Episode 27: Extracting Value from Data

Hey listeners, welcome to SphereCast, a podcast all about technology, technology advice, technology inspiration, and how real entrepreneurs have used technology to build their businesses from the ground up. If you're wondering how technology can support your business goals, rest assured our guests have been there and done that.

Do you speak the language of numbers? The ability to see figures on a page, make sense of them, and articulate those ideas to others is truly a craft, a skill that comes more naturally to some than others, particularly to those of the analytical bent. But whether or not you're inclined in that direction, it's a skill that has to be refined, practiced, and mastered. And for those who put in the work, for those who become more fluent, more often than not, they find themselves at the top of the financial ladder.

Hey, Luke here with another week of SphereCast, and this week, as part of our CFO podcast series, Xenia and I interview Adrian Gaveglia, Portfolio CFO at EmergeONE and Interim CFO at EnterpriseAlumni. Throughout his career, Gaveglia has held a variety of high-level finance roles at companies in the London area, including a lengthy stint at HarperCollins. Adrian has extensive experience making sense of digital platforms, navigating mergers and acquisitions, and providing in-depth financial analysis. At the end of the day, Adrian is a master of the numbers. And like any good CFO, Adrian's superpower is reading between the lines of the spreadsheets and asking the right questions, all to discern what's important, what's not, and where companies should be paying special attention.

On the podcast, Adrian shares how he finds both what matters and pitches others on his point of view. He also speaks to the attributes of a good financial leader, the nature of luck in business, and much more. So without further ado, here's our conversation with Adrian Gaveglia.

Hi, everyone. This is Xenia with SphereCast. Today we're thrilled to host Adrian Gaveglia on our CFO podcast series. Hi, Adrian. How are you?

I'm good. How are you?

Doing well. Thanks for asking. Adrian, you're a successful CFO at EmergeONE and EnterpriseAlumni. As our listeners know well, we always begin with our guests looking back for us and sharing the experience they feel prepared them for a finance leadership role. What comes to mind for you?

I guess the main thing would be, obviously, I had a I had a professional contract where I trained in audit. So from a technical finance point of view, I've obviously had sort of specific training that makes the finance side pretty straightforward. I would guess the leadership side has come really from experience, and I would say mainly from role models and mentors that I've worked with. So I'm I'm quite lucky in that I happened to have two people who I've worked for who quite senior and invested quite quite a lot of time, and they were also very good leaders in their own right. And I guess learned by watching them do their thing, obviously rubbed off on me.

If you're thinking about progressing in your career, you're always looking at what the attributes are that those people have. And I guess some of the ones that I could see would be that they were consistent, they were measured, quite thoughtful, and quite analytical. And sometimes people, when you say they're analytical, they think you're indecisive, but they were very decisive kind of leaders.

I guess other things that have helped in terms of my journey would be, my various roles have always been very close to decision-making, whether it would be part of exec, a senior leadership team, or on the board. And I guess just having experience working with different personalities and different leadership styles kind of rubs off on you. And you kind of look at the things that you think work well or don't work well, and you try and incorporate them into the way that you go about your sort of framework or your sort of way of leading.

I want to follow this up quickly, so thanks for sharing that. So you touched upon this already. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit. Was there any particular attribute that you thought or you saw, not an attribute, let's say, vices of these people that you were working with, and you thought, "Okay, I'll do XYZ, but I wouldn't do this because this clearly isn't working"? Were you noticing things that way as well?

Yeah. So, I mean, one thing I think is important in a leader is consistency. I've worked with leaders who are very inconsistent in that they kind of people can't tell how they're going to react or what they're going to do. And I and I always found that very very difficult. You have to kind of have a method where people can trust you and they can trust the way that you're going to behave. That doesn't mean that you can't be you can't show passion or you can't change your mind, but you always have to kind of do it in a way where I feel you're transparent in the way that you came about your your decision.

If people don't really understand why you make one decision or another, they kind of get very It gets very difficult to be in that environment. So I try to make sure that whenever I make a decision, it's kind of obvious why I did it. Now, you got to be careful of having to explain yourself all the time. You just shouldn't have to, and you don't really want to do that, but you kind of just need to make sure that you're not one thing one day and another thing another day. Although in reality, no one's 100% consistent all the time, but you've just got to be as close as you possibly can to having a leader who people people know what they're going to get from them.

Yeah, I think that's really valuable advice there because if the goalpost is changing for the leader all the time, and the organization, rest of the people are looking at you and you are basically steering them. So if you are not consistent, it can it can make their life difficult. And I think the trust also is is difficult to, you know, gain trust, I guess, and it's part of the leadership. Okay, that's Thank you for sharing that.

