290. CFO Revisited | The Unconventional CFO with Jeremy Foster
Episode Details
Transcript
In this CFO 4.0 Revisited episode, Hannah Munro talks with Jeremy Foster, now CFO at Kasasa and formerly CFO of Talroo, to explore why some of the most effective finance leaders don't fit the traditional CFO mould.
Jeremy shares his unconventional journey to the CFO seat and explains how stepping beyond conventional finance thinking can help organisations move faster, make better decisions, and support sustainable growth.
Also covered on the podcast
- Jeremy's unconventional path to becoming a CFO
- Why modern CFOs need to think beyond traditional finance
- Building agile, high-performing finance teams
- Approaches to scaling finance in high-growth businesses
- Making smarter marketing investment decisions
- The tools and practices behind an agile finance function
Speaker 0
Welcome to CFO four point o, the future of finance. The CFO role is changing rapidly, moving from cost controller to strategic visionary. And with every change comes opportunity. We are here to help you take advantage of this transition to win at work, drive your career forwards, and lead with confidence. Join Hannah Munro, managing director of ITAS, a financial transformation consultancy, as she interviews key experts to give you real world advice and guidance on how to transform your processes, people, and data. Welcome to CFO four point o, the future of finance. Speaker 1
Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of CFO four point o. Now with me today, I have Jeremy Foster. So Jeremy is a CFO over in the US, and I thought it might be interesting to explore a few different, questions around the role of the CFO, particularly in fast growth companies, and also talking a little bit about organizational design. So welcome, Jeremy. Fantastic to have you on the show. Speaker 2
Thanks for having me here. Looking forward to it. Speaker 1
Brilliant. So do you wanna give us a bit of context? Tell us about the company. Tell us about, what excited you about joining them and maybe a bit about your your your history as well. It'd be great. Speaker 2
Yeah. So Talroo is in the recruitment marketing space. We are, not the, not the Goliath in the room, which is always Indeed in the US, but we are very fast growing, and are, currently, we process over a billion job searches a month. We provide, enterprise and mid market employers with the ability to access a number of unique candidate audiences, through a very targeted search platform. So, we basically... You can almost think of us as effectively a search engine that helps match up both our owned property, which is jobs to careers, as well as some unique publisher, partnerships that, for example, Amazon might need to hire a warehouse worker in Austin, and they're not gonna have, you know, Austin warehouse workers dot com available, but we built all the tools, capabilities, and have machine learning, search and match that will allow us to say, okay, Amazon's looking for warehouse workers. We're seeing some candidate flow over here at austin warehouse workers dot com. We're gonna match those up. And then we've also got our own site where we build, candidate profiles and help make sure that both job seekers and employers are getting the right fit. Speaker 1
Awesome. So... And so that's a little bit about Toll Root. Tell us a bit about yourself. So what was your background before you joined? Speaker 2
Yeah. So I actually come from a pretty, unorthodox background. I actually started in marketing. My undergrad degrees were in marketing and management and got my start, goodness, twenty twenty years ago now for a, five hundred million dollar community bank in New Mexico and West Texas and started out as marketing director, then worked my way up to lead, retail banking operations and marketing for them. Did that for a few years, then ended up doing a stint for a a company called Accenture that you've probably heard of, leading curriculum development and management for a nationwide bank client. And then from there, I ended up, working for a company called, at the time, BankView, which became Kasasa. And what we really built out at Kasasa was a co branded, product of product suite of primarily deposit products, checking accounts, and savings accounts that were distributed through a thousand community banks and credit unions. And so the easiest way to think of what we were doing there is you might go into the local jeweler and look for a Rolex, and we wanted to basically be the Rolex on the shelves of community banks and credit unions. And we did that with a number of, reward checking style products, which either paid high interest rates or gave consumers iTunes credits, those types of solutions. And, grew that very successfully, ended up selling that to private equity, then went and worked for a company, helped launch a company called Homeward, in the property technology space as CFO. And then I... I'm CFO at Kasasa. Sorry. And then helped launch Homeward as CFO and then had the opportunity to go work with that at Teluru and and have really enjoyed it ever since. Speaker 1
And that's really interesting, obviously. So in terms of building the skill set and setting yourself up for success in that first CFO role, What was your what was your strategy around that? Because that must have been a real shift. Speaker 2
