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Contact Jennifer Booth: https://www.linkedin.com/in/booth-jennifer/
Jennifer Booth’s bio: https://leasequery.com/about-us/leadership/#jennifer

LeaseQuery: https://leasequery.com/
More information on LeaseQuery’s 2021 Lease Liabilities Index: https://leasequery.com/lease-liabilities-index-2021/

Contact Donald Scherer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schererdonald/

More about Donald Scherer: https://www.crossborder.ai/person/donald-scherer/

IMA Website: https://www.imanet.org/

About the CMA Certification: https://www.imanet.org/cma-certification

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam (00:05):

Welcome back for a special bonus episode of IMA's Count Me In podcast. As you know, this series is dedicated to bring you the latest perspectives and learnings on all things affecting the accounting and finance world, as told by the experts working in the field and thought leaders shaping the profession. Well, IMA is pleased to announce that it has continued to shape the profession through its CMA certification and has just officially certified it's 100,000th. To celebrate this milestone IMA has planned a month long celebration to promote the impact the CMA has had on the accounting and finance profession. To kick off the celebration, IMA's brand content and storytelling manager, Margaret Michaels, spoke with IMA's senior vice-president of certifications, exams, and constant integration, Dennis Whitney, about the state of management accounting profession and the trends impacting its future. Keep listening to hear this insightful and celebratory discussion about IMA's CMA program.

Margaret (01:08):

Great. Well thank you Dennis for joining the Count Me In podcast. The first question is about the certified management accountant or CMA program that was launched in 1972 by IMA. Can you tell me a little bit about what the impetus for creating a certification program like this was?

Dennis (01:30):

Yeah sure Margaret, thank you for having me today. I'm very happy to talk about the CMA program. Yeah, it's interesting, back in the 1960s, IMA started seriously thinking about a certification program. The impetus behind that was that rightly so they believe that management accounting was a distinct profession from public accounting and that the competencies needed inside organizations were different from public accounting. There was quite a bit of overlap. You know, financial accounting is necessary both for public accountants and accountants working inside the company, but there are distinct competencies, cost management, financial planning, and analysis that are very important for accountants working inside organization. So they identified that need and they started the planning process to develop the CMA program. And it took several years of planning, but they had their first Board of Regents meeting in the beginning of 1972 and rolled out the first exam in December of 1972.

Margaret (02:44):

Wow. So the CMA has a long history and how does IMA ensure that the program is relevant to the profession right now and evolves alongside it?

Dennis (02:56):

Yeah, the CMA program has evolved quite a bit over these, almost 50 years now. You know, when we first developed the CMA in 1972, there was more of a focus on cost accounting, but today the focus is more on a planning, analysis, decision support, and also technology and data analytics. So the way we keep up with the profession is, you know, we're constantly scanning the environment, reading research papers, talking to CFOs, corporate controllers. But what we also do is every six years or so, five to six, seven years, we do what's called a job analysis survey. So with that, we identify the tasks that management accountants do every day and what they need to know to do their job efficiently and effectively. And so from that research, we're able to develop the content specification outlines and the new exam and keep up to date with the profession.

Margaret (04:02):

And how does continuing education fit into the CMA program?

Dennis (04:07):

Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting that you use the word program because the CMA is a program. It's not just the exam. When you finish the exam, you're required to do 30 hours of continuing education every year, including two hours of ethics and the reason for that is management accountants need to stay on top of the latest trends in the profession. They need to develop new skills, new techniques. You know, if you got your CMA 20 years ago, you know, most of that knowledge is still relevant, but there are new skills and in order to maintain your relevance on your job and add value to your company and also help you develop your career, it's very important that you keep your skills current. So that's why we have the continuing education as part of the program.

Margaret (04:58):

That makes sense. And I'm sure that continuing education aspect appeals to a lot of professionals who are looking to stay current right now. In looking at the growth of the CMA program, it seems as if the CMA has been growing most significantly in the last five years with 50,000 CMAs added from 2016 to the present. And for perspective, it took 50 years or from 1972 to 2016 to reach the first 50,000 CMAs. So what trends do you think are contributing to the CMA's astronomical growth in the last five years?

Dennis (05:39):

Well there are a couple of factors that go into that. First of all, for most of our history, we were pretty much a US, primarily a US certification. I mean, we are still a US certification, but our candidate growth has expanded beyond the US. So about 10 years or so ago, we started seriously looking to develop markets overseas. So we've seen tremendous growth overseas. Now we're still, we're growing actually quite well in the US, but we're actually growing very, very well overseas, especially China. We've seen tremendous growth in China. But we've also seen growth in Europe, middle east, very strong growth in the middle east over last 10 years. And India, India is a market now that's really growing quite a bit. And also Southeast Asia, for example, in the Philippines and Vietnam. So it's a global growth and that's attributed, contributed a lot to the growth of the program. The other thing is that we've, we really work hard to communicate the value of the CMA. And for example, we have every year now for the last, I'm not exactly sure how many years, five years or so, we've been doing a commercial and an ad campaign where we make sure that we tell the public, not just our CMA's and our candidates, but tell corporations through business development and tell the public through marketing, how relevant the CMA is. So that increasing exposure has more people who know about the CMA and more people who realize the importance of the CMA, particularly hiring managers. So we're seeing, for example, more ads saying CMA preferred and I think those are the reasons primarily for the growth. Well, one other thing actually is a bigger exposure on the university campuses. So more students are interested in the program as well.

Margaret (07:54):

That makes a lot of sense and clearly now more than ever, hiring managers and organizations are faced with challenges revolving around rebuilding post COVID and the talent war that we hear about where there's fierce competition for CMAs in particular. So as organizations look to build a more enhanced digital capabilities and transform their finance and accounting departments, how does the CMA specifically prepare them for those types of challenges?

Dennis (08:35):

Well the CMA has a very unique set of skills. So, y...

Contact Demetrios Frangiskatos: https://www.linkedin.com/in/demetrios-frangiskatos-00290a7/

Demetrios at BDO: https://www.bdo.com/our-people/demetrios-frangiskatos

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch (00:06):

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch Roshong and this is episode 137 of our series. Today's conversation is between my co-host Adam and the co-leader of BDOs SPAC assurance practice, Demetrios Frangiskatos. The SPAC, Special Purpose Acquisition Company market has long-term implications that cannot be overlooked. Demetrios joins us to explain factors currently driving the market as well as other considerations and risks. To learn more, keep listening as we head over to their conversation now.

Adam (00:48):

Demetrios, thanks so much for coming on the podcast today. To start off our conversation, where's the SPAC market now and what factors have been driving its activity and is it still a viable option to going public today?

Demetrios (01:02):

Thanks for having me, Adam and looking forward to our discussion. Yeah. You know, the SPAC market has been on a roller coaster ride over the last probably 18 months and all of it is sort of been going up just at different speeds and different levels. The market right now is probably a little slower than it has been, you know, earlier on in the year with regards to initial public offerings and raising capital through the pipe market, but there's been no indication from, you know, whether, the bankers,, attorneys sponsors, what we're seeing in the marketplace that it is still a viable option. We're still seeing activity. We're still seeing SPACs raising money. We're still seeing spot sponsors, which include asset managers and strategics and high net worth individuals who have had a lot of success in doing M&A, looking to raise capital. So I don't see it slowing down. I think we were sort of in an unprecedented market at the beginning of the year and that incline had started from the year before, and that might've been a pace that was difficult to continue following. But it still seems like it's going strong and you're still also seeing even the traditional IPO market go strong. So they both seem to be viable, options that are continuing in the marketplace, as well right now.

Adam (02:51):

So back in April of this year, the SEC issued a new guidance regarding, related to warrants that seemed to shake up the market. Can you talk about what happened there and what implications were for sponsors and target companies alike?

Demetrios (03:08):

Yeah, of course. Yeah, that was, that was a bit of a splash in the market with respect to the accounting behind warrants was dealt with in a certain way for a long period time and with the SEC statement it changed the direction of that accounting from what was fairly easy to account for the warrants as equity instruments, to if the warrant instruments had certain clauses they would have to be reclassified as liabilities. And what did that do, that caused, you know, there was at least 400 SPACs out in the market that raised capital, that had to reevaluate it. That was de-SPACs that occurred in the marketplace, where the warrants carried over from the original offering into the new operating company that became public that had, restatements. So it caused quite a bit of noise. And, you know, the timing was interesting because the statement came out in April and then in March, I shouldn't say then, but prior to that in March, we had started seeing a little bit of a slowdown in the market. I think the pipe market was reaching a bit of a capacity point in how much private investment was going to go into these SPACs and the combination of those two really, really put a pause in the marketplace. And it took, it took about, you know, maybe a couple of months for the market to start getting back up and going and enough time for the companies to evaluate what the rules mean with their current equity instruments, you know, attorneys to evaluate the structure, including the bankers. And initially there was a lot of hesitation and what to do, whether to file new SPACs with, you know, the legacy terms and my ability accounting, try to restructure these agreements so that they have equity accounting, and that started shaking itself out and initially we saw mostly filings of you know, saw the restatements on the old, on the existing companies. We started seeing filings of SPACs with, warrant instruments with liability accounting, and now we're starting to see a shift where the sponsors and the bank community and the attorneys are working on instruments that will, get these warrant instruments to equity accounting and you know, we're working through several within our firm as well, so you're starting to see the market evolve and address some of the concerns that the SEC presented in their statement.

Adam (06:06):

Can you maybe touch on the regulatory focus that continues to increase, such as the current chair's Gensler's the statements that he's made?

Demetrios (06:14):

Yeah, no, of course. I think, you know, you're going through changes in the administration right now, because of the presidential change so that's, we'll probably gonna see some shifts in regulatory focus and, you know, the appointments that are being made and coupled with, you know, Gensler's comments, maybe a month, month and a half ago, he was talking generally about the capital markets and there's been an uptick both in traditional IPO's, and that there's an expectation that will continue. But did talk about SPACs, and their sort of their resurgence from, you know, these were vehicles that existed several years ago, or much longer than several years ago, but they just weren't, they weren't being used as often and obviously now the activity is tremendous. And he was, you know, he was focusing on our investors protected appropriately with these SPACs specifically. I think his focus was on retail investors and them getting the appropriate information, that they need both on the initial IPO stage and in the de-SPAC when the target is the operating companies identify and the DSPAC occurs and I think he was cuing that there should be some focus on this and make sure with the volume that's going on that the disclosures and the information flow that's getting to investors is at the right level. And, the second point he raised, which I think has always been something that's been a focus is, just generally speaking the efficiency of the vehicle and whether, you know, is how it compares to traditional IPO. Obviously, the SPAC sponsor is the ones that are raising the capital and are the ones that are looking for the operating company. There's a certain level of dilution and costs that they bring to the table. The SPACs that we're you know, in the current market, maybe several years ago, they didn't have pipes, but now they have pipes which are private investments in public equity. So there's significant capital being raised through that and that they're getting discounted pricing. So the combination of all that is a concern that gets brought up, are the retail investors aware and, are they properly, being, you know, evaluating their decisions with the information for what's going in? So it's clear that there's going to be some heightened focus on SPACs, disclosure, the right level of information for investors, and then ultimately I thi...

Continue the conversation with David!
https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidshar/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch (00:05):

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch Roshong and this is episode 136 of our series. Many would describe the global business environment over the last year and a half as rather turbulent. From accelerated growth due to technology, followed by the effects of COVID-19, burnout has become a very common theme in the workplace. David Shar, business psychology expert, and founder of Illuminate PMC joins us to talk about what businesses and people can do to avoid burnout and find real meaning in their work. Keep listening as we head over to the conversation now.

Adam (00:49):

So David, thanks so much for coming on. Burnout is a word that I've been hearing a lot lately, especially with people coming on the other side of the pandemic and coming out of their homes a little bit more, but so many people have been stuck in front of computer screens in their homes for so long. Can you just kind of talk about what is burnout?