I want to quickly switch or pivot to a slightly different mode here, a little bit technical. So Xenia mentioned a few positions. There's a lot more positions in the finance finance leadership role that you have been in. So I'd love to know you must have been spending a lot of time on analytics, PowerPoint presentations, etc. So what we'd like to know for our audience is, what is your preparation process for any meeting with, let's say, board members who are going to ask you tough questions? And we're talking about an audience which might get lost if you give them too much analysis. So how do you extract the optimum or the highest level of information which you think is worth sharing with them, and that will get your point across as well?

I think the first thing is like, it depends on whether you're dealing with the board as a collective or you're dealing with the board individually, because obviously each member is different. But if we take say you're dealing with the board, I think the most important thing is that you're always observing and listening to what they say so that you kind of understand what what what their strengths are and how well they can interpret your data. So the most important thing is when you're presenting stuff, that you're clear that the person who's receiving that data, that they're going to understand it, or you're going to present it in a way that they understand.

For example, I've had people on the board who are non-finance. And so if you're going to if you're going to ream through loads of dense data and not put it in a digestible chunk or in layman's terms, they're going to get lost. So you kind of really have to understand who you're talking to and then figure out how you're going to present it.

A lot of the time, I think the most important thing though in board in a board meeting or when you're presenting to the board is that if you are say with your CEO or your founders, that you and them are aligned. The most important thing when presenting to a board is that you and the CEO are aligned on what's being presented. I think one of the sort of big hiccups or big things that you get in board meetings or when you get presenting data or presenting information is where you present something and then your say CEO or founders kind of don't recognize the data or the information or think it's contrary to what they perceive has been going on. So one of the most important things I always think is to be aligned, to make sure that before you go into a meeting that you guys are all aligned, the senior people are all aligned. That isn't to mean that you can't can't challenge something else because, obviously, there has to be a degree of commercial tension between a CEO and CFO, but you don't want to be pulling out surprises where people in people in the room are looking at each other, looking at you going, "Well, why aren't Why is your CEO looking at you as if what you've presented is something that doesn't exist?"

In terms of what I think is really important is also trying to second-guess if you get asked to do a specific piece of analysis. So in the past, I've been asked, "Can you do a bit of cohort analysis on your sales vertical and explain where you are, right?" I always try to second-guess what the second and third question is, because when you present data, it's always very clear that people will read it and they'll have questions. And I always try to think, "Well, if I get given this data, what questions am I going to be asked?" Now, sometimes I'll actually do further analysis and present it in a dashboard or a KPI pack, or I'll just keep it in the back of my mind so that I know what the answer to that is. And when I get asked a question, I make sure I have the I have the information.

I kind of think it's really important that when you're presenting stuff, you're proactive in thinking what feedback or what questions you're going to be asked, right? If you sit there and just present the data and then haven't thought through what it is you're presenting and then somebody actually asks you a load of questions that are difficult because you haven't thought about it, then that isn't going to look good for you. So I tend to kind of think what is it that if I present this if I present this dashboard with these graphs or with these or with this information, what else is somebody going to ask me about it?

And then obviously, like I said, real importance is to tailor it to the audience. So I once did a presentation about the financial data of the publishing division that I was working with at HarperCollins. I was the only finance person and everyone was editorial, marketing, and sales. So the narrative was more important than the actual data, because I'm working with people who aren't finance people. What's really important is that I spell out the narrative to them in a way that they can understand. The graphs and stuff, they're great. They're going to look at them, but what they really need is for me to talk them through it in a way that they understand, which is simple layman's terms, no no complicated language. So you really need to think about when you're presenting data, who you're presenting to. Sometimes you get various different people with different backgrounds in a meeting and you have to weigh up how how technical you're going to be or how dense you're going to be versus someone who's not going to quite get it.

In some of those instances, I've actually just kind of spoken to a board person either before or after the meeting, kind of just sat them down and kind of given them a you know, a sort of more easy view of what was going on if I know that they're not, say, very numbers-orientated, but they really want want to know what's going on. So the key points would be to think about what what else you're going to be asked, what other questions you can have, so be proactive, and then just always try and tailor it to your audience. And when presenting, I always think that less is better than more. But always be prepared to have that more in the back of your pocket if you need it.

I think that's very wise words from you. So thanks for sharing that. I don't even know what I can add there. You've covered literally everything there. So thanks for the details there. I think perhaps we could segue into an example of a situation, let's say. So I have seen this problem a couple of times. I work for a sales team as well. So there have been situations where let's give you an example. So our CFO or corporate finance manager just joined recently a few months ago, and he started looking at the CRM data, etc. And then next thing that came out was, "Okay, you guys are not looking at something." And and he brought those numbers up. And as a as a team, we we've had like we had no emphasis on that particular number, let's say sales velocity, for example, right? So he he brought that to the table. So I'm sure you've ran into much more complicated situations in the past. So I'd love if you could share an example where you've kind of ran into a situation where people are not seeing something, not seeing the potential of a number, and you you you have to basically go and sell it to them and raise the profile of that particular KPI or a dashboard or something like that.

