Count Me In®

Links mentioned in today's Podcast:
https://www.thecareertoolkitbook.com
https://www.thecareertoolkitbook.com/resources

Connect with Mark:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hershey/

https://twitter.com/CareerToolkitBk

https://www.facebook.com/TheCareerToolkitBook

https://www.instagram.com/thecareertoolkit/

Full Episode Transcript:

  < Intro >

Adam:            Welcome back to Count Me In. IMA's podcast for finance and accounting professionals working in business. I'm Adam Larson, and today I'm excited to bring you part two of my conversation with Mark Herschberg. In which he provides a helpful framework for thinking about hybrid work plans and how you should approach finding most productive balance for individuals, managers, and teams within your organization. 

In the interest of time, I'm not going to list all of Mark's credentials, again. Just high-level for those who missed the first episode. Mark teaches at MIT, he's a serial entrepreneur and business innovator, and he's the author of The Career Toolkit: Essential Skills For Success That No One Taught You, which I highly recommend you check out, just follow the link in the show notes. 

Okay, that's enough introduction. Let's get right into another highly insightful conversation with Mark Herschberg.

< Music >

So, Mark, I want to welcome you back to the Count Me In podcast. We had a great time talking about The Great Resignation last time. And today we're going to be talking about hybrid and hybrid work and what that means for organizations. And, so, to start off, I know that during Covid everybody went remote because you couldn't unless you were certain types of organizations that had to still work in person. 

But many organizations went remote completely. And now as we're on the third year of Covid, and people are coming back to work, everybody's moved to hybrid. So what it really boils down to is what can we do to be more effective in this hybrid model, going forward?

Mark:             That's a great question, and there are a number of ways we can look at this. But to start, here's four things to think about as you begin to return to the office. 

First, let's formalize the rules. Often we have a certain way of working, and in our last episode, we talked about corporate culture. Usually, it's not written down, we just know this is how things get done on our team, in our department. But we want to be more explicit about how we do that, and this is for two reasons. 

First, it's a little different, this is a disruption. Now, we had a disruption in 2020 when we said, one day, "Stop coming to the office." And that was very disruptive. We know what's coming, we can be a little more intentional and planned this time. But also we have new people coming on board, who aren't going to be around us as much to learn by seeing. To get that osmosis, that just feel for it by being there.

So we want to be more explicit with the rules. I don't mean employee handbook; I mean how we do things. When should you call a meeting, versus this could have been email, versus this could have been a Slack message. 

When you create these rules get input, you, the manager, you have enough to do. Don't think, "Here's one more thing I have to do." Get input from the whole team. In fact, you can even potentially pass this off to others to take the first pass. 

Now, you as the manager will get the final say, the ultimate decision. But others are probably really excited to say, "Oh, I get to be a larger voice in this. You're asking me to take the lead on this, this is fantastic." They see it as opportunity, whereas you see it as one more burden. But, again, you will have the final say.

But that's to say you should really, as a leader, incorporate the voices of the whole team. Don't be afraid to almost be a little formal, in terms of the welcome back. There was a trend back in the .com era, back when companies would shut down. It was very sad, these people you had worked with for a while, there was a shift, and they did something rather clever. They said, "We have some experts who understand how to make a shift, we call them clergy."

Clergy are very good at you're transitioning from being single to being married. You're transitioning from having this person in your life to now they aren't anymore, and we have ceremonies to mark that. You're doing a big transition when you say, "Welcome back to the office." 

You can just say, "Well, you're showing up Monday, deal with it." Or you can say, "Hey, we're coming back and we want to welcome you back. We want to recognize there is a formal change here." And that can be a ceremony and that can be a fun, good ceremony. It doesn't have to be solemn, it could be a party. It could be more than just a happy hour. 

Don't just say, "Well, we're going to do drinks, Monday, when you're back in the office." Make it symbolic. Make people understand and feel this change, just as we do with other life cycle events. So I think you should create a formal one. 

And, finally, don't be afraid to change what you're doing, this is new for most of us. Now I've run hybrid companies before. I've run virtual companies before, but everyone has been different, and, especially, as we do it at a global scale. 

As we do it, not just our company, but every company. Don't be afraid to say, "Maybe we need to change this up, how we do it." And that's okay, it's not a mistake, it doesn't make you look weak; it makes you look responsive to your employees.

Adam:            And it also sounds like you're saying that when we come together, it should be more than just doing our meetings. Like when we come together makes sure we're meeting face to face. It should be more than that. It should be more social activity, so that we're engaging and connecting outside of, "Hey, let's meet about this spreadsheet."

Mark:             Well, the ceremony I was referring to is when you first come back. Maybe in the first week or two you do something formal and that's probably more of a one-time event. But you've brought up a very good point. 

The initial thinking by many people is, "Okay, you're in the office two days a week, three days a week, you really need to be productive." 

We know employees, you're at social or chat, you surf the web sometimes....

Connect with Kyrill: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kyrill-asatur/

Full Episode Transcript:

< Intro >

Adam:            Welcome back to Count Me In. The podcast for accounting and finance professionals working in business. I'm Adam Larson, and today we're going to talk about something that is, no doubt, near and dear to you, namely, your money. 

My guest is Kyrill Asatur, the CEO and co-founder of Centerfin. As a longtime advisor to hedge funds and other large institutional investors, Kyrill was often asked by friends and relatives for advice on how they could better manage their money. How the big shots on Wall Street do it? And for a long time, he didn't have a good answer for them because that institutional level of service and expertise, simply did not exist for individual investors. 

This is the story of how he decided to correct that inefficiency, in the investment and management ecosystem through the power of fintech. This podcast is a must listen for anyone with a 401K and IRA, or any other investment accounts, which means it's pretty much for everyone. So let's get started. 

< Music >

So, Kyrill, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I'm really excited to have you on. And I figured we could start off by just introducing you to our audience, and just so you can give us a little bit of background and your story.

Kyrill:             Sure, thanks for having me on, Adam. So my background is about 20 years ago, well, a little over 20 years ago now. Out of undergrad, I joined, at the time it was called the Global Operations Division at Goldman Sachs. And it was an analyst program, three-year program, where I got to rotate through several different roles. And, so, I did that. I was in foreign exchange for a little bit. Then equities, and then decided to find an area of the firm that aligned itself with the hedge fund industry. 

So I got, personally, very interested in the hedge fund industry, just always been reading about hedge fund managers. And at Goldman Sachs there's many different ways, as you can imagine, you can interact with hedge funds. 

But the one business that was directly correlated, so to speak, with the hedge fund industry, was the prime brokerage business, which is basically serving all hedge fund needs. And Goldman had, and still does have, the kind of premier prime brokerage business, top three prime brokerage business in the country. 

And, so, I was able to get myself a role in that business. So I was there for another six years, five, six years after that, after my first three-year rotation. And then I joined a hedge fund that I covered, they were actually ex-Goldman guys, too, and I was with them for another five years. 

Ultimately, I got recruited into a couple of different roles with other firms, and decided in 2016, so now about six years ago, to start my own advisory practice. 

And initially focused on working with hedge funds and other alternative investment managers, very organically and really through, as they say, necessity is the mother of all invention. 

I decided to start what is now Centerfin. And the idea was really because over the two decades or so that I've been working on Wall Street, I've always struggled to help friends and family that will come to me and ask me about what to do with their money. So they might have a retirement account, or a 401K, or just savings that they've saved up, that they would like to invest. And, frankly, I just never saw any great options out there that I can point them to. 

And having spent my whole career, or at least the biggest part of my career, interacting with large, sophisticated, institutional investors like pension funds, endowments, foundations, family offices. I, basically, learned the way that they invest their money, and it was very different than the options that were available for if you're an average Joe or Jane, so to speak. 

And, so, Centerfin was founded to address that need, in my mind. And we're basically two years into it, a little or two years into it. We went live at the beginning of this year. We have a tech-enabled, kind of tech-forward service. And, so, we spent a bunch of time building it, but we went live at the beginning of this year and growing nicely in these crazy markets.

Adam:            Yes, the markets are very crazy with everything that's happening, the inflation. And in the past three years with the market, the way it's going, I know it's been really crazy for everybody. And I know organizations, and our focus will probably be more on organizations and people within those organizations. 

I know organizations are looking to invest and trying to build their wealth. As well as they're trying to keep above water in this industry. What do you think the future of finance is looking at as things are, continuously, changing and the finance team has to adapt as they go along?

Kyrill:             Yes, absolutely. So really technology is playing a bigger role in everything. So one of the reasons why we started our company and the way we structured it, it was because we felt like technology was something that could be used to just create more efficiency in really any process. 

But, for us, it's the investment process, managing people's money. And by "Create efficiency", I just mean do things in a way that are cheaper to the end consumer. So for us it's an individual. But this works all the way up and down the chain internally at an organization or externally depending on we all have clients we serve.

And, so, I think technology is a major, and you've heard about it, people have referred to it as fintech. It's finance and technology combining, and the interesting thing is that it's still early, quite frankly. Because I do think that technology is making its headway in helping create efficiencies in organizations, and processes, and procedures. But, quite frankly, most of the financial world infrastructure is still what existed 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, in some cases. And, so, there's just a lot of opportunity.

Adam:            There is a lot of opportunity. And as you mentioned there, a lot of the systems that are in place, are still the same things that were built years ago. 

                        Now, is it more advantageous to go with a solution that may be more digitally native, that doesn't have the backbone of the original structures, but it's trying to be more agile and adaptive with technology advances?

Kyrill:             Yes, I think it's absolutely advantageous. So I actually was having a conversation with a former colleague this morning. And what struck me is that even when you try, and this is somewhat by design. 

But even when you try to structure your business in a way that's very customer-driven. And that's really our ethos, is that we really want to focus on the customer. What'...

Connect with Robert: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertbendetti/
Check out IMA's Statement of Cash Flow Tutorial

Full Episode Transcript:

 < Intro >

Adam:            Welcome to Count Me In. The podcast that brings you an insider's look at accounting and finance professionals working in business. I'm Adam Larson. My guest today is Robert Bendetti Jr. Robert is a CPA and the CFO of Lifecycle Engineering, and he joins me for a high-energy discussion about cash flow management. 

He shares timeless wisdom, he learned from an early boss, to how he uses the latest technologies to optimize his entire cash flow process. This is one of those inspiring podcasts where you can tell the guest is not only a true expert in his field, but passionate about helping others take their skills to the next level. Enjoy. 

 < Music >

Robert, I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It's really exciting to have you on. And today we're going to be talking a lot about cash flow and cash flow management, which is near and dear to the accountant's heart. But before we get to that, I just wanted to start with if you could just tell a little bit about your story and how you got to where you are, and then we'll continue the conversation from there.

Robert:           Adam, pleasure to be here. Cash flow management is my favorite topic and always has been. I describe myself as a CFO, husband, father ultra-runner, and when I'm doing all of those things, I'm thinking about cash flow management. 

I don't know about everybody else, but it's certainly important and it seems like everywhere I work it has been important. Yes, a little background, I've always done corporate accounting. I am a CPA and member of the IMA, best org ever. But I never worked in public accounting, it's always been corporate accounting and the kind of standard internal individual contributor to manager, director, to VP, to CFO.

Adam:            So what is it about cash flow and cash flow management that excites you so much?

Robert:           Really early on, I had a boss tell me, and he stole this quote, and I don't know who said it originally, "Revenue is vanity, profit is sanity, cash is reality." And it just really stuck with me that everything else is just fun and games, until we actually get paid cash. I cannot pay payroll with your hopes and dreams, your purchase order, your good meeting. The only thing I can make payroll with is cash.

Adam:            That's very true. And speaking of cash flow, IMA has a Cash Flow Management course, that I know you took. So you can take that course and you can learn the basis of cash flow management. Which most accountants do know, but they probably forget, depending on what their job role is. But then what happens?

Robert:           Yes, first I'm going to plug the course, free CPE for IMA members. I am, like many CPAs and CMAs, always delinquent in getting my CPE. It's two months before the time to send in the paperwork. I'm like, "Ha! What? Do I have to do that again? Is that every year?"

I don't know how I've forgotten it for 20 years. But, yes, I love it when there's free CPE, as a member of the IMA, and, yes, Statement of Cash Flows tutorial. Great course, one hour, little hitter is a fantastic reminder on the foundation of the cash flow statement and how important it's. 

But to, "Now what?" It started to get my creative juices flowing, and I started to think about also the framework of the days of the fast, cheap, easy money might be over. That we might look back at 2010, '18, '19, even '20 as the good times and that the future '23, '24, '25 might be rising interest rates, recession, it might be inflation all in the same stew. So no time better than the present to get your cash flow in order.

Adam:            So how do you do that?

Robert:           Number one, I think is, obviously, the cash conversion cycle, CCC. That’s the foundation and, yes, check mark. And I'm not going to cover that because we're a bunch of accountants. But next, maybe 102 level accounting is going to be; you need to review your customer and job selection for profit and credit worthiness. 