David (01:07):

Yeah. First of all, thank you so much for having me Adam. So burnout is definitely becoming a little bit more of a popular topic. Fortunate for me, unfortunate for everyone, I guess. And it is, becoming more and more universal, especially with what everyone has gone through and were not done, like you said, as we are now leaving our homes and going back to work and, many of us will be teleworking and be on fully virtual teams, but whatever that means going on to that, and I know it's a horrible term because it's used so much, but to that new normal, we're not out of the weeds yet. This is when, we're all going to have to start to really cope with what we've gone through and burnout by definition is typically defined as having three pieces to it. The first one is this emotional exhaustion and emotional exhaustion is often misunderstood. It's not physical exhaustion, it's not mental exhaustion, but it does lead to those things and even lead to physical ailment, but it starts as emotional exhaustion. The second piece is a general cynicism of work and, that's where we start really putting up barriers between ourselves and our coworkers and our clients and if we have employees between ourselves and our employees, we have this general sense of cynicism and we separate ourselves from our work as much as possible, mentally. And then the final piece of, burnout would be a reduced sense of personal accomplishment. And what that is, is that we feel like we're turning our wheels twice as fast and getting half as much done, or we feel like we're putting in the effort, but not getting the reward and maybe that means the compensation, dollars and cents compensation, or maybe it just means the recognition or the positive feelings or whatever it is we're putting X in and we expect to get Y out and there's an imbalance there, which is either real or just perceived, but either way it will take you to the brink of burnout.

Adam (03:48):

So as you described all of those three things, I know that I've been there, I'm sure you've been there, I'm sure many of our listeners have been there. What can business leaders do to prevent that burnout?

David (04:01):

Yeah. Another great question. So, right. We've all sort of been there, especially over the past year and a half. You know, who hasn't felt extremely cynical, who hasn't felt emotionally exhausted as they're trying to learn to do their job, in a new reality and, you know, within accounting, a lot of your work could be done virtually and a lot of you may have been already working primarily virtually, but even those individuals didn't necessarily have their children at home trying to homeschool their kids, you know, at the same time, that's incredibly difficult. There are, there were incredible barriers that we made work harder. And, so there's a lot that can be done from a leadership perspective, as well as the individual's perspective. But the biggest thing that I would say from the very beginning is we need to reconnect with what it is that we do, right? Like, we need to reconnect with our proverbial why, like what is our firm all about, what is our business all about? We need to be able to reconnect with that because that's what we've gotten away from. We get so lost in the weeds and so overwhelmed and distracted that we lose sight of maybe it's the client interactions, maybe it's the mission of the organization, maybe it's a difference that we're making and suddenly instead of all of those things, it's just spreadsheets on the computer and it becomes very easy to lose sight of those other things and so we need to take away the noise and create the sense of why again, and we need to be able to do it in a way that, brings people, brings people back mentally and also gives them a sense of control in their lives again. Work during the pandemic, could have been part of the problem, or it could have been an escape from the problem, depending on how much control employees felt when they went to work or virtually signed into work. If they felt in control of their work, then when their entire lives felt out of control work was the haven where they were still in control. But if that wasn't the case, then work was just part of the problem.

Adam (06:37):

So let's dig into that, finding your why a little bit more, you know, sometimes people have very mundane jobs, when you're first starting out in accounting, you know, sometimes you just, you know, kind of crunching numbers. How are people supposed to find meaning in that work and connect with that why, if they're so far down?

David (06:55):

Yeah, it's really interesting. So my first job, my first real job was, I was a kennel worker. I wanted to be a veterinarian and, turned out that, to be a bio major pre-veterinary you needed chemistry and physics. So I'm like, nope. And ironically, I switched to the business college and the very first class I took, I'm like yes, I'm getting away from all the math and the very first class I took was accounting I. So you gotta be kidding me, but suddenly when you took moles off the end of a number and you put a dollar sign in front of it made a lot more sense to me. But yeah, so my very first job was working in these kennels and I was pre-veterinary, I wanted to be a vet and I remember one day as a young man, I was literally pooper scooping, like picking up poop from the floor of a kennel. And I was doing this, I was working on alongside a coworker and I remember looking over and seeing her face and realizing that the two of us were doing completely different jobs, the same exact tasks, but completely different things. She was picking up poop. I was, I was creating a cleaner and safer environment for these sick animals. You know, I was caring for animals while she was cleaning up poop, you know, and it was just in the mindset. It was in how we saw our jobs and when you're in accounting or any profession, you have a choice in how you see the actual why of what you do, how much you connect with that. And we typically find careers where we have some sort of role model that we look to somebody that we see that we're like, yeah that's what I want from my career. And there's usually not that much of a separation between our career and life outside of our career. We look for significance in our lives, we look for significance in our career, and that might mean something different to each of us. Maybe want to make a difference with the organizational mission. Maybe you want to be able to, you know, afford to travel around the world and work from wherever, whatever it is, you're lookin...

Contact James Burton: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jcburton/

Personal Capital: https://www.personalcapital.com/

Advisory services are offered for a fee by Personal Capital Advisors Corporation (“PCAC”), a registered investment adviser with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Registration does not imply a certain level of skill or training. Investing involves risk. Past performance is not indicative of future returns. You may lose money. PCAC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Personal Capital Corporation (“PCC”), an Empower company. PCC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Empower Holdings, LLC. © 2021 Personal Capital Corporation.

Personal Capital SRI portfolios are powered by Sustainalytics.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam (00:00):

Welcome back to Count Me In. IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Adam Larson, and I'm here to bring you episode 135 of our series with featured guest, James Burton. In the wealth management space, a few can claim to have accomplished more than James, a 20 year veteran of the industry, he has held executive, management, and C-level positions at some of the most respected financial institutions in the world. He now serves as Chief Growth Officer at fintech trailblazer, Personal Finance, and joins Count Me In to talk about how to turn a crisis into opportunity. Keep listening as we head over to the conversation now.

Mitch (00:50):

So James, obviously the global pandemic of 2020 caused a crisis for many businesses. A lot of our listeners felt this impact. For you personally, I'd like to start off our conversation by just having you explain, how did you help clients and organizations navigate through these difficult times, particularly in the beginning?

James (01:09):

Yeah thanks, Mitchell. You know, something like a pandemic and the initial market slump that it caused, that really, that really makes you reconsider everything, right? All your assumptions about your business model, your strategy, your growth opportunities, trying to see into the future. And naturally many of our clients went through very similar reflections about their goals and their financial situations, and they had a lot of questions about the future too. And the demand for advice, financial advice and expert support definitely increased. And in this case, it turned out that our company, Personal Capital, we were highly prepared for the crisis because we already had a hybrid digital and human model advisory model is technology enabled to operate remotely. So in a very general sense, we just stuck to our knitting. That's a British term, I think, meaning, we stayed on strategy and we continued interacting with our clients and supporting them through their financial concerns during the pandemic, particularly in those early, very stressful months. But we also made a very crucial pivot to getting everyone to remote working, from home literally overnight. And we could do that because of how the company was designed and built. So, you know, the result was that despite the initial market slump that we went through, we actually saw strong growth last year. People want advice. They want to holistic advice and they mostly don't want to travel to a brick and mortar building or office with wood panels, you know, nice little offices. They certainly didn't want to travel during a pandemic, right. And now, you know, a year later they know that in fact they don't need to go any further than their kitchen or the home office, to work with us. So we were able to help them, right away and we were able to help them remotely, which was great.

Mitch (03:14):

And now, you know, kind of building on this conversation a little bit, in leading up to our recording today, I was told that you follow a quote from Winston Churchill. It's a bit of a mantra and if I can just read the quote, "never let a good crisis go to waste". So, to help explain for our listeners here, why, what does that mean to you? How, do you go about using that as a mantra?

James (03:37):

Yeah, so Winston Churchill, he certainly produced a lot of great motivational quotes and I do particularly like that one, "never let a good crisis go to waste". I find myself using it a lot actually. And, you know, a good crisis, is very often a great opportunity. And that's because it's when you're forced to reconsider everything, you know, all your assumptions, your business model, your strategy, your opportunities, even your very survival sometimes. A really good crisis puts all of that in the picture. And as a result, it's often when meaningful change is initiated and it's when we move forward from the past, you know, to the future way of thinking. And in the case of our company, as I mentioned, we found that as it happened, we designed and prepared very well for the lockdown and we could commit to this virtual first approach. And as a result, we've proved beyond doubt that virtual financial advice works very well. If you have the right technology and business model and it's here to stay. So a great crisis here, which it really was, and in many ways still is, you know, helped us prove that and move into a future where, you know, advice can look very different for Americans.

Mitch (04:55):

And now we are, you know, roughly 16, 17 months through this, you know, it's been a year and a half and, you mentioned going into the future a little bit more, not every bad thing that happens is a crisis necessarily for business, right? We don't always face something like the COVID-19 pandemic. How can this mantra, this quote still apply on a daily basis, you know, once we kind of returned to normal or the new normal, however you want to refer to it. Can you give us some examples and some response options for the daily ups and downs of business and responding this way?

James (05:31):

Sure, sure Mitchell, and look, you know, certainly these have been some strange and scary times in the past year. But you know, it's exciting to look into the future and see things improving. I'm definitely happy to share some examples, but, you know, as I've thought about this, as you point out, you know, real crises and real opportunities, they're not exactly daily events, you know, thank goodness. They tend to come along just when you think everything's going great in your business, like maybe early 2020 for example. So every few years you may get a really good crisis, you know, something really challenging or bad happens in the environment or, you know, in your business. I've got some examples of how to put, you know, a good crisis to work, but I have to mention that they're not really day to day examples, they're how to really harness the big situations. So if you'll indulge me, I'll happily proceed, but, you know, I generally wouldn't use an expression like, "never let a good crisis go to waste", in the day-to-day environments, right. That's just doing our jobs. So I'm happy to proceed with, you know, let's just say longer term, bigger picture examples. I'll go for it.

Mitch (06:48):

Absolutely. Yes, please do.

James (06:50):

That's great. So, first of all, I could go back in the time machine, maybe about 20 years. And, at the time I was working for a well-known stock broker based here in San Francisco, and the company had experienced huge growth in the late 1990s. And then along came the crisis, the tech bubble burst in 2000. For anybody who was active in the markets at that time...

Contact Karri Callahan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karri-callahan-5219676a/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch (00:00):

Hey everyone. Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch Roshong and this is episode 134 of our series. In today's conversation, you will hear from Karri Callahan, CFO of global real estate company, Remax. Karri spoke with my co-host Adam about the role of the CFO and shared some tips for finance leaders. From strategy and technology to diversity, equity and inclusion, Karri has great perspective on many topics business leaders should be aware of. So to hear more, keep listening as we head over to their conversation now.

Adam (00:47):

So Karri, thanks so much for joining us and as you know, the role of the CFO is become very multifaceted and how can aspiring finance leaders better prepare themselves for providing a strategy and insight?

Karri (01:00):

Great, thanks so much for having me Adam, I appreciate it. And I think there's a couple of things to consider. First and foremost, I think it's important that you always keep learning, making sure that you continue to build your network, connect with peers and think about joining the right organization for you so that you can hear from different speakers and industry leaders on a regular basis, I think is really helpful. Some organizations that you can consider and that I've found helpful include Financial Executives International or FEI, and also the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, so the AICPA. Since I've been the CFO of a publicly traded company for the last five years or so, I've also found, NIRI or the National Investor Relations Institute, a great resource, they offer some fantastic certification courses and trainings and have just a tremendous library of events and programs that they offer. So I think that's also another resource for you. And then of course, last but not least, IMA definitely I know you all have a lot of resources to help professionals. I think the last thing I would say is just read things that are of interest to you, so that you can stay current either on recent economic trends, trends that might be impacting your business or your industry, or just business leadership in general. But I think some of the best advice I've gotten is that it's important and critical to really be intentional about how you spend your time. Your time is truly invaluable and making sure that you get the most out of every minute is critical, but if you keep really absorbing information, learning from others, the better prepared you're going to be as life and your profession throw you curve balls.

Adam (02:53):

Yeah, definitely. So, you know, speaking of time, we know that time, technology takes a lot of our time and technology has changed how finance and accounting operate with how, many routine tasks or many, many routine tasks are now automated, freeing up professionals to focus on higher level tasks. How well acquainted should today's accounting and finance professionals be with technology like intelligent automation or RPA?

