Explore every episode of the podcast FP&A Today

Glenn reconnects with Adam Shilton—who reveals the highs and lows of more than a decade selling to finance teams and what 134 deals in 36 months taught him about CFO challenges. The founder, writer, and speaker has now launched his own venture focused on helping entrepreneurs and solo business owners.

• My Experience selling finance software including SAP
• Bridging the Sales-Finance Divide: Why pipeline forecasts are inherently “fluffy”
• The Deposit Game-Changer: Why commission should only be paid on receipt of deposit, not just signature
• Finance coaching sales on overdue invoices AI and AR automation
• AI Agents workflows 

What does it take to be the finance leader behind Hollywood stories? Diya Sagar, CFO of AWA Studios, which produces critically acclaimed, original stories for comics, TV, and movies, joins Glenn Hopper to reveal how she manages the money behind the magic—from funding graphic novels that may not pay off for years to navigating the unpredictable world of graphic novels, film and TV deals. 

• How a “creator-first” approach shows up in budgets
• Building a Hits-Driven Portfolio
• The Ultimate Model: From Page to Screen Economics
• The 2-4 year timeline 
• What Boards Really Want in a creative industry

With more than 20 years of experience helping startups scale from seed to series B, Maria Azatyan has built architectures for companies across ai, robotics and the new space economy, translating complex technologies into numbers. This is coupled with her frank perspective as a single mother balancing finance leadership and advising startups. 

• Sci-fi Dreams Made Real: sharing experiences with Waymo
• Setting up ArmGate, empowering entrepreneurs 
• One month to “two minutes” using AI to work with data
• Case study: AI to Automate ERA Filings for Venture Funds
• Role as ex-CFO at DocDoc.ru whose exit was ranked one of Russia’s top five IT & Digital M&A deals. 
• Problems with cash flow to 45% year-over-year revenue growth 
• Biggest startup challenges for finance teams 

Joyce Li, CEO, and chief AI strategist at Averanda Partners, brings a rare combination: CFA charter holder, computer science graduate, MBA from Wharton, Board advisor on AI. She advises on multi-billion dollar investment strategies and works with boards and C-suites on AI strategy, governance, and adoption. 

• The power of Excel in an AI age
• The ROI of AI and what boards want to see 
• 15% as the magic AI productivity number 
• Agents and the future of finance

Rohini Jain leads finance strategy at BILL,  which delivers strategic finance capabilities in one integrated platform including AP, AR, expenses and procurement. She has more than 20 years of experience shaping and leading finance, product, and operations teams at global fintech, payments, and e-commerce companies including at PayPal, eBay, Walmart and General Electric. 

She spoke to us ahead of the earnings release for Bill.com (November 5) which revealed total revenue at $395.7 million, an increase of 10% year-over-year, and core revenue, (subscription and transaction fees) of $358.0 million, an increase of 14% year-over-year. Bill now serves 498,100 businesses as of the end of the first quarter. 

In this episode: 

• Deciding to choose finance (and disappointing my mother) 
• The GE “magic” building the next gen of finance leaders
• Building a diverse skill set in my finance team
• Love for engaging small and medium-sized business 
• Challenges and stress of public CFO role 
• Building agentic capabilities and finance’s future
• A surprising Excel revelation 

The opening voice on a Lyft earnings call is that of Aurelien Nolf, VP, FP&A and Investor Relations at the ride-hailing firm. He holds a dual role managing the 60-person FP&A, finance analysts, and investor team with access to billions of data points looking at the mode, price,drivers, frequency and demand for current offerings– and much-anticipated future services – such as robotaxis.  In August 2025, the company saw an 11% increase in revenue to $1.59 billion for the quarter ended June 30. Its profit climbed to $40.3 million from $5 million a year earlier, driven by a rise in ridership and bookings. In this episode Nolf opens the hood into the FP&A processes and opportunities at the San-Francisco-based iconic brand.

In this episode:

• The metrics that matter with billions of data points 
• The logic of combining FP&A and investor relations
• Finance hackathons, curiosity and the culture of Lyft
• Operational vs financial metrics driving Lyft’s success
• Using ML in our forecasting, variance analysis, and IR reports 
• The challenge of hiring for FP&A in the Bay Area

Chikako Tyler is the Chief Operating Officer at California Bank & Trust (CB&T). She began her career at the leading California bank in 2010, starting as risk manager, progressing tos trategic planning and analysis (spanning seven revenue divisions and 150 units), before serving seven years as Chief Financial Officer revealing . Here she reveals the strategic leadership as the bank grew, from $9 billion to $15 billion in assets, and overcoming challenges from the post global financial crisis to COVID.