A lot has changed in the past two years and maybe you looked at it pre-pandemic and you understood your customer profitability, project profitability. Or you understood your job profitability, or your customer credit worthiness, a lot has changed. Somebody that was credit-worthy before may not be in the future. And, so, I think right now is the perfect time to be checking those things. 

Number two is what are your policies and procedures around job or milestone, invoice timing, and, for that matter, what's your invoice processes like?

Well, did it used to all be physical and now you're fully remote? 

Did it used to be lean and now it is cumbersome? That's the number two thing. 

And then the third thing is collections, not everybody likes collections. Some people find that it's a little uncomfortable to, "Am I being annoying? Am I being rude? Will the salespeople not like me?"

You need to stop caring, there is somebody on your team who is a little rough around the edges, and that is the perfect person to promote to leader of collections and to be right on top. Because the squeaky wheel gets the grease and you want to get the grease, you want to get the cash. As maybe we are entering into Q4 '22, and '23, and '24, maybe we're entering into some tough financial times, if not you, potentially your customers.

Adam:            So as the customers enter that tough financial times. As we're looking at rising interest rates, and all the different things that are affecting us. What can accountants do to prepare for that? You just mentioned some things that they can do. 

But I imagine that there are other elements that they would have to do like technologies, making sure that all their systems are in place. Making sure all the regulations and all those things are in place. But what recommendations can you give them as we look to that future? Because it's not going to get better yet.

Robert:           Yes, I'll give you level one and level two. Because sometimes you skip level one because you assume everybody's doing it. But maybe there's one person on the call that isn't. Level one stuff is just to remind the team that it's really important, that maybe you got PPP money, or customers were paying you early. 

You're a government contractor and the government was paying you in seven days instead of 27 days. That's not going to happen in the future and I know everyone's overtasked, and they are super busy with other things. 

Level one is just reminding the team, "Hey, sending those invoices out on time, coll...

Connect with Jennifer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenniferreneesmith/
Learn more about Scribe: https://scribehow.com/

Full Episode Transcript:

  < Intro >

Adam:            Hello and welcome to Count Me In. The podcast that explores the world of business from a management accountant's perspective. This is Adam Larson, and today my co-host Neha, is talking to a woman who describes herself as an accidental CEO. Jennifer Smith is the founder and CEO of Scribe. 

A software company that helps businesses capture and scale the expertise of their top performers, to drive new levels of productivity. From fighting collaboration overload to leveraging RPA, to attracting the right talent, Jennifer discusses how her obsession with efficiency has fueled her unique and unplanned leadership journey. Let's start the conversation.

 < Music >

Neha:              Welcome to Count Me In, Jennifer, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Jennifer:         Thanks so much, I'm excited to be here.

Neha:              Awesome. So first things first, you call yourself an accidental CEO. Tell me more about that and what brought you to this point in life?

Jennifer:         Because if you were to ask me 15, 20 years ago, gosh, maybe even five, seven years ago, "Would you ever be CEO? Would you ever start your own company?"

I probably would've laughed at you and said, "No." It's not something I've ever thought about. I don't know anyone who does that, that's not in the cards for me. I started my career as a management consultant. 

So I was at McKinsey for seven years. I worked mostly with financial institutions in the Oregon operations practice. Which functionally meant I would spend nine to five sitting next to agents, in operations centers, looking over their shoulder and watching what they did. 

And if you ever do that work, you learn the name of the game is you figure out who the best person is. And you sit next to them and you say, "Well, what are you doing differently than everyone else?"

And you find that they've found better ways of working. They would say, "Oh, I was trained to do all of these things, but here's how I do this better." And they would show me, they're all tabbing, they're doing really fast things on their computer. They became whizzes at finding these shortcuts and these very complicated pieces of software they were using. 

And, as a consultant, I would dutifully write that up and sell that back to my client. But I always thought like, "Gosh, if we had a way to just capture what these people knew how to do. They could have had really big impact on that op center. They could have helped their colleagues all be better." And I said, "Well, it's an obvious problem, someone will solve that someday, surely." 

And then, you fast-forward 10 years later and then I'm working in venture capital, and investing in enterprise software companies. And I spent a lot of my time talking to buyers of enterprise software, again, folks in financial services. Just trying to understand like, "What are your open problems? What are your challenges? What are you trying to solve?"

And this idea kept coming back. People saying like, "Oh, gosh, well, I or my people are spending a lot of time doing similar tasks over and over again. And actually they do it differently, it's definitely different between people, everyone finds their own way." Sometimes it's not even consistent within the same person. They do something once a quarter, they don't quite remember it, they try to do the process, especially, if they've a very complicated software. 

I'm like, "Wouldn't it be really nice if there were a way to just know what was the best of what everyone knew how to do?" And I don't really have a way of doing that today. My only option is to tell someone, "Just take time away from doing your actual work and please generate a document that shows what you know how to do." That's not a very popular request. 

And, so, I looked at it and said, "Gosh, technology has gotten so much better. It's so many years later and we're still facing the exact same problems." And I shifted from like, "Someone should do something about this." To, "Well, I don't think anyone is doing anything about this and they should, so I guess I'll do something about this."

And, so, I very much did not intend to start a company. I cared a lot about solving a particular problem. I'm obsessed with efficiency. And I just saw a massive inefficiency in how millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world are spending their nine to five, trying to navigate these complicated pieces of software and trying to do it quickly, because everyone's got a million things going on and everyone's just doing their best.

But most people are doing it sub-optimally and it's taking them more time, and they're spending a lot of time even just trying to figure out what to do, that's not a good feeling. And, so, I said, "Well, gosh, if I could solve that for people, why would I do something else? This feels like what I should be doing." And, so, I started my company, Scribe, three and a half years ago now.

Neha:              Wow, that's really insightful and thank you for connecting it to common business problems that we are all facing every day. So this reminds me of a conversation I was having with my daughter, she's 10 years old. And I was telling her about coming on this interview and meeting you, the CEO of the company. 

And she was very curious, of course, about the company and your work. I was, of course, able to help her understand what the word Scribe means. But how would you explain to a fifth grader, in simplest terms, what you and your team does?

Jennifer:         Yes, we actually design our software, so a fifth grader could use it, it's designed for people across digital literacy. So you could actually tell her to just try it out if she's at all curious, and she should be able to do it. 

So, Scribe, very simply, we're a desktop application or a browser extension, your choice. And we will watch you do work and auto-generate step-by-step, written guides with screenshots showing how to do that process. 

So let's say, for example, you have a client who is constantly asking you, let's pick something very simple, "How do I log into my QuickBooks Portal?" I don’t know, that's probably a question you've gotten before. So all you would do is you would click the Record button and you would log into the QuickBooks portal, and you would click Start Record. And, boom, Scribe would auto-generate step-by-step written guide on how to log into a QuickBooks Portal.

Again, very simple example, but it would say, "Step one, navigate to www.quickbooks.com.

Step two, click on the Login icon, instead, it's got a...

Connect with Douglas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-douglas-clayton-414a785/
Learn more about FilmDoc: https://thefilmdoc.com/
Heart of Camden Trailer: https://vimeo.com/439742490
Dovere of Camden Trailer: https://vimeo.com/327729693

Full Episode Transcript:
[00:00:00]       < Intro >

Adam:            Welcome to Count Me In, the podcast for accounting and finance pros working in business. I'm Adam Larson, and today we examine leadership from a different angle, with Douglas Clayton, affectionately known as the FilmDoc. 

Neha Ratnakar caught up with him to discuss his journey from making crowd-pleasing HR videos for a satellite company, to researching leadership at Wharton for his PhD. To advising C-suite executives through the lens of filmmaking. There's links to the trailers for the award-winning documentaries in the show notes. So be sure to check them out if you're interested. Now sit back and enjoy this great conversation with Douglas Clayton.

[00:00:43]       < Music >

Neha:              I was going through your profile and it fascinated me, among many other things, by the way, that you had a very long and interesting career in SES satellites. Tell us how was it working with actual rocket scientists and what lessons did your time in SES teach you?

Douglas:         That's a great question. There are a couple of really fun elements of working with rocket scientists. One of them is when I go to family dinners, or parties, or functions, and people say, "What do you do?" I get to say that I work with rocket scientists, and that's an instant attention grabber. 

But certainly much more substantial than that is just working with folks who are so smart. And most of the engineers and scientists who I've had the pleasure of working with are modest folks. They don't have big egos, they work really hard, they love to figure out problems. They actually love to have problems so they can have something to figure out. So I've always enjoyed it. Always considered it a great privilege to work with people who are so smart and, in many ways, so very kind as well.

In terms of, "What was it like to work at SES?" It was a lovely experience, life-changing experience, I'll say, actually. The way I ended up working at SES is I worked for GE Capital for many years. Then I ended up transferring to their satellite business, which was headquartered in Princeton, New Jersey. And three months later, we were sold to a tiny company called SES, in the tiny country of Luxembourg. 

Now, you can maybe imagine going from working for this giant company being acquired by a small company. We all had choices to stay, or to maybe move on with our careers, or to stay with SES. And the best decision that I made, career decision, was to stay with SES, and the reason is because, at that point, I was an HR manager, or also known as a generalist.

And what we discovered is that as an HR person, and then eventually as a leader, our decisions really mattered when you worked for a small company. Where when we worked for GE we were often in execution mode. 

So then to move from a big company where the big decisions were being made in Connecticut. To a small company where they were relying on us in Princeton to help guide the corporate office in Luxembourg, which, again, it was a very small company. 

It really mattered and it helped to develop our confidence. And then as I evolved in terms of leadership and the company moving up in the organization, that happened more rapidly because of the size of the company than it would have happened with GE. 

Working for a company that's headquartered in Europe was a real game changer, as well. Because I needed to put on a different hat and look at work and look at the world through a different lens, not just an American lens, which was fine. But, now, I really needed to understand, "Hey, how do we do leadership? 

How do our accountants and finance people, how do they need to work together from Europe, between Europe and the U.S.? 

How do our rocket scientists work together? 

How do we merge these two cultures? Very different country cultures and company cultures?" So it was quite a learning experience, for me, something that I could have never gained at GE, in the position that I was in, and it's something that I would've never gained just through university.

Neha:              That's so fascinating, and I'm glad you made the switch and stayed on. All right, I loved what you said about having problems to solve, actually loving the fact that you have problems to solve. Now, tell me when Covid-19 hit, it must have been very difficult for SES. Because satellite making or maintaining them is not something that you can take back home with your laptop and do it from your dining table. So how did the leaders, and the people teams, in SES make this new reality work?

Douglas:         It was extraordinary, what happened. I had a front-row seat because I was part of a task force, the Covid task force, and we would meet weekly, and I was on that team for several months and until I retired. But watching the team, which was led by our human resources leader, Evie Roos, at the time. 

It was extraordinary, the decisions that they were making and the stakes were so high. Part of our satellite business is, certainly, working with space engineers, and satellite engineers, and rocket scientists. But we also have, just as important, dynamite teams of people who actually operate. And I'll say quote-unquote, "Fly our satellites." They work 24/7.

And, so, what were we going to do with them? So certainly we allowed, I'll say 95% of the organization to work from home, or the vast majority, and that was a whole another challenge and project.

But then we have this other group of people where we can't allow them to work from home. We really needed them to come into the office. To sit at the monitors and to take care of that part of our very important, essential, part of our business. And, so, it was really around listening, and listening to what people recommended. Listening to the experts in the field. Listening to the supervisors and the employees, and just making decisions based on what was best for them. 

So, for instance, the folks who were our satellite operators, who had to come into the office every day, we had meals delivered to them. It was an extremely sterile environment. 

If there was anyone who was near someone who had Covid, then, that person needed to quarantine. It was very strict because you can imagine potential disaster of having a team of people, who can no longer come into the office to fly satellites because Covid has spread through there. It was executed exceptionally, so that was just one area of our business. 

And, then, of co...

Connect with Ane: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aneohm/
LeaseCrunch Website: www.leasecrunch.com
What is ASC 824? The ultimate guide: https://www.leasecrunch.com/blog/asc-842
5 FAQs about embedded leases: https://www.leasecrunch.com/blog/embedded-leases
Request a demo: www.leasecrunch.com/request-a-demo

Full Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] < Intro >

Adam:            Welcome back to Count Me In. The podcast for accounting and finance professionals working in business. I'm Adam Larson. Today we'll be discussing a perennial hot topic lease accounting, specifically, FASB's new standards for private companies and nonprofits under ASC 842. And just in case you're unaware, the deadline to transition to the new standards is December 31st, 2022.

Thankfully, I'm joined, today, by a true expert in this, infamously, thorny topic. Ane Ohm, is a CPA as well as co-founder and CEO of LeaseCrunch, a software company that helps companies simplify their lease accounting. If you're looking for practical tips and best practices to make lease accounting a little less stressful, this is the conversation for you. Let's get started. 

[00:00:51]       < Music >

Well, Ane, I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast, today. We are going to be talking about lease accounting. And as all of us know that the standard, the new Lease Accounting Standard deadline is approaching very quickly, and people should get started. We've been talking about this since what? 2018. And if you haven't gotten started the time now is to get started. What do you think? What is your advice to people as we start talking about this?

