, if they're not going to go into that level of detail, if they see that level of detail and open up ideas, then it's important for them for their departments anyway.
So hopefully there's...
And it's interesting when you talk to people when...
Because I've spent so much time just really deep in what we can do.
And really for CFI, pushing the envelope in a lot of cases of where you should be able to do this, and then waiting for the next version of chat GPT to come out or whatever, and hope that it has a bit more compute or something.
But the truth is we were pushing the envelope, but we saw some amazing things that you can do with these tools.
And so the classes are out there, but also on the other side, Macabicus, you guys have rolled some AI features into that.
So you're not just talking about it, but you're also deploying some of that.
Can you talk a little bit about what you've done there?
And maybe what you've learned from that, how you envision AI influencing other finance productivity tools, especially obviously our audience with the FP &A community.
And I should say, I would make a little plug that we were launching some cool things for CFI next year too that I'm really excited about.
Because I think that AI changes training to your point about just having a thought partner and things like that at the C level.
But for Macabicus, what we did right away when we really was clear that AI for finance professionals wasn't going anywhere, and this was part of the conversation, and this was going to evolve rapidly.
We took this wait and see approach, but right away started R &D.
I think we were starting R &D 24 months ago, 18 months ago.
We started R &D, but we've discarded a lot of things in that.
And that is because in finance and banking, the standards are so exacting.
You cannot have something that's mostly reliable, in our view.
You can't have something that's somewhat predictable.
So we've done a lot of experimenting and saying, that's not commercially ready, but that's great.
And let's put it on the shelf for right now.
So what happened was we did launch an AI feature, a tool that I love.
And it's called Formulate.
And essentially, you can put in a spreadsheet that's got hard coded, and it'll turn the things that are hard coded that should be formulas into formulas.
Now, this is not groundbreaking, and there's, let's say, an investment banker, though.
It's an annoying part of the job.
They get these kinds of spreadsheets with hard codes all the time.
So it's maybe saving them 20 or 30 minutes, but it's a really annoying 20 or 30 minutes.
And it's something that we can do with a high degree of accuracy.
So when we think about it in Macabicus, we're thinking about what are rote things that are also annoying and time consuming, that people are having to do that we can do with AI with a very, very high degree of accuracy.
So that's how we think about it.
We've got a couple other things coming next year that I'm pretty excited about, that we're pretty far along in development.
But we're going to discard a lot of things, because to us, we've got a really high standard of the expectation around this stuff, for Macabicus, for sure.
So that's just a lot of experimentation and being willing to throw something away or put it on the shelf if it's not quite right.
Yeah. It's so funny when you were talking about replacing the hard coded values with the formula.
I was thinking about early in my career, when you were going through the budget process, and you would intentionally strip out all the formulas and send the VO, the value only versions of the spreadsheet, so that some knucklehead wouldn't break your formula or whatever, as they were going through and all
that. But then as someone, and later in my career, especially when you receive it, you know what the formula is, and you're like, I've got values only here.
That is a thoughtful tool that is built by someone obviously who's been in that situation.
So that's great. Yeah, it's actually, it ends up being, I guess, because of the evolution over time, it ends up being a unique way to develop an enterprise product where it's really focused on the...
I mean, if we're running any sort of SaaS tool or whatever and thinking that I spent that much time thinking about the user and how they use it and solving their problems, and then fit it into an enterprise solution, it's like, well, that's the best UX design and feature set and everything probably
you could come up with.
Glenn, you're so right.
And I feel so lucky to get to work with Macabicus and have that as part of our family of brands because it is, first of all, I've never worked on something that has such incredible product market fit.
When people use Macabicus, they use it and they are loyal and they take it with them from job to job.
If you look at our...
When a customer downloads a free trial, they open it up and start using it, they are going to buy.
It's just kind of best in class, but it was built as a product -led...
A product -led. Meaning in the early days, it was just this tiny team and really our founder, Ryan McGregor, was doing it off the side of his desk.
He was still working in finance and banking.
So it was designed to be very self -service.
So you could download it, you could buy it, you could get your support.
Everything could be...
You would never have to interact with a human.
That's called product -led in software today.
And Macabicus started as product -led and then we layered in the sales organization.
We layered in the enterprise features.
So I just feel like we get the best of both worlds and I feel we're so lucky.
We don't have to struggle with a lot of things that software companies have to struggle with.
Thanks to the large part to Ryan and his great work on creating an incredible product, really.
Okay. I'm going to go down a rabbit hole here.
CFI, Macabicus, Data Rails, there are so many companies out there who tie in to Excel.
And Excel has been the backbone for years and years of all finance and it's ingrained in finance departments just around the world.
And it's hard to picture that going away.
But if I'm doing a SWOT analysis for CFI, Macabicus, or Data Rails, or so many other companies that are out there, I'm thinking about AI right now.
And we've talked about this not in an interview setting as well.