In this episode:

• Math academic to commercial real estate
• California Bank and Trust’s stress testing
• Efficiency ratios and operating leverage
• Differences in the path CFO to COO
• Inclusion and leadership in banking
• The most company specific fave Excel function answer

As a fractional CFO and financial advisor, Carl Seidman, a returning guest, has worked with finance teams at some of the world’s most recognized companies, helping them strengthen forecasting, cash flow management, and strategic decision-making. He also teaches several top-rated online courses including the FP&A Mastery Signature Program. 

• My first fire-drill, creating a cash flow in one week 
• The under $50m revenue opportunity for fractional CFOs 
• The power of an advanced (live) FP&A course 
• Expectations and reality for AI in your finance career
• The catastrophe if AI gets something wrong 
• What I learned about Copilot in Excel developing a LinkedIn course
• The Power of LET 

Peter Lynch is the founder of ASimpleModel.com and serves as Chief Strategy Officer at Stephen Gould. He has worked in private equity for most of his professional career at Rabobank, JP Morgan, Argenta Partners and Hilltop Holdings. But he’s perhaps best known for turning complex financial concepts into clear accessible lessons through ASimpleModel.com.

• JP Morgan in Buenos Aires
• Crazy models during the financial crisis 
• Capital allocation strategy at Stephen Gould 
• How a Simple Model took off 
• Most common mistake in building a financial model 
• Clarifying private equity
• Incorporating AI into everything I do 

Andrew Polito is VP, Controller at Go HQ which provides a suite of back office services, including recruiting to delivery companies. The Fort Worth-based company provides back office support for transportation and logistics, seeing 500% growth in five years, earning a spot on the Inc 5,000 list of fastest- growing private companies in America. 

In this episode:

• From audit to shifting to a private company finance team
• Building FP&A from the ground up 
• Power of the 13 week cash forecast
• How I introduced automation in an initial two-person finance team  
• How our finance tech stack delivers the data and insights to succeed  

Mariya Guttoh is  Director of FP&A and Treasury at PayJoy, a global FinTech company expanding credit access through smartphones to underserved customers in emerging markets. Celebrating 10 years this year , the company has served over 15 million customers and is on track to reach $650 million in revenue and $110 million in profit by the end of 2025.

In this episode Mariya traces her steps from cosmetic marketing in Ukraine to arriving in the US with $300 and working three jobs while earning her MBA to becoming a finance leader.

• My finance journey working three jobs to pay for my MBA
• Becoming an advocate for AI in finance Two finance camps– “excited but clueless” and “cautious but clueless” 
• Using AI to automate vendor reporting across 10 countries 
• Identifying high impact AI wins (forecasting) 
• My ideal magic FP&A solution 
• How I turned myself into a self-created extrovert 
• Offset in Excel 

Akhil Khunger, VP Quantitative Analytics, Barclays, has more than ten years of experience in the field. Akhil develops statistical models to forecast balance sheets, revenue and probability of default. He has experience with time series modeling, statistical modeling, machine learning and building implementation frameworks using Python and other programming languages. Akhil, who has a master’s in Financial Engineering from UC  Berkeley and London School of Economics, has worked in CCAR and Bank of England stress testing and know the Basel III/IV framework, SR 11/7, SR 15-18, and SR 15-19. He also has experience managing junior model developers.

In this episode: 

• The worst year for modeling?
• Diving into models 
• Working with big datasets
• Getting to the real reasons behind trends and data  
• The power of stress testing 
• What human judgement can bring to the table 
• The AI component in forecasting 

Esti Levy Dadon, Executive VP Finance, Fiverr ,started in public accounting at Ernst and Young, before leading the finance function at Fiverrr. Since joining the global marketplace in 2016 she steered the company to a successful IPO in 2019. In her words: “In almost 10 years at Fiverr  I’m still waiting for things to be boring and repeatable, but it never happens because things change all the time”

In this episode:

• Building finance from the ground up at Fiverr 
• The path to IPO and the financial work required 
• Challenge of building a robust forecasting model for a public company
• Creating a finance team to last
• Business partnering process at Fiverr
• Traits for hiring in FP&A at Fiverr   
• Mindset FP&A perspective shift to connect you to the business

What do FP&A professionals need to understand about data work and BI and the work that BI is doing? Marcos Bento, Director BI, at Wasabi Technologies: “They need to translate business requests in English in a way that the BI folks can translate that into codes.

That’s where the magic happens.”