Oh, I mean, I've had quite a few. I had one recently in one of the startups that I was working where the sales everyone was looking at the top line of the sales, and the sales were growing, but the way the industry was made up, a lot of the volume was concentrated in the hands of two or three big players. But a lot of the more lucrative sales were outside of those two or three big players. Because it was a scaleup, the focus was on the top line, and no one was really looking at what was going on actually in the detail of who who actually are your clients.

And the clients that they had were predominantly those big three clients. So they had basically a lot of their business in the hands of only one or two clients, which is always a risk when you're a business, and they kind of hadn't concentrated on the other more lucrative verticals that were out there. And the other problem with it was that the resource that was being sucked away from that other those other verticals to support that business was way more than should have been necessary.

So I had to kind of, instead of looking and focusing just on the top line of sales, break it down into the verticals, and then break it down into showing the sort of the profit margins and how the growth was happening over time. So the correlation was, these two clients are growing and growing and growing and growing. That's the only real growth in the business. There's no growth in the other more lucrative clients, even though they're smaller. If you get the combination of having lots of them gets you more more margin and makes your business more broad, that wasn't being seen because individuals were just purely focused on their personal gain, which was their bonus, their bonus scheme, and they weren't really looking at what was in, what was really more important for the business is, yes, to grow fast, but to grow in a measured fashion and ensure that the clients that you're growing are sustainable, but also are the profitable ones and where your business wants to go.

So that's one that I've had recently. And then another one that I've had was actually was actually more to do on the cost side where we're winning business, and the business is very successful in winning business, but the way that the costs are analyzed in the P&L is very inconsistent. So when you go from one client to another, you don't have a uniform way of saying, "Well, what is the actual margin on that business?" Because different things are going into different places. And so, currently, with one of the clients that I'm working with, trying to find a consistent way to ensure that the costs are consistent across each client, so we can actually compare them, so we can actually see if the cost that is to acquire that client and then maintain that client is actually worthwhile.

Because at the moment, you can't, so while you can't to the level that I would like to do. So at the moment, you're you're looking at your top line and going, "Yeah, that's great." You're looking at your cost of sales, "Not so great," but you can't really tell why or which customers it is that you're not basically doing as well as you should be. So, yeah, one of the big things that I think is really also is always important is making sure you can get the right granularity and the right the right reporting on data to tell you how your business is actually performing.

So, Adrian, thanks for sharing that. That was quite broad and a good example. I want to understand something from you. So let's say that an organization is relatively small, and is turning over, let's say, 10, 15 million a year in terms of the revenue, and they have 15 to 20 clients, a couple of salespeople, so they're very efficient. I've never been able to get my head around this, what data can you actually look at when the actual data is so small and everything is out there in the open? How can you extract value and do something financially with that to improve at that point? I just can't understand the scope of that. So can you can you help us a little bit there, maybe?

Well, I mean, the first thing you should always be looking at in your revenues is where your revenue streams are coming from, and you should be looking at what sectors you're in and comparing it to the market. So one thing that's really important to me is you should always be looking to better yourself. So if you have competitors or if you have parallel businesses, you should always be looking at what you're doing and comparing it. But the first thing, basic thing, is make sure you categorize your revenue into the correct, different areas and the different verticals.

The second one is then you want to compare the performance between those, whether it's, on the top line, whether it's cost of sales, whether it's the resource that you're required to look after them. So I've got a couple of technology businesses, right? And they're service businesses. So when you deal with service businesses, there's a tendency to think that everything is just a cost of technology, but there are a lot of people costs, and assigning those people costs to what to say a client or what they're actually doing is important, because if you don't have a way to assign the costs to the to the sales, how are you going to evaluate what's going on?

So there always has to be in my mind, you always need to be figuring out what cost relates to that business and how do you do it. You talked about the scenario of having two salespeople, right? So one of the things that I find that is important when you're looking at sales is like, if you've got a sales team, how are you incentivizing them? Are their incentives in line with what your what the business's goals are? Because sometimes they're not.

So, for example, the reason why it's important to look at margin is I've been in businesses where people are selling things at way lower than they should be because there are no parameters around what they how they can sell. Do they have a margin that they have to work to? Do they have certain parameters in terms of what they can and can't give a client? So those things are important because I've worked in a business where I had two teams. One team was dealing with bigger clients, and one team was dealing with smaller clients. The team dealing with bigger clients always looked like they were doing really well, because the clients are big and they deliver big revenue.

But the team that's dealing with smaller clients has lower revenue, but was always outperforming its forecast and always getting 25, 30% more than what they should have been doing. But because the absolute value wasn't as much as the bigger clients, they kind of got treated as if they weren't that important. And I could see that that team was actually doing so much better than people were giving them credit for. Now I kind of basically had to say to the, you know, to the CEO and the other founder at the time, "The way you're incentivizing people and the way you're making people feel about sales is incorrect, because these guys are your best performers, but they're being made to feel like they're the worst performers because the incentivization scheme is around volume, which they can never get."