And this is, I don't know how long it's going to take, but Satya Nadella was talking about agents the other day.
Everybody's talking about agents right now, including me, which they're fascinating and I think they're going to be the next thing.
But thinking about how everything we do right now, so think about all SAS apps, NetSuite or any kind of ERP or whatever.
They're basically massive databases with a UX over them.
They're just create, read, update, delete databases with different bells and whistles added on.
And in that where you're extracting data from databases and you need to manipulate it, it all comes into Excel.
And there's the nature of how we've worked for 30 plus years has really been...
Yes, there's data that lives elsewhere.
And yes, if you can do SQL queries, there's great things we can do there.
And there's different frontends, but Excel is all in the background.
But I'm thinking about with generative AI and how maybe all SAS software, certainly ERPs and related to finance, it's going to change.
It's not like whatever this backend structure and whatever the wrapper that's on top of it, if you've got all these rules that your employees...
Think of an SOP for a task or for a job description and what people are doing.
And we go into Excel right now and there's a whole industry around being able to use Excel and things that tie into Excel.
But with AI, potentially, it's going to be, we're not going to have to write queries anymore.
We're not going to have to do these formulas.
We'll just in natural language be able to query it.
And it's going to be structured and unstructured data.
And it's going to be...
We have to get to the place where things are fully integrated, but I wonder how long it's going to be.
And I'm a terrible futurist with these questions, but I think if I'm looking at sort of our, what are our risks that are out there for kind of everything that we do, this would be a full upheaval of the industry.
But do you kind of think about what, whether it's Macabicus or CFI or any of these...
If I'm an old SAS ERP system, do you have thoughts on how far out some sort of transition like that might be?
Or does CoPilot get so good that your interface is just like you might as well be just in chat box and not in the Excel world that we all are used to?
Yeah. At some point, right?
I think so. I, first of all, am a horrible futurist as well.
So here we go. Well, too bad futurist of pining.
But here's how I personally think about it and how it won't keep me up at night, which is like, it is changing.
How we interact with software, extract what we need, how we approach tasks, it is not a question that that is going to change.
I think the thing is, is how long is it actually really going to take?
So CFI and Macabicus, for me personally, as I think about being an investor, I think about you have to stay light on your feet.
You have to be ready.
You have to be curious.
You have to be doing R &D.
You have to be looking at things and thinking at any moment it could change.
But the reality is these things are going to take a long time, right?
And your product is going to evolve with it.
So I might not know what that looks like today, but I can guarantee you that as we change how we interact with software, well, we're going to change how you interact with Macabicus too, right?
Or if how people learn and get trained changes, well, we're going to adapt and evolve too.
So I think you have to stay light on your feet, be ready for anything.
But the pragmatic, the realistic thing here is these things take a long time.
I mean, I'm always shocked at people who have never used AI, have never even opened chat GPT.
We look at the numbers and we think this is happening so fast.
And it is, you have to stay light on your feet, but it's going to take a long time.
And an example that I think about is actually a non -finance example.
About a year and a half ago, HubSpot did a demo of the AI things that they had been building.
I will never forget looking at this demo thinking tomorrow the world's changing, because look at how you are no longer interacting with the interface of the software.
You are basically interacting solely through chat and getting everything you need.
Well, you know how many people I know that are using that HubSpot interface?
None. Everybody I know that works in HubSpot is working in a software just like they always have.
There's a lot of promise, it's absolutely going to change.
But these are such early days, and it's just not happening, I think, at the pace people think.
And yet it's happening quickly, don't get me wrong.
Yeah. And here's the softball for you with everything going on.
So for years, and when I was coming up in my career, this was certainly the case, everybody, the common wisdom was, if you want to get ahead and stand out, and this is kind of how I sort of tried to differentiate myself as a finance person, but everybody used to say, learn coding.
And now, but even, I will say, I'm a terrible coder that doesn't stop me from doing it all the time.
I'm not very efficient at it.
But I am much more efficient getting LLMs to write code for me.
So I do hear a lot of people say, well, you don't have to know how to code anymore, the LLMs can just do it.
But if you're not familiar with kind of the basics of coding, you're not going to know if your loop, if your for loop is not closing or whatever, or whatever the case is, and if you don't know the syntax.
So I still think there's an argument for learning coding.
But if knowing sort of the environment and not knowing when but sort of seeing that reading the tea leaves and seeing where technology's going, what courses or tech with training would you recommend that young or mid career or heck even a senior career finance professional if they wanted to stay relevant
and be able to kind of ride the wave of where we're going with technology, what types of courses or what certification would you advise these people to take to be sure to kind of future proof their careers?
Yeah, yeah. So what I would always encourage people to do is to get curious and think about it as nobody's coming to you with the knowledge, right?
You've got to experiment, you've got to practice, you've got to be curious, you've got to look at lots of things, you've got to start a course for 10 minutes and say, this isn't it, you go try something else, you've got to read an article, you've got to play around.