In part two of our deep dive with Marcos Bento (BI) and David Suter (FP&A) from Wasabi Technologies, we explore the execution side of their successful data partnership. In this episode:

• Our 130-Iteration Journey: Net retention metric evolution
• Cost per dollar of new ARR (and how settled on it)
• Storytelling across technical and executive audiences
• Lean team compositions (4-person FP&A, 5-person BI)
• Power of the problem solving skillset in our hiring 

Wasabi Technologies (a Boston-based cloud storage company with over $530M in funding, a decade of hypergrowth, 450+ team members, and multiple exabytes of storage deployed) sets high standards for its finance and analytics teams.  Both teams are under pressure to deliver fast, accurate, and actionable insights. Marcos Bento, Director Business Intelligence at Wasabi Technologies and David Suter, Director, Financial Planning And Analysis at Wasabi Technologies join us for a special two-parter. They delve deep into how their teams work together, across functions to turn raw data into real-time financial intelligence.

In this episode: 

• Building and gaining trust between BI and FP&A 
• Getting from “10% out” to within a couple percentage points for forecasting 
• KPIs such as dollars per terabyte 
• BI and FP&A as investigative reporters 
• Predictive analytics: forecast in the 6 or 12 months working with sales 
• The manifesto for AI at Wasabi 

Daniel Gardner is operational finance business partner at FirstGroup Plc, a leading UK-based provider of public transport. Daniel brings a unique perspective shaped by a diverse finance career across iconic consumer brands like L’Oreal, the Body Shop and Hunter Boots, where he led major forecasting overhauls and drove commercial transformation. Now at First Group, he is leading the development of a cloud-based forecasting system for a billion pound division, working with more than 50 stakeholders to deliver scalable real-time insights. 

In this episode he talks about the power of “systems thinking” in the CFO’s Office as a way of understanding how different parts of an organization (or any complex system) interconnect and influence each other.”If there’s an area, I’d say that FP&A could do with its systems thinking. Structure makes behavior and behavior makes structure. So it travels in a loop, which means that to make changes in an organization, you either have to hire people who do not exhibit the behaviors naturally or you’ve got to change the structure and alter the incentives that are producing the problems.”

In this episode:

• Bringing my philosophy-training to finance 
• Six week finance transformation at Hunter Boots 
• Getting from lagging to leading indicators 
• 99% of People Problems Are Really System Problems
• Python+ Excel (practical examples) 

Sarah Schlott, Senior Director of Finance at Tray, a leading point of sale system in entertainment,  joins Glenn Hopper to tear down the sacred rituals of corporate finance. Rising from billing temp to strategic finance leader, Schlott who has been in corporate finance for 18 years, delivers brutal honesty about what’s broken in FP&A and how to fix it. She challenges everything from annual budgets to variance analysis (“forensic accounting in disguise”) while advocating for a bottoms-up, operator-first approach that actually works.

In this episode:

• The power of aggressive curiosity in finance 
• My most accurate forecast was also the one that failed 
• My views on variance analysis 
• Running a $100M forecast in Excel 
• Why we shouldn’t treat the annual budget as a “golden idol”
• Moving away from a “spreadsheet guilt trip” every month 
• From Singer-Songwriter to Finance Leader

Connect with Sarah Schlott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahschlott/

Connagh Hopkins is Head of Business Planning and Reporting at Western Power, one of Australia’s largest electricity network operators. Connagh shares her fascinating and unconventional journey from working on the global licensing for  “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? to navigating Australia’s energy transformation.

In this episode: 

• Who Wants To be a Millionaire success (powered by Lotus123)
• The Consolidated 10 year plan at Western Power 
• Scenario planning and Inflation challenges in utilities 
• How we are stacked: 65 person finance team at Western Power
• The power and challenge of AI in finance

Connect with Connagh Hopkins: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connagh-hopkins-a9b3871/

Connagh Hopkins is Head of Business Planning and Reporting at Western Power, where she oversees the FP&A function for one of Australia’s largest electricity network operators. With more than two decades of experience across utilities, property development, not-for-profit, retail, fuel, and media sectors in both the UK and Australia, she’s known for her focus on commercial strategy, cross-functional collaboration, and building high-performance finance teams.

Matt Hudson became CFO of Grammarly – the popular writing assistant tool –  after the company acquired Coda (a productivity tool)- of which he was a founding member.  Now as CFO at Grammarly he is overseeing rapid change at the company which has over 40 million daily active users and $700m in revenue (and a 50 person finance team). Finance is helping pioneer a company vision of  AI redefining every business application and workflow, “reinventing productivity”. To this end, in May 2025, Grammarly raised $1 billion in non-dilutive financing from General Catalyst to fund sales and marketing costs and strategic acquisitions. Since then, Grammarly acquired email startup Superhuman (July 2025). You sense more is coming.