Karri (03:21):

Yeah. So it's a great question. Remax LLC, president Nick Bailey, who I work closely with, he oftentimes tells our agents that if you know that technology won't put real estate agents out of business, but agents who don't embrace technology will put themselves out of business. And I think that advice is applicable to so many other professions, including mine and accounting and finance. And so I think as you think about technology and as all professionals really think about technology, it's important that we're always learning and evaluating and studying new trends from a technology perspective, that makes sense for your company and the finance and accounting operations within your organization. Our teams are constantly evaluating how to incorporate new technologies and software into our routine accounting and finance processes and the reason why that's so critical is because it frees up our team's time to really help analyze trends within the business, evaluate business opportunities and really work strategically with other leaders within our organization so that we're contributing to strategic growth initiatives. And so technology is a key point to that, you know, as part of that transformation within our business, our company now has more in-house technology expertise and firepower than we ever have. We have now about 50% of our workforce that's directly involved in technology and we've recently announced an organizational change to really create one technology team comprised of all of those professionals so that we can really maximize collaboration, focus on our customer and end user experience and operate with purpose, passion, and excellence from a technology perspective. And I think what that does over time is, you know, we expect it really will benefit the entire corporate team, including everyone from an accounting and finance perspective, as well as other services function by really enhancing the delivery and supportive technology and data to all areas of the business so that we can continue to drive the business forward.

Adam (05:28):

Definitely. It sounds like Remax is doing some wonderful things to, be a leader in the industry. So what do you do to stay ahead on the technology curve?

Karri (05:39):

Yeah, great question. So I think, you know, fortunately the piece of change in the real estate industry, it's incredibly exciting and incredibly dynamic and because of that, our leadership team has really a front row seat to the latest technologies as we implement our MNA strategies as well as just continue to focus on our organic growth as well. For example, you know, despite a global pandemic in September of last year, we announced the acquisitions of Gadberry Group and Weenlow. Gaderry Group specializes in building best in class products that help clients solve geospatial challenges through accurate and precise location data. Weenlow is a Florida based startup that is reshaping the mortgage loan processing, process within the mortgage brokerage channel and they have developed the first service cloud for mortgage brokers effectively combining third-party loan processing with an all-in-one digital platform. And so those are just two really exciting opportunities that we have been able to execute upon as we really look to stay ahead of that technology curve. You know, we're always assessing the latest technologies and innovative companies with in, in the space and in our business pursuits because we are the worldwide leader and we want to make sure that Remax, stays in that position from a real estate technology perspective is clear. That mission is hugely beneficial to my knowledge of what's currently out there and what the space is, is truly lacking. It sounds simple, but another way to stay ahead of the curve is really by surrounding myself with a healthy mix of like-minded individuals and people who really stretched me beyond my own constraints. We have a fantastic network of about 140,000 real estate agents, more than 600 headquarter employees, and we operate in over 110 countries and territories globally and I'm so fortunate to be able to work with and network alongside people who have very similar core values and yet challenge each other to continuously improve and innovate. And I think that collaboration really transcends across our headquarters organization because I think staying connected with leaders on the technology side is really important. I have a standing weekl...

Contact Hilla Sferruzza: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hilla-sferruzza-cpa-mba-b3170b8/

Meritage Homes: https://www.meritagehomes.com/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam (00:05):

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Count Me In. IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. Adam Larson here with you again, and I'm pleased to introduce today's featured guest speaker Hilla Sferruzza. Hilla is the CFO of Meritage Homes and spoke with my co-host Mitch about the role of today's CFOs. In their conversation, she explains why future ready executives must have a holistic view of the business and possess four lines of sight. Keep listening to hear more about finance, strategy, technology, and more.

Mitch (00:42):

So in today's episode, we are talking about the role of the CFO becoming more central, more complex. Let's start broadly, and then we'll kind of work our way into some more specifics. So first, what is it about today's business world and the way organizations are run that requires the CFO to have a more holistic view and a better understanding of the business.

Hilla (01:05):

So, thanks for having me on Mitch. In today's world everything is moving at an accelerated pace. So change digitalization, everything is causing technology to just move really fast. So the risk of taking a wrong turn can be really expensive. So I think the CFOs have to take a step back and kind of look at the entire landscape of a company and really understand all of the interconnectivity of what we're doing as a company, as an organization, and make sure that decisions that are being made really impact the organization appropriately. So whether we're looking at it through the financial lens or risk assessment lens, a technology lens, an investor stakeholder lens, you know, more recently ESG and DI lens. It's really important that we understand the implications of everything that's happening. We're much less siloed than we used to be. I think we were kind of along this path anyway, and then maybe the pandemic and working from home accelerated that where decisions are being made real time very, very quickly. I would say in the public sector, where I am the CFO, it's maybe even more accelerated and CFO is having to answer live, you know, kind of on the go conversations, whether it's from investors or from analysts, you really have to have that broad knowledge of what's happening in the market, as well as all your competitors. So you kind of are a co-leader of all this data and you have to bring it back internally and make sure the guidance that you're providing the rest of the executive team and the initiatives and strategy that you're driving as a CFO really encompass the entire company's organization and operations, not just, you know, what are we looking for on the bottom line? What's the EPS going to be, of this decision, the consequences of this decision.

Mitch (03:00):

Now, with this deeper understanding, this broader understanding as well that you just mentioned of the business, how are you better able to lead the strategic planning, the risk mitigation processes for the organization? We have a lot of these individual conversations about, you know, the role of the CFO, but what is it about the CFO of the finance team that really allows them to work cross-functionally and ultimately make these important strategic business decisions?

Hilla (03:26):

So I love to say that the finance team is agnostic, right? Our only goal is the success of the company as a whole. Every other functional area, maybe has a little bit of a different spin. Maybe it's conscious, maybe it's subconscious, but they're all driving to a different objective. Maybe if you're in sales, you're focused on a different metric and if you're in operations or in purchasing or in marketing, everyone's got a little bit of a different spin on what they think is most important to make the company successful. I think finance is agnostic, right? So we can maybe take a step back, see the entire picture, not get lost in the forest or the trees and then give counsel that is best for the organization. So I can share an example. So I work for a home builder. We always have a little bit of a push and pull on timing and on dollars. We break our teams between the folks that do what we call horizontal work, which is land and vertical work, which is the actual construction of the building. There's always a little bit of a tug of war between those two departments. The finance team can take a step back and say, well what's actually most beneficial for the organization is to take this approach. Sometimes it breaks or it's one department, other times it breaks towards another department, but maybe, you know, I keep on saying agnostic, maybe a different word is also arbiter, right? We're kind of the one that maybe can help negotiate between all the different departments and through dollars and cents explain why certain decisions are the best decisions for the organization as a whole, even though there may be not an ideal state from one department versus another.

Mitch (05:06):

I think that's a great way to put it, the arbiter at the end that you mentioned, it really is, you know, just the understanding that we're talking about here from both sides of the equation and making sure that things balance, you know, when it comes to accounting, making sure that everything makes sense and works out. The way you explained it right there, the push and pull really helps clarify things, so thank you for that story and that analogy. I think, another interesting part of your role as we talk about these different decisions and different teams working together, obviously you have oversight over the finance team as CFO, strategy, operations, all the regular things that the CFO has a responsibility for, but you I understand also have oversight over IT. So what are some of the advantages of having IT under your umbrella when it comes to these cross-functional teams, cross-functional conversations and things like that?

Hilla (06:00):

So, obviously I'm a CFO. My first love was always numbers, but I will say that my current passion maybe almost bordering on obsession is the IT function. So I kind of inherited the IT function as I think a lot of CFOs do because the underlying system of record, the accounting system is kind of my general umbrella. And IT is a role that I guess it could sit with the CEO, the COO, or the CFO in a regular organization, but they're a little bit of a, you know, they kind of get tossed around. Nobody really wants to own it. It's a little bit intimidating to have a function roll up to you that's maybe not your core level of expertise. So when the IT team became part of my CFO team, I was nervous and excited. It's been a long time since I kind of didn't know something from soup to nuts, but I really dove in and the more I dove into the IT function, the more I realized that IT was going through a metamorphosis, right. They had kind of been the back office, keep the lights on part of the organization. Nobody even knew where they sat and call them if your password didn't work. And then they've really morphed into a key contributor and everything operations. Sure we still help you with your password, right. But the real core of what we do is operational efficiency, operational excellence, and, giving us that edge, that next differentiator. So for me as a CFO, this is the lens into the business. This is the lens into ops, all of the projects, all of the requests, whether it's a wholesale change ...

Contact James Stark: https://www.linkedin.com/in/james-stark-312a2/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam (00:00):

Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host, Adam Larson and today I will be previewing a conversation between my co-host Rouba and her special guest, James Stark. In this episode, James shares his insight and views on the challenging global landscape and the must have skills for CFOs. He is active in Egon Zehnder's financial officer's industrial board practices and is well-versed in the financial leaders need to evolve and optimize their careers and their organizations. Keep listening to hear more from James and Rouba now.

Rouba (00:42):

So I want to ask you a little bit about your career in the finance and accounting industry for so many years, I mean, throughout your career you've facilitated a lot of peer to peer learning within the finance and accounting profession itself, and you're a huge advocate for creating lasting value. Can you tell us a little bit more about what it means to drive that kind of level of value in today's very volatile globalized marketplace?

James (01:13):

Yeah, of course. So look, I tie this to the rise of the strategic CFO, which is something that's been written about quite a bit over the last decade or so. What that means, I think in practice is that CFO, senior finance leaders are becoming much more forward looking to help drive business decisions and not just kind of the backward looking scorekeeper that they might've been 20, 30 plus years ago. I think elements of that would also include scenario analysis and how you translate corporate strategy down to business unit or functional or even product strategy. So there's much more of a focus on commercial outcomes and driving the business forward. I also think finance leaders are really well equipped to help drive this value, given their position in the organization. Especially if they can broaden their skills beyond just kind of whatever that core part of finances they kind of came in or came up through. So, you know, rotations can help with that as you think about moving around between controllership to FP&A or treasury or investor relations or strategy and corporate development, et cetera. I've had CFOs tell me over the last, maybe five plus years that, you know, technical skills now are really just more like table stakes and what truly differentiates finance talent and helping to drive value creation, is having greater impact via, you know, better strategic thinking, being both deeply analytical, but also pairing that with a willingness to embrace new technologies and then also strong leadership and interpersonal skills can really help motivate and organize and energize the broader organization and I think specifically to that peer to peer learning piece, and I think part of that is also, you know, if you're a lifelong learner, you're going to be kind of more adaptable and you're constantly being incorporating best practices that you learn from others outside your organization, or even outside your industry.

Rouba (02:56):

Yeah, I'm all for the life learning approach, that's really a big value, at IMA. So when you look at, when your focus in recent years has been a lot on innovation and organic growth, but let's look into this new era, this new normal that we're in, the COVID-19 pandemic pre, during, and post, and as organizations are crumbling, some are succeeding, some have completely remodeled their entire business model and they're struggling to survive. What role does innovation play, I mean, and organic growth play at this time, if at all?

James (03:35):

Yeah, great question. It's certainly very timely, right. So I've been talking to senior finance leaders for almost two decades now and when I asked them about their top priorities, innovation and organic growth is always at, or near the top. And that's both for the company, but also even within the finance function, right? How can you improve your operations and processes within finance? So I think there's always a role for innovation, but it's important as well of course, ebb and flow, depending on what's happening both within the company, as well as the broader macro conditions. You know, in times of crisis it's well-known that R&D spending is typically one of the first line items that gets cut or at least drastically reduced, right. Cash is king and so, yeah, totally get that, that's going to happen in a downturn. But you know, but once that storm is weathered and you start seeing a return to normalcy, I think then it becomes time to quickly pivot and identify new opportunities for growth again. And I think the earlier you can make the pivot, you know, the better the odds that you can beat your competition at it. I'd also, you know, even use Egon Zehnder as an example in terms of what we did during the pandemic. You know, as the pandemic was ramping up, we didn't lay off anyone globally. You know, it was, we did stop, we did stop hiring, but we didn't lay anyone off and, you know, given our values, we didn't think layoffs were the right thing to do at the time, but also strategically, we didn't think layoffs made sense, and I think, you know, some of our competitors actually did lay off staff and, you know, as a result now that we're seeing this strong rebound in some markets, we feel like we're in a great position.