So it's really important, in my mind, to always understand, when you've got a sales team, because you talked about a sales team, is to understand how their sales work and how they're incentivized. Because I've seen so many easy sales targets that one person gets lucky and makes lots of money, and other people who their sales incentivization is so onerous, but they're actually doing a stupendous job, and they get demoralized, and that's not good for you. So, yeah, I'm not sure if that answered your question, but—

No, it it did. It it it it kind of, you know, has made me think about a lot of other things that I could be looking at. But I I just I think you pointed out in the beginning—

I'll give you a specific example. If your client is, say, Barclays Bank, right? And then one team is dealing with Barclays Bank and then the other team is dealing with just a small local bank. And the absolute number is always going to look bigger in Barclays Bank, it's a worldwide bank, but the local number is going to look small in comparison. But if that person is constantly beating their target all the time, that has to be recognized, because maybe they deserve a bigger a bigger account. Maybe they're you know, they deserve to be remunerated more. And things like that are really important, because some people might have an easy ride simply by the accounts that they've been that they've been given.

I agree. I agree. So and also I think that there's a lot of there's a very good point around it also gives you a chance to understand the potential in the market. Like, if you were selling a product at a at a low margin, you're not really comparing yourself to the competition. So so there is many areas which you can pick up and improve. So just by seeing your business in good shape, I think, is not enough sometimes. And it's it's about, you know, strategically where your organization is going and how the different products are performing or services are performing. So and how you compare with the competition as well. So there's a lot of things, I think. So, yeah, thanks for sharing that. That really was helpful. And I just, you know, I just came up with that question, so I just had to ask you, because since we were going in that direction. So thank you for that. Xenia, over to you for the next part.

Thank you. I have another question that comes to mind. I'm curious to find out, Adrian, whether you have an established FP&A team or do you have people that are maybe part-time and switching multiple hats? Have you ever played a role or part in establishing an FP&A structure in your organization?

So at the at the moment, I'm doing I'm I'm doing most most of the stuff myself. But for EnterpriseAlumni, that's that's basically my remit is to build out the finance department as we scale. So, obviously, that's that's in the back that's the in the back of my mind. My background has always been commercial, so it's always been FP&A driven. So obviously when I started at Carphone Warehouse, the role that I was given was completely brand new and it was basically a commercial role that looked at financial planning and analysis of the of the trading team, which is basically the team that put the proposition together and bought the stock. So I kind of built that team from one people to four in the space of about a year.

So that was really good. I mean, I have to say, you know, Carphone Warehouse was one of the most commercial, and probably one of the best businesses for me personally to have to have gained my experience because it was really fast-paced, really entrepreneurial, and really clever in a lot of the stuff that they did in terms of sales and marketing. I then also kind of had a role in HarperCollins, where again, I built up the the finance the finance team, predominantly the commercial team, FP&A team, but it was it's not just the building of the team, but it's also the processes and the and the board packs and the and the things and the monthly packs and the numbers and what you review.

So I tend to think that building a team is one thing, but building the the framework for what they do is also important in terms of timelines, delivery, and what you present. So more recently, obviously, in the startups that I've done, one of the challenges that I've actually had is is that in a lot of early-stage startups, you get the FP&A being done by the founders. So the founders may have may have put together a forecast and they may have used that to bring money in.

So they can be very wedded to that, and handing that over to finance can be difficult and can be a challenge because that's how they manage cash, that's how they manage that's how they manage sales. But the reality is, when a business starts scaling up, the FP&A function cannot be sitting outside of finance because finance brings the realism and the accuracy to that. And obviously, founders and CEOs, they have other things to do that they couldn't possibly be able to do it as well in their day job. So, yeah, I guess there's I guess I've had experience of building FP&A in corporate teams, and then having the challenge of say taking FP&A away from, say, the founder spreadsheet that they that they kept when they started the business back in their bedroom to, well, now this business has taken in, you know, multiple funding. Now we kind of need to have a more professionalized, more rigorous sort of FP&A function with more regularity. And I guess that that's really that's really important, is to embed that into business and to embed those, you know, processes as soon as possible, particularly where you have a board that wants to review financials.

You and Luke spoke prior to the recording of this episode, and Adrian, you shared an interesting point, and it was the power of collaboration. Can you share with our listeners why, from a CFO's perspective, of course, it has become important to harness and foster productive collaboration with both internal and external stakeholders, or perhaps what tools can be used to improve this?

The CFO basically sees everything in an organization. They've got the numbers. They can visualize everything that's going on. If you've got a very strategic CFO, they become very good at seeing the problems and successes in the business and thinking through how to make them better.