 In this episode

• Grammarly $1billion non-diluted growth investment explained 
• Being a founding member of Coda (acquired by Grammarly) 
• How my product expertise plugs into finance 
• Joining YouTube when it was around $140million in revenue to $3billion by the time I left ( $36 billion today)
• Will CFOs see an explosion of costs because of AI 
• FP&A set up at Grammarly and biggest KPIs
• Bonding over a love of Chili’s

Lauren Pearl is a Business Strategist and CFO Advisor who helps startup teams build data-driven businesses. The 3x founder with over 13 years of startup leadership experience now serves as CFO, advisor, and instructor for over 300 growing companies. She also runs the podcast “Growth Minded CFO” and offers a free course on financial modeling.

In this episode:

• Financial models at startups
• Sniffing out BS at startups
• Storytelling as a pitchdeck 
• Getting startups to engage with finance 
• Free financial modeling course 
• Being a punk band roadie 
• Functionality of Excel 

Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenepearl/

Daily CFO newsletter: https://www.laurenpearlconsulting.com/newsletter

Today’s guest barely needs an introduction. Purna Duggirala (aka, “Chandoo”) is a celebrity in Excel circles. Since 2004, Chandoo has been regularly sharing everything he learns working with Excel training hundreds of finance teams, and had roles including as Data Lead, Remuneration Modeling & Analytics for the New Zealand government. 

The 16-time Microsoft MVP runs Chandoo.org , which aims to “make you awesome in Excel and Power BI” getting 250,000  visitors per month from all over the world and his YouTube channel has 750,000 subscribers. His stated goal is “to make you awesome at Excel and Power BI”, and produces the go-to Excel resources  from blog posts and videos to full online courses.

• My Excel Journey and Community building 
• Skill gaps in FP&A Teams
• Power BI vs Excel vs Python
• Copilot – advantages and limits
• My favorite Excel function

Check out https://chandoo.org

Chandoo’s Free Data analyst course: https://chandoo.org/wp/free-data-analyst-course/

Connect with Chandoo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/purnaduggirala/

In this special episode Glenn is joined by Nate Saperia to answer the 10 most burning questions in FP&A. Nate brings nearly 20 years of finance experience including at Accordion, Spruce Finance, Hess Corporation and GE. At Saperia Consulting Nate specializes in real-time dashboards, financial planning, and interim CFO/FP&A leadership. 

The questions:

Q1: How can I use AI in FP&A?

Q2: What do you think of FP&A solutions?

Q3: How can you get to driver based decision making 

Q4: Fastest levers FP&A teams can pull with margin pressures rising?

Q5: How can an FP&A function trust the financial data it’s using when it doesn’t control the data?

Q6: Should the CTO or CFO own the data?

Q7. Skills to get from M&A Financial due diligence to FP&A?

Q8. FP&A Internship, what advice? 

Q9. Things I wish I had known earlier in FP&A?

Q10. What’s the future of Excel in FP&A? 

Australian-born Luke Mulcahy started in FP&A at larger businesses including Coates Group (internet leader in Sydney) and manufacturing company Sherwin-Williams. But for nearly 4 years he has loved having “wow” moments of finance insights with smaller companies. closer to the $5-10million range, where powerful insights are taken straight from finance to the CFO. In his words: “You can have those moments a lot more frequently with small business owners and just tell them what they’re, what they’re missing, what they haven’t got eyes on.” In this episode:

• Forecasting energy consumption for a utility company in Australia
• The fear and strategy of becoming a fractional CFO 
• The ideal set up for FP&A in small businesses 
• Why big companies often have big data problems (and cleaning that data)
• Big FP&A wins in small business
• Solving the date problem in Excel 

This special episode formed part of FP&A Con 2025 which saw a record-breaking 1500 registrants. 

The guests: Nathan Bell, Managing Partner, VAi Consulting, is among the most in-demand experts. Bell has unique experience– having started in computer science, before leading finance teams at Native American Bank, Digital Media Trends and Gartner– where he advised hundreds of FP&A teams facing chaotic data situations).

Anna Tioma former CFO of Sandoz and  Softeq. Most recently she has pivoted to become a fractional CFO at Blend2Balance. 

Anna Yamashita, Solutions Consulting at Data Rails who has worked across SAS finance throughout her career where she helps FP&A teams implement modern performance management solutions.

In this session: 

• How AI is being applied in real FP&A workflows today 
• Predictive analytics as the gold standard
• Getting to a single version of truth with AI 
• ROI in AI 
• Mastering Data Management 
• Misconceptions about AI in finance and security 
• Co-pilot, prompts
• Bonus: Security and AI 

This episode is 53 minutes packed with practical Excel insights for an FP&A practitioner and Excel advocate at the top of his game. Jeff Gudim is a senior financial analyst, Excel evangelist and hardcore financial model architect at Strategic Education, listed on the NASDAQ and which owns for-profit, online Capella University and Strayer University, Jeff made the leap from private wealth management to corporate FP&A, leveraging his financial planning skills and Excel skills rising up as a data-driven problem solver. Jeff  leads forecasting and analysis for a hundred million dollars IT function. 