Rouba (05:02):

Yeah I don't think many anticipated the pent up demand and how it's going to see them scramble to get their business back to normal. So if we look at automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, they've already begun taking serious inroads into the professional realm and not just in the finance and accounting sector, but every single industry. So digital transformation is now the conversation at every boardroom, every discussion and it was extremely accelerated by COVID. I mean, whatever was in the works a few months ago just became a priority all of a sudden. So when you think of this post pandemic, new normal per se, what are the skills that the finance and accounting professionals are going to require in order to maneuver with this new normal?

James (05:49):

Yeah, you know, I think some of these kind of core skills will get amplified given what we've seen over the last 16 months or so, right. And so that's around adaptability, resilience in being able to lead through ambiguity. I think we'll see likely an acceleration of some of these pre COVID trends as we move to the new normal. I think many have already, as you said, many have already been focusing on advanced analytics, bots, robotic process automation to improve performance within the finance function. As we, move to the post pandemic normal, I think those areas are going to remain robust. I'd also expect to see many people turning to artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced data visualization technologies, and of course, digitalization to do things better, smarter and faster and who knows at some point maybe blockchain may eventually even live up to it's hype.

Rouba (06:38):

Hopefully. I mean, it's the biggest conversation right now, blockchain and cryptocurrency taking over the world. So we've seen companies around the world undergo major digital transformation efforts in the region. Some of the most notable are, Emirates NBD. I mean, these guys spent 1 billion dirhams, on, their own transformation. You're talking about roughly a quarter of million dollars, and just to enhance their performance, Coca-Cola says that they were able t...

Contact Marco Otti: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marco-otti/

Budgeting Revisited: https://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/may-2021-budgeting-revisited/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch Roshong and this is episode 131 of our series. For today's conversation my co-host Adam spoke with Marco Otti about possible solutions in different approaches to budgeting. Marco is a group controller who acts as a finance business partner to support the decision-making of Autoneum, the global market leader in acoustics and thermal management. In their conversation, Marco discusses some of the common issues with traditional budgeting and explains why CFOs need to rethink how they plan and execute their budgets. Keep listening as we head over to their conversation now.

Adam: (00:50)
So let's start by talking about some of the issues with traditional and better budgeting. Why change?

Marco: (00:56)
Yes, why is innovation in budgeting needed, right? I mean, as a group controller, I contribute to our company's annual budgeting, monthly forecasting and three-year financial planning process, and I often ask myself, how can we as management accountants do a better job at budgeting, right? Kind of process be simpler or different. I'm sure most listeners have been involved with the budgeting process in one way or another. Maybe ask yourself as well, what do you consider the most significant barrier to improving or changing your budgeting process? There can be many barriers of course, for example, organizational attitudes towards budgeting, time, cost, inflexible IT systems, or the process being controlled by another group/department, or maybe you think there are no barriers at all, then that's great. One thing to remember is that traditional budgeting is still used in the maturity of companies. At the same time, many of these organizations identify agility as their strategy, which is quite surprising because traditional budgeting is too rigid to support agility well. And if you read Kaplan and Norton, they say that the ineffectiveness of many budgets also comes from the fact that almost 60% of organizations don't link budgets to their strategy and only 25% of managers have incentives linked to the company's strategy. Most of us are aware of the limitations of traditional budgeting. So it can be a very time-consuming exercise with limited value, as assumptions are quickly outdated. Also decisions are often made too early and other to senior level. And based on my own experience, having been involved in a budgeting process, the issue with traditional budgeting is really the amount of work compared to the benefit. I mean, having annual and detailed discussions with cost centers can be quite time-consuming and usually the complaints come from us, the finance function, finance organization who manage and execute this process. So depending on how lean and improved your process is, it can be an efficient exercise as well. With better budgeting you can substantially reduce the planning effort, for example, with less meetings, less reporting requirements, more top-down guidance, shorten the process to maybe one or two months every year. However, process improvements are still a continuation of the traditional budgeting approach and does not bring fundamental changes of instruments.

Adam: (03:30)
So then what are the essential functions of budgets and what are they used for?

Marco: (03:34)
That's a good question because, the functions and what budgets are used for, are quite relevant and important, like translating your company strategy into targets, which refers again to the strategy execution, Kaplan and Norton are talking about. Budgets are, if you will, the tactical implementation of the strategy, they are about resource allocation, which again, starts with developing and validating the company strategy. Therefore, I would say you cannot just remove the budget with its functions and manage your costs and business because planning is still important to coordinate activities, in your own organization. As an example, let me share some of the different functions the budget has at my company, Autoneum. We use the budget for setting absolute targets for the year and to support the performance management throughout the year, for example, every month. So the budget really serves as a reference point for performance and based on many assumptions, it gives a prediction of the next year and how we plan to control costs. Also it is used for resource allocation and managing continuous improvement initiatives. In any organization, traditional and better budgeting is really a mix and let's say a compromise of some of these and other functions.

Adam: (04:57)
Okay, then, so in the context of traditional budgeting and VUCA environments, how did your company respond to the crisis last year?

Marco: (05:04)
Yes, I mentioned agility before, of course, in a VUCA environment, like in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, traditional budgets were not very useful to compare performance against because they were basically irrelevant by the end of the first quarter. So how did we respond? On the top line we planned for different scenarios and updated them weekly. In terms of costs, we used the most recent rolling forecasts, which are updated monthly. And in discussions with the business unit locally agreed on how to best cut costs. In some cases we instructed some top-down adjustments, based on the revenue levels. So for a time really stopped focusing on a budget, right, and shifted the attention to the monthly forecast and came up with intermediate targets based on the circumstances. This is also something to think about when you put yourself in the shoes of the decision makers. What did you or your company do to respond and manage costs during the pandemic? Did you empower your local teams because they know best how to manage costs. Or on the other hand, did you centralize decisions as much as possible because in a crisis there is a need for strong leadership, right? Actually, I mean, this spectrum of self-control versus command and control is relevant when thinking about new budgeting approaches. You can manage costs with detailed annual cost budgets or increase autonomy and flexibility by using absolute or relative KPIs, or even no targets at all. Of course, this then needs strong company values and a clear direction.

Adam: (06:45)
What are the possible solutions for more business agility and changing to different budgeting approaches like beyond budgeting?

Marco: (06:52)
Actually this question, was the reason why the president of the IMA Switzerland chapter, Hessel Brouwer and myself, reached out to CFOs and academics in Switzerland to learn from their experiences of moving to more modern and agile budgeting techniques and then also publish an article in strategic finance. One of the main ideas of the beyond budgeting theory is to separate the budget functions as outlined before. The key budget functions, are target setting, forecasting, and resource allocation. So instead of having one compromised number for all these functions, you would in a first step separate targets from forecasts and from resource allocation. With that, you would have three different numbers serving different purposes. A key tool is forecasting or rolling forecast, which supports the ongoing planning and forecasts are used for the purpose of better decision-making and not as a target or application for resources. Forecast should reflect the best estimates with as little details as possible and be again, decoupled from targe...

Contact Keith Terreri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keith-terreri-595b4bb/

NEC Corporation of America: 

• https://www.linkedin.com/company/nec-corporation-of-america 
• https://www.twitter.com/nec 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome to episode 130 of Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host, Adam Larson and today I'm pleased to introduce our featured guest speaker, Keith Terreri. Keith is the Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President of corporate operations, and IT for NEC Corporation of America. In his double role of CFO and CIO, he has developed a wealth of skill and knowledge necessary for effectively overseeing and managing accounting, FP&A, supply chain management, corporate operations and IT. In this episode, Keith describes the convergence of these two pivotal roles and explains the value each team brings to the business regardless of the organizational size. Let's head over the conversation to learn more.

Mitch: (00:57)
So our listeners are well aware of the changing role of the CFO. It's something we talk about all the time, you know, the need for a strategic foresight decision-making business partnering is something that's very popular. A lot of this is due to the evolution of technology, but you have a unique role. You have a double role of CFO and CIO at NEC. So what does this convergence of the two roles really look like to you on a daily basis?

Keith: (01:22)
Thanks, Mitchell. That's actually a great question because it's certainly different than when I was just CFO. The convergence of these two roles, it's actually been a very eyeopening experience to say the least. So the convergence has come with some great synergies, and also a significant amount of risk management. From a synergy perspective, obviously our back-office functions of OTC, which is order to cash, PTP, which is procure to pay and record to report, or RTR have been greatly enhanced, right? So finance corporate operations, and IT are all one team now and communicating regularly. The interaction in visibility for both groups has been fantastic as one team and under this scenario, we work on a daily basis to make sure not only our ERP is running smoothly, but also our network and data is secure. For a risk management perspective, obviously cybersecurity has become a major part of all IT team's responsibilities over the last several years and now it's a part of daily operations for companies. However, in this dual role it's been becoming increasingly clear to me that cyber security is everybody's responsibility, not just the IT department. As everybody knows, ransomware attacks are very prevalent right now making cybersecurity the utmost importance on a daily basis. So we constantly monitor our network for security purposes and many companies are moving towards a zero trust approach from a cyber security information perspective and so that is also part of our daily discussion. Customers are also getting much more stringent, you know, on their contract requirements, requiring information security clauses in the contracts with us, so that we have to be very cognizant of that as well. So now we are very involved as we continue to make contracts with our customers. So, I mean, all in all it makes for quite a different daily routine than just finance.

Mitch: (03:32)
Well, as far as finance goes, you know, I know much of your career prior to this role, prior to taking on CIO also was specifically in the finance function. So talk a little bit about how those experiences and those skills helped you prepare for the responsibilities you just discussed and what you've taken on involving IT.

Keith: (03:51)
That's another great question, Mitchell, thanks. I mean, primarily, it was really my training in risk management that has helped me the most. Always concerning myself with the downside of either operational or finance issues has been very helpful throughout my career and now with that, the added responsibility for IT, thinking about the downside, or any type of issues from an IT perspective, has really been a good mix for me. Also having had experience in cyber liability insurance probably since it started, or when it was first offered, I've almost kind of grown up with that. So as a CFO, financial risk management is very important and frankly cyber risk has become, definitely become a financial risk to everybody these days based on all of the cyber activity that's out there in the world. I mean don't forget, I mean risk management is not only for services you provide to your customers, but also for your own network and your data. So you've got two things you have to look at from a risk management perspective and we do this frankly, on a regular basis. So when you think about all the, you know, traditional finance experience, most of the times the CFOs are responsible for risk management insurance. I think that the cyber liability insurance, which is changing rapidly as we've seen in the last month or so is very important for both the CFO and the IT guys to understand completely. I particularly, if you have a chief information security officer, that employee needs to be very familiar with how the policy works, if you should ever have a claim.

Mitch: (05:34)
Now, oftentimes because of the risk management perspective, you were just talking about how that falls on the CFO's shoulders. They're usually responsible for forging a relationship with the CIO because of the cyber security, cyber liability, things like that and the joint relationship is responsible for handing the priorities of finance and IT individually. We spoke a little bit your role prior to this call and, you know, you serve both. So how do you really communicate the needs and further support the relationships of two different teams as one person?

Keith: (06:08)
So this was definitely something I wanted to focus on when I took over IT three years ago. And I really think, you know, as a CFO and being able to look holistically at the financial statements and also preparing our annual budgets and forecasts, it becomes slightly easier to allocate resources for cybersecurity and for IT initiatives. There's no longer in my mind, right? In the way we have things set up a competition for funds or resources between finance corporate operations and IT. So it really makes for a more collaborative approach on resources so that when we prepare our annual budgets, we go together as a team and we've already kind of vetted out, you know, the priority of funds and funding for resources. The entire team discusses and ranks the needs so that we're all in sync. You know, one of those slogans I adopted early on with the finance team was “we're all IT now”, and that has really helped kind of change the mentality and increase the collaboration between the two groups. I mean, under this type of scenario, there's no longer any finger pointing and everybody accepts accountability. You know, in a traditional scenario where you have the two teams separated, in a traditional scenario, there separation of these two teams can create friction, which is not necessary in today's ultra fast paced business world. The entire leadership team of finance and IT, and corporate operations meets once or twice a week. They think that's an update from my perspective, but really it's for them to interact and update each other so that we're all on the same page and so no one person can say, “I didn't know IT was doing this”, or “I wasn't aware of finance wanted to do that”. And this communication has brought foresight and respect,...