It was. So... And and in some ways, maybe less of a shift than, you might otherwise think. I think there's a tremendous amount of value in having a strong understanding of finance when you're in the marketing chair and of understanding marketing when you're in the finance chair, particularly if you're in technology or in a high growth company, because a big part of what you really need to be able to do is identify where your investments can help the company grow the most quickly. And so, I'm a, I'm a big believer in, in removal of constraints. And so if you think about, a factory, for example, you might have nine machines that crank out a hundred widgets an hour, and you got one machine that cranks out fifty. And if you add that one machine that adds fifty, you've just doubled throughput for the entire factory. The same thing is really true of technology companies. It's just more complicated because you're not looking at machines, you're trying to understand people and understand where the resource limitations on the business are and what's the current constraint upon growth. And a lot of times the constraint upon growth is marketing. And so I think that if you're a CFO who's got background in that, there are obvious synergies. And then if you're a a, you know, marketing... Chief marketing officer or VP of marketing who's trying to ask for budget, it's obviously pretty helpful to be able to know where your ROI is coming from. And so for me, it was a pretty... I wouldn't say a seamless transition, but a pretty fluid one. Speaker 1
And do you think any... There's anything else in terms of a different viewpoint that sets you particularly apart from others... So it's more traditional CFOs or CFOs from more traditional backgrounds? Is there anything else that you feel that you've brought to the role that perhaps wouldn't have been the case if you've gone through that usual route? Speaker 2
Yeah. I think I think my background in operations helps a lot as well. I think, you know, typically, if you look at what's gonna make a business of, of, of viable and growing business, you really need to identify three things, right? What's the lifetime value of the customers that you're gonna bring in? What's your customer acquisition cost? If the ratio of those is healthy, if you're gonna, if you can land a customer that's gonna generate a hundred thousand dollars in gross profit and it costs you thirty thousand dollars in marketing and sales cost to get them, then, you know, you can put thirty grand in and a hundred grand comes out the other end. And it It's just a question of timing and financing at that point and running in PVs, right? Net net present value calc. And, and, and so if that piece of the equation works well, then the question is how big is the total addressable market and how much of an organizational support structure do I have to invest in to be able to reach it? If the, if the TAM is big enough to build out an efficient delivery channel and an efficient, you know, whether that's delivery from the perspective of developing and delivering the software products or delivery through your account management team, or delivery through building out the right channels that you need to be able to distribute those products. If you can, if you can look at that as a piece of the equation, then it gets to be pretty easy to arch... I shouldn't say easy. It gets to be pretty easy to design. It can be difficult to architect and build, but the design function of the organization, it's it's a lot easier if you understand marketing and operations and finance. Speaker 1
Awesome. And and when you make that transition, did you do any formal finance qualifications to to build up your skill set in that area? Was it something that you'd absorb through marketing? Speaker 2
So I'd already gotten my MBA. And so there was some formal training there. And then when, actually was in the process of getting, my MBA at the time I was working part time and reporting to, our controller and, and vice president of finance at, at Bankview. And she went to the CEO and said, look, you know, Jeremy finishes his MBA. We're gonna lose him. If we don't do something meaningful. At that point in time, our, our CFO left the company and our, our VP of finance went and asked Gabe, Hey, you know, I believe in Jeremy. I wanna work with him. I'd rather work for him than anybody else. Can you give him a shot and give him a promotion? And so, they they bumped me up, actually the semester before I finished my MBA. So I was in a full time program as a full time CFO, as a first time CFO, and a and a new dad, for that last semester. So he's pretty busy. But, we then brought on, like, hired... I... I've interviewed and hired, an experienced CFO coach for a couple of months. And, Manuel was just a terrific, like, mentor for a couple of months to help me kinda get my bearings. And then, you know, I had a good a good team of informal mentors around me as well. So our our president, you know, several other... And my former CEO at the bank, several other people that I could draw on for some expertise and help. Speaker 1
Yeah. So you had a good team around you to to support that transition as well, which is so very important. Awesome. Absolutely. And in terms... And, yeah, I guess in terms of your your viewpoint because what, obviously, you've worked for a lot of high growth. What do you think is, like, essential characteristics of a of a CFO in a high growth organization? What are the the elements that people need to consider? Speaker 2