In this episode

• Getting from private wealth management to FP&A
• How Excel jumpstarted my career 
• My favorite ever Excel model 
• Monte Carlo simulations 
• 3 time saving tips every FP&A professional needs 
• Dynamic arrays and Lambda functions and “fundamental” Excel change How to convince your team to use advanced Excel Completely new favorite Excel function or feature Connect with Jeff Gudim on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-gudim-7a994546/

In this masterclass Shifra Isaacs, developer Relations Advocate at Ascend.io, delves into her experience as data scientist, technical writer, and support lead providing fresh insights for FP&A and finance professionals.

In this episode:

• Data science vs business analytics 
• Pulling data not yet able to be modeled 
• Python for Excel 
• The right models for risk scoring, variance analysis and forecasting 
• Replicating a process with a new tool using AI
• How can we survive in an AI first world

Connect with Shifra Isaacs on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shifra-isaacs/

Taylor Otstot, Vice President Finance,  Dashlane joined GoDaddy (now a $30billion valued) domain registry, domain registrar and web hosting company before their IP. In 8 years he climbed to senior Director of Finance running an FP&A team of 14. From this experience and as VP Finance at DashLane he says he hires for 3 things: curiosity, ambition, and finance leaders who are service-oriented. “If you bring those three things to the table, you're able to wade through a lot of the ambiguity that comes with those decision making processes.”

Also in this episode: 

• Finance and FP&A as antidote to the machine of Big 4
• 3- 4 years in audit as the “perfect amount”
• Getting to strategy in FP&A
• Partnership vs accountability as a false choice for FP&A
• Improv comedy having its moment in finance 
• The Tarantino approach to finance presentations 

Connect with Taylor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorotstot/

Subscribe to CFO Frameworks newsletter on Substack: https://www.cfoframeworks.com/

Dave Sackett is Co-Founder and CFO of ecommerce company, AIOne,  and former CFO of  semiconductor company, ULVAC Technologies. He is a vocal advocate for blockchain and AI and finance, bringing a blend of tech savvy, operational rigor, and a  focus on “servant leadership" - that is putting the needs of the employees first and helping people develop and perform as highly as possible. He's a frequent keynote speaker, a Forbes contributor, and an active member of Financial Executives International.

• Cost accountant to CFO and AI leader 
• How I practice servant leadership mindset as a CFO 
• Being an introvert CFO leader and overcoming the challenges
• Costly failures of traditional forecasting in FP&A
• Where FP&A Software is going to be in 5 years 
• Finance AI use cases 
• FP&A as custodians of financial truth in AI age 

Connect with Dave Sackett on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davesackett/

Derek Paulson is Director of Finance and Performing Marketing at Rad Power Bikes, a Seattle-based e-bike company changing transportation. In this episode he talks about his approach to  navigating tariffs (“There  no, no word in the English language more scary to a finance professional than the word uncertainty” says Paulson as he discusses required “efficiency” and “flexibility” in their supply chains). He also reveals his approach to the finance transformation required to shift Rad Power from a direct-to-consumer to an e-commerce and retail focused model, that is “starting   with a blank Excel sheet to do the modeling for Rad Power Bikes”. In this episode:

• How Honeywell and PepsiCo are top training grounds for finance leaders
• Efficiency vs flexibility in supply chains 
• Is an MBA worth it in finance?
• Data privacy, AI, and finance 
• Making the case for SUMIFs

Connect with Derek Paulson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekpaulson/

“The Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) is a non-for-profit with a really simple mission, which makes it really easy for me to wake up and know what I’m doing every day,” says Bryan Lapidus, Director, FP&A Practice at the Association for Financial Professionals. “We exist for the success of the corporate finance and treasury professionals. FPAC, our certified corporate FP&A certification has been in the market for about 11 years now and 5,000 people have earned it in more than 80 countries.”

Returning guest Lapidus joins Glenn Hopper  as they discuss the climate for FP&A including:

• Evolution of FP&A  and AI 
• Certificates vs Certification 
• Why business school doesn’t prepare you for FP&A roles
• The impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on changing the CFO role 
• Why you need different CFOs at various stages of a company lifecycle 
• Why FP&A professionals are so hirable and promotable
• How to become CFO from an FP&A role  

Annette DeYoung, Principal Solutions Consultant at Datarails, is an accountant-turned FP&A manufacturing leader. She has deep experience in leading finance teams at manufacturing companies including Berner Food and Beverage, Rockford Products, Fairbanks Morse Engine, and JL Clark. It was at JL Clark, as Director of FP&A, that Annette implemented FP&A Solution, Datarails to mop up inefficiencies and end drain all-late night sessions at the finance department— she  liked the product so much she ended up joining the company and has since spoken to more than 1000 FP&A professionals seeking to love FP&A again by removing tedious repetitive processes.