Ane:                I think the big thing with any accounting standard is that, and when I was running a different company. A new accounting standard would come up and I would ask my accountant, "What is the last moment I have to do anything about this?" And that's when I would do it. And the challenge with the lease accounting standard, if you wait there's a couple of things, first of all, leases can be complicated. 

And, so, that analysis of your lease, spending the time understanding it in the context of the new lease standard can take some time. And, secondly, if you need help and you wait the experts are going to be busy. So you're going to have a really difficult time getting a hold of someone who can really guide you through the right steps. 

So we're actually hearing CPA firms state that if their clients wait, they're going to have to charge them more in order to be able to offer that assistance. Because they're going to be so busy with other things. If you wait until January, February, this is going to be rough. So start now, get on top of it, it's just going to make things, life, better for you.

Adam:            Yes, for sure, because you don't want to wait till the last possible second because it's going to fall back in your face. Do you think that maybe we could start, in this podcast, to maybe go over some practical expectations and how to make your adoption easier? Especially if you are just getting started now, or even if you've been aware, you've been preparing. But to the actual practical application, it's still going to be a difficult process.

Ane:                Yes, so there's something to it when you think about the new Lease Standard, you have basically two types of leases. Leases that existed before the standards needed to be implemented, and then leases that start after the standard need to be implemented. So talking about those leases that started before your initial application date of the new standard. The FASB, Financial Accounting Standard Board really wanted to make sure that this was as easy as possible. It sounds like that might not be true, but it is, they have said that repeatedly. 

And, so, what they've done is they've actually provided some practical expedience and those practical expedience, the whole purpose of them is to simplify the new standard. So for those transition leases, those leases that existed before, if you have a nice software available to you, there's really only six pieces of information that you need to do. 

If you apply those practical expedience, make sure you're doing the things that make this as easy as possible. And then collect those six basic pieces of information. And those are; start date, well, guess what, that start date is going to be the initial application date of the standard. 

So if you know that already, huh! If your end is December 31st, that's going to be January 1st, of 2022. All right, so we got one. Second one is, "When does the lease end?" It can be a little more complicated because you have to not just say, "When do I stop paying? When is the initial end of the lease?" I have to, also, look at it and see, "What might I be reasonably certain to renew a term or might I be reasonably certain to terminate early?"

So you really have to look at what is the total lease term, including renewals, if you're reasonably certain. It's a high bar but you do have to look at it.

The third thing is discount rate. So, and I don't think we know this but those first two seem, they are pretty easy. And the discount rate is the FASB offers the ability to just use the risk-free rate. So that's great because that's publicly available. 

You don't have to really think about it too hard. Or the challenge with the risk-free rate is that it will tend to be lower, which means your lease liability will be higher. If you don't want that for larger leases, the FASB, also, more recently, allows us to decide your discount rate based on asset class. 

So you can say, "All right, for my office lease, which is a big lease, it's going to be big dollars, I'll spend the time to figure out the higher discount rate. And if I have vehicles or photocopiers, I'm just going to use the risk-free rate."

So that's a nice thing, so that's the third piece of information. Fourth one, is, hey, is this an operating lease or a finance lease? Well, once again, FASB says, "You know what, if you had an operating lease before it's an operating lease now. If you had a capital lease...

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Full Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00]       < Intro >

Adam:            Welcome back to Count Me In. I'm Adam Larson from IMA, or the Institute of Management Accountants. For those of us joining us for the first time. I'm excited to welcome back Michael Teape to the podcast. Michael is a seasoned management coach and the co-founder and president of Teape Training International.

Today, we discuss the tips for leaders in the face of constant disruption to business as usual. With Covid, inflation, supply chain issues, technology changes, leaders need to stop bracing for the next curve ball, and instead look for ways they can adapt to find new paths to success. 

It was great to get Michael's insight and optimism on this important topic. Let's get the conversation started. 

[00:00:45]       < Music >

Michael, thank you so much for coming back to Count Me In. We've talked about being more productive at work and maximizing our human capital management, in the past with you. But today we're going to focus in on the disrupted leader. And I figured we can start off by what do we mean by the disrupted leader, and how are leaders being disrupted?

Michael:         I think it's easier to say, "How are they not being disrupted? "

Adam:            Yes. 

Michael:         Because, I think, when you're a leader in your organization and everyone thinks about what's going on? What are the challenges right now? There's some common themes that are only getting quicker, faster, more challenging. So you can think of climate change. Climate change has a huge impact on how we work? Where we work? All of those, and safety elements of that as well. 

Social change; the diversity of the people we work with now, that's been being disrupted. We're not all in the office in one place, that's another part of social change as well. Covid-19, I mean, hello? Last three years, it's been a real challenge. And that's one of the biggest ones because it was an unknown challenge. 

The others climate, social, and the last one, technology. The technology revolution, what they call the fourth industrial revolution, are the four key areas I see right now, and there'll be more. There'll be more things that come along, let alone the small challenges of running a business. Issues with clients, lack of clients, too many clients, things not going well with clients, disruption on so many levels. 

So now we've cheered your audience up. And, so, it is not an easy place. It's more about how we react to it, and technology is one of the biggest ones. That fourth industrial revolution talking about the technology revolution. It's that people are coming up with intuitive ways of breaking our systems and doing things differently. If you have an organization that's run on mainframe systems, spreadsheets, there are so much things available to skip all of that.

Fintech, the financial technologies that really don't have any of those and are just very simply making connections, using the technology in front of them quicker, faster, cheaper, that's a huge part that's going on as well. So, yes, where are they not being disrupted, Adam?

Adam:            Exactly, I think, you hit it on the nose, there's so much disruption happening all over. But when you're thinking about, as a leader yourself, if I'm thinking about my team and how I act with my team. Yes, there's so many outside disruptions. What does it look like, for me, if I want to look upon myself and how am I being disrupted? And what does a disrupted one look like? Because you don't want to stay there, obviously.

Michael:         No, it's a stressful place to be, being disrupted, you're playing defense. You're frustrated that things aren't working, which causes stress. Which also limits our vision and our focus. A lot of being creative and getting ourselves out of these issues, by thinking of new things that we could do to face a challenge and move forward. 

So, yes, that looks like, and I'll say this, Adam, a lot of the time we don't realize we're in this space. Call it the disruptive leader, we don't know that we're acting in a certain way because we're under stress. We've got our blinkers on, like, "My business is not making money.

How are we going to make some money?" And being stressful, following up on one particular client who's never going to give you the money is a blinkered approach. You need to be looking at, "Well, what could I do to create another million dollars?" Depending on the size of your organization; 50, 100, million. "What could I be doing?"

So they're disrupted, they're blind to the problem, really. And what I mean by that is that they're focused on the minute, the tactical, trying to get the number of accounts, trying to charge more per client. When really the problem is maybe what I'm offering the client is not what they're looking for. Have you ever thought about that? And that would be a curious mindset. 

So being blind to the problem is all about losing your focus overall and focusing on the minutiae and doing… Have you ever heard that adage, "If you're ever doing the same thing and expecting a different result, that's a definition of insanity." I love that term, that phrase. So that's where someone would be stuck, that would be one of them. 

And that links into the other one is having no direction, no purpose, and what I mean is that; where are we going? Where do I want to go? And I think I shared on our last podcast, a little bit, I'll have to go back and have a little look at it, maybe your listeners would do as well. Is that I was working with a client who was totally disrupted by Covid. 

They were a Fintech. They were 30% growth they were aiming at and it just disappeared overnight. Because people didn't need to manage cash flow because they weren't out spending cash. And, so, the flow was very different and it wasn't where their market was. But instead of panicking this person found the purpose. Well, her purpose was to take over the world and help the cash management globally, however, that's not possible right now. 

So I believe it's coming back but let's focus on rebuilding what we have. The mergers, the acquisitions, being more efficient. Let's focus on fixing what we have, and we have a dream time right now. Let's not think of it as, "Oh, my goodn...

Connect with our Speakers:
John Macaulay: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johncmacaulay/ 

Colleen Lucero: https://www.linkedin.com/in/colleen-lucero/

Full Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00]       < Intro >

Margaret:       So in this special podcast, Celebrating 50 Years of the CMA, or the Certified Management Accountant program. Margaret Michaels, myself, IMA's Brand Content and Storytelling Manager, will be talking with two CMAs. One who earned his CMA in 1975, soon after the CMA program had just begun. And another who earned her CMA quite recently, in April of 2022. 

John Macaulay is a former IMA chair, who was among the first CMA program completers. He held a number of distinguished roles in the industry. Including serving as CFO of the telecom company, Royal Street Communications. 

Colleen Lucero is a Manager of Client Analytics at Graebel, a relocation services company. Colleen earned her CMA in April of 2022. I am so pleased we could chat, today, with both John and Colleen about their CMA experiences and career journeys. 

[00:01:15]       < Music >

Margaret:       So, John, I'll start with you. I noticed in your bio that you did not study accounting as undergraduate major. Rather you pursued a biology and chemistry degree. What made you decide to shift into accounting, and how did you hear about the CMA program?

John:              Thank you, Margaret. It's good to be here today and chat with everyone. That's a rather complicated story, but I will try to shorten it up as best I can. I graduated from college in 1965, with a degree in biology and chemistry. I was studying pre-med. 

I had pretty much decided, by the end of my junior year, that I probably didn't want to spend another six years in school. And, so, I decided I wasn't going to medical school. 

1965 was the middle of Vietnam. And, so, I signed up for Navy Officer Candidate School and I went and became a Navy officer. A guided-missile officer on a couple of different destroyers. And it was a great experience and exposure, for me, to not only international travel and different cultures, but also to leadership and the military. 

When I got out of the military, I knew I wanted to go to graduate school and get an MBA. I hadn't settled on accounting at that point, clearly, but I knew I was headed in the direction of business. I had worked at a bank, in Cambridge, and I actually became the head of personnel. I was there for only a year and a half, actually, and after about six months, I became the head of personnel, we had 650 employees and 12 branches. 

So it was a rather challenging decision to go back to graduate school. But I was accepted by Northwestern, the Kellogg School, and we moved from Boston, by that time I was married, from Boston to Chicago, and spent two years at Kellogg getting an MBA. And there I specialized in accounting and finance, Accounting, and Information Systems. 

The second year, I became the assistant to the chair of the Accounting and Information Systems Department. And did some tutoring and wrote a couple of cases for him.

From there, I went to work for General Mills in Minneapolis, and this was 1972, I started working in May. And in about September, my boss, two levels up, whose name was Jerry Ford, came around and said, "John, would you be interested in taking the CMA?"

Well, I had actually refused, at Kellogg, to take the CPA exam, and I'd interviewed with some of the big, I guess it was the Big Six at that point, it may have been Big Eight still. And I told them I was willing to go into consulting, but I didn't want to be an auditor. 

I had no interest in the CPA. And, so, they didn't accept me, but I had plenty of opportunities. And, so, I said to Jerry, "Sure I would. I'd absolutely love it." But I said I wanted a certification and I didn't want to be a CPA. I wanted to be a management accountant in business.

So Jerry said, "Well, this organization, called NAA, is going to have this exam." And Susan's grandfather was actually a member of NAA and had been the president of the Boston Chapter many years ago. And I said, "Well, that's perfect." 

And, so, we began to try to get ready for this exam, which we knew nothing about. And we held one or two, "Study sessions" in our headquarters, in Minneapolis. But we didn't have any real success because it was just a reading list. Some of the books I'd had in graduate school. 

So, anyway, we went, it was a two-and-a-half-day exam at the University of Minnesota. And I listened to part of the previous podcast and Denny Beresford talked about the ice storm in Pittsburgh. Well, the second day we had a blizzard in Minneapolis, we actually lost the power. It was in the library at the University of Minnesota. 

We actually lost the power, but there were plenty of windows. So we had a lot of light, and we just continued writing the exam, so it wasn't really an issue. I was fortunate, I did pass all five parts of the first exam. 

So I say I got it in 1972, but IMA decided I didn't have, "Enough management experience" at that point, and, so, they wouldn't give me the certificate. So I actually got my certificate later in the second batch of certificates. 

But that's fine, I didn't have a problem because I actually wrote them a letter and said, "Well, I think I have the experience and this and that." And next thing I knew they wanted me to be on an exam review committee. And, so, that's actually how I got involved with leadership in IMA, which I'll talk about a little bit later.

Margaret:       That's a great story. It seems everyone, in the first class of CMA takers, had unfavorable weather conditions. To add to the challenge in taking the test for the first time. 

And Colleen, like John, your undergraduate degree is not in accounting, but in Spanish Language and Literature. So what prompted you to embark on an accounting career, and how did you hear about the CMA program?

Colleen:          Yes, so I got my undergrad in Spanish and I thought I was going to do interpreting and translating. So after I graduated from my undergrad, I started down that road and then realized that it ended up not being quite the fit that I was hoping it was going to be. But I was getting other certifications for interpreting and translating for large conferences, and even in the courts, and some medical stuff. 