Great question. So I think, I think it's really, I'd say one of the most important is, is part of being able to help a company grow quickly is. Again, kind of identifying and removing whatever's limiting that growth. And that may be that there's insufficient marketing budget to generate leads. It might be that you don't have enough of a Salesforce to handle the calls. It might be that you need a marketing development rep function to set discovery calls so that your sales team is efficient. It might be that you're taking too long developing software. And so once you discover what's limiting the company's ability to grow, a lot of it ends up being about thoughtful resource allocation. So it's not just about throwing money at it. It's about figuring out what the most efficient way to deploy the funding to remove the limit on growth is. And if you if you think about it from that perspective, first off, you have to be nimble because if the company's growing rapidly, you're gonna hit walls at different points in time. And I would say one of the big challenges that one of the things that can make a really successful startup CEO, I think, is they identify whatever the most immediate limit on the business is, and they tackle that thing and they wrestle it to the ground and they beat it into submission. Most of the time it's getting your first sale, right. Or getting your first customer. The challenge that a lot of times happens then when you're helping transition a company to a scaling company is they're still looking for that one limitation and the business is getting bigger and it can't one, a business can't react to every single change that quickly, especially when you get to four hundred, five hundred at that. Like you just can't continue to pivot that fast. And so part of what the CFO has to be able to do is see those limits and those constraints coming in advance. Right? So some of it's about looking ahead and saying, okay, well, when we hit this number of leads, we're gonna need to hire more account executives. And and at that point, You've already started the process of bringing them on board so that you don't kind of hit a wall, waste six months figuring out what's going on and then lift the barrier. So that's one big component I think is, is helping the organization be, be more foresighted. The other is sometimes things aren't gonna work out. You're gonna have a marketing strategy that doesn't plan out pan out, or you're gonna have, you're gonna have a key software platform that nobody buys, right? You're gonna run into some of these. Challenges and the quicker you can help the organization pivot the better off you're gonna be. So I would say the key things to being an effective growth oriented CFO are one helping the organization look further down the road and being more far farsighted in your decision making two being nimble enough that when those decisions end up being right, you can capitalize on them. And when they end up being wrong, you can change quickly. And then three, helping to build out effectively the nervous system of the organization so that the organization can see when something's working or not and respond more quickly so that you can make the whole organization more nimble. Speaker 1
Absolutely. And when you say building out, what... Do you mean processes? Do you mean systems? Do you mean people? Or do you mean all of the above? Speaker 2
Could be a... Could be... So depends on where the organization is when you start. If you're starting from scratch, then, you know, the company needs a model. They need a a business model and a design, a plan to be able to execute to. Then you've also got making sure that you have the right people and that the people are organized in the right way and structured in the right way. So they they've each got clear lines of sight. Everybody knows who's responsible for what, and you're maintaining tight communication, between people so that you don't, you don't run into organizational drift, right? Where one part of an organization was working on an initiative and they're still working on that initiative. And the rest of the organization has pivoted to focus on a new initiative. Well, if, if your account reps who are managing your existing, your relationships are still talking about old products and you've got four new products that have been deployed that the sales team is talking about, you're gonna have a disconnect. And so a lot of it is just making sure that everybody one, you know, knows what the organization's initiatives are. Two, everybody's having the conversations with each other to get better and better at delivering what their clients or customers need, and communicating the value that the organization's creating. Speaker 1
Awesome. So, because I think there's some great points in there in terms of getting everybody aligned. And I think this is one of the interesting things about certainly how I hear you approaching the CFO role. It's very much in that strategic headspace, which a lot of CFOs struggle to make the shift into. Not because they don't want to, but because they... They're struggling to find the time and balance it with everything else that they're doing. So how do you find the time? How do you create that space to to focus on the strategic side? Speaker 2