In this episode 

• Why I fell in love with manufacturing and finance over my career 
• How creativity drew me from accounting to FP&A
• Why a hard-coded accountant attitude was difficult to reconcile with more creative FP&A 
• How to create finance business partnerships on the manufacturing floor 
• Why I brought Datarails into my finance team at JL Clarke 
• The future of Excel in FP&A
• Is finance (finally) making a move with AI? 
• The power of getting out of your comfort zone in finance 

Connect with Annette on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahdeyoung/

Craig Barry has held senior finance roles at some of the most iconic companies in tech and entertainment, including LinkedIn, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Electronic Arts. At LinkedIn, he led central forecasting, supported more than 10 acquisitions, and played a key role in the company’s integration with Microsoft before becoming Head of FP&A at BioRender- building FP&A from the ground up helping the company scale ARR from $18 million to $50 million. Now Barry is principal consultant at ClearSightIQ.

In this episode 

• My winding road to strategic finance 
• Junior FP&A Analyst position at Electronic Arts as my first break 
• Cost center focus in creative industries at EA with $3b sales
• LucasFilm (pre-Disney) run as a sole proprietorship by George Lucas 
• Pixar head of finance for their Canadian operations and production planning 
• LinkedIn and focus on “revenue, revenue, revenue”
• FP&A focus on modeling for acquisitions at LinkedIn and “virtual” P&Ls
• Strategy for building out FP&A from scratch at BioRender 
• My fractional CFO life 

Mike Dion works at a Fortune 100 company. He has previously worked as a finance leader at Verizon-as well as startups and as a mentor to  enterprise giants to scrappy startups—unlocking tens of millions of dollars in value across industries like Entertainment and Telecom.  He does this through Mike’s F9 Finance:  a no nonsense website and newsletter (with 20k subscribers) passing on the skills that have accelerated his career, providing a guide to new tools (based on his experience automating 100,000 hours of labour) and secrets to promotion. He tells Glenn Hopper: “Three things, increasing revenue, decreasing expenses, and making your leaders look good. Those are the three things that move your career, not the reports, not the forecast tools to get to that.”

In this episode 

• Passion in media and entertainment 
• putting in our first consolidated planning system
• At Verizon starting a center of Excellence (after facing a situation where 40 VPs wanted 30 decks based on Excel files   
• Lack of approachable finance content: introducing Mike’s F9 Finanance   
• Secrets to dynamic modeling and scenario planning 
• 3 Ways teams are getting overwhelmed with forecasts  
• Better prompting and my relationship with AI
• A completely new answer for Fave Excel Function

F9 Finance: https://www.f9finance.com/ 

F9 Finance YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance

FP&A Today goes on the road!. Our host city is Boston and the historic Harvard Club with an audience of Boston CFOs and FP&A leaders. Our first live recording sees an all-star panel of Jack McCullough, CFO Leadership Council, Michael Bayer, CFO of Wasabi Technologies, Cathy Yang, CFO Trexon. 

By way of background, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, talked of “remarkably high” levels of economic uncertainty. “I don’t know anyone who has a lot of confidence in their forecast,” he said. FactSet, a financial-data firm, found that over half of the companies in America’s S&P 500 index cited tariffs in their earnings calls—more than in any other time over the past decade.

In this episode we probe how finance executives can navigate today’s complex geopolitical and technological landscape including: 

• The ROI of a CFO AI Strategy  
• How to navigate as a financial leader with tariffs and trade tensions
• Trexon’s Experience navigating tariffs affecting 12 business units and 16 sites
• Tech and AI’s role in enhancing supply chain visibility 
• Pricing increases for customers due to tariffs and navigating that from the CFO’s Office 
• Back to work or not for finance teams?
• The future of accounting

Shannon Nash is a chief financial officer, board director, investor, attorney, filmmaker, and CPA. She sits on the boards of Net Scout systems, Lazy Dog restaurants, and Sofi Bank, and most recently was CFO at Wing, the Alphabet-owned drone delivery company, and one of the hottest companies in the US. Here, she reveals the secrets FP&A professionals need to know about presenting to the Board and how to turn numbers into a narrative to advance to CFO and beyond

• Explaining the power of the Board to shape a company’s strategy
• The finance of film-making and my experience making a major new documentary
•  The power of  FP&A in securing $150 million in funding at Reputation.com  
• Presenting to boards -what drives us crazy
• How improv training unexpectedly revolutionized her executive communication style

Connect with Shannon on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonknash

Watch On Board documentary: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/onboardthefilm

CEO and Principal Analyst at Amalgam Insights, Hyoun Park helps CIOs & CFOs create the ROI and strategic business cases for better AI and IT FinOps. He is also host of the weekly podcast, This Week in Enterprise Tech.

