I’ve been thinking a lot about how to tailor Mostly metrics content to my “ICP” (Ideal Customer Profile). Many content creators fall into the trap of making stuff for a theoretical person they “think” is out there.
And after some soul searching (that’s assuming us finance people do have souls), I realized exactly who my ICP is… it’s ME.
That’s genesis of Sunday Soundbites. Each weekend I sit down and go through the latest Run the Numbers transcript for my own education, picking out the best nuggets and writing them in my journal. I’m on the prowl for stuff that I can put in my tool kit for later. It’s one of the highlights of my week (yep, I’m a super dork.)
I figured if it’s something that I get immense value from, others might as well.
So whether it’s through your ears 🙉 or your eyes 🙈, enjoy these bangerz.
Finance teams of the future
The finance teams of the future are going to be indistinguishable from data analysts or data teams, and it's simply because the pace of decision making has become faster.
I think the larger you get, the more time you have to look at reports - quarterly, monthly, or weekly. But in a startup, you honestly don't have that time…
It just takes too long to get the information you need. You know, it's month end, then it takes, with a great team, it takes five days to close the books. And with a not great team, it takes 15 days to close. So you have financials at the end of the following month that aren’t that useful. So how do you get information before, not after the close of a month?
The only way to do it is to ensure there's seamless interaction between data and finance. And I'm really proud to say we have this at Public. You can see, down to a user level, revenue, gross profit. and our product managers, our operations team, our customer support team uses that information to make better decisions for their customers.
And that marriage allows us to serve the users. They are most valuable to the company.
CFO sitting in on any meeting, and not being perceived as the police
In any company, the CFO should establish that they can sit in on pretty much any meeting in the company. And the reason for that is there is no product decision or engineering decision or operations decision which is outside the remit of the CFO's role, right?
Because you cannot represent the company in a financial model as well as to investors internally and externally accurately without really knowing the bones of it. And how do you get to know the bones of it? You need to know how the decisions are being made across the org. And so what I would tell other CFOs is to actually do it from time to time - go sit in on that product meeting.
Listen to how prioritization is being done. Listen to how the customers are being served. Listen to how your customer support team is interacting with customers. It changes all the time. And so it's not just when you join the company, but do it all the time…
I think it comes down to relationships, right? If you have relationships across the org where you're not the person to say no all the time and you know who you could sit with, who is not gonna be intimidated by your title, that's the meeting that you should be in, right?
But it's really important to know people across the org, up and down levels, talk to everyone you can, right? this role, as you know, has to come with humility.
Because at the end of the day, you're representing a business that others are building and running and you are working on ensuring an accurate representation of a complex machine into a set of numbers, right?
And so if going into the room helps, do it, but certainly you wanna make sure you're in a room where they're gonna stop talking business when the CFOs in the room. So it needs to be a meeting where people will continue to do their job. And the way to do that, by the way, I wanna be clear, is you only have the right to be listened only in these contexts - you don't get to weigh in and say change that decision, right? You can only be part of so many decisions across the org.
Every forecast is ultimately wrong
I would say every forecast is wrong, right? There's never a perfect forecast. Now the question is, is it directionally correct? Is it correct enough that you feel like you still made the right business decisions and even if it's wrong on some things, does it work out on average overall, like one product did worse but the other one did better? But generally, growth is trending in the right direction, et cetera, right?
But every forecast is wrong, which is exactly why I think as a CFO in an environment with massive uncertainty, which we're still in, but seem to be coming out of, you need to present options… you need to say this is the range of outcomes, and as long as we're above this, we're in the clear.
Hire people who scare you… and want MORE
Hire people that scare you. And I think it's such a great piece of advice because truly when you have people on your team who you feel like you don't really know the limits of their abilities, that's the kind of person you wanna hire.
It's such a joy to have so many people on my team who are like that. But to answer your question, how do you know when people are ready for more? It's this, right? Like, they don't even know truly where the job ends.
They take so much ownership of their work. They're coming up with new ideas. They've solved something along the way. They've talked to like two people and they're like, okay, so I saw this and then I talked to a few people and then I worked on these three options. So what do you think we should do?
And they don't even wait for me to say, okay, can you chase this down? Right? They see something and they go after it and they don't feel like it's not their job to find an answer.