Contact Denise Dettingmeijer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisedettingmeijer/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:00)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host, Adam Larson, and I'm here to kick off our conversation for episode 129 of our series. Today you will hear from Denise Dettingmeijer, Chief Financial Officer of Randstad North America. Denise is a dedicated financial leader who is passionate about bringing more women into the field. While she talks with Mitch, she explains what needs to be done and how it can be measured to ensure women are integral part of the future of finance. Let's head over to hear her perspective on the topic now.

Mitch: (00:44)
Thank you Denise, for joining us. Our conversation today is about bringing more women into the field of finance. I know you said this is something you're passionate about. So to begin, can you please share with our listeners kind of your perspective on the current environment, the gender gap in the industry, and really what interests you about this topic?

Denise: (01:02)
Yeah, I absolutely can, and thank you for having me here today. You know, starting with the current environment, we can't not speak about the pandemic, so hope everybody's safe and sound. What that has taught us as an industry, as finance professionals that flexibility, the speed, the creativity, just, you know, crisis management was always one of our skill-sets, but nothing at this level before. And putting that into an environment like a pandemic from a past where those skills were always extraordinary for us, I think just exploded, you know, what we can do for the company. When you lay that over onto the gender gap, there is definitely a gender gap as a result of COVID as well in the industry, not just in the industry, in the world with working women. So focusing down on the finance thing, the one word I have is women are definitely underrepresented in the finance worlds. Statistically there's 38% of finance majors are female and 18% of CFOs are female. Those are for fortune 500 companies., it gets lower when you include all companies, 12%. So when you start out at 38, we could argue that's too low and what can we do about the education and having people that look like me and others, you know, getting involved in the finance stream of universities then accountants and other professionals, but regardless, even at the 38%, if we could get to 38%, that would be quite an accomplishment. We're hovering much, much lower than that. So no matter how you do the math, truthfully, we're underrepresented in an industry and in a function that actually suits traditional female traits and so many career pathing for so many people.

Mitch: (02:45)
Now you are at the forefront of the industry as CFO and through your experience as a finance leader, you talked a little bit about the numbers, but what else have you noticed as far as progress? How have you seen the industry really progress with this topic?

Denise: (02:59)
Yeah, so, the industry, as I think that beginning entry level has progressed. So you see a lot of women in finance when you do finance in general. So whether it's accounting, accounts receivable, payroll, FP&A, you know, the whole scope of finance, you see more and more women at the entry level. Truthfully, I haven't personally seen it progress in the upper ranks since I've been working, it's still a unique position. There's not a lot of women when you go to CFO events, when you look at panels, it's just an underrepresented group in this area. So while the industry has progressed toward, more soft skills, being able to connect people, it used to be a really kind of a technical function. It's progressed to understanding bigger pictures and teamwork and traits that perhaps are generally more seen as female traits, the female representation and finance hasn't progressed along with that. I think there's things we can do about it, of course. But until now it's really, it's still unique for me to see another female CFO. And every time we join a meeting, we're still counting. We're like, okay, there's 20 of us, there's three, that's more than 10% great. Right. We're still counting and when we can stop counting, I think we've made a difference.

Mitch: (04:23)
It's very interesting and you know, very, as you just said, minimal change from the target, the goal that you're really looking for. So obviously there's room for improvement. When it comes to, you know, closing this gap, how do you recommend the industry improves? What is, what is still lacking? What needs to be done next?

Denise: (04:42)
Yeah. So, there's hundreds of things. I think for me, the, the big ones are, it's hard to make this change, right? And I know people talk about unconscious bias and you know, you hire people who look like you or who have the same experiences. We've got to crack that and crack it for so many reasons, not just women, but race and all of the other, you know, gender issues or diversity issues that are happening. We no longer have to, you know, 15 years ago we had to put forth the business case of why diversity matters, how come companies perform better with a diverse leadership team. Those, we don't even talk about that anymore. Everybody understands that agrees with it, it's scientific, it's proven. So I think it starts now with the humans and the fact that we can all learn and admit we have unconscious biases, here at Randstad, we switched that and go, you have to have conscious inclusion. So there's a difference between saying, yeah I'm unconsciously biased, I can't help it everybody has it. To I will consciously include, and in this case women and finance, I will consciously include them at the table. If women have trends when they enter a room of more than 10 people with, you know, eight chairs at the table and five along the wall, they'll sit against the wall cause just don't want to take up a chair. Ask them to take a seat at the table, literally. We tend to when asked what we want to do with our careers, we say, well I want to add value and be happy. Men tend to say, I want to be CFO. And so if you can not let women get away with that answer and instead of, you know, ripping off the bandaid, you can say, well, whose job do you want next? What job do you want to do, you know really help us come to the conversation in a way that will be heard because we don't answer questions the same way, we don't communicate the same way, we don't act the same way. So I really think if you change your unconscious bias, become aware of it, but flip it to that conscious inclusion and really make an effort, it'll make a huge difference. The other thing I have to call out is the elephant in the room and it's money. You gotta pay us the same. And right now for me, you can do all those other things, but if it comes down to a life-changing moment, elderly care, child care, a spouse at home, a partner at home, and somebody makes less money than somebody else, generally speaking, the one who makes less money stays home. And unless you start paying women the same, they're going to stay home. So to me, start with the pay, you're not getting a bargain if your women in your department are getting paid less now they will leave. You will have a brain drain, pay them the same and then consciously include in the conversations in the career progression, speak the way we need to be heard and help us speak so you can hear us.

Mitch: (07:34)
You know, I really love that conscious inclusion and we have done a lot as far as unconscious bias and we just released a report on, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion. As you said, all of these, everybody's aware of them at this point, you know, everything going ...

Contact Laura Boyd: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-boyd-2598a853/

Hunter Douglas: https://www.hunterdouglas.com/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:00)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Adam Larson and this episode, “Business Partners Developing Their Soft Skills”, is number 128 of our series. Laura Boyd, Vice President, Corporate Controller at Hunter Douglas joins us to talk about a topic not addressed enough among accounting professionals, the softer skills required in the profession. Everyone assumes accountants are all about the numbers and they are, but without the ability to collaborate across departments, they cannot be true business partners to the organization. Keep listening to hear about the specific soft skills required and how to develop them throughout your career.

Mitch: (00:51)
So our conversation today is going to focus on the soft skills and everyone typically assumes accounting and finance professionals, they're all about the numbers and we know they are but, I think everyone's starting to realize accounting and finance professionals really must possess and further develop these soft skills. So can you kick us off by sharing your perspective on this and let us know why you think that is?

Laura: (01:14)
Sure. Well, I think technical skills are obviously very important in our role as accountants and finance professionals. Our ability to analyze numbers and apply technical financial guidance, whether it's cost accounting or manufacturing accounting, or U.S. GAAP, IFRS otherwise goes a long way to supporting success in our careers. However, too much emphasis or rather not enough emphasis on developing and possessing these softer skills will really limit an individual's ability to properly support their business and develop their career in accounting. When we say softer skills, what we're really talking about is our communication style, leadership skills, team building skills, ability to make decisions, et cetera. Many of these skills are people type skills or interpersonal skills and since nearly every accounting role requires engagement with others in some way, shape or form, these become critical qualities to possess as your career progresses. In addition, people don't always think of accountants as customer service professionals, but in some way we are. Our business partners are our customers. They're on the receiving end of our hopefully quality work and we have an obligation to not only support them, but work well with them. And it takes several soft skills to be able to listen to a business partner and really collaborate with them. All of these things make finance professionals more well-rounded partners for the business, which is what our ultimate goal should be as accounting professionals. Well-rounded partner is an ally for the organization. If I could make an accounting pun, a well-rounded business partner is an asset for the organization. So while the technical side of our life is incredibly important and critical, it's becoming more and more clear that the softer skills are just as important for us and for our business’ success.

Mitch: (03:29)
So you already named a few of them. We talked a little bit about communication and teamwork and things like that. There are many soft skills and they're all important. But when it comes to being a business partner and really taking that step forward as a leader, which of these soft skills do you believe are most important for accounting and finance professionals, and why might that be?

Laura: (03:51)
Well, if you research around there's many resources out there from many folks that are much smarter than I am that'll tell you what's most important and why and what the right order is, et cetera. For me, in my experience, I think the three most important soft skills are interpersonal skills, communication and adaptability. So for interpersonal skills that's kind of a broad category, but it's a very important one. When I say interpersonal skills, I really mean the ability to build and maintain relationships and develop rapport with business partners and colleagues. Having good interpersonal skills is incredibly important when you're building a team, you need to have a strong foundation of trust and accountability for accountants and finance professionals this is invaluable. We should strive to be seen as an authentic partner for the organization and a person on whom people can rely upon and trust. Without that, we're just a bunch of number crunchers. Another important skill I think is communication. I think many people know there's many types of communication. There's verbal, written, and nonverbal like body language, facial expression, et cetera. But I think the one piece of communication that people really miss is listening. When people are listening to others, this is a fairly obvious statement, but you actually hear what people are saying and what they mean. Without strong listening skills, communication is really just a one-way street and probably not very effective. The better finance professionals are at listening, the better we are business partners because we're that much closer to the pulse of the business. And then finally I think adaptability is critical. If we've learned anything from the COVID pandemic, it's that we need to be flexible and adaptable. Now, traditionally accountants are not usually the most flexible people and I can say that because I am one. But, the ability to pivot and react to an ever-changing environment is critical. Our businesses are making fast and drastic and dramatic decisions practically every day. So we have to be able to switch gears and change direction as needed. In addition, I think it's important to be able to handle tasks and responsibilities that are a little outside the norm. By demonstrating a willingness to get involved even if you don't have all the expertise that's required. It's a changing world and I think accountants are a smart group of people who can contribute beyond the numbers if they're willing.

Mitch: (06:57)
You know, we at IMA, we have a leadership academy and we put out all these leadership development courses and we focus a lot on these softer skills. We just did one that focused on listening and listening skills, because it truly is so invaluable to just take a step back and make sure you're paying attention, you're listening and really absorbing the message that's being shared. So I can truly appreciate that and we've seen that become more and more important with our listeners here, obviously, but, with the organization as a whole in our members. With these skills, these skills that you identified as being most important, I guess my next question for you is when are they really most necessary or required? You referenced a lot about being a business partner, demonstrating these skills, at what career stage do you typically recognize somebody or maybe whether they do or they don't possess these softer skills?

Laura: (07:51)
Well in reality, these skills are really necessary from day one of your career. Most people in entry-level accounting roles have the necessary technical skills to do their job as required, or at least they have the requisite education beneath them on which they can build. And in addition, accountants will do continuing education classes or sit for an exam that gives them some credentials that are important down the line. And that is all fine and good and definitely necessary, but the fact of the matter is most accountants don't possess these softer skills right out of the gate and that's unfortunate. As I said earlier, good interpersonal skills are important for accoun...

Contact Carmen Rene: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmen-rene-a063546/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Mitch Roshong, and I'm here to introduce you to our guest speaker of episode 127, Carmen Rene. Carmen is the Vice President of Finance and Corporate Controller at Salt Health. She is a passionate leader who focuses on and emphasizes team management, multidisciplinary work groups, and coaching through obstacles. In this episode, Carmen talks about what it takes to be a leader and build teams around trust. Keep listening as we head over to their conversation now.

Adam: (00:46)
Simon Sinek said, “a team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other”. What does that quote mean to you and how you interact with your team?

Carmen: (00:57)
Sure. This is one of my, certainly one of my favorite philosophers, if you will, on leadership, but certainly one of my favorite quotes by Simon Sinek, because of what it really says to me is just because you are surrounded by a group of people and just because you work with a group of people, you don't necessarily have a shared vision and a common goal and a shared interest in being successful. And so without all of those things, I don't really think that you have a team that is focused on the same thing. And my belief is that, that objective or that dynamic comes when you trust each other. If you have a group of people who you know have your best interests and a common objective in mind, then I believe you have a team and you have an opportunity of being successful.