In this episode Hyoun discusses some of the quick AI wins for finance departments.

• My journey Starting as a CRM administrator to analyst 
• Cloud spend getting out of control (unexpected cloud bills for $20m!)
• AI use cases: invoices, contracts, billing and spending contracts (dealing with 1000 software contracts) and reconciliations
• Agentic AI and uses in Finance 
• Zero based budgeting and Forecasting in the AI age 
• ROI for AI investment
• People who will lose their jobs in AI in finance vs those who will survive  
• My futurist prediction 

Connect with Hyoun on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hyounpark/

Host of weekly podcast, This week in Enterprise Tech: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034

 http://www.amalgaminsights.com/

With nearly 300k subscribers on YouTube, Bill Hanna’s weekly videos on The Financial Controller Channels provide his audience with lessons over a 15-year career in Auditing & Corporate Accounting. He provides inspiration and practices in accounting and finance through his videos and courses “Designed To Save You Years of Learning” (as one reviewer wrote “I have learnt more with you than 3 years studying accounting and finance”).

In this episode:

• How I stumbled into accounting 
• Lessons in accounting leadership 
• The power of mentoring teams about mistakes I make
• FP&A vs controller 
• The accounting crisis affecting the CFO’s Office  
• My accidental influencer journey 
• Bringing practical explanation of concepts through one company followed across the course
• The accounting concepts needed to get to CFO
• Having a wife who is also an accountant 
• Being a Mac user using Excel 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-hanna-cpa-7653a851/ YouTube channel (Financial Controller) https://www.youtube.com/@TheFinancialController

Courses: https://controller-academy.com/

Today’s guest is perhaps the leading CFO name in data and analytics, the ex-CFO of Tableau and DataRobot. Now as Founder & CEO at Caliper, Fletcher draws on over a decade of executive experience at the intersection of finance and analytics. At Caliper, his mission is transform cloud cost and usage data into actionable insights

In this episode Fletcher discusses 

• The relationship between analytics and the CFO
• Subscription, net dollar retention, customer retention, and annual recurring revenue as key metrics 
• Getting from CFO to CEO and the learning curve 
• How we rely on AI and predictive ML and seasonal patterns to find anomalies
• Getting to base analytics and starting in AI
• Challenges and waste with cloud and holding engineers accountable
• The opportunity to  save 30% on cloud spend
• Moving from Excel to Google Sheets

Connect with Damon LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/damon-fletcher-bb8a6614/

https://calipersoftware.ai

Walmart, Kraft Heinz, Blue Rock Therapeutics, and the Four Seasons hotels are just some of companies that  regularly invite Ron Monteiro to coach their finance teams in storytelling. But Ron’s success followed decades of fear in presenting and public speaking in FP&A settings. Starting in accounting at Hitachi (“Ron Monteiro: “it was actually the only job I could get”) the CPA and CMA was inspired by a manager who gave him direction and mentorship doing FP&A as Kraft, as well as work over a decade in daily overcoming his debilitating fears. Now he delivers a playbook to teams across the world where finance is “expected to be at the table, not just tactically, but strategically.”Ron is also the author of a new book: Love Mondays which draws on his experience and interviews with finance leaders.  

In this episode 

• Fear of public speaking I’ve carried through my life 
• Kraft Foods and a leap of faith from my manager
• 15 years at Kraft with 7 jobs and five promotions including FP&A manager, analyst and director 
• Transforming Kraft FP&A into strategic value: Kraft Singles and “Getting Our Shit Together” meetings
• Brendan Flynn’s leadership of finance at Kraft developing future finance leaders 
• The downward trend of FP&A post 3G Capital’s buyout 
• CPG and the essential metrics 
• Learning what you can do to grow – listening tour as business partnering and putting your hand up

Love Mondays! A Proven Process to Bring Joy Back Into Your Work Week and Life Paperback by Ron Monteiro https://www.amazon.ca/Love-Mondays-Proven-Process-Bring/dp/B0DPMTVYY3

“Consolidation. A  lot of people don’t know exactly what it is. They think that it’s just an aggregation of numbers. Like you just add numbers, but it’s more technical than that. Most of the time when we are talking about consolidation, it’s international big groups that have subsidiaries around the world. Consolidation is the process of converting those financial statements normally built locally, because they have to be compliant with the local requirements and be compliant with the GAAP of the group.”