So one of the things is is I make sure that I've got the right team supporting me so that I can focus on the strategic space. I have a phenomenal controller, and I've been very blessed to have had three phenomenal controllers over the years. And so, I, I don't spend a lot of my time thinking about accounting. Now that's obviously tougher if it's a true startup, right? You can't have a finance function that's twenty five percent of the organization's revenue that just doesn't work too well. And so, you know, some of that's about being in a space that's the right, that's the right size. Right. I, I didn't enjoy being a startup CFO for that reason. We ended up building a very successful model and the company's been very successful. Beau while I was there and since I left, but the, the role wasn't what I enjoy. And so some of it's about if you're in a spot, the first thing you have to do is figure out how to create efficiency. And sometimes you may have to make room. So when I first went to bank view, we didn't have an FP and a function. We didn't have, we had a good controller. But we were spending a lot of money on legal, outsourced legal. So the first thing that I actually did was I, I built out a very basic legal function that ended up saving us about six hundred thousand dollars a year. Then some of that money went to building out an FP and a function. I was able to give four hundred grand back to the business to help grow the business. And so we ended up putting more resourcing in to places that really needed it. And I ended up with a really terrific director of FP and a and a good analyst, and that allowed me to become more effective. So sometimes it's just about finding the opportunity to, creatively think about staffing and structuring so that you can free up that time. Speaker 1
Yeah. No. That's a that's a great piece, and it goes back to what you're saying about focusing on resource allocation. Where are you spending your resource? Be that people or, you know, obviously, money. And where does... You know, what does that mean in terms of impact on the organization? So I'm actually gonna pick your brains. It wasn't on our list of topics to which we sort of sent through, but I'd love to understand how you approach marketing investment because this seems to be a topic that a lot of CFOs, struggle with in terms of understanding the value and the output. How... Just out of interest, how do you approach it? Speaker 2
So the first thing to do is to get a good handle on your customer acquisition cost, right, and your lifetime value of your customers. So LTV is relatively easy to calculate if you're a SaaS business. Right? You've got an attrition rate that you can track to. You've got a fixed monthly license fee that you can track to. You can calculate your gross profit margins, and you can come up with a lifetime value of a customer pretty easily. After that, then you just need to get a feel for what your costs are. And a lot of times, I I I tend to think of it in two... I think of customer acquisition cost in two ways. The first is what's our marginal customer acquisition cost. And in that, I'm typically putting in the entire sales team, and all of our direct lead generation spending. So anything that is intended to drive marginal activity, goes into that number. And then it's really just divide LTV by customer acquisition cost, and you're off to the races. Right? Like, it's pretty basic math. The other view is, you may have a lot of marketing investment and spend that is not directly lead gen. Right? You might have brand spend. You might have headcount. You might have, strategic product marketing investments. And those I usually don't put in in terms of evaluating whether the core business is acquiring customers rapidly, but I, I keep a view of it and I make sure that I'm taking a look at that so that I can understand if we're actually getting an ROI for it. And if we're, if it looks like we're not getting an ROI on that, then we'll start to dig in and try to really understand, okay, what's the purpose of the brand spend? Are we, are we trying to build more underlying awareness so that our. Let me pause and roll back. One of the challenges that can happen with direct lead generation is you, if you're doing it right, you're hitting your lowest lying fruit first. Right. You're getting your cheapest new prospects or most, most efficient new prospects. First, Part of what that means is that there's a, there's a diminishing marginal return on that spend. And so one of the benefits, one way to look at brand is that brand spend should be an investment that makes all your lead gen spend more effective. It's not the only way to look at brand, but it's a reasonable way to look at at brand. And so if the argument is, well, we're making these brand investments to help push this down, then you go through and you look at KPIs around that. If the argument is well, brand spend just, we just have to spend it just because just because Then at that point, the question needs to be, okay, well, what are the metrics that we're gonna use to make sure we're getting some strategic value out of it? Right? Are we are we seeing more overall awareness? Are we, you know, Those are those are the types of KPIs that I would then start to go back and look for if I suspect a disconnect in that area. Speaker 1