And while I'm doing all this, on the side I got this, what I thought was a transitory side job with a small business. And I ended up realizing, "Oh, my goodness, I actually love what I'm doing for this small business." With a small business, you put on all kinds of different hats. 

So I was supposed to be just the office manager. But I ended up working with their CPA and doing payroll, and invoicing, and working with their books. And he...

Connect with Simone: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bizwithsimone/
Simone's Podcast: https://cannabisradio.com/podcasts/cannabis-business-minds/
CBM Network: https://www.cbmnetwork.com/courses/startup

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

Welcome back to Count Me In the podcast that brings you inside the fascinating world of management accounting. Few industries have more interesting or infamous background than cannabis. From a management accountant's perspective, it's the story straight out of the wild west of business. Joining me today is Simone Cimiluca-Radzins, a leading consultant in the cannabis industry. We discuss our unique journey from a big four CPA to bringing accounting and finance order to attain businesses in cannabis country. Let's start the conversation.

Adam:

Simone, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. I'm really excited to be talking about cannabis and cannabis and accounting and accounting in the cannabis industry. But to start off, I wanna find out how did you get into this industry and what's your story?

Simone:

I'm so excited to also be on. Thank you so much for the opportunity. You know, I am an accountant by nature. I grew up in a family where my dad is an accountant, a controller, you know, did the whole kind of accounting route and it just was the thing that just made sense going up in college. I was like, oh, accounting's easy. Let me go do this. And then got recruited pretty young in university to be part of PWC. And then it almost felt like my career path was kind of just set, maybe luck, maybe opportunity, you know, the combination of all of that. And I did, I did a few different corporate accounting type of jobs. Got to travel the entire world, which was amazing. Doing internal audit for one of the large studios down in Los Angeles and then moving to Paris for a few years and being able to do international consulting.

Simone:

I've always focused on accounting, right? So internal control development, processes, you know, process improvement. But it was nice because at that point, at the very end of my corporate tenure, I guess we could say it was an opportunity to really see how I could truly be an advisor and truly implement things instead of just telling people, Hey, you know what, you've got all of these control problems and see you later. Here's your audit report. And so that was a really nice kind of end towards my corporate tenure. And yeah, I think you probably hear it often that some people just get burned out and doing international consulting. That's how I felt like it was, you know, and it's funny saying it cuz it was such a dream when it was there, but then at the very end, it was like two weeks in Paris, two weeks somewhere else in the world.

Simone:

And you're battling jet lag. You're, you know, I'm in my mid twenties at this point, almost like late twenties I guess. And you're kinda like, well, hold on, I wanna hang out with people. I wanna have friends. Like, this is so fun. But at the same time, I feel like there's something more. And, you know, I decided to quit my job and I lost my visa living in Europe. I lost my visa and I went back to the US and started freelancing from one of my, you know, previous jobs. So it was a really great freelance gig and that started to get me into freelance and understanding, well, okay, this is really cool. Like, I have to do my deliverables and I can kind of just maybe build something on my own.

Simone:

And that's when I think the entrepreneurial bug started where I was like, Hmm, you know, I think that there's something more, but I didn't know what that more is. And in the end, I think I'm just getting there, right? And so that's like, oh, this is a while. So I guess to any listener who's feeling that it's okay to feel like you might not really know exactly what you want, but that there is something more. And freelancing, it was just a great opportunity. I can make great better money than I was making in my corporate gig. And I had just moved to LA and so I got a subscription to magazines. I don't know if if if people still get that, but when you move into a new place, you can get all these, these magazines. And I got this one.

Simone:

There was on the front cover, women in the marijuana industry. And I was like, what? Now I'd been in Europe, I'd been in finance I hadn't thought about, and it was marijuana then I call it cannabis now. It's, you know, the real term that you wanna use. I hadn't thought about weed, cannabis, marijuana since I was in high school. And I was like, Hmm, this is interesting. And I started really diving in into what is this industry? And at that time it's 2015. And so if we just roll back, there's not even two states that have legalized adult use and some obviously have, have legalized medical use. But, so it's all brand new. I'm in California, which is the Wild West, which is the biggest market in the entire world. And I just started doing this research about like, what is, I'm an auditor.

Simone:

I was like, okay, let me understand the ecosystem just like I would a business. I was like, okay, let me understand the players, what is happening? Like what is the supply chain and all of that. And I just thought to myself, okay, I think this is the industry that I wanna be in. And before I even got on my own, I thought, okay, but how do you really learn it? You learn it through the numbers. Just like I learned every other business, right? Like, you can understand numbers, you can understand how everything works. So I approached a CPA firm that was very cannabis, like, it was very clear they were working in the cannabis industry, which is not, you know, was not at that time something that you would promote. And I said, Hey, I can help you. I can help you with your sales, I can help you, you know, build, you know, a better process. And I had a year, a little bit less than a year working with them until I felt really confident that I could just go out on my own and start kind of building my own business and start kind of working on different projects in the cannabis space. So that's how I got in.

Adam:

Wow, that's amazing. So when you got in, it was still largely a cash industry, right? So I can only imagine how crazy that was because everything is digital currencies and all that stuff and the world of business today, even in 2015, it still was. And now, and in that time, how did you manage that?

Simone:

Well, so the interesting thing is, so there's twofold. There's, I got 80% of businesses still lack banking today in 2022. So you really have to have a good set of internal controls. And working with those businesses even in 2015, you know, you could just spoil it back to the basics. But what's fascinating is that they're, you know, there's almost something that you could call legacy industry, meaning operators that had been in the business before it was quote, unquote "legal" in that state. Right. So had probably got involved in, you know, if you think about California, there was an ability to truly build a business, even though it was a cooperative model starting in 1996 when there was the first dispensary. But from a federal perspective, and there's still a lot of federal issues, they were not supposed to hold their receipts. They were supposed to erase everything, which is an accountant's worst nightmare.

Adam:

Wow. I can only imagine.

Simone:

Yeah, so it was a lot of education and it still i...

Connect with David: https://www.davidredwards.com/contact-us
Check out David's book: https://www.davidredwards.com/about-newyouwhoknew

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

Welcome back to Count Me In the podcast that explores business and leadership topics from the management accountants perspective. I'm Adam Larson. I'm joined today by David Edwards to discuss how organizations and leaders can overlook the human when dealing with human capital. In other words, businesses can often see their people as assets before they see them as, well, people. David explains how this mindset often backfires on organizations and why focusing on values that motivate human beings provides a more balanced and effective approach to collaboration and productivity. And just a reminder, David,has a new book out entitled "New You! Who Knew: Surprising foundations to get more done, feel more connected, and stay balanced in a rapidly changing world." There's a link in the show notes, so make sure to check it out. Let's start the conversation.

Adam:

So David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We're really excited to have you on. And today we're gonna be talking about people and the value they bring to organizations. And traditionally, as we all know people have always been looked on as assets. And through your book and through conversations that you and I have been having, you don't agree with that. So let's start there. Why don't you comment on that?

David:

Yeah. So if we go back into history, right, we haven't actually literally had people on our balance sheet for since 1860 roughly. But we treat people still very much like their assets. And you might recall, I mean, we go back into, just in my career for example, Jack Welch he made famous this kind of policy where they took the bottom 5% of their performers and then summarily fired them. And you know, and you don't wanna be in the 5% obvious, the bottom 5%, you don't want to be anyway. But you know, if we look at math, there's always gonna be a bottom 5%. You know, by default there's gonna be the top 5% and the bottom. And so, you know, this is a way of looking at human beings that says you're an asset. We look at how corporations over the years have, you know, you just move people around or we used the word drive.

David:

To me, this is non-human. So for example, I was looking at a job description the other day, and it, and it said, you know, drive, I think three times, we are gonna drive innovation. You're gonna drive change, you're gonna drive performance. So since a corporation is little more than a collection of human beings who have come together to accomplish some common purpose, right? So as a group of human beings moving towards some goal, trying to accomplish some purpose, if we think about working with human beings or as human beings working together, let's think about you, Adam. Are you married?

Adam:

Yes.

David:

If you go to your wife and say, Sweetheart I hurt my knee and I need you to drive me to Home Depot so I can get a new ladder. And if you drive me there and get me there, hmm, let me see in the next 15 minutes, you're a good wife, I want you to drive me there. So how is she gonna respond to that?

Adam:

Not very well.

David:

Not very well because you're treating her as if she was the car, right? You can treat your car that way and if your car doesn't get you there in 15 minutes, you can say bad car, you suck. And might have some other more colorful language, but you would never do that to a human being, at least I hope not, right? Because we're not machines, we're not assets. We are in fact human beings. And if we want to be successful in business or in life or in any relationship, right? We would want to say, Well, what are the principles not of a machine, or not really even business principles, right? You can't ignore business principles, but how do we want to engage with fellow human beings? And that should by definition make us more successful.

Adam:

So if we wanna be more successful, you mentioned something about principles, maybe we can dig into that. What are some of these principles that we should be implementing till we can be better human beings.

David:

So I think one of them that works very nicely as a human being as well as in business, and I'll kind of go on the business side at first. How many businesses do you know, have a statement that says, these are our values.

Adam:

A lot of them do.

David:

Right! Maybe even a majority of businesses have gone to that effort, right? So let me ask you, in your experience or talking to people or just in your life and career, how many of those businesses, I'm getting a little distracted here, but how many of them have a statement? But you know, that company well enough to know that they're not really living those values?

Adam:

You know, I can't say that I've taken the time to look at value statements to to, to pay attention well enough to know whether they are or not.

David:

Yeah. Or maybe another way to look at it is, is you've ever gone into a business and been a customer of a business. And if you ever have anybody, you know, listening or watching has had this experience where they go, you know, I don't know what their values are, but they're not, at least not today. Yeah. I mean we've all done that, right? We've all had that experience.

Adam:

We've all seen that, of course.

David:

So values as a company, I believe are extremely important because they set boundaries, right? Businesses by definition have some goal that they're trying to accomplish. And inevitably they wanna make a profit, right? This is kind of, it's part and parcel of every business. And so what values do is they set some boundary within which that company has said, we're gonna set some boundaries or limits around how we pursue these goals, right? Our business goals. And that's good, right? Because you really don't want to be operating and like anarchy basically, right? Anything goes, you know, whatever it takes. I mean, we've seen that it's happened in business probably not infrequently. People like Enron and you know, some of these kinds of, you know, famous examples, but where they go, hey, there's no boundaries. We don't have any values. We're just gonna go make a dollar.

David:

And you know, that's all that matters. However we do it, you know, that's, we don't care, right? The means justify the ends, that kind of a thing. So values are important in that regard. And it also is one way that we start to engender trust, right? If we have values and we're actually living those values, there's greater trust in between individuals and trust, right? As I think Steven Covey's son wrote the book, "The Speed of Trust", right? And if we don't have trust, you know, we pay a tax. None of us likes taxes, right? So I mean, we pay a tax for that. The same with human beings. And that's why I think values in a business as a collection of human beings makes perfect sense because values as human beings make perfect sense. And so we think of them as a constraint sometimes or as barriers, but it's much like the freeway.

David:

We've decided a long time ago that if I'm gonna be going 70 this way and you're gonna be going 70 in the opposite way, that having a big concrete barrier in between those lanes is a really good idea, right? Because it makes us safer, because it makes us more confident,...

Connect with Aparna: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aparna-iyer-7a6a135/

Full Episode Transcript:
Neha:

Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast for management accountants making an impact in the business world. I'm Neha Lagoo Ratnakar from IMA. Today I'm speaking with Aparna Iyer, the treasurer and head of investor relations at vPro. Aparna's career. Got off to quite a promising start when she earned a gold medal for the highest score on the exams by the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. She's gone on to hold many roles across the accounting and finance function at vPro, and along the way, she has constantly pushed herself out of a comfort zone to keep learning new skills and developing her empowering approach to leadership. We cover a lot of ground in this fascinating conversation from robotic process automation to the benefits of ambition to how we might be working in the Metaverse sooner than you think. Let's get started.

Neha:

Welcome to Count Me in, Aparna. It's such a pleasure to finally meet you for this conversation.

Aparna:

Thank you, Neha. It's an absolute pleasure, and I'm looking forward to this conversation, actually.

Neha:

Awesome. So let's start with an obvious question that's been on my mind ever since I'm knew about you. You joined vPro more than 19 years ago, and our generation is infamous for job hopping, right? Tell us more about your long and successful journey at vPro.

Aparna:

You know Neha, I'll just tell you briefly about myself. You know my father worked in a nationalized banking in India, and I in, you know, all the way up to 23 years when I joined vPro. I have not stayed in a city more than two years because we've been always hopping schools, colleges, you know, so for me, also, I'm quite taken by surprise that I actually managed to spend 20 years you know, in one place. And I think the credit actually needs to go to the organization. Because, you know, when I joined vPro, I was very impressionable, you know, rearing to go. I think what vPro really does well is, you know, it paces your career for you, right? I don't spend more than about three years in a role give or take. And every three years there is always something that's in the works for, you know, what next, how can things get better, bigger?