Adam: (01:53)
So what I'm hearing with that, what you just said is having that common objective, having that common mind, you know, how do you get to that common mind? That seems easier said than done.

Carmen: (02:05)
It's always easier said than done, right? I mean, I think that's a big part of what leadership is about all day long is a constant reminder and communication and check in about what we're looking to accomplish. It's often referred to as the why. What are we looking to get out of what we're accomplishing? What are we looking to accomplish? What are we trying to get and why? And if everybody understands the why, which I believe is a common interest, but, you know, oftentimes I work in accounting, right? It's very easy for people to go, we have to close the books, or because we have month end reporting, or we have investors, we believe we work for a company that we believe in, we're working towards an objective that we believe in, we have a team of people that we care about and we want them to be successful. So our why, is not the journal entry, our why is not finishing the books, the why isn't even for the most part the day to day. The why is where are we going and how do we know when we get there? And then we all understand that what I'm doing today is a step in that journey so that we can achieve, or, you know, land at the destination at some point. I think that's that common interest. And in many cases in business, we don't know what it is, right. If the common interest is I need a job because I need to pay my bills. That's not a common interest, that's Carmen's interest. But if the common interest is to leave mankind better than it was when we got here, because we work for a company that's working on a health solution or a cancer cure, or we're looking to have renewable power so that we can save the planet, right? Then all of a sudden we have a why that means something bigger than the journal entry. But my role in that big why is this team will be successful to ensure that this company has the financing that it needs in order to continue the projects down the path to achieve the objective. And if everybody on your team and keep in mind a team is very often multi-disciplinary, right? It's not just the, in our case, the team of accountants, the team of FP&A analysts, a team of treasury management, right? It's our executive team. It's our supply chain team. It's our friends on the manufacturing side of the house. It's our, everybody who manages the shipping and receiving departments, right. If we all understand the role that we play in that greater objective, then we show up to work, ready to give people the benefit of the doubt, ready to trust that we're all here at the end of the day to accomplish the same thing. Then I think you have a team, not just a group of people that you hang out with all day long.

Adam: (05:17)
You mean that makes a lot of sense. And you don't always work in with people who are doing the same thing you're doing. Many times there's people from multi-disciplinary groups who come together within a group and it seems like the things that you were just describing would work very well for that group, that multi-disciplinary group would have to understand the why in order to work well together. What are some steps you've taken to make sure that these types of groups are successful?

Carmen: (05:47)
You know, I think that the most important thing that you can do is be curious. And what I mean by that is, for example, I just put into place, purchasing policy. Kind of boring, right? But as part of that process, I spent some time with the, Ph.D. scientists who worked in laboratory, and we were having a conversation about how they use pipettes. I’m sorry pipettes and pipette tips in the laboratory. Now, as I mentioned, I'm an accountant, right? I never used a pipette tip in my life, but as members of the supply chain, I've ordered them before. So I was sitting with them for a day, observing them in the laboratory about how they use pipettes and how the process in an experiment is impacted or how the results are impacted by the process and how clean they can keep the sample. So literally every time they would move to a step to a next step, they would change the pipette tip. Now that seemed a little excessive to me for a minute. But then later in that day, or sometime later that week, I was reviewing results of something that had come out of the laboratory, product that we had to scrap, right, we had to throw it away. And I asked the question, well, why are we throwing this stuff away? What happened? They said, well we had some contamination in the processing. And it connected me back to that exercise of watching them prepare samples and changing the pipette tips. So all of a sudden I understand a whole lot better why we need pipette tips, why we need so many of them and where contamination can occur. And I brought that back to the purchasing policy around how do I set up a policy that enables them to have a blanket purchase order, right. A standing order for pipette tips, because they use them all day long, every day, all month. Right? So, because I understand, I have a much better understanding of the why, and this is a very small example, but I have a much better understanding of the why and how these products are used, so I can understand how I need to design a process that accommodates, not just me who happens to hate blanket purchase orders, but I can accommodate my scientists who wants to know that there's just going to be a constant stream of product being delivered to their laboratory so that their experiments aren't in any way altered or impacted. I hope that makes sense as a how you can bring multi-disciplinary teams could together to just have a simple conversation. So why their day to day is impacted by my day to day.

Adam: (08:51)
It's a simple conversation of being able to turn off your perspective and point of view for a moment and look at things through somebody else's shoes for a moment, and then suddenly your w...

Contact Bob Kolodgy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bob-kolodgy-a5849214/
About Bob Kolodgy: https://www.bcbs.com/about-us/leadership/robert-kolodgy

Bob's Interview for Forbes CFO Network with IMA's Jeff Thomson: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffthomson/2020/02/07/the-finance-leader-in-health-care-an-interview-with-the-cfo-of-blue-cross-blue-shield-association/?sh=418e829169ac

BCBS: https://www.bcbs.com/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:00)
 Welcome to episode 126 of Count Me In. Thanks for coming back and listening to IMA's podcast. I'm your host, Adam Larson and today's expert guest is Bob Kolodgy. Bob is Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer for Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, a national Federation of 35 independent community-based and locally operated Blue Cross Blue Shield companies. In his role, he is responsible for the blue's federal employee program, oversees the national employee benefits administration, and has overall accountability for Blue Cross Blue Shield brand management, and the associations finance, licenser, enterprise information technology, and information security areas. During his conversation with my co-host Mitch, Bob discusses the role of the CFO in building organizations ready for the future. Keep listening to hear his perspective on innovation, data, and value.

Mitch: (01:02)
So for our conversation today, we really want to emphasize the role of the CFO and making sure that they are capable of building organizations ready for the future. Now, innovation certainly is a term we use often in accounting and finance as organizations seek to create and increase value. So to start off, I would really like to know what innovation means to you.

Bob: (01:31)
Yeah, thanks Mitch and thanks for the opportunity to address IMA today, it's a great group and I love to be part of your events, so thank you for that. You know, with respect to innovation and accounting, let's put it in perspective and I've always said this at the beginning of innovation conversations with finance people. It's like, well, we don't want you all to be all that innovative, I mean, your accountants after all. And you need to be careful, right? So there's all kinds of, accounting principles and things like that. And we don't want you to be creative with that now, maybe be creative about how you do what you do, right? And so how can you as an accountant, or a finance person in an organization, actually innovate in a way that creates value. And so, when we try to take that apart, I look at value as the sum of three things, cost or efficiency, quality, and service. And so anyone can apply those principles to what they do I think, and add value. And so for me, innovation, particularly in accounting and finance in those disciplines really is focused more on those things and keeping them in balance, right? So innovation can accelerate any one of those things and as long as it does that without detracting from the other two, it's adding value. So for me, it's kind of that simple. And, when you look at what we've been in for the last, 14 or 15 months with the pandemic, it really sort of dots the eye on the need for innovation, right? We had to pivot in so many ways that we never would have expected so quickly and, you know, true innovations have come out of that in many forms and now its a matter of advancing those and in some cases bringing them to scale. There were certain things that came out of the pandemic that were really innovative and they're going to stick whether we expected that to happen or not. The time after the pandemic will be, not like anything we expected or planned on our prior trajectory.

Mitch: (03:37)
Yeah, I completely agree, among these different conversations that I have, I've certainly seen many organizations who have explained that they will be adapting some of these ongoing principles moving forward and making it part of their business, because of how they had to pivot and adapt in the last year plus. My next question, continuing on this topic, as far as innovation goes and the different components that you spoke about, what is specifically the CFO's role when it comes to initiating this change, enabling innovation and driving the anticipated results, evaluating those results, where does the CFO really make an impact?

Bob: (04:16)
Yeah, I think innovation and enabling new thinking and so forth is really an area where the modern CFO can differentiate themselves from the more traditional financially focused leader, and if it's done well, the CFO can become the corporation's architect for business value. I saw an article recently from Accenture on this, and I found it very, very interesting and poignant. CFOs are uniquely positioned if they apply certain levers that they have access to, to be able to create this differentiation and be the architect of business value. And just to list off the levers quickly, visibility of the whole enterprise, the CFO typically because they deal with all parts of the company has a view into what is going on in all those parts and the ability to see where synergies exist across those verticals, the ability to do analytics and have access to data across the enterprise is really critical. CFOs, not only have access to financial data, but now more and more operational and market data and, a variety of things that they can bring together to bring insights that are actionable to the organization. Understanding enterprise risk is a critical role that the CFO or critical conversation, or are part of the conversation the CFO can bring, because they can measure risk and they know that you may be able to take risks in one area of the company and balance that off with some protection and hedge and the other areas of the company. The CFO can and should have a strong relationship with all the C-level executives in the company, right? So there should be good working relationships there and the CFO's ability to mentor and discuss things with his or her peers in a way that brings to life this greater business value. And finally the financial authorities, I mean the CFO obviously has a financial authority within the organization and can reinforce the economic basis for investment decisions, right? So the CFO can bring voice to somebody else's idea, in a way that that person may or may not be able to do. And so, these things can really be exploited by better collaboration with C-level peers, by leading in with unique insights, whether it's based on data, unique analytics, perspective on risk, or what have you, and then taking ownership for ensuring that value is extracted from all of the new technology and data platforms. These things are proliferating coming up all over the place. And I think it's the CFO's responsibility to make sure there's a value equation attached to each of those, or if not, make sure everybody else understands that and make sure that expectations are aligned along those vectors and CFO needs to be able to cultivate a good commercial awareness and stay ahead of the curve of the industry, right? So whether it's regulatory change, federal policy changes, the business environment, changing the competitive landscape, changing or just trends and particularly important, I think is understanding what the potential disruptors are. You know, I'm in healthcare, there are disruptors all around our industry, whether you're talking about health plans, providers, pharmaceut...

Contact Professor Orpurt: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-orpurt-phd/

"Spruce Up Your Learning", Strategic Finance (January 2021): https://sfmagazine.com/post-entry/january-2021-spruce-up-your-learning-skills/

Telling Ain't Training by Harold D. Stolovitch  and Erica J. Keeps: https://www.amazon.com/Telling-Aint-Training-Expanded-Enhanced/dp/1562867016

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:05)
 Hey everyone! Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host, Adam Larson and this is episode 125 of our series. How can you spruce up your learning skills and why should you? Well, Steve Orpurt, Clinical Professor of Accountancy at Arizona State University joins our show to talk about how you can become a better learner and the benefits of doing so. Professor Orpurt teaches corporate governance, ethics, and sustainability reporting. His recent research focuses on the statement of cash flows with top tier publications and presentations to the international accounting standards board. His conversation here with Mitch was inspired by a recent article he wrote in IMA’s strategic finance magazine titled, Spruce Up Your Learning. Whether you're a seasoned professional, a young professional just starting out, or a student preparing to embark on an accounting and finance career, keeping current on your learning is imperative. So let's keep listening to learn how.

Mitch: (01:08)
So we started talking based on your article, Spruce Up Your Learning, in IMA’s strategic finance magazine. My first question for today is how did you really become interested in learning about learning?

Steve: (01:20)
That's an interesting question. I had an opportunity quite a long time ago 20-25 years ago to work at a startup company that worked with Stanford University of Chicago, Carnegie Mellon, London School of Economics, called younext.com. And when I joined that, they were trying to build an online MBA program and they hired a number of instructional designers. I had never heard of an instructional designer and I ended up working elbow to elbow with them and they taught me a lot about their profession, which is learning. So I've always had an interest since then. And as you know, I'm an academic accountant so I had no background in that area and I've just kept reading and one of the more influential books that I read over the years was a book entitled, Telling Ain't Training by Stolovitch and Keeps. The title kind of undersells the book because it really focuses on learner centered learning, not the teaching. And so that's been a substantial influence on what I do in a classroom. And so from there I just started reading all the research on learning and just kept going. So that article that I wrote was more to help students and others who are interested in improving their learning, most of that material is actually written to a teacher or an instructor to use to help students learn, but I thought it should be put in the hands of the students themselves to improve their abilities to learn.