Yeah. It's a really interesting piece because I think the ROI behind brand is one of those harder to measure elements, especially as you're a small to midsize space versus, obviously, a more established company. There's there's a few options out there. So... But... So do you have any top tips for measuring brand, you know, and then, like you said, you assess it. What... How do you approach it? Speaker 2
Yeah. So a lot of the time it's one thing to do, I think, is make sure that the the finance team is really partnering with the CEO, the marketing department, and the sales department to make sure that everyone has thought about and agreed upon what the intent of that brand spend is and what are the outcomes that you're looking to achieve. And that that that may be something that is highly measurable. Like, you can conduct a survey in a specific market. If you wanna go into that market, you can conduct a survey and, and say, all right, I think in this area, we've seen awareness go from X to Y over a year or two years. It might be, we wanna look at the impact that moving into this market and spending this bra, this brand investment. What impact did that have on our actual customer acquisition? And that gets a little less precise when you're dealing with smaller numbers, right? If you've, if you had eight customers sign the quarter before you spent the brand money and you spend a million bucks in brand and you get ten customers that sign the next quarter, you don't necessarily know what the impact was, but you can at least start to go back and look at it and say, you know, is this worth continuing or should we just kill it? And, you know, a little bit of that is intuition. It's it's is this bigger than a bread box? Some of it is measurement, right? If you do have the customer acquisition cost measurements tracked on a regular basis, then at a minimum, you can see whether or not it's going up or down. Speaker 1
Absolutely. So... And then you incorporate brand... You can incorporate branding CAC, or do you keep it separate? Speaker 2
I keep a separate view of it, but I calculate it both ways. So I I actually have a graph that I... One of my favorite graphs is actually one that looks at, that looks at our, customer acquisition cost, And then it has two lines, one line that does not include brand one line that does include brand. And what you can see is if there's significant drift in those lines, right? If you start to see, if you start to see the brand line going up a lot, your overall customer acquisition cost is rising pretty rapidly. If you're including your brand investments and you're not seeing any improvement in your CAC without it without brand included, then you know that you may not be getting that marginal reduction in customer acquisition and direct lead gen cost. Right? And if that's the case, then then you need to see whether or not that brand spend is something that you wanna continue making. Speaker 1
Absolutely. That's a really great, a great insight. And final question before we shift away from marketing in particular. And, I'd love to know, are there any questions that you ask or... And or, I'd say, ways in which you challenge the marketing team perhaps that's slightly different from a typical CFO? Have you have you had that conversation with your team? Speaker 2
In some ways, I'm probably less challenging of marketing and sales than the typical CFO. I think most CFOs actually biased towards prove that we should invest in sales and marketing. And I think that's a really candidly, not great way to grow a business. Right. The real question should be, we need to invest in sales and marketing. Let's let's prove that the investments that we're making are the most efficient and the best ones we can make. And that's a very different approach. Right? I never... I I think, the heads of sales and heads of marketing that have worked with me in the past, would probably tell you that they spend less time having to fight with me about their budget and they spend more time, investigating with me whether or not specific initiatives are yielding fruit. Speaker 1
Yeah. That's a really great way to think about it, and I think you're right. I think there is a tendency to say, prove to me I should invest this money, then this is the budget. Tell me where you're gonna spend it and why you should spend it there. Yeah. It's a really, really great point. I think that should be one of our catchphrases for this podcast, to be fair. Speaker 2
Yeah. Yeah. I think it makes a huge difference. Just the difference in mindset becomes less about, you know, proving that the organization needs to grow and, and it puts the sales and marketing team less on the defensive of like what I remember at one point I had to go back and I, I actually built a, market by market regression, to identify the correlation between marketing spend and growth in that market. As a marketing, as a marketing person, I did that. And, and I think that it was a good exercise. But also what was, what was really more important as the marketing exec was for me to understand which initiatives were working. And so I think if you go into it from the perspective of telling your sales team and your marketing team, you know, cross my arms and, well, I, you know, we're we're profitable. Tell, you know, tell me why we should take away some of our profit to grow. The answer is that the, the CFO should know whether or not it's makes sense to make a growth investment because the CFO should be looking at lifetime value and customer acquisition cost. And the CFO should be the one saying, Hey, our, our