What really struck me when AI, because of chat GPT really became part of the conversation that everybody was having professionally at work in all sectors, what struck me is that you instantly had this curious self educating group that dove in immediately, right?
And then you had these other people who were not curious and kind of got back and had never even let's say tried to chat GPT at all.
And I just think that the people that get propelled forward in their career are the curious people that explore, to teach themselves things.
So for me, it's less about like, what course will I recommend?
Because of course, for finance professionals, I'm going to recommend our AI courses, for example, many of which you created that are fantastic.
But I think bigger than that, it's just, I think today as a professional, we can't wait for others to teach us things or move us forward.
We have to take that upon ourselves.
And that means exploring, learning, teaching, getting curious, you know, swimming through a course or deep diving into a course.
And I just go back to curiosity and creating this and empowering yourself as an individual.
It's so important. And to your point about, you know, you've got to learn how to code I my son's 26.
And this is, by the way, when are things going to change?
It's when the people that are in their 20s today, or, you know, in their 30s, because they've been working totally differently, right.
But my son has built an app through help with chat GPT is help.
But it's not that he doesn't have to put his fingers in the and do the code to write it's not that chat GPT can't build you an app.
But it can teach you so much.
And it can generate so much code that it can get you to the point that if you're a self learner, and you're curious, you can get there.
So it's like to your point earlier about the slot partner, whether it's a teaching partner, a thought partner, whatever it might be.
But I just, I really encourage people to like, you've got to take it upon yourself.
Get curious, drop any fear you've got, go get tools, play around, try things and just continually being pushing your own skills and knowledge forward.
Well said, and you're definitely preaching to choir with that.
So well, this has been great.
And I do we I think I told you before the show, we have two, two questions that we always in the episodes with.
And the first is, I've heard some pretty interesting things over the times that I've asked this question hosted on the podcast.
But first is what is something that most people don't know about you, maybe something that we couldn't find quickly just by Googling you really quickly.
I knew you were gonna ask me this.
And I just was like, what am I gonna say?
Because I think one thing that people will know from Googling me is I'm a really boring open book.
I my hobbies are my family and my work.
I have two adult children.
I'm so lucky that my husband and our kids were really close.
So I am either working or with my family, I spend a lot of time working, I love working, like I think some people just like, they just love work.
And it's not a burden or whatever.
So I am really boring.
You know, I have very little like, I was thinking, what would somebody not know about me?
And it's like not a lot there.
I'm it's weird that you said that because my the subtitle of my latest book is boring open book.
I don't know. And it's not selling as well as I thought.
Yeah, I have no extra skills, no hobbies.
I mean, I do a lot of meditation and yoga, but that's not really like a secret.
Alright, and our last question.
And I was told that my answer on this because I was on I was a guest on the show before I was the host of the show.
And I said that my favorite excel feature was VLOOKUP.
And someone told me the other day that there's no better way to date yourself than by saying VLOOKUP, not even XLOOKUP, not index match, not flower query, but VLOOKUP.
It's like, yeah, Mr.
90s here. With that caveat, what is your favorite Excel feature and why?
Well, I'm about to out myself here.
My favorite Excel feature is the help.
So here's my big expose.
I'm really bad at Excel.
It's one of those things like, you appreciate art, but you're not an artist or you like love music, but you can't even, you know, touch a tambourine.
I think the beautiful Excel model is a work of art.
My Excel skills are so bad that the number of times I'm using help and Microsoft help has gotten so good.
And I can't wait for like CoPilot to get better, because I can't, you know, like I'll be the number one user of CoPilot himself.
So there you have it, the truth is, help is my number one favorite feature.
I love it. And when you said that, somehow I immediately went to when you mentioned CoPilot and help.
And maybe it's because I'd already anchored myself by talking about the 90s.
I want Clippy to come back.
I want a useful Clippy to be there.
That's what I want CoPilot to be.
It's so funny you say that because my answer was almost Clippy.
But then I'm like, I'm really dating myself.
And the users probably the listeners won't know what Clippy was.
So friendly. So yeah.
I guess finally, how can our listeners connect with you if they want to learn more and reach out?
Yeah. Well, LinkedIn's a great way because I'm usually on there.
I'm responding and commenting.
So find me on LinkedIn.
And then, you know, check out Corporate Finance Institute.
It's the longest domain you'll ever type in.
So you got to be careful there about Corporate Finance Institute and Macavicus.
But yeah, I think LinkedIn, I'm there, I'm responsive and love to connect with people.
Anna, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Glenn, thanks so much for having me.
Thanks for you know, we're big fans of your podcast here, Data Rails.
I mean, like everywhere you cannot, I mean, it's just what an amazing story over the last couple of years with Data Rails of just like how ubiquitous that's becoming.
So we're big fans of the podcast and big fans of you.
Thank you. Thank you.