Aparna:

So in some sense, I've been truly you know, privileged and lucky that you know, I got an opportunity to work through multiple roles, multiple leaders, and the sector itself has evolved so much through these last you know, 20 years. So much more complexity. So much more M & A. You know, we've had you know in the last 10 years, you know, we've had so many new leaders join in. So the organization itself keeps changing. There's so much to learn and there's, it's such a growing sector that I, you know, I didn't even realize that I had spent 20 years. The other thing that we project does well, and, and is perhaps one of the bigger reasons for me staying back is in vPro finance, we really build you know, we hire people from campuses and then we build careers for them.

Aparna:

So all my peers are pretty much tenured in vPro, and we have like a shared history. So the camaraderie, the collaboration is just you know, off a very different level, which all of us thoroughly enjoy. So I would say that you know, other than what the organization puts in, it's what my peers put in both in terms of the kind of benchmark they set, how you know, enriching it is to work with them, how it is to learn from them and, you know, really contribute in the process, right? Like, work becomes fun when, you know, it's just extended family. So I would say these are, you know, two reasons why you know, it just work. And like they say, why fix something that's not broken?

Neha:

Wow. And that's been quite a journey. Thanks for sharing it with us, and I hope other companies are taking note of these excellent practices.

Aparna:

Yeah. Yeah.

Neha:

So what has been your biggest challenge in your career so far?

Aparna:

Neha? You know, I think every time you take up a new role, you feel that, oh my God, this is just so much more challenging than you know, what I've ever done. But, you know, truly I was most apprehensive about was coming back to work after I had my daughter. And that I think would have been perhaps the most challenging phase of my career, because I was just coming back from a six month long break at where I was doing something completely different, right? And somehow when I joined back, and I never thought I would feel like that. I felt very low on confidence, and I wasn't sure whether this is what I wanted to do. Is this the purpose? You know, I felt so overwhelmed you know, taking care of a young baby and coming back to something very intensive at you know, in the vPro finance, it was perhaps one of the, you know, phases where I really needed help, right?

Aparna:

From all my mentors, from the organization, from my peers, from my reports. And thankfully, you know, that that phase, you know, lasted for about nine months to a year where you know, I was just wanted to find my confidence again. And, you know, once that happened, right? And time, with time every quarter, it kept getting better. You know, all us finance professionals live quarter, quarter, say quarter, like they say, right? Three or four quarters under the belt, I was feeling a lot more confident, again. So that I think was one of the most challenging phases because, you know, I needed to find that balance and make sure, you know, I was getting it right. So that was one point where I felt you know, I really needed the support of the ecosystem. The other part was when I, you know, took on something like treasury and IR, you know, invest relations, the current role that I did, that I'm doing I took this on three years back and you know, I'd not done treasury at all in the first, you know 18 years or first 17 years of my career, knew nothing about markets, hedging investments, and, you know, we all are exposed to it as finance professionals, but I've not done it, you know, with a KRI to exceed a certain benchmark.

Aparna:

Coming in and knowing when you know that you are the person who's perhaps knows the least about that subject in the team, and yet you are the leader, I think it poses very different challenges. So, pushing myself out of the comfort zone, being okay with the fact that, you know, for another six months, I'm going to be the person who's gonna be least informed in a room, and yet I had to lead it, yet I had to bring my perspective to it, yet I had to understand and learn and, and work with people. So I think that was also another challenging phase, right? But it's only a matter of time, you know? You just need to apply yourself. So that's the other myth I busted, right? So a lot of them say they don't wanna try different things because they're just so concerned that, you know, how will they add value?

Aparna:

What I really understood about adding value is you, your, your vantage point can be so different, and the value that you bring to the team or you bring to a function can be so different. It may not always come from the tried and tested path, You know the vantage point that you'll have is very different, and you bring way different perspectives, and you can always add value no matter what you do. Cause everything else is just adjacent. So, you know, those are very good learnings for me. And it was challenging and I was very unsure and anxious many times, but I think you had to give it some time and, you know, you lace it.

Connect with Ryan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-goral/
https://www.gspiregroup.com/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast focused on management accountants driving business forward. I'm Adam Larson. Coming up I speak with Ryan Goral about unlocking the full potential of small businesses through mergers and acquisitions. Ryan is the founder of G-Spire Group, a consultancy focused on companies often overlooked and underserved when it comes to corporate development services. When it comes to M & A, big companies all get the headlines. The reason is pretty simple. A deal worth billions of dollars will always draw more attention than a deal that's only worth millions. This focus has contributed to the perception among many business owners that they're simply too small or inexperienced to participate in M & A. Ryan explains why M & A is a strategic option relevant to virtually every business and highlights the critical role management accountants play in corporate development success. Let's start the conversation.

Adam:

So Ryan, I just wanna thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We are gonna be talking about mergers and acquisitions today, and I was looking at the recent Bain and Company Global Report from 2021, and they were saying that the total transaction value for M & A was an unmatched $5.9 trillion in 2021. So it seems that M & A is on its way back. The last conversation I had about this was back in 2019 and it was much under that number. So maybe to start off you talk a lot about, in your business about the benefits of growing your business through mergers and acquisitions. So maybe you can start by covering what are the benefits?

Ryan:

Sure. Thanks for having me. Yeah, the, you know, companies can grow through acquisitions for a number of reasons and it's strategic, you know, really what is their strategic reason for growing through acquisitions? Yeah, trillions of dollars. I think the M & A market's been real, really red hot. You know, the market that I serve, I serve privately held companies that are on the, you know, 10 to 50 million in revenue range. So my transactions I'm typically working on is way, does not have a B or a T in the title. But I think that, you know, the last couple years we've seen a couple things that are driving M & A activity. One has been the historically low interest rates. So the cost of capital has been, you know, really, really attractive for a buyer to go out and secure debt and even equity for that matter to engage in transactions.

Ryan:

That would involve buying a company as part of their growth strategy. You know, and the various strategic reasons or I guess categories if you wanna call it that, that a company would really wanna look at as part of a growth plan that would involve M & A. You know, you see companies you know that I think talent is one, you know, that I've seen companies wanting additional talent and maybe the labor force right now, which it is, it's constrained. So a lot of these companies have all the work that they ever would want, but they'll have people in the labor to satisfy it. So, you know, growing through an acquisition to pick up key talent is kind of one strategic motivation. There's other kinda strategic reasons. One being size and scale from a cash flow perspective allows the company to, you know, invest more into other certain strategic initiatives.

Ryan:

So size also equates to sometimes more value. So if your company is trying to improve shareholder value, you know, size does impact that value. So you'll see kind of acquisitions as part of, I just want to get bigger and grow. I try in my practice, try to hone in the strategy a little bit more than just let's grow because you wanna make sure the acquisitions are aligned with that strategic importance. But the types of acquisitions typically see are you're buying a competitor. So that's kind of market share strategy. You see acquisitions that are maybe of a supplier, so you call that vertical. You're trying to, you know, own the supplier so you can enhance your own margins. You know, sometimes you'll see a geographic strategy where a company wants to grow into other geographic areas that are strategic for them. And making an acquisition in those kind of geographies is sometimes the right strategy.

Ryan:

And then, you know, really the last one that there's a number of reasons, but the other one that comes to mind is, you know, expanding your product and services to your customer base. So if you're, you know you've got one product, one service that you're offering, maybe your customer's constantly asking you for, Hey, do you do X, Y, Z? And you're like, no, we don't do that. Go talk to ABC company. Maybe it's a good strategy. Go buy ABC company so you can have another product service to offer your current customer base. So those are some of the strategic reasons that drive M & A. But I think the trend that you mentioned to start off here was you've got cheap capital and you know, as you get into bigger transactions, you see, you know, if a public company has, you know, a stock price that is historically, you know, very high, sometimes they're using that stock as currency, which is another driver of the activity.

Ryan:

So there's, there's a number of reasons, the amount of M & A activity that we've seen. And the last one that I've seen and more that's more in my market is you've got, you know, kind of an unprecedented amount of baby boomers retiring and their business is typically their biggest asset. So you're seeing kind of a transfer of wealth from one generation to the next that's occurring cuz there's a good amount of baby boomers that actually own privately held companies. So you're starting to see that activity happen and I think that's driving the market too.

Adam:

Yeah, so there's a lot of great benefits out there as you've just described. And so with somebody looking into, get into that, one term that I've heard is corporate development. So why would that, why would that matter? Maybe you can start by defining corporate development in terms of M & A and then why is that beneficial to develop to, to why does it matter as a small to medium size business in your getting into mergers and acquisitions?

Ryan:

Yeah, so corporate development is really more of a term that you'll see in larger companies. These are companies that have entire departments, corporate development departments, and they're these departments, sole responsibility is getting the company ready and then sourcing, closing and integrating acquisitions on behalf of the entire organization. So they are the M & A team of these larger companies. They're just called corporate development department. In my work I've seen, you know, that that service doesn't really exist for those smaller privately held businesses for a couple reasons. One, it's, you know, you can't, typically there's not enough resources to hire a full time corporate development executive, you know so, and then the other, the other reason why you don't see it much in the the smaller privately held company spaces, they're usually run by owner/operators. And these are folks that are really good at running their business.

Ryan:

They're really good at managing their employees and customers, and they tend not to have time or capacity to think about M & A and how other, you know, partnerships and alliances could be beneficial to them growing. So that's just a capacity challenge. And then there's a lot of these privately held businesse...

In this special edition of Count Me In, Kelly Richmond Pope returns to help commemorate Global Ethics Day 2022. We discuss her latest IMA report, Ethics in the 21st Century: Management Accounting Practices for Robust Compliance Programs as well as her forthcoming new book, Fool Me Once: Scams, Stories, and Secrets from the Trillion-Dollar Fraud Industry.  In addition to her role as IMA Research Fellow for Corporate Governance and Ethics, Kelly is professor of forensic accounting at DePaul University as well as the award-winning documentary film maker behind All the Queen’s Horses, an in-depth look at the largest municipal fraud in U.S. history.   

Ethics in the 21st Century: Management Accounting Practices for Robust Compliance Programs
Fool Me Once: Scams, Stories, and Secrets from the Trillion-Dollar Fraud Industry
Connect with Kelly

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that takes you inside the impactful world of management accounting. This is Adam Larson, and today is a special edition of Count Me In to Celebrate Global Ethics Day 2022. And there's no better guess for such an occasion than Kelly Richmond Pope, IMA's Research Fellow for Corporate Governance and Ethics, professor of forensic accounting at DePaul University, award-winning filmmaker and the author of the forthcoming book, Fool Me Once: Scams Stories and Secrets from the Trillion Dollar Fraud Industry. Kelly and Neha discuss her latest IMA report focus on how management accountants are modernized in compliance in the 21st century. Plus we get a preview of her new book and lots of other updates. It's always interesting when Kelly stops by. So let's start the conversation.

Neha:

Welcome back to Count Me in. Kelly, it's such a pleasure to have you again on the show.

Kelly:

Thanks for having me back.

Neha:

First of all, congratulations on your new report, Ethics in the 21st century that came out recently.

Kelly:

Thank you.

Neha:

Our listeners would love to know what the report is all about.

Kelly:

The report is an overview of how to not only update the compliance function within your organization, but utilizing managerial accountants in those updates. So that's really what the gist of the report is, and we focus on three recommendations on how to update that.

Neha:

Wow, that sounds like a very helpful report for management accountants and finance and accounting professionals around the world. So I've went through the report and saw that you call designing an Effective Compliance program, both an art and a science. Can you help our listeners understand what you mean by that?

Kelly:

Well, you know, it's one of those jargon terms you use a lot and it sounds good when you use it, but now you've asked me a question about it. So let me tell you what I mean by that. I think that the science part is the fact that a lot of programs or organizations are siloed into departments, and so that's the scientific understanding of how we believe organizations should work. So you have your legal department, you have your accounting department, You may have your internal audit department, you may have operations, and all of these departments are siloed. And so I think that that's the science of how we organize companies. But the art is how to utilize all of those different departments together and finding the strengths of each of those groups and bringing them together. So they're one cohesive machine that works together, is the art part of it. And that takes some skill because we don't think about an approach of everyone working together. We think about a very siloed approach of how we work, and I think that when we are trying to update our, our compliance programs, we really need to look at these various silo departments and pull from those so that we can have this one cohesive team

Neha:

That is very insightful and it might be a jargon, but thanks for helping us understand it better. Now of course, most companies try to have some sort of compliance program in place, right? What do you think is the biggest inhibitor when it comes to the effectiveness of these compliance programs?