Mitch: (03:05)
Following up on that and making a connection to our listeners. Why is it so important? Why do you think it's so important for someone to improve their own learning skills? And like I said, particularly for the management accountant?

Steve: (03:17)
Well I think learning, which is a skill, is just becoming much more valuable today than perhaps even a decade ago. If you stop and think about the management accounting role, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, it would be fair to say that it was kind of a departmental role, but now it's an enterprise wide role. And you can think of some reasons for that. We can look at things like artificial intelligence, robotic process automation, process mining, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, enterprise risk management, cloud computing, mobile computing, sustainability reporting, sustainability reporting standards. These are all topics that we didn't talk about much 10 years ago or so, and now they're front and central for our management accounting and they require substantial learning. So I think that the role of a management accountant has really moved from kind of a departmental role into an enterprise wide role. And it just requires a lot more learning and learning well, so it's just a more valuable skill. So one of the reasons I wanted to write that article was simply to say, we can learn faster and better.

Mitch: (04:38)
It's a great point. And, you know, particularly from the IMA perspective, all those topics you just addressed are things that we are certainly pushing out there and are very interested in upscaling or rescaling in order to learn the necessary skills on the job and for the profession, the industry at large. For our listeners who, whether they're familiar with the article or not, when it comes to improving your learning, do you have any recommendations or what's an important learning strategy that you advocate for?

Steve: (05:11)
Well there are a number of them. I think the, one of the most valuable and one of the easiest to implement, because you can do it right now is to ask yourself questions before you start looking at the learning material. Most of us will pick up an article or something we're learning from, we just start reading and a better approach is to take a minute or so and think through what questions you have about that material. Because when you ask questions, you engage your mind and you read more actively to try and answer those questions. Continuing with that then as you read, you create more questions that you are looking for answers for and so it just creates a more active involvement with the learning and obviously that means you'll learn better, but as it turns out, most of us that have tried this would say you learn not only better, but faster because you remember material, you can apply it better, and if you want more extensive material, you know what you're looking for. So I think this notion of asking questions before you start reading something, and then actually while you're reading it, is easy to implement and extremely valuable habit to build. Ironically, I've had really good success by asking questions before I read articles, because it's led me to actually set aside many articles that once I start questioning, I realized I'm not going to get that much out of it and I'm not that interested in it. So it's actually been a time saver just in terms of organizing material that is valuable to me. And, so again, I think even at the most basic level, this is really easy to implement this idea of asking questions and, very, very valuable in terms of time management, but also in terms of just improving your learning.

Mitch: (07:18)
So I know myself as a learner, one of my go-to strategies, and I think this goes for many people is, as you said, you just start reading and you start highlighting, you start taking your own notes. How does asking questions in advance and really engaging your brain? What are the benefits above and beyond taking notes and highlighting and simple learning strategies that I'm sure many of our listeners frequently do?

Steve: (07:46)
Something that almost all of my students do. It's extr...

Contact Andrew Warner: https://legendarypodcasts.com/andrew-warner/

FULL PODCAST TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:05)
Hey everyone! Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA’s podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host Mitch Roshong and this is episode 124 of our series. What happens when marketing, finance and data analytics collide? Well, in today's episode, Andrew Warner CEO at Marketing CFO uses his unique mix of experience in both finance and marketing to help explain how companies can combine these efforts to create a sustainable business. Hear him speak with Adam about bridging accounting and marketing as we head over to their conversation now.

Adam: (00:43)
Now Andrew, I've been really looking forward to speaking with you as, I been wanting to know what is a Marketing CFO and how did you get to this place?

Andrew: (00:53)
Sure. So, Marketing CFO is really something that, is something that I've kind of invented just because of the unique need that I've seen in the market. I think as you know that, there's a lot of data in finance and it's very easy to approach that from an analytical perspective and that's how a lot of accountants and finance people typically will approach most problems. But nowadays in marketing, you're getting to where you can track so much spending and the results and there's so much there that it's almost to the point where it's more of a finance type role than a creative role. And if you can kind of combine those two sides of the world, the marketing side with the finance, there's a lot of potential that gets unlocked for the companies that you work with.

Adam: (01:40)
That really makes sense how marketing and CFO kind of collide. How did you get to this role?

Andrew: (01:46)
Well to be honest, it was a bit of an accident. So I started out in the finance world and I was working in a accounting firm, probably like a lot of your listeners work at, and on the side I had some e-commerce businesses mainly focused on drop shipping products and there's a lot of digital marketing involved and so I actually had tempted to leave the finance world to go into that industry. I had a small exit with an e-commerce store that I owned and started consulting on the digital marketing side, but what kept happening was that a lot of my clients, even though it was supposed to help them with the marketing, I kept getting pulled back into the finance world. They didn't know if their advertising campaigns were profitable. They didn't know what their business goals were and what campaigns fit into those and which ones didn't. They had cashflow constraints and inventory issues. And so I kept fighting it for a while, I was trying to avoid going back into finance, but about three years ago I just accepted it and have been serving in that role as kind of being the bridge between those two worlds.

Adam: (02:52)
That's interesting how I think we all kind of fall into our profession by accident a lot of times. So many times, accountants, marketing is just another line on the income statement, but a lot happens to get it there on to the income statement. As you just mentioned, how you kind of fell into the Marketing CFO, you know, how can a CFO better connect with their company to be more effective in making sure that everything is connected?

Andrew: (03:24)
Yeah, that's a great question. And what's so cool is that 20 or 30 years ago, if you'd asked me that question, it would have been a much different answer and it would've been really tough for a finance person to understand everything that's going on in the marketing world, but nowadays there's so much data and there's so much information available and it's very, it's moving more and more to being quantitative where you still, it's still great to have that creative and qualitative and understanding of the mind of your customer, that's still really important for marketing, but you can also start measuring your metrics. And that's one of the things that I do a little different than most CFOs, is that just like you said, instead of marketing expense being an expense on the income statement, I normally start with the, before getting to the revenue, looking at how many users are you getting, how many new potential buyers, how many leads are you getting, and what's your conversion rate at closing those? And I think that that's really where the story needs to begin and that really hasn't. Traditional finance hasn't had a good system for tracking that and catching it. And so I think that's something that you can't really rely on the double entry accounting built in the 13th century to really help with that. But I think it is something that's essential for a CFO to focus on.

Adam: (04:40)
So that’s not the first time I've heard you mention like the double entry 13th century accounting, when you and I were talking before we started recording, you'd mentioned it a few times, is that still the foundation of what management accountants will face today or is, are things changing?

Andrew: (04:55)
Yeah, I think the cool thing for management accounting is that it really does change a lot and it really, instead of having that standard financial reporting that is, you know, gap or whatever else, when you're on the management side you're really trying to help the business grow and there's so many other pieces there. I think that the principles have stayed the same. You always want to find your constraints. You always want to try to, maximize efficiency, maximize the return on any investment that you're making. I think the big change has been that there's more data to tell you what your return is, what your investment has put forward. And I think that you have to go a little bit beyond the traditional accounting world to be able to do that. And I could probably walk you through some examples, to really show that in a different light, but the, it is really cool, that the 13th century bookkeeping system has really just with a few slight tweaks, has continued to serve our world so well. I'm not against that system by any means, but I do think you need to add some other pieces on top of that if you want to have a holistic picture of modern business.

Adam: (06:07)
Well, can you give us some of those examples to help illustrate that for the audience?

Andrew: (06:12)
Yeah, sure. So I think that, a few things you can look at, so a lot of times people will focus on the constraint of inventory, right? And so that may be something if you're in a manufacturing company and you're trying to focus on where's the constraint, and it's almost like you might have a constraint first approach to resolving that. You could also do that with the marketing side of your business. A lot of times I see people that they're really great at getting traffic to their website for example, but they do a terrible job at converting those visitors into customers, but they continue to focus on just getting more and more people when the real constraint is that conversion rate. And I think that that's something that's really a key component that a accountant could really understand well and that they can, they have that mindset to where they could really serve a marketer or just serve the business in general to better understand where is that constraint. Maybe even get more specific into specific areas, specific web pages if it's a website, specific customer targets if it's more of like a traditional Salesforce type system and then I'm starting to track that over time and seeing what the trends are and trying to determine what the levers underneath that data you can pull to really help improve that over time. I think all that's some great examples for how you can take the principles from trad...

Contact Tracy Jackson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tracydjackson/

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Mitch Roshong and I'm here to bring you episode 123 of our series. Many businesses have had difficulty and/or needed to adapt to the way they onboard, train, and culturally integrate new hires following the lockdown and virtual shift to the business landscape. To explain how organizations can overcome these challenges and better help their employees become and remain part of the team, Tracey Jackson joined my co-host Adam for a conversation about the training and culture gap. Tracey is an engaging and energetic financial and accounting executive who serves as the CFO at CVR Energy. With over 25 years of experience across corporate finance, risk management, accounting, IT, and FP&A, she has developed extensive team building and change enablement skills. Keep listening for her insight as we head over to their conversation now.

Adam: (01:03)
Onboarding is something that can be very difficult with or without a lockdown. How has that impacted entry-level employees, especially?

Tracey: (01:18)
I think it's been another challenge on top of something that's already very challenging for organizations. Organizations, some do this very well, although not many, and some have continued to struggle with it even though there've been so many studies that show that getting someone hooked into the organization and integrated into the culture is part, the first step in successful retention. And I think the pandemic just gave us a curveball on something that was already very difficult to achieve. I can say that we've done some things very well and we've continued to fumble in a lot of different areas and the prep work that I did for the podcast actually gave me a lot of things to think about in terms of what we can do better. Specifically, a lot of our new hires come in on day one to the office even though quite a few of our employees are still at least on a split schedule, 50/50, and there was a lot of appreciation for that moment where they're in the office and they can see what the home office looks like, get their badge, hear about the company's goals and objectives in an onboarding session that HR hosts, meeting with their boss, if their boss is in the office beyond that, when people have received that initial landing, sending them back out over the last 12 months to work from home for an undetermined amount of time is where we really had to swiftly adjust. And I can say across the entire organization, we've done some of that well, and some of that not so well. The things that have been successful, I used to do a monthly luncheon with all of our new hires. It doesn't matter what level of the organization you are, I just felt like it was important to sit down with me and demystify the executive leadership team a little bit and talk about us as people and how we feel about the organization, what's going well, talk about our industry and I had to transition away from that obviously, and what I replaced it with was a webcast, that we do. And we haven't really been hiring as many people, so we haven't done it every single month, but every other month or so we get all the new hires are invited to a webcast with me and they can ask whatever questions they would like to ask of me about my personal life. I'm very, I'm an open book so, and I'm a divorcee and I have three cats so I might be a crazy cat lady, but, you know, really just making sure they know that we're all human and that we're real people because they don't even see us now. At least before I could go down to one of the floors that my folks were on and wander around and they could lay eyes on me, but now all they hear is my voice. If we talk on a conference call or on the phone for something, and then quarterly at our town hall meetings, which also had to change format, we used to do those in person and now we do a webcast for those. So lots and lots of challenges with just helping people feel like they've actually joined a new company and a new culture and understanding, why we do what we do and what our values are.

Adam: (04:52)
Yeah it's gone from having that personal touch of the face-to-face to a phone call or seeing somebody's face in that little box on the screen, you really lose that human connection. So you have trouble feeling like you're a part of the organization now.

Tracey: (05:05)
Now one of the comments that I got from someone was that they, now that they're back in the office, this individual has their own office so they can shut the door on and so they feel safe, so they're here quite a bit and then as the staff that are in cubes have been rotating in and out, they've been trying to introduce themselves to these people that they've maybe never seen before and they've been startled to find that these are actually individuals, some of them, that they've had extensive conversations on projects, but they had no idea what they looked like. So it's definitely changing the way that we interact with each other and form our persona of people because when you only have a voice paint your own picture, and when you see somebody in person, you have so many more cues as to what really makes up that individual.

Adam: (05:57)
You know, you've already mentioned some of the things that your organization has done. What are some of the things that you can do to help these employees? Because even when you're in person, we lose the facial cues because our faces are covered up by a mask.