customer acquisition cost is out of whack to our LTV. How do we get LTV up? Right. Or how do we get our CAC down? And if the, if the CFO's not having that conversation with themselves six times a day with no one else in the room, then they're doing something wrong if they're trying to grow a business. But then the next conversation that needs to happen is, Hey, you know, marketing sales. I think that if we do this, we're gonna get our customer acquisition costs down. Can we explore this idea? Yeah. Great. Awesome. Now your ratios are right. Throw money at it. Right. In an efficient way, but get the, get the engine working the right way so that when you pour, you know, you need to pour a dollar in and get three dollars out. And if you can do that, then it becomes about figuring out how you can continue to funnel more and more into the system without having that ratio fall off. Speaker 1
Absolutely. And and in terms of figuring out where those ratios should sit, are there particular benchmarks that you work to? Does it depend on the organization? How do you think about it? Speaker 2
I really think about it in terms of time sensitivity. So the typical typical private equity and venture capital rule of thumb is kind of three to one, right? And three to one gross profit to, to tack is a reasonable metric. You can do different treatments to it, like discount it back so that you're at least taking into account the sensitivity of the cash flows. I think there are some businesses where if you have a fast cycle time. So for example, one of the, one of the models I helped build out the biggest advantage we had was a very fast cycle time. So the total transaction time was five months. You didn't have this really long five year lifetime value. And normally that's a drawback in the eyes of private equity and venture capital. Right? Show me, show me what your recurring revenue is. Right. What's your ARR, right? That's the, the, always the question, but there are some businesses where the advantage is that the cash flows are fast. And so we were able to build out a model where every five to six months, we were effectively tripling the value of the marketing spend. And so if you can do that every five to six months, now your now your annual number's nine X. Right. Cause your cycle time's quick. And so, you know, we have a lot of traditional finance tools that work great with a little creativity for, for adapting that. Right. It's an old school, discounted cash flow can tell you a lot on what you need to do. But I think that it's really important to think about the the risks associated with the cash flows, the time that it takes to generate them, the long term potential. So another one of the businesses I worked for, the big advantage that we had was we land a client and they didn't pay us a lot up front. But we could predict to a high degree. How much that would grow over a five year period. So it's kind of the opposite, right? The big benefit at that point is you've got this highly predictable model. And so part of where that really weighed in for us was we were able to change our pricing structure to de risk for clients. So they weren't paying us a bunch of money up front. It was a more variable priced model. And as they began paying us, Based on the performance metrics that they cared about, making it a success based metric that they cared about dramatically reduced our sales friction. So our customer acquisition costs plummeted, and we kept... Like, we ended up keeping ninety seven percent of revenue and ninety four percent of gross profit with our pricing change per client, but our customer acquisition costs got cut by two thirds. Right? And if you can do that, you can really you can really change a business pretty quickly. Speaker 1
Awesome. No. And I think there's some some really interesting, pieces there in this in terms of figuring out, like you say, how... Where do you hold your value? And like you said, it depends on... Did... It it depends on the l t... Obviously, the LTV, but also, like you say, your cycle, your acquisition time, all of those things as well as, cash acquisition. So, so very aware that we are rapidly running out of time. So... And we talked earlier about this nim... Being a nimble CFO in creating almost this agile finance function. Talk to me a little bit about how you structure your finance functions when you're going into these high growth organizations. Speaker 2
Yeah. So, typically, I I like to have a controller, and I like to have an FP and A function. I like I like an accounting function and an FP and A function. And if you can afford to have them separate, it's great to have them separate. Sometimes it makes sense to have them together. But the key thing is making sure that you have both kind of your traditional gap financials covered in a reliable way, and also making sure that you have all the management financials that the organization needs. Really. I do. I, I kind of alluded to this. I do think of the finance function as the nervous system for the business, right? It's a coordination function that should help each hand know what the other hand is doing. And, a lot of that shows up in your management financials and in making sure that the metrics are there for people to be on the same page. I would say that that part of being agile is being consistent as weird as that sounds. So if you are on the one hand, you it's important to have a