Kelly:

Well, I think there's two inhibitors. One is compliance. The word compliance triggers people to think, all I need to do is check the box and just get this done. And the second is, most people believe that they don't need it. They believe that they're ethical. They believe that they don't need this type of reinforcement. So you have these two forces that you're battling. And quite honestly, most organizations do have very boring compliance training. And some of it is routine, but there is room for it to be more engaging and more dynamic. So I think the fact that we have conditioned people to think about this as, Oh goodness, here comes compliance again. Just let me get this done. And so we have a level set, a level shift that we need to make within our employee base to even get them excited about what we have around compliance. So you're fighting an uphill battle from the beginning. And so how, what, what can we infuse into compliance to really change that to get more people on board, is the big question.

Neha:

That's so true. Every time I've had conversations in companies, people think compliance training is going to be a snooze fest. So thanks for bringing that up. And can you help us understand how can companies avoid that kind of mentality or perception about compliance training?

Kelly:

Well, I think when compliance, there are some routine things about compliance, and that is true, but I think where you have the opportunity to be creative, you should be. And so my passion area, my research area is around fraud and forensic accounting. And I think that there are areas within the compliance training realm that can lend itself to more creative and more engaging types of approaches. And we tend to not do those. If we do that more, I think that we can change the attitude around compliance and make people more excited about it.

Neha:

Absolutely. Love that, Kelly. Let me pivot from that and ask you another question about whistle blowing. Now, how can companies incentivize internal reporting? So employees feel empowered to speak up when they see any misconduct?

Kelly:

You know, whistle blowing is an interesting topic because again, you have this same uphill battle that you're fighting. And a couple years back, I did a TED Talk entitled how whistleblowers shape history. And one of my motivations around doing the talk, because the whole idea around TED is do you have an idea worth sharing? And so my motivation around doing the talk was because whistleblowers are so valuable to organizations and to society, but how can we encourage more people to come forward when it has such a negative stigma? So I think one of the things that we need to do within our organizations is first remove the stigma and almost celebrate it. And it's, it's hard because despite the benefits that whistle blowers offer us, we tend to not trust them when they ...

Dream Exchange
Connect with Joe

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the ways management accountants drive business forward. I'm Adam Larson and my guest today is Joseph Cecala, CEO and co-founder of Dream Exchange, a company focused on building the next generation stock exchange designed for early stage growth companies. This is yet another podcast where I learned a ton, like how the rise of electronic stock training essentially shut down IPOs and equity stock market access for businesses worth less than $50 million. What's more, I learned how management accountants will play a critical role in making these new venture markets actually work. Whether you work at a small business, are interested in investing in small business, or wants to know more about the relationship between equity markets and innovation, this is the podcast for you. Let's get started with Joe Cecala.

Adam:

So Joe, I wanna thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We're really excited to get talking to you about the Dream Exchange, but before we get there, I just wanted to hear a little bit about your story. I was reading your bio and I just think you've got a really great story starting off as a CPA and to where you are now. Let's start with your story and go there.

Joe:

Sure. And Adam, thanks for having me. I my story I like to say I Forrest Gumped my way through my career, right, I started as a CPA went to law school and became a shingle lawyer doing a lot of small business venture capital transactions. And you know, my accounting career really informed that quite well. I guess the big story of how we're here today is one of my clients, Jerry Putnam, founded a company which became Archipelago, actually the world knows today as New York Stock Exchange, Archipelago in the mid 1990s. It was the first company to actually carry equity security trades using the internet or among the first two. And I got this national market expertise when that was being born. And here we are 26 years later with a lot of legal expertise in capital markets.

Joe:

So several years ago I just decided that a new exchange model was needed to accommodate smaller companies. And we worked on legislation for that. It's still pending in Congress and we're actually building a national exchange as well. So everything that we're doing is born out of those early years of learning what a stock exchange is and does and how one is born, and the mechanics of that and adding the kind of practical business of how to run one to the legal expertise of how to create one. And really the other, I guess the other major portion of what we're doing that's different is that, you know, we're targeting what we call underserved markets. The entrepreneurial market, very small companies that don't really see interest from a stock exchange in the earlier stages of their business life cycle. And we're also especially concentrating in minority markets.

Joe:

The capital group that is financing the exchange and is the majority owner, our minorities, it's a black owned exchange, the first one in the history of the United States. So, you know, and we're in the licensing, we're in the process, we'll be hopefully licensed in about a year. So we're in that process right now, but things are going really well. And that's how I got here, was really starting as a financial professional and moving from financial professional to early stage company, venture capital lawyer. And so I really wanna help those small companies. It's more about the companies through my career I haven't helped or can't get access to capital than it is about the unicorn companies that have an easy time. So that's how we got here today. And hopefully the journey will be easier go in the next six years than it has been for the past 10.

Adam:

I sure hope so.

Joe:

Yeah, me too. So, and then I guess what I would say is the Dream Exchange today as it exists, as it perhaps might inform you know, the audience for this particular, you know, group. We're really concentrating on what are now gonna be known as early stage growth companies. That's actually a coined expression. It is in the Main Street Growth Act. And what that means is those are companies that are very small. They might have a valuation of, you know, 10 or $20 million, but they're gonna be seeking capital you know, for 10 or $20 million. And we're providing the mechanics of a brand new stock exchange environment for those early stage companies to be traded with customized rules and customized reporting and customized attention that the national exchanges really can't provide because the financial reporting and the cost of the coming public and Sarbanes Oxley and DOD Frank and the regulatory environment for very large companies is much easier to absorb the expense of doing that. But how do we maintain the same quality in investor protection in a small market while simultaneously making the cost less so that those smaller companies could get access to capital in a public market that's really the driver behind the meat and potatoes of the Dream Exchange.

Adam:

Wow, that's, there's so much there that I think we're gonna have to unpack a little bit of it. And I know that for me and I know a lot of other folks, you know, maybe we can start with, you know, how do you set up an exchange and what exactly is in exchange? Because we all hear about the stock exchange and stocks being there, but maybe there's a way that you can describe it for us that even a seven year old could understand it.

Joe:

Yeah, that actually, and thank you for asking that because that is, it really is not commonly talked about. Most people talk about the functions of an exchange without actually knowing what it is. So a stock exchange is merely a set of rules by which the buying and the selling of equity securities is conducting. That's all it is. And today those rules are primarily driven by electronics. So trading rules, what type of order, what type of sale, what the rules say about how the market participants have to conduct themselves fairly. Now, most people think stock exchange and what they're actually thinking about is what's called the secondary market, because you, the stock is already a public company and you wanna go and you wanna buy your shares of IBM and you have to go through a stock broker, some very large organization that is carrying trades to a stock exchange.

Joe:

Stock exchange is matching the trades that the order book and the matching engine of an exchange literally matches trades today in millionths and billionths of a second. And that's what people think. They see the Dow Jones averages and they see the New York Stock Exchange you know, set of listing is up or down. The function of the stock exchange is to match trades in a fair and equitable environment. Now, the other function that most people are, are familiar with is the initial public offering market, the IPO market. And they look at exchanges and go, they went public on NASDAQ, or they went public on NYSE. That's the capital formation part of exchanges. Now that's another kind of misinformed use of stock exchange because stock exchanges don't actually take anybody public. Investment banks do. So the investment bank has to make an arrangement so that when a company files publicly and sends its registration of its shares to the SEC, they can also take a registered share of stock to a stock exchange and apply to be listed on the exchange.

Joe:

Merely getting registered shares with the SEC does not automat...

Links mentioned in today's Podcast:
https://www.thecareertoolkitbook.com
https://www.cognoscomedia.com/brain-bump
https://www.thecareertoolkitbook.com/resources

Connect with Mark:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hershey/

https://twitter.com/CareerToolkitBk

https://www.facebook.com/TheCareerToolkitBook

https://www.instagram.com/thecareertoolkit/

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast focused on the issues, challenges, and characters shaping the management accounting profession. I'm Adam Larson. Today I'm joined by Mark Herschberg, serial entrepreneur, business innovator, and the author of the Career Toolkit: Essential Skills for Success that No One Taught You. Now, lots of people cover career and work best practices, but if you ask me, it all can start to sound pretty similar, but that's not the case with Mark. There's a good reason he teaches at MIT, which you're about to find out. In fact, Mark had so much insight and advice to share from his research and years of building companies and teams, we ended up recording two podcasts, the second of which will be coming out soon. But for now, let's get started with Mark Herschberg discussing the fallout from the great resignation and what he's learned about how to fix work.

Adam:

Mark, I wanted to just thank you so much for coming on the podcast today and today we're gonna really focus on the great resignation and we've all been hearing this term they've been writing about it since it started in 2021, but I wanted to start off by just you talking a little bit about what what it is and what it means for everybody today.

Mark:

Well, thanks for having me on the show today. The great resignation is really the term that is an umbrella term for what is the largest rewrite of the capital labor contract that we have seen in a century. Now certainly we are seeing people leave jobs quitting, finding better jobs, sometimes going back to their original job, but it's also a larger cultural change about what people are looking for in their jobs. And so we need to recognize this isn't just, well, we have to do a better job hiring or retaining. It is a shift in terms of what people want and companies need to adjust if they wanna stay competitive in the labor market.

Adam:

Yeah, it sounds like it, and it also sounds like companies really need to focus in on how do we keep employees as well? Because I'm sure during the pandemic employees were seeing, do I really still need to be here? And that they started asking themselves a lot of questions.

Mark:

Well, that's a really good point. And you get different answers depending on who you ask. When it comes down to any job, it's really about the communication needed. It's about who needs to communicate with whom and when and how best to do that. It's why we have emails, slack, phone calls, meetings, they're all channels of communicating, whether it's project updates or you and I coordinating and coming up with ideas. That's what a lot of work is. What we found is that certain types of work can be done from home. We don't have to be sitting next to each other. And people have speculated about this for years. I work in technology. We've certainly been on the forefront. I've been working with teams all around the world for years. You can do some of that, but there are limitations to that and it seems like we might be overshooting a bit in that people don't understand. At first we said No, you'll have to be in the office five days a week. It's like, well, we know we can work when we're in the office zero days a week. You can work in both modes, but is that optimal? And so there are different facets you need to look at to decide what is the optimal number of days for a particular team at which points.

Adam:

Yeah, and it also seems like it's more than just money that people are leaving because of a lot of times people leave because of money or because of culture, or all those things. But you can't just throw more money at your employees and say, Okay, you know, stay here.

Mark:

That's exactly right. Money is a bit of a factor. And as we record this at the start of the summer in 2022, we've been coming off some of the highest inflation rates that we've seen in a generation. And so you do need more money to stay competitive and other companies are throwing money at them. But here's the thing, you are probably not the highest payer in your market. One company is, and it probably isn't you. So if you're just competing on money, that's going to be a problem. What we saw is people are responding to these other dimensions, and this is what I meant when I said it's a rewrite of that capital labor contract. It's no longer I pay you money, you do the work. And so we're seeing employees, particularly younger employees, but we are seeing it across the spectrum. They're looking not just at money I'm using at Compensation General, or there's stock options of salary, but also work life balance, company culture, alignment to mission and support, just to name a few.

Mark:

We saw companies that back at the start of the pandemic in 2020, some of them said, look, it's tough for everyone. Suck it up and do it. And other companies said, hey, it's tough for everyone, so we're going to give you Fridays off for the next two months because this is crazy. Spend some time with your families. We all need the stress break or what can we do to support you while you are at home? And so the companies that were more supportive of their employees were the ones who basically had more loyalty and had employees say, I know you're looking out for me and are more likely to stay. So it's important that we really sell our employees current and future ones, not just on the compensation, but on all these other facets.

Adam:

So it what I'm hearing you say, it sounds like company culture is a huge part of avoiding the resignation, but also, you know, when you, when new people are coming on, you wanna make sure that they fit that company culture to make sure that they're gonna stay on.

Mark:

Culture is very important. Now by culture, I think a lot of companies get this wrong. They think the culture is the seven values. Someone in marketing put on the website that says customer first or whatever the mantra is. And I'm sure there is value to those, but the actual culture of your team might be at your company level. More likely it's at a team or department level is how you interact day to day. For example, I have a colleague who told me at a former company, the rule was whoever yelled loudest got their way in the meeting. I guarantee you marketing did not put that on the website. But when you show up, ...

IMA’s Neha Lagoo Ratnakar speaks with Oded Zehavi, CEO of Mesh Payments, about digital transformation of the finance team. They discuss how powerful new software tools and automation opportunities empower CFOs and their teams to streamline business partnering, sharpen internal controls, and simplify business operations.  The good news is it’s much less complicated than you think.

Connect with Oded

Full Episode Transcript:
Neha:

Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast by and for management accountants. I'm Neha Lagoo Ratnakar from IMA, and today I'm speaking with Oded Zehavi about how the enormous potential of digital transformation is finally coming to fruition for CFOs and finance teams everywhere. As the CEO and founder of Mesh Payments, Oded has a bird's eye view into how accounting and finance professionals are utilizing and customizing powerful new software tools to streamline business partnering, sharpen internal controls and simplify business operations. And what struck me during the conversation was that how appropriate the word transformation is in this moment. It's like the buzzword I've heard a million times crystallized into something real for me. During the course of this interview, you'll hear how technology has clearly elevated the value the finance function is able to provide to the business in real time. Let's get started with Oded to see how businesses are leaning into this exciting new era of innovation.