And I think the collaboration piece comes from the fact that because the finance, the head of finance, the CFO can see that, they're in a unique position to bring people together. Because they hand out budgets, they deal they normally deal have a one-on-one relationship with most departments, whether it's marketing, sales, HR, finance, tech, because they're in that unique position. If you look at if you look at specifically organizations, what happens in in say early-stage businesses in their life cycle is you get businesses where when they scale up, they can sometimes be siloed and fragmented, and maybe even the founder's vision doesn't quite resonate as it did before. And where that becomes important to have a good CFO is that the CFO can basically help to focus the founder's vision again by looking at stuff such as delegation and communication, which is the key to collaboration.

So it's really it's really important because CFOs, they're used to delegating, they're used to having teams, they're used to giving responsibility through to their teams. And they can lead by example by showing showing other departments how to do it. And if they're really good communicators, they're also very good at communicating and breaking down the silos and bringing people together. And one of the things that you get, I find quite often in businesses, particularly ones that where there might something might be have gone wrong or they have had success and they kind of now need to are not in the same position and need to see need to change something, that the CFO is very good at being impartial and very good at bringing people together to work together, because they can see the different areas.

And that really helps that a lot of professional accountants or accountants with a professional qualification are tend to be very commercial and very strategic, and they tend to very good at placing things together and understanding what needs to be done. And, for me, that makes them very good leaders in in collaborating. And the other thing that when I say collaboration, that doesn't mean that you that they don't challenge. Part of collaboration is getting feedback and critical analysis. And I think a good CFO is able to bring everyone to the table, get them talking, get them following an agenda, following a path, but also helping to to to to give the feedback and drive where a business is going.

So in my in my experience, I've had one CFO who came into a business, and literally from the day he walked in, he changed everything about the business. He made it more data-orientated, he made it more, you know, more commercially focused. He made he changed the conversation that was being having in the exec from being a little bit more, how do I say, about each each person's personal achievements to say the company's achievements by making people focus on the bigger picture. So, yeah, I do think that the CFO has a unique position and I think that unique position is from the lens that a lot of people don't really see it or don't really understand that the CFO kind of sees everything, and it's from a from a set of accounts or a set of management information, the CFO sees more than just the numbers. He sees the wheels of a business, and he sees how it's moving and and and moving along.

I completely agree. I've worked in multiple organizations and I agree, CFO role is very unique and key in any organization. What advice or what's one thing you wish you had known when you began your career as a CFO?

I guess what, I mean, one thing's a personal thing. I tend to be someone who likes to feel like I know everything, and sometimes that's that's a positive and sometimes that's a negative. On the negative, it's always made me feel when I entered into a situation where I hadn't encountered it before, felt a little bit like, "Oh, I might not be able to do this, or I might get it wrong."

And I guess what I've realized is, it's not the CFO's job to know everything. It's their job to lead and put in the processes to get things done. So rather than focus on having absolute knowledge, what's more important is having the skill set to be able to drive your team to get to the right answer or to be able to do it. So I think one thing that I know now is I don't need to know everything. And if I don't know it know it now, there's different ways of being able to find information, get information, get someone in your team to do it. And that's probably the biggest thing on a personal level.

On a more sort of general level, I think the thing that I that I didn't realize until now is that some people are sometimes in in finance because they think that that's their key skill, is you're good at numbers. But actually, just because you've gone down the route of finance doesn't mean that that's the be-all and end-all of all your skills. So, for example, for me, I'm very much like the commercial side. I like understanding how a business operates, and the numbers for me are only they're the they're the they open the door. And I guess what I've realized is that I really just utilize use the numbers to get my foot through the door in understanding how a business works and how it operates and how to drive it forward.

So that's just a more It's always good to understand what is actually motivating what's actually the thing that really drives you. And it's not necessarily all doing a great set of accounts for me. What what's more the driver of my personality is like driving success in a business and being feeling that that's something that I'm part of that success.

I I hear you on that one, exactly. Numbers shouldn't be, you know, be-all and end-all of of what you're doing. So it's it's just a gateway to to finding out what what is going on, and then building from there or rectifying, and then building towards the strategic goals. Is is what's at the core of this position where you are now. So I appreciate that.

I will ask you another question, a little technical, and I think then we'll switch gears a little bit towards, you know, a bit more personal part. So, Adrian, can you share with us your experience of using data in, let's say, some new data technologies in driving a business?

Yeah. I mean, I you know, I would I would say I like data and I like to manipulate data, so I'm always curious about what systems and stuff businesses are using. When I, in my first role at Carphone, we predominantly used Business Objects, and we had our we had a sort of I wouldn't say bespoke accounting system, we just had an accounting system that very few businesses used. And while Business Objects was good, there were what became clear is that there was a real division between the reporting team and the finance team. So, yeah, in that scenario, the Business Objects never agreed to the accounts, which which was really odd, right?

So I've always been very wary of pure reporting tools that aren't driven by the same data that's going into the accounts. And I think, for me, one really thing that I whenever I go into, say, a system integration or system change, I'm always looking for one version of the truth, and trying to ensure that whatever reporting tool we have we use, that that the data that they're getting is as close as possible to the data that goes into the accounts.