budget, right? It's important to have an annual budget that you can set and that you can measure yourself against. So you can say how good a job did we do predicting thirteen months in advance of what was gonna happen? It's a, it's an important accountability metric. However, if you're running the business off of a one year plan that gets updated once a year, you're not gonna be agile. And so part of, part of what I try to make sure we do is build out first of all, a recurring and consistent cadence for effectively quarterly reforecast process where everybody gets fully realigned. Any major strategic decisions get made, captured, recast, and you've done a full fledged reforecast. The other thing that's really important is to have good, if your budget's your your map, it's important to have a decent set of, you know, GPS and altimeters and speedometers and... Right? You need KPI measurements to help you identify what's happening on a month to month or even sometimes on a daily basis. So, You know, I've I've we've got a daily income statement that we can look at and see how did we do today. And it's not GAAP, but it's close. Right? There's, you know, there are daily updates on sales and marketing activity that's happening every day. We review it as a team every month, maybe twice a month. Right? So some, some of being agile is just making sure people are communicating and coordinating and you keep the map, you keep the budget. Right. But you, you use your compass and you use all these other tools to help, you know, you know, we just walked up on a big mountain that wasn't on the map. Do we go around it or do we go over it or we dig through it or we tunnel, you know, tunnel under. And and if you've got the right tools and the right team, that's a lot easier to do. Speaker 1
And you also talked about your team structure. So, obviously, FC plus FP and A. So, basically, operational and the FP and A elements. And you mentioned tools. So without... You know, we do try and keep products product free on this podcast, but what sorts of tools do you find essential to be able to create the agile function? Speaker 2
So we really, historically always Excel. Right? And I don't know anybody that doesn't use Excel in the finance space. It's a very versatile tool. You know, Cluvio or other visualizers, other dashboard, you know, applet functions that you can use to help the business see what's going on are important. And then in, in two of the places I've worked, it's been really important to have, Call it data and ETL governance tools. So, things to help manage multiple databases and make sure that you've got consistent treatment. So at one place, it was MicroStrategy. And then, I've I've... We've just deployed Sigma. And so there are some there are some tools that can be used to help normalize and standardize data, and that's really important too. Speaker 1
Awesome. So so lots of, pieces in terms of, obviously separating out the functions. Are there any other top tips that you think are really important for CFOs in high growth that that people should be thinking about? Speaker 2
Focus on focus on what matters, which is, for most people, people. Right? And then focus on identifying whatever your bottlenecks are and figure out the most efficient way to remove it. I mean, it's, you know, I I kinda I kind of, I joke a lot of times in in our weekly revenue meetings, that, yeah, my job's pretty easy. The direction we wanna go is up into the right. Like, let's just figure out how we keep revenue going up into the right. You know, it's not rocket science. Speaker 0
Who we need. Yeah. Speaker 1
Offens the right. Speaker 2
Yep. Yep. What's hard is figuring out how to get everybody aligned to do it. Speaker 1
I was gonna say that. I think that's always the challenge, isn't it? It sounds super simple, but it's actually... Sometimes super simple is actually quite hard. Speaker 2
That's right. Speaker 1
Right. Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jeremy, for joining me on the podcast today. For anyone who's listening, I'm sure they find it incredibly valuable, particularly, I think, your viewpoint, on marketing and as an... You know, it is an investment and an expectation versus, an ask, and I think that's a really great shout out. For anyone that is listening, I'm I'm always open to new ideas for podcasts and guests, and this has been really, I think, really insightful and a a different shift. So if you have any questions, this is a shout out to our listeners, or thoughts on topics to come up, please send them through. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just send me a quick message. I'd always love to hear feedback on the podcast. What's worked, what you like, what you want more of, and maybe what we should change. So please keep it coming. I wanna say a massive thank you to to Jeremy, for joining us on the podcast today and sharing his insight and also his unconventional background as well. I think it it gives hope to those that are perhaps not in a typical CFO backgrounds that, you know, that those opportunities are there. And it's been great to hear your insight on all things fast growth, of course, marketing. So thanks, Jeremy. It was... You've been a brilliant guest, so thanks for coming on. Speaker 2
Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for for having me. You have a great day. Speaker 3
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