Neha:

So let's start with the obvious question today. We are all witnessing a transformation in the way we work and finance and accounting is one of the functions that lends itself very well to remote working. How do you think the CFO's office has changed since the pandemic?

Oded:

So people usually speak a lot about the fact that everything is remote now, which is key, by the way, by the way that finance people operates. I will even go back in time and speak about something that less people are talking about, which is why the category, which I mean, which is spend management, have been really driving from the beginning of the pandemic. And in my mind it's always start by the fact that before the pandemic, the finance teams were really focusing about T&E. So everybody were a lot of fun. Various sales guys were traveling and it's all about how we collect received, how do we close the books? There was so much noise so many people involved. What does does it mean? And so many employees have been brought, and it's really beyond the fact that he's taken a lot of the time from the finance teams activities.

Oded:

It also created a lot of noise and camouflage some other problems that might have been bigger or different. And when the pandemic started, that was shut eliminated overnight. So now nobody travels anymore. No receipts have been chased. That noise have been gone quiet. Totally. And on top of it, there were two other trends which in my mind have really impact the way finance team operates. One, as you mentioned, is the fact that now companies are fully remote and distributed. So a lot of the processes that historically the finance team could have solved by telling the employees, you know, what? Come to my desk, yes, tomorrow and we'll make this happen have not been relevant anymore. And last, but not least, the fact that many of these companies move a lot of the infrastructure to the cloud. So now a lot of these old on premise licensing models have been shut down.

Oded:

And now everything move to more recurring models where you need to pay every month a much smaller amount with much more softwares. So the combination of all of that really made a huge difference when it comes to how finance teams need to treat spend or treat corporate spend. And what I'm seeing is that over the last two years, the space itself have been exploding. So many great companies have come into this space, which are now giving very new technology, amazing user experience will talk about it in the second, and last but not least, a new business model, which in our category, historically, companies have been used to pay for software that helps them control spend. I'm amazed there are still companies that are even considering paying for some of the very, very old legacy platforms on things they are not really using, where there are so many options like mesh in the space that enables them to pay only for what they use and sometimes not even pay anything because a lot of us have been using the model where we, the merchant that we are paying for are, are really paying for the service. So a lot of transformation and changes in the way finance team have looked at spend management and on top of it and you started by the remote and the fact that companies are now distributed. So it's not only that are distributed, they're also global. If we were talking, having this conversation few years ago, most of the US companies were usually around this very one site usually in one city in the US it could be San Francisco or New York or one of these leading countries.

Oded:

The pandemic really shifted a lot of the employees all across the US and now there are new places where employees from different reasons want to spend time in like Austin, like Miami, like all these places which are totally outside of the where traditional headquarters have been based and last than not least, why stay in Austin when you can spend the same time and work from a much more exotic place. And I've seen companies that have become fully distributed and fully remote. And for the finance teams, all of these challenges are really something that is transformational. And they have really invested a lot of time and effort in the last two years to be ready to give solutions or be, give service in such a changing world.

Neha:

Wow. I love that, Oded, there's so much that has been happening, and thank you for summarizing so well how work, softwares, platforms, our activities have changed in the last couple of years. Now let's talk about the mindset changes. What have you seen change in the last couple of years and is there anything that the CFOs or the finance departments can do to help with this mindset change?

Oded:

So it's interesting that we are talking today, which is more or less in the middle or the beginning or some people out the hand of additional neutrons to change in the mindset of finance team or finance people, if we can go back when the pandemic came, everybody stopped and tried to reduce cost and see what happens that very quickly after a month or two, the world, especially the high tech scene, have really shifted into growth. Just growth and growth and growth. And companies have been growing and bringing more to employees. They're more talents and spending more on media. And it was really about growth. Not all, but most of the companies didn't invest enough time about unique economics and controls and things that are fundamental when it comes to business. And we are in the beginning of a new transformation or new mindset change where everybody said saying to the same fine sense things that they will say to them a year ago, Grow, grow, grow, stop, stop, stop.

Oded:

And let's focus on the fundamental economics control and visibility. And it all comes back to the fact that now changes are happening much quicker, but then nobody knows if we'll talk again in two months, what will be the mindset then, that it will be just control, and it might happen the same way it was in the pandemic. The only thing that we know that is that we don't really know. From what the impact for finance teams is that they now need to have an infrastructure, which is ...

Connect with Mat
Read more about Online to Offline

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that brings you impactful people and stories from across the world of management accounting. I'm your host, Adam Larson, and joining me today is Mat Boyle, CEO of Online to Offline, to discuss how businesses and management accountants can make a big difference in the world by shifting their focus from profits first to mission first. While this is much easier said than done, as you'll hear, Mat's inspirational story is an important reminder that it's possible to do well in business and even better than ever when you measure your success by something greater than the bottom line.

Adam:

Well, Mat, I just really wanna thank you for coming on the podcast today. Thanks so much for sharing your time with us. And to start off, I wanted you to kind of walk through a little bit of your story with us as we were kind of talking, coming up to this call, you mentioned something that you learned to focus, no longer focusing on profit, but on the impact your business was making, and that's not something you hear every day. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that with our audience.

Mat:

Yeah, sure. Adam, thanks for having us. So the sort of condensed version of the backstory, I'd built quite a large sales training business. So I had four offices around Australia. We had a stack of businesses that will help in their sales teams, really navigate through the changes caused by the internet. And from a profitability point of view, it was amazing, but there was this kind of hole inside me that it was really unfulfilling and my days was spent training sales people that didn't want help. They needed it, but they didn't want it. So it was just this horribly unfulfilling sort of thing. And I met this guy back in 2015 who was an Australian guy that worked with the Thai immigration police. And he started talking to me about the work he was doing over in Thailand and how he was involved in rescuing kids out of exploitive situations and women outta sexual slavery and human trafficking.

Mat:

And the more we got talking, the more things just sort of opened up for me and the, you know, my heart sort of went, I've gotta see this. So about six months into the conversation, and I eventually convinced him to take me over to Thailand, and I spent three weeks working with him and his team in Thailand doing the front lines rescuing kids outta brothels and women outta brothels and just seeing this depravity, which is human trafficking, and you know, that some of the sites and the sounds were just horrendous. But the thing when I was talking to all these women and that, that the stories were identical, that they all needed money and got caught up in this life because someone gave them a job that they shouldn't have lent to money from someone they shouldn't have.

Mat:

Or they were promised a job that didn't exist and they were all taken advantage of by their desperation towards money. So when I was sitting back in Australia and I'm sitting back in a boardroom a few days later, I sort of had this idea of, well, instead of businesses paying me to train their sales teams not to do the work that I've paid them to do, I've been paid to do. What about if I just could automate and outsource all of these elements of the sales process, businesses could pay me to build the systems and manage the systems and they're gonna make more money, but then I can go and create jobs in these developing countries where all these women are getting exploited and train them how to operate my system and actually be able to use my business as a way of making good.

Mat:

So that's what we started to do and started to develop all these systems that can automate and outsource big chunks of the sales process, but do it in a way that no one actually ever realizes it's not been done by you. And in 2018, we ended up opening our first outsource center in the Philippines, which has gone gone amazing. And then Covid has gone slowed down our growth and we are on track to open our second center in Thailand sometime sort of before sort of March next year.

Adam:

That's quite a story. I mean, to have something like that caused such an impact on you that you want to completely turn your business around, that can't be an easy decision to make. And it's a very risky one.

Mat:

It was a very easy decision to make because I made it with my heart, not with my head. It was an incredibly risky situation. And the journey between sort of 2016, 2017 when the idea came and where we are now, we certainly have faced the consequences of that, you know, of that decision. Because going through this said, I made it purely with my heart of going, I have to make an impact from there. And I kind of threw out all conventional business acumen around, well, what happens to your existing customers? What are you gonna do with everything you built up? And so over a period of a few months, we ended all of our contracts. I just stopped prospecting for new business and didn't replace them. And just focused our whole energy on trying to fix, solve this problem and, and tried to create these systems and open the center.

Mat:

And, you know, as is often the case, it always takes twice as long as you think it's gonna take and takes three times the amount of money that you think it's gonna take. And, you know, through all of that journey, the consequence is we actually went through complete financial meltdown and we lost our house, lost our cars, and basically went down to having $50 to our name at our kind of lowest point. And you know, that's kind of where we were able to kind of keep persevering and keep getting through. So like fortunately now we're in a much stronger financial position than we ever have, and the business is going great, but there certainly was a big journey from start to where we are now, which has been challenging.

Adam:

So maybe we can talk a little bit about that journey, about becoming to the success you are now. I know a lot of that contributed to getting the right people in place in your organization to make sure that you were doing the business in the right way. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that to how that became successful.

Mat:

Yeah, so there was a few kind of phases where I was first in that survival phase where it was just me. I was just hustling. I was just, you know, I was robbing Peter to pay Paul and I didn't really have a financial strategy in place other than how can I pay this week's bills type of strategy. And that, you know, although that was getting us forward, that was creating other holes with taxation and a heap of other kind of just areas that, because I was so single minded focused on the goal at hand and trying to do everything myself or being left behind. So I started to look for support teams and one of the sort of first pieces I put into place is actually bringing on a fractional CFO. I've been working with a lot of the accountants and, you know, all the accountants, all they kept doing was just filing my tax returns and telling me, because you've done A, B, and C this way, this is what we've had to do.

Mat:

So they're just telling me about their problems and how they've stuck a bandaid over it rather than actually working with me to try to solve the problems. And that just kept making, compounding the problems, you know, and just putting us deeper and deeper and deeper in a hole. So I'm, you know, one side, I'm, you know, busting, busting everything. I've got to ...

Connect with Tori
Connect with Denny
Learn more about the CMA Certification

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

Join us in this bonus episode of Count Me In, where IMA brand storyteller, Margaret Michaels sits down with two noteworthy CMAs to discuss the 50th anniversary of IMA's globally respected certification for accounting and finance professionals

Margaret:

In this special Count Me In podcast, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Certified Management Accountant or CMA program, I will be speaking with two CMA exam takers, Denny Beresford, who earned his CMA in 1972 and made IMA history by becoming one of IMA's first CMAs, and Tori Heavey, a recent graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who won the CMA student award for the highest score on the exam in the June/July, 2020 testing window. Tori also recently won the Elijah Sales Award for her CPA score. Denny has spent a lifetime working in accounting and finance. He currently serves as a member of IMA's Financial Reporting Committee and as the executive in residence at the JM Toll School of Accounting, Terry College of Business at University of Georgia. Tori is a recent graduate of the Master's in Accountancy program at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and is currently working as a tax associate for KPMG.

Margaret:

Thank you Denny and Tori for joining me today. As we talk about your experience taking the CMA exam. Denny, you have the distinction of being among the first people to sit for the CMA exam in 1972. At that time, the CMA exam was administered with paper and pencil and the field of management accounting was not widely known. What do you remember about taking the CMA exam? How did you learn about management accounting? Was it through school or work experience and what are some of your study methods and tips?

Denny:

I had been a member of IMA, it was actually the National Association of Accountants or in earlier years since 1962, shortly after I graduated from college. And in fact, I'd been active in my local chapter back in Los Angeles, rising from a helper on some of the committees to become president of the chapter shortly before I transferred from Ernst & Ernst's office in Los Angeles to the national office in Cleveland in 1971. So I was very familiar with what was going on at, at the organization and the fact that the CMA exam was being developed over a couple of years before that. And I guess I was generally familiar with the management accounting profession, having again been participating in IMA for a number of years being involved particularly at the local chapter level and then also at the national level.

Denny:

And also having been an auditor and interacting, of course with many of my clients for that period of time. And when the exam was was first offered, I decided that it would be a good thing, first of all, to support the organization for by taking it. And I thought it would be something that would help build my self confidence, you might say, in dealing with, with clients. Since I was a public accountant, I knew that I had to be able to speak intelligently to controllers and chief financial officers and others who were involved in the management accounting profession. And so I thought that being able to pass an exacting exam like the CMA would again, give me both self confidence and also a positive credential that would show that I was on similar footing to them.

Denny:

What I remember about taking the first exam, I was in Cleveland in the National Office of Ernst & Ernst, and at that point, and I don't remember how many different settings there were, but the closest location that I could, where I could take the exam was Pittsburgh. So I had to I go there, drive over to Pittsburgh, which isn't too far from Cleveland. I had to stay overnight. And the morning of the exam, there was an ice storm in Pittsburgh. And another fellow and I were both gonna take the exam together and we had to drive from the hotel to the, I don't remember exactly the place it was being held, but it was a half hour or so away, and we could barely make it there because of the streets were all icy and it was just a terrible weather situation.

Denny:

But and it was in a cavernous location, some sort of a very large convention location, something like that. And it was large and very cold. And again I had no idea how to prepare for the exam because back then there hadn't been any previous exams, had nothing to to go on in terms of looking at what questions had been asked in the past. And for the first exam, what the organization had done was give a list of books that you could consider studying to prepare you for the exam. I thought that was kind of a good idea, but not a very good use of my time. I knew that a couple of the parts of the exam, particularly Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and some other parts were pretty much in my wheelhouse and I could do well on those.