So, for example, when I moved onto HarperCollins and Harlequin, again, HarperCollins used Business Objects and Cognos, and they all did their own thing. They agreed to the accounts in the main. But then Harlequin used Tableau. And Tableau was very different to anything else that I'd used previously because it was very visual. And what was interesting is that we also had a data team at the time at HarperCollins, and they they hadn't really pushed any new sort of data tools onto the business until we acquired this business, Harlequin. And we were like, "Well, hold on. How come Harlequin has this really good sort of reporting tool called Tableau and we're we're still using Cognos and Business Objects?"

Now, I really like Tableau from a business visualization perspective. I think it's I think it's really good in visualizing data. However, what was clear there was, back to what I was saying, is they were using data from directly out of, say, the point of sales systems, and that wasn't necessarily the same data that was going into the accounts. So you'd get to month end and there'd be, "Well, this is the number that we had been reporting for the month, but this is the number that's gone into the accounts," and they disagree. So I try as much as possible, wherever I'm involved in any sort of change of system, upgrade of system, that we get to one version of the truth.

More recently, I've upgraded the financial software, so gone from, say, Xero to to Dynamics. And in that process, decided that we would use Power BI. And again, Power BI is a really good tool. It's really good because it's obviously Microsoft and it works really well with Excel. And from a data manipulation point of view, it's really good. It's not quite as good, I would I would say, as Tableau in terms of visualizing data, but, yeah, I those two systems I've worked I've worked with, they've each got their positives. I think Tableau is better, as I said, visualization. I think I think Power BI is better to manipulate, and and the fact that it comes as almost as from the same data that you're getting a lot of the time from Dynamics is actually makes it easier to ensure consistency of data.

But, yeah, I mean, I'm if I'm being honest, I feel like most most systems that that analyze data, they kind of do a lot of the same things, but actually the more important thing, and this is why you get more and more finance involvement in data, is I've seen where, you know, the data team is separate to the finance team and the data just contradicts each other.

I read one of your comments that really stuck out to me, and it was on LinkedIn. It went something like, "Better to be lucky than smart." Can you tell us more about what that means?

Yeah. I mean, like I said in the beginning, I've had one or two mentors that really invested some time with me. And one of the the first mentor that I had, he's like is he was my manager at Carphone and he was incredibly smart guy, really, really smart. And we just had a we had a conversation once over coffee. And, he kind of said to me, "The smartest people don't always get to the top." And at the time, I was a bit kind of, "Don't say that, cuz that's kind of demotivating."

And then I didn't think much of it. And then I had another mentor who spent, he invested quite a lot of time with me. And, we used to take take me out to lunch. And, you know, he was very, you know, very much trying to build my sort of softer side, softer skills, and he said to me, "Relationships are really really important, because the reality is that most successful people, it's luck plays a huge part in their success." You don't you don't see just smart people being successful all the time. That's not the key. The key is that for some for whatever reason, you marry up hard work, intelligence, with an awfully huge slice of luck.

And I think you can see that you can see that round in the world we're in, right? There are a lot of people who happen to be in businesses that grew at the right time and they had they were there at the beginning and they they had shares. And so they've made loads of money and then they're associated with that success, but how much did they actually have an involvement with it? Whereas you get a lot of smart people who might be in another business that wasn't as successful, but actually they did they did a huge amount. But because the perception is success is to be a unicorn, or a listed business, or to be a big brand, they're not seen as being successful.

So I guess the point is is, while I do agree to certain extent that you make your own luck by, you know, being a hard worker, being have good relationships with people, and, you know, just having integrity, I think to say that just you just have to, you know, if you're smart, that gives you a guarantee of success, no. I think you can be you can be smart and you can be unsuccessful. I think successful people, there's a huge amount of luck, right place, right time. There's a there's a lot of a lot of things going on other than just being smart, basically.

I very much agree, I think. Yeah. A lot of things have to, you know, like they say, stars have to be aligned for things to happen. So, you know, there's a lot of things in action which we may not see. And and this is one of the reasons, Adrian, I think, you know, when I I I'm not a big fan of these books that people are writing nowadays, a lot of pop culture books, seven ways to do something, 12 rules to do something. And they're being Some of these authors are just looking back at the steps they took to become to get from point A to point B, which, you know, B might be very successful or something, but, you know, quite often I don't see the the luck factor or or things that happened that were not in their control, which pointed them towards this path of success. And and I I feel like, you know, that it's not the full story. We're not seeing everything. And it And I see that a lot of people, you know, a lot of younger generation are being misled into this.

I might be being a bit biased or generalizing things here, but I see that I see this behavior nowadays that people expect that everything should be like, "I need to have the road map to do something," you know, one, two, three, and I'm there. And and they get frustrated very quickly, and and there's a lot of, you know, mental health issues on the rise, I think. This is not This is not entirely the reason for it, but I see that there's there's less of this, you know Everything is is kind of being very, you know, seen as a mechanical process, which may not be, you know, the full story.