Tracey: (06:12)
Right, and this gets to just a personal philosophy. I have found that our productivity shifting from a hundred percent in the office to nearly a hundred percent out of the office was not negatively affected. If anything, we may have been more productive and my personal opinion about why that is, there's less water cooler talk, which is not necessarily a good thing, but it sure does take away from wasted time. And you, we didn't have hardly any HR issues over the last year like we would have had in the past, because we didn't have cube mates bickering over things and we didn't have silly HR scuffles that we had to deal with. They were bigger picture issues about caring for a sick loved one and how did that impact their work schedule when they're at home. And so anyway, my personal opinion is that we have to make this adaptation on a permanent basis because efficiency and productivity and lease space and all of those things, companies are going to figure out, I can save a ton of money if I don't have to lease five floors in a building. And so, things that we can do to help bring them into the fold, I think really fall to the individual's manager and the individuals commitment to come into the fold. A lot of the past has been the expectation that companies feed new employees, copious amounts of opportunities to learn and integrate and interact and become a part of the culture and do networking events and volunteer events and that dynamic, that entire landscape is gone now. And so one, we have to train our managers better about the importance of bringing someone into the fold. And two, we have to express our expectation that the employee has an obligation also to buy into the new way and be willing to do, whether it's webcast events with their entire teams. And we all, I think at this point, everybody has a camera. Whether it's on your computer or not, you still have your phone and nearly everybody has a phone with a camera on it at this point. So participate on webcasts and help demystify what people look like. Don't get on a webcast and not show your face because we don't know what you ...

Contact Arno Wakfer: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnowakfer/

Arno's Articles:

1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/make-everyday-value-creation-day-arno-wakfer-ca-fmva-/ 
2. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/finding-your-value-creation-opportunity-gap-arno-wakfer-ca-fmva/ 
3. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-finance-needs-ask-questions-getting-closer-arno-wakfer-ca-fmva-/ 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Mitch: (00:00)
 Hey everyone. Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This is your host Mitch Roshong, and I'm here to bring you episode 122 of our series. Today's conversation features Arno Wakfer, a former CFO with over 15 years of commercial finance and general management experience. He is now a coach and trainer focused on upskilling managers and professionals through learning programs in Power BI and business finance literacy. In this episode, he talks with my co-host Adam about value creation and how finance and accounting professionals can get closer to the business through insight and storytelling. Keep listening as we head over to their conversation now.

Adam: (00:51)
So Arno, what are some of the value creation ideas that the finance and accounting team can use to set reminders and form habits?

Arno: (00:59)
Thanks Adam, thanks for the question. I think before I go into that, I'd just like to share my own view on what I think it means to drive value in a business. To simplify these, that I think whatever finance does will contribute towards increasing the value of a business for its stakeholders. Any business, any stakeholder business, wants an asset that increases in value and I think finance should be there to help increase the future value of an asset, which is the business. Alright, so looking at some ideas around finance creating value, some ideas around that. So the first thing I do is looking at financial analysis. So what they can do is they can perform business off assessments and troubleshooting risk areas. The second one is cashflow improvements, you know, working with businesses to improve strategies, to improve the cashflow. There's many strategies that you can use to accelerate in delayed cash flow coming in and out of a business. And we all know cash is King and it keeps the doors open so we need to protect our cash. The next one is cashflow forecasting. A lot of business is done with forecasts, when it comes to cashflow I think it's vital. You need to do at least 12 weeks of cashflow forecasting and try and at least have a safety of margin of at least three months of your fixed overheads, just to give you a little bit of buffer in the time that the business struggles. So that's another way that you can create value. Maximizing profits, monitoring all the key drivers in the business that generate profits and measure that in real time if you can. And then, any early warning signals when anything's off track is not on track that management can address. The next one would be, I think where we can also add as early is auditing spreadsheets. I think a lot of managers use their own spreadsheets to make decisions on, and we come across spreadsheets that can have errors in them and those errors lead to poor decisions. So I think finance can be more involved in analyzing and checking those spreadsheets for correctness. The other idea is to, for finance to get more involved in data analytics, you know, being able to use it’s auditing data into analysis and to be able to analyze underlying transactions or key activities that drive business. For example, if we want to analyze where we bleeding on profit margins on a specific customer, on a specific product, on a specific location, I think finance should be able to analyze and give that intel financial intelligence to key decision makers, which will assist the future planning and strategy. And the next one is data visualization, which is becoming a hot trend skill in finance and accounting is being able to turn data into storytelling. Most of us are visual learners. When we see a picture it explains a story to us and I think instead of just pushing out financial reports, we can spend more time on actually visualizing and storytelling the performance. And with that, you can use business intelligence like Power BI, which is the top-rated business intelligence platform in my opinion, by Microsoft. The next one is finance literacy training. I think finance can help educate non-finance people in business about the numbers so that they can just make better business decisions. Finance speaks a foreign language to most because we understand the numbers because we've been taught that and we work with it every day, but non-finance people don't. So we need to be able to remove all the technical jargon and try and simplify the numbers for different levels of management so they can just help make better decisions. The next one is business metrics and KPIs. I think we need to work with business units through finance business partnering, to be able to define what metrics they use to make decisions. Every person's got different inputs that they need to put the full cost and their budgets together and draw strategy. So work with the business units to develop the business critical KPIs and then have regular interaction with those people to monitor those KPIs. Then we can also do businesses systemization. So, I mean, that's processes systems, improving those to create efficiencies and automation in business. Businesses want more, they want to do more with this and I think finance can help create those efficiencies in business. Alright, so that's kind of like, the key value creation ideas after I liked it that I think would add value to business. Thanks Adam.

Adam: (05:31)
Yeah, so I think those are wonderful ideas and now that we've kind of covered those ideas, what are some of the challenges that can prevent those same professionals from delivering value creation?

Arno: (05:43)
Yeah great, great question. So, the obstacles I see finance have in terms of driving value creation. Cause it's easy to say let's drive value, let's do more, but it's, for me, it's a change of a mindset. And what one is to focus on first is the need to find ways to speed up the month-end reporting process. I think before finance looks again, they're spending time on reporting again, and then when they finished the next reporting cycle starts. And reporting is looking backwards, it's not looking forwards. So, I think we need to look to find ways to do more frequent recons, to be planning and eliminating bottlenecks in the month-end reporting process, so that's the first thing. The other thing is the obstacles you'll face is the company culture, its that people don't necessarily like change. And when they do happen, they're not supported by the right people. And then people are not very clear while they're being implemented and they don't really understand the benefit to them in the business. So typically what one would need to do is cost versus benefit and being able to negotiate and be persuasive as to why we need to make changes to drive value creation. Next one is not having the right finance team. You can put all these value creation activities in place, but if you're not driving, if the leader of the team is not driving the right behavior and getting a mission statement of the finance team that's aligned to the bus...

IMA's website: https://www.imanet.org/

International Management Accounting Day: https://www.imanet.org/about-ima/international-management-accounting-day

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam: (00:00)
 Welcome back everyone and happy International Management Accounting Day. Each year, IMA celebrates International Management Accounting day on May 6th. This global day of recognition commemorates the important role management accountants play within their organizations. Around the world, finance and accounting professionals work to bring insight and help their organizations realize untapped opportunities and operate more efficiently. While this work happens every day of the year, on May 6th management accountants are publicly recognized by IMA. So to celebrate and support the public recognition, Count Me In has a special bonus episode for you featuring IMA's President and CEO, Jeff Thomson. Jeff spoke with Margaret Michaels, IMA's Manager for Brand Content and Storytelling about the future of finance and accounting. Keep listening to hear them discuss the valuable ongoing efforts of management accountants and the race for relevance in a digital age.

Margaret: (01:03)
Digital transformation enabled by automation, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and other technologies has been the headline story when people talk about the future of finance, but you often bring up the fact that these are really not new technologies. Can you elaborate on that theme and talk a little bit about how the foundational concepts in competing on analytics and other texts laid the groundwork for the transformation we see today?

Jeff: (01:41)
Sure Margaret. Great question and two related, but somewhat different concepts. So these technologies have been around and developing for some time. Artificial intelligence, has been around for some time, blockchain has been around for some time. But what's different is that all industries have been impacted by these technologies and the applications have been exploding. You know blockchain, for example, the use cases for blockchain were just a few several years ago, but now blockchain use cases have absolutely exploded. You know, blockchain was something we've heard about several years ago, primarily in the financial services industry, but now blockchain applications are permeating many, many industries including education, non-for-profits, and when we think about artificial intelligence, it's not just artificial intelligence in certain industries, it's artificial intelligence in many industries and many applications, so the question is our ability to leverage all of these wonderful uses of these technologies. Now, and then when we think about, RPA robotics process automation, robotics process automation has actually been around for nearly a decade. So when we talk about new technologies, the technologies really aren't that new, but it's the application and comprehensiveness of these technologies across industry verticals that are new. Now, moving to your other question competing on analytics, it's actually the book, Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning, by Thomas Davenport and Jean Harris. It's actually a book in 2007 that really laid the groundwork for the transformation to data analytics that as you said, we're seeing today. And when you think about it, imagine it was written in 2007 and when you think about the science of winning in the marketplace, what do you think about? You normally think about cool apps, things that consumers see in front of them. Like I said applications, products and services, things you can touch and feel. You don't think about nerdy things like analytics, but if you fast forward today, analytics is the thing we're talking about. Data scientists, data scientists are the number one sought after job because data analytics is how we get to know our consumers and their needs and their wants. They’re how finance team professionals offer insight and foresight to their CEOs, to their boards of directors. So that is the competency and skillset that we as finance team professionals must really aspire to and really accelerate our competencies.
 
 Margaret: (04:59)
 Great. Now you often say the race for relevance to describe the current iteration of digital transformation in accounting and finance as technology evolves faster than the skills of the people who need to use it. What are the skills finance and accounting professionals need to focus on to keep up and what competencies really stand out to employers in a time when skills are increasingly commoditized?
 
 Jeff: (05:28)
 Yeah so another great question Margaret you're on a roll today. Yeah, so there's going to be the infamous hard skills and the softer skills, so we are in an absolute environment of disruption. In fact, we often talk about the VUCA world that we're in, and no it's not a Hungarian goulash, it's VUCA volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, VUCA. And we were actually in that environment before COVID-19 tragically struck the world with non-traditional competition, climate, and I can go on and on. So when I think about behavioral characteristics for finance team professionals and CFOs, I think about agility and I know we're going to be talking about agility perhaps in a bit later. I think about adaptability because if you don't have the ability to deal with new situations, stressful situations, totally unexpected situations that your best planning could not have possibly anticipated then you're not going to be able to adjust and deal with the situation from a risk management perspective or a planning perspective. So agility, adaptability, but also being anticipatory. Having that radar at ability to plan the best you can, so from a behavioral perspective, what I call the three A's; agility, adaptability, anticipatory skills. From a harder skills perspective, and again this is for the finance team, strategic planning, strategic thinking and then of course data analytics, data science, everything data, data transformation, digital transformation. Now I don't want to lose sight of the table stakes because as we thinking about the progressive CFO and the CFO of the future, we have to be clear that there are table stakes. There are things that the CFO team must do with excellence that are expected. Things like risk management, internal controls, an ongoing and continuous commitment to ethics, leadership, executive maturity, executive presence, and the like. So we can't lose sight of what got us there and that's a unwavering and relentless focus on, as I said, ethics, internal controls, accurately and fairly representing the financial condition of the enterprise. And then we can offer that insight and foresight and having, enabling the organization to do great things and create great products and services that will change the world.
 
 Margaret: (08:38)
 That makes a lot of sense and I'm glad you mentioned agility and resilience because COVID has certainly highlighted the need for leaders to help their people become more agile and resilient. How do you define agility and resilience? How equipped are finance and accounting professionals to deal with uncertainty while continuing to innovate and improve processes?
 
 Jeff: (09:04)
 So agility is, and again, this is a, perhaps a Thomson un-scientific definition, but maybe those are the best. They're not particularly scientific, but agility in my mind, Margaret is the ability to quickly move employees and resources, human resources, and other types of resources, technology resources into new roles or areas of the organization to support cha...