Denny:

The other parts I wasn't so sure about, but I felt that trying to study them by going back and reading textbooks or the like, would not be a very good use of my time. So my strategy, if you will, was to try to do well on one or two of the parts, and then of the other parts that if I didn't do so well the next time when I had to take them over, I'd at least know what to study for. And as it turned out, I passed the whole exam the first time and had one of the 10 highest scores. So that strategy worked out pretty well and it didn't have to go back and study, but that's as much as I remember about preparing for the exam, why I took it and exactly what happened when I was there.

Margaret:

That's great. That's a great story about the ice storm. You really persevered taking the CMA exam a very rigorous enterprise indeed. Tori, now that you've heard Denny's experience, how do you think the way you've taken the exam is different from Denny and what did you do to prepare for the exam?

Tori:

Yeah, my experience was a little different. I did not have an ice storm to deal with, but I've kind of grown up through the shift to digital. I rarely ever used computers for school until I came to college, really. Freshman year, most of my exams were still on paper and pencil. And gradually more and more classes switched to exams on the computer. And this transition really helped me prepare to take the CMA exam electronically, specifically for the essay portion. It helped that I'd improved my typing skills tremendously over the time or the few years I'd started using computers more and got more used to typing papers online or even just using different software. I used the Wiley CMA exam question bank to prepare and study for both parts of the CMA exam. And it was totally computer based. All of my prep except for my own notes that I still write on paper and pencil.

Tori:

But seeing the exam simulated during my studying in this way definitely helped a lot. It familiarized me with the test software and it made actual exam day a lot less daunting just to have kind of more familiarity in being used to the situation that I would be in. Cause sometimes it can be so nerve wracking on the exam day to go into a testing center. Right now we use Prometric centers, which I'm not sure if y'all are familiar with those, but you have to schedule an exam slot online, a few, usually a few weeks or months in advance. And then the day of you show up and you are assigned a computer that has like the blockers all around so that everyone is, it's almost like small cubicles a...

Connect with Dr. Marsha Huber
Read the report Thriving Amidst Challenges: A Guide to Small Business Resilience

Full Episode Transcript:
Neha:

Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast where management accounted stays center stage. I'm your host, Neha Lagoo Ratnakar. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Marsha Huber, who is IMA's director of research to discuss a recently published report, Thriving Amidst Challenges: A Guide to Small Business Resilience. I have to say, this report is such a great example of the timely and rigorous research IMA specializes in with the goal of providing practical insights and actions that truly help businesses learn and grow. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, but make sure to download the full report using the link in the shownotes, because it's literally brimming with insights that can be put to use immediately. Now let's get started with Marsha.

Neha:

Hi Marsha, welcome to Count Me In. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Marsha:

Oh, thank you so much Neha. I feel privileged to have been invited to talk about this IMA publication.

Neha:

Oh, it's all my pleasure, Marsha. And first of all, congratulations on your new report. Thriving Amidst Challenges: A Guide to Small Business Resilience and that's quite mouthful, but a very much needed topic. Can you tell us, our listeners, what this report is all about?

Marsha:

Yes. It's a report that was developed from interviews with business people, the small business development center, and various members of the small business committee at the IMA. And I spoke with people, read interviews and developed models with people and experts, and here's the report of our findings.

Neha:

Cool. And I'm glad you were able to do all that. And how did you come up with this topic? What's the story behind this report?

Marsha:

Yeah, it's really interesting. I was not the originator of this report. During the pandemic, the small business committee at the IMA had a heart for small business and they actually had another publication. And then this was the second of the two about resilience, small business resilience. And I was invited as a new researcher at the IMA to help the small business committee write this report. And that's what I did. And it was a excellent experience.

Neha:

Thank you for sharing that journey with us Marsha. So, let's talk about the resilience model. I found it very interesting. Where does that come from and how can it help businesses bounce back?

Marsha:

Yeah. This came from actually a lot of interviews with the small business development center, Youngstown State University, because they worked with small businesses and they worked with small business during COVID. And at that time, when this was happening, I was also a faculty member at Youngstown State. So I worked with them as well to work small businesses. And so we decided to think about companies that thrived, you know, this is a report about thriving during hardship and resilience, the very definition of it is bouncing back. So how can you bounce back when certain challenges come your way? And what happened was we found three elements among the businesses that thrive as well as the experiences of our small business committee members. These different three, there were three concepts that stood out. And would you like me to describe those concepts?

Neha:

Sure. Go ahead, that would really help our understanding of the model.

Marsha:

Okay. So just imagine three circles, and you can also look at the report as I talk about these things, because these are illustrated, but you know, I'm just gonna lay it out three circles and one circle is business focus. And of course, during COVID, and now, we still have a continuing pandemic. You know, business focus is important for everyone, but it's not everything. Okay. So what else we saw as a visionary leadership and the companies to thrive, they could see beyond they didn't lose sight of their goals. They kept their eyes on the goals, but they also had to be flexible and agile and they had to change for the circumstances and they could see things that they never saw before. So, and I might give some examples if you want some in a moment. And then the other element that was so important was a people-centric culture. That the companies that thrived thought about their people, they thought about them as family, you know, not worrying about, you know, we have to lay people off or we have to do this and that they're thinking about how can we keep our people here?

Marsha:

They're our family. And I think you see now even a heightened awareness of wellbeing, but before the pandemic, yeah, wellbeing is around. But right now it's very important. And I think it actually began at that time where everybody was in the same boat, we were all working from home, having kids at home, you know, things happening, dogs coming in our Zoom meetings, our animals and everything else going on, that we had to change. And some of those things brought humor into what we did. And when you bring these things together, the business focus with the visionary leadership and the people-centric culture, those items mixed together, came to what I called a zone of thriving.

Neha:

Wow. That was very insightful. And thank you for bringing the human bit in it. It is true that the pandemic did bring out that human side of us. We were more real on those Zoom calls than we are in the actual office setup.

Marsha:

Yes. Like I'll just give you example of one company, they were in the concession food truck business. Now during COVID, there was no food truck business to go to, people were not going out to eat. All their orders were canceled. And they were the top food truck company basically in United States and everything came to standstill. So they thought, how can we keep our people working when we don't have a business anymore for a while? And so they developed and they saw, looked at everything they had, they basically reenvisioned what they could do. And they started a hand washing station business. And they cuz they had the products, they had the manufacturing process, they had the people and that's what they launched. And then they started selling these hand washing stations. And the University I worked at, they put them in, people put 'em in venues and they're really cool. You don't need to touch anything. There's three stations, you're six feet from each other. And then you wash your hands and your, the soap is there. You wash your hands, you dry your hands. It takes like 20 seconds. And then the next person could go. So that's the very ingenious idea that came just because they cared about their people.

Neha:

Wow. That was pure genius, I agree, Marsha and thank you for also volunteering a bit ago to talk about some examples. And let's talk about the six Rs of resilience. That's something that also stayed with me. Can you give us some examples of what that means for a management accountant?

Marsha:

Yeah. And when we talk about the six Rs, let me mention them, under visionary leadership, there's reflect and reimagine. Under business focus, there's reevaluate and reinvent. Under people-centric culture is reconnect and recharge. And again, you know, it's the six RS, resilience, you know, was a way to model these things, these different ideas. So the first example already talked about was visionary leadership, you know, reflecting and reimagining, you know, w...

Connect with Anthony

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:

I'm Adam Larson and welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast by and for management accountants. Today's guest comes to us from the forefront of the data automation revolution. Anthony Nitsos, a proud CMA, a consulting CFO, and the founder of SAS gurus shares the unique story of how he transitioned from pursuing a career in medicine to how he discovered the power and beauty of accounting. From explaining how accounting forms the spinal column of any manufacturing business to practical advice for writing the coming tidal wave of financial automation, Anthony's insight and expertise is important listening for management accountants everywhere. Enjoy the show.

Adam:

Anthony, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We're really excited to have you on and today we're gonna be focusing in on automation and what that means for the management accountant. But to start off, I wanted you to kind of tell us a little bit about your story.

Anthony:

So thank you, Adam for that. And I really appreciate being on your program today. You know, I've had an association with the IMA for a long time, which we uncovered in our kind of a preliminary, so that'll be part of the story. But I actually started off in medicine of all things. I was accepted into an accelerated program at the university of Michigan at the age of 18, but several years into it, I realized I really did not want to be a doctor. So it was one of those kind of all right, well you're most of the way to a doctor and you've kind of got a bachelor's degree to show up for, but what are you gonna do with your life now if you've decided not to go in medicine. So I think by, you know, stint to the fact that they both started with am, I went into manufacturing right after medicine.

Anthony:

I don't know if it was anything more than that, just like, okay, I need a job. I need to, you know, make money. But the strange thing is, is what they had me do was really, you know, kind of the beginnings of process reengineering analysis and trying to figure out why in this particular case, you know, logistics were breaking down material, wasn't ending up where it went. So I got kind of a baptism in fire. What it showed me was that corporations are very similar to bodies. You know, they even, you know, means the same thing. So this training that I got in medicine actually translated pretty well into manufacturing. And so there, I, you know, from there I took off. After that, I did a stint where I was doing a lot of ERP implementations. If folks recall back around the year, 1997, everybody started panicking that their code would blow up when the year 2000 showed up.

Anthony:

So there was this huge, you know, Y2K, doomsday disasters, et cetera, et cetera. And at that time I was picking up accounting skills. It was one of those things where it was pretty clear that the impact of manufacturing was absolutely a financial one in that, you know, when you got right down to it, you're making decisions on the shop floor that impact profitability. So it was kind of a natural progression for me to just kind of move over into more of an accounting type of world. And ERP really brought that together, cuz that's where you really unify back then still in today, you know, the operations of the company with finance. And so that's where the accounting management accounting piece came into it. And it was right around 1996 where I actually got my first certification in accounting and it was the CMA.

Anthony:

And I remember that being really useful to me and still to this day, I'm not gonna say it really stopped being useful because whereas the CPA exam and I've taken that, and you know, I've also passed that and I'm also a CPA, but I became a CPA later. I was a CMA first because CMA was very broad based. And from my training, you can't look at one part of a body anymore than you can look at one part of a corporation it's an integrated systemic whole. And so how those pieces work together and how they work most efficiently together, the principles are very similar between medicine and, you know, process reengineering. They really are, you know, you go after the root cause the idea of medicine is not to treat symptoms. I know there's a big debate about that, but really what we are trained to do is find the root cause and fix it.

Anthony:

And manufacturing is no different and neither is IT. So moving from the physical body to the physical manufacturing now to a more, you know, electronic realm, bringing ERP and all the systems and how they touch everybody together and unifying that ultimately in a framework, which was based in accounting in my mind, because in my mind, the accounting pieces, like the spinal column of the body, you really build everything off of that. All of your reporting, all of your metrics comes off of that. And so focusing the attention to get to the numbers most accurately, most efficiently really became kind of the focus of my next position, which was a controller for a Japanese company. It was a company that was a manufacturing company that had been purchased by, was an English company that had been purchased by the Japanese, excuse me and the president at the time really wanted to have his own money guy rather than have somebody from Japan come in and do the numbers.

Anthony:

And so he quickly moved to hire a new controller and that was me. And so at that point we knew we were going to scale the company 10 times within the next three years. And so my experience in accounting, the fact that I also spoke Japanese, cuz I had actually studied there, helped out, I understood the cultural kind of the, you know, became kind of like the cultural liaison with the Japanese people when they showed up and then going over there. But that was kind of a side issue. The big issue was they gave me opportunity in a Greenfield implementation to design the entire data collection, information, reporting, financial reporting and whatnot for what was going to be a $50 million company that I had inherited at 5 million using Peachtree. So here I am, freshly minted CMA got his first controller job, applying all these skills and saying, okay, we now get to design a data collection piece for all the production data, all the manufacturing data, all the material data, all the labor, blah, blah, blah, in a way where we really kept the cost down.

Anthony:

So this was my first and in some ways, best experience scaling a company because I was actually given that power. I was given the authority to basically design the system. And so we had at the time when we started that 5 million, there was myself, a full-time accountant and kind of a half-time payroll person running, you know, the entire back office. When we reached 50 million, I had the same three people, only the payroll person was now full-time. And so we were able to, by applying Japanese manufacturing principles and techniques of totally total quality management, plus Six Sigma black belt process, reengineering analysis, plus my training in ERP systems and what could be done. And at that point, the state of automation was you drove everything off of barcode scanners. And so once everything was set up easily, so each person had their own badge, their own employee badge.

Anthony:

That was what they used to swipe in and out of the clocks and also what they were used to swipe in and out of jobs. And we made it easy for them to do that. We had readers everywhere and the jobs themselves had their own codes. And so all you had to do is just match the two up in a system and boom outfalls the data. So it was the principle of a sin...