Yeah. I mean, obviously, I worked in publishing, right? So from my perspective, I published quite a lot of When I say I published, I was in the divisions that I worked with were non-fiction division, right? So I worked in a lot, and I I can tell you for a fact that what you said is 75% accurate. A lot of what a lot of what goes on is about the narrative of those books, it's about sales and marketing, positioning them. The fact of the matter is, if you take if you take probably someone like Steve Jobs, you see people saying they they who want to sort of parallel their management style or their leadership style with him, but he's a unique character.

And it doesn't mean that he got to where he got to by that side, you know, that that—

By wearing blue jeans and black T-shirt every day, you know, for example.

Yeah, exactly.

I think the thing I think the thing is I think the thing is you can you can sit there and think everything is has a has a rule book and a playbook, but then that doesn't really make sense because the world constantly evolves and constantly changes. There's so many things that we don't understand despite all this technology and despite all the money that we invest, that things are more much more fluid. There isn't there isn't, unfortunately, there isn't a yes or no answer to certain things like, you know, building the or setting up the next unicorn business. It's not, you know, there isn't there isn't a there isn't a rule book that you can follow that guarantees that that's going to happen. And that's why life is actually so exciting and so good, because there are there are pitfalls and there are there are, you know, ups and downs, and that's what, you know, that that's what that's what living is about, right? And that's, you know, that's part.

If you look at any successful person, I mean, whether it's Richard Branson or whatever, these big, you know, these big entrepreneurs, you can see a lot of them have had failure before they've had success. And, you know, the statistic that I that I always read is, the older you are, the more likely an entrepreneur is to succeed because they've had, you know, whether it's they've had more life experience or they've failed at stuff. So, yeah, I mean, I don't think you can I don't think you can basically suddenly say, "Oh, I'm going to follow a rule book and that's going to that's that's going to eliminate 20 years of experience and, you know, shortcut me to where I want to be."

Yeah. But, you know, sometimes with luck, you can get a shortcut as well.

Exactly. But I guess that's what I'm saying, it's more likely it's going to be luck, you just land in the right place at and the right place at the right time that gets you there.

It takes a lot of effort to to get into that position though, and that that's that's what we're all doing, I guess. So, okay. Right. We we are short of time, so I'll I'll let Xenia handle the next part quickly, and then we can, you know—

Awesome. So I have two more questions left for you, Adrian. We're almost done torturing you. I want to give a chance for our audience to learn about a typical day in a CFO's life. Could you describe for us a typical day for you for for you?

Yeah. I mean, most of my days actually don't have a huge amount of routine. So, a lot of the time it revolves around a one-to-one relationship with, say, the founder or the CEO. So at the moment, a lot of the a lot of the conversations I have I have saying a typical day will be about things going on in the business and about how we can how we can evolve the business. So, for example, it might be it might be we're talking about refinancing, and you we're talking about what what we can do now, what we can do in the on the future.

Sometimes there might be there might be more to it where, you know, I actually have to I actually do, you know, the financial model, but more it's more about discussing options, what can we do. Another another thing that's typically comes up a lot is about strategic planning and a lot of like, "Well, because the businesses I'm in, just to be clear, at the moment are more scaleup-type businesses, are you know, okay, we're here, but if we continue on the trajectory that we're on now, what do we need in 3, 6, 12 months, 2 years' time in order to continue on that growth and embed that growth?"

So a lot of the time, it can be stuff that's actually like, "Well, do we have the right people?" It can be looking at the looking at individuals, or just looking at it holistically, what do we need? Have we got the right have we got the right infrastructure in place? So a lot of the conversations at the moment in my in my day, they'll be they'll be There's quite a lot of reactionary stuff, so there'll be stuff where something unexpected happened and I kind of need to figure out how to resolve it or how to take it forward.

At the moment, I've got a role as well where the business is predominantly in the US. So I'm having to juggle a lot of my time working with the US, and kind of arranging my time with the with the US. So a lot of the time the first part of my day is actually thinking about, planning about meetings that I'm going to have in the afternoon in the US when the US wakes up. So, yeah, I mean, that the the typical day is a mixture of, say, doing things in terms of, like, you know, some FP&A, liaising with, you know, with bankers or liaising with financiers, liaising with board members. And then the other part of the day is is like dealing with, like, operational stuff, CEOs, founders, board members, and kind of dealing with dealing with things that are operational day-to-day.

But at the moment, if I'll be honest, the bulk of my time is actually more strategic planning. How do we take the business forward in the next sort of 3 to 24 months, and what do we need? Looking at looking at runway, looking at where we want to where we want to grow, whether that's markets, clients, and what type, you know, what type of infrastructure, but more specifically, people do we need in the business.

Adrian, if you were able to go back in time 10 years, what would you tell yourself about leadership that you didn't know then?

I think the first thing that that I would say is a a leader doesn't have to know everything. I think when I was younger, I felt I had to know everything, your leader has to be able to answer every single question, they have to be able to, you know, be the person who knows. And I think that is clearly not the case.

I think the second one would be patience. I think there's sometimes a tendency with when you want to be a leader or you want to get to the top, that you get there as soon as possible, or you get there or you want to get there with a certain milestone, right? And I think I've come to realize that everyone has their own path, and they take their of their own time when where they get to, where they establish the skills that make them that make them a good leader. So I would say, in terms of leadership, don't don't feel feel that you you have to get to where you need to get to to some preordained time. It will You will develop the skills and you will get the skills in your own time for your own experiences.

I guess the other thing I would I would think about, and I think is really important, is about team. I think you're only a good leader realizes that they're only as good as their team, and that their success, an important element of their success, is their team. So, where where sometimes when you're younger you can be a bit more individualistic and look at yourself, when you start to move through the hierarchy of an organization, you realize how important team is. So I would say, as a leader, leadership doesn't doesn't really isn't really just about the individual, it's actually about the wider team and the wider organization. And you very much as a leader, you influence the culture of the business and what's around you.

So, yeah, that old sort of saying is, you know, you lead by example, I think is really true. And so, one of the things that I would say to myself is always try to act in the way that you want others to act. Because if you don't, and you and then you expect them to suddenly do as you say, not as I do, that's never really going to happen. So I guess, yeah, it's it's it's that thing of be patient, take your time, don't feel you need to know every know everything, that isn't what a leader is, and think about your team. Yeah, those are kind of things that I would that I would tell myself.

Amazing. Which leads me to my next question and final question of this episode. We're at our final part here, and this is where our questions get tricky. So, Adrian, in your point of view, what are the most important attributes of successful financial leaders today?

I guess I think the first one is you've got you've got to be you've got to be a considered and measured character. I think a good financial leader doesn't doesn't react, but they're analytical and decisive. Good financial leaders are good at listening and taking in information to make decisions. The best financial leaders are transparent in the way they operate. They make sure information is available, they make sure that information is timely, and they make sure that what information is presented is correct for the audience.

Specifically in terms of financial leaders, it's one of the key things you always get with finance, is it's sometimes it's some people's cup of tea, and sometimes it's not people's couple cup of tea. And particularly in sort of founder-led businesses, you normally find one founder is is quite good with the finances and one isn't. I think one of the key skills of a a finance leader in those scenarios is to make sure that not just the finance-orientated leader, or even if they're both not finance or they're both fine finance-orientated, that they always make sure that that other person is on board and they can explain things in layman's terms. So, being able to communicate and deal with people with different levels of ability, I think, is really important. So that's communication.

The most important thing for any leader is influence. Leaders are in place because they want to influence. To have a seat at the table and take the business forward and influence that direction. And I guess that for me is the most important thing is is your ability to influence. And I think all the other attributes basically funnel to that attribute that allow you to influence, by being a good communicator, being able to delegate, being able to be transparent and produce information that people believe in. Trust is really important as well, right? So if people trust you, if they see you're consistent, going back to what we said at the beginning, if they if they see that you that you know you have no agenda, and you know, and that you act with integrity, it makes it easier to influence people.

And I guess, one of the other things that I think is really important in this day and age, is I think gone are the days where you can be, you know, really cold, hard leader, and that the finance person can be just that sort of the computer says no, there is no budget. You know, there has to be a bit of empathy and a bit of juggling from the finance person from the finance lead. They need to know, they need to know when they have to try and work with the business to make something to make something happen, right? They can't always be no. There will be instances where they have to say no, right? And we all we've all been there, but they need to be sort of emotionally aware of how to what are the right things and when is the right time to to support the business to drive it forward, and be maybe a bit more agile than they would have been in the past.

Thanks for sharing that. So, Adrian, we have indeed come to the end of the episode. I didn't know how we've, you know, gone from zero to 60 minutes there in such a short time. It feels like 10, 15 minutes only. I hope you have enjoyed this as well, but I think it was a it's going to be a great opportunity for anyone aspiring to be not just a financial leader, any kind of leader in any organization, or anyone wanting to progress in an organization. I think the this episode is is is shining a lot of light on on on subjects, you know, that matter a lot as a person, as a professional. So thanks for sharing all the wisdom, Adrian. We're really thankful and happy that you spoke with us.

Brilliant. Thank you. I look forward to listening to it, but I'm one of those people who hates the way I sound when I hear it played back to me, so—

You sound really good, frankly! But I feel the same, like you said. I don't like to listen back to my episodes as well, but I do it, you know, with it it cringes me, but I still have to listen to it. So it's part of our job.

You got a voice for you got a voice for for podcasts, Luke, so—

I hope so!

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