Charaf Bourhalla has been Head of Consolidation at Nestle Skin Health, Vimian Group and Edify Investment Partner.  He holds several key certifications, including the FMVA from CFI, ACCA with a focus on IFRS, and the PMP from PMI. His posts on LinkedIn reach millions of people explaining complex topics simply such as IFRS 10 – Consolidated Financial Statements, AS 16 – Property, Plant and Equipment and AS 1 – Presentation of Financial Statements.

In this episode:

• From years of struggle, to Kimberly Clarke as a reporting analyst to entering a pharma company as business controller 
• 13-year tenure as a consultant developing a deep understanding of IFRS, USGAAP, French GAAP, and IPSAS, 
• 3 Jobs as Head of Consolidation including Nestle Skin Health with 70 subsidiaries around the world
• Simplifying complexities of financial consolidation and non financial KPIs
• Secrets to working with FP&A for consolidation and forecasting and building a mid-term plan
• Continual training for teams in subsidiaries 
• Technology and complexity changing the consolidation game
• How Charaf called in when a company found itself consolidating more than 70  legal entities using Excel
• Not to pick consultants with partnerships with only one provider 

Connect with Charaf on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charaf-bourhalla-04760a1b/

Grab a beer and listen to this special episode. We are joined by Pavels Cvetkovs FP&A director at Carlsberg Group who reveals the formula of FP&A at the famous brand. Carlsberg was founded in 1847, has 140 brands, and 30,000 employees – and FP&A is core to their success, says Cvetkovs.

In this episode:

• How my career in the Big Four (and audit) served as “finance military school” 
• Moving from business controller to FP&A
• The essence of Carlsberg – innovation in brewing and sustainability 
• Distinct shareholder structure at Carlsberg run by Carlsberg foundation 
• What’s so special about the beer and beverage industry and our FP&A practices 
• Power of inventory management, sales seasonality, and supply chain and cost planning in brewing 
• Forecasting and planning and achieving highest levels of collaboration 
• FP&A set up and management of 10-20 KPIs at Carlsberg 
• Business partnering as a mindset at Carlsberg 
• Visiting sites in operations at Carlsberg 
• Biggest challenges overcome in budget season
• Refining my financial modeling skills

Follow and connect with Pavels on Linkedin:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/pavels-cvetkovs-471b231a

Alex Edmans is a professor of Finance, non-executive director, author, and TED speaker. He is regularly interviewed and writes for WSJ, Bloomberg, BBC, CNBC, CNN, ESPN, Fox, ITV, NPR, Reuters, Sky News, and Sky Sports. He was previously a tenured professor at Wharton and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.

 In this episode we talk to Alex about his new book “May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About.  He is also a co-author of the classic text book,  “Principles of Corporate Finance” and top business book (his first book) Grow the Pie, How Great Companies Deliver both purpose and Profit. His Ted Talk on what to trust in a post truth world has alone been viewed nearly 2m time.

So many thought-provoking takeaways for anyone in FP&A! 

• Leaving Morgan Stanley to become a professor of finance
• Why I give Ted Talks rather than just publishing research 
• How CFOs and FP&A leaders can think about purpose 
• Is ESG a tick-box exercise for finance?
• How FP&A and finance leaders can check their biases 
• How you can control your addiction to bias
• Silicon Valley Bank and why financial models were affected by bias 

Follow Alex on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aedmans/

Links to Alex’s new book:

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases―And What We Can Do about

TED: What to trust in a “post-truth” world

Over the last 12 years, Jason Hershman led financial planning & analysis at successful, hyper-growth companies in the sports arena. 

But his career started as a ballboy at the Philadelphia Eagles. It was a  job he spent months pursuing at 14 years old. This experience taught Jason a key lesson. He says: “things that seem out of touch, out of reach are not, it just takes a little hustle, a little effort.”

This attitude has stayed with him as he has led multiple finance teams and embarked on everything from redesigning the chart of accounts, owning  the month-end close, building financial models from scratch, raising millions in equity, renegotiated debt, to IPOs.

Finance highlights included leading the $400 million sale of Appetize, a B2B SaaS business in the sports industry (Appetize is the software provider for all of the MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL stadiums as well as theme parks such as Six Flags, Disney, and SeaWorld).  After this, Jason launched his own fractional CFO business, Point FP&A, providing FP&A to some of the most exciting companies in the sports industry. He has the luxury of turning down clients who are not in the sports world.

In this episode:

• The Philadelphia Eagles as a ballboy for 5 years – things that are out of touch are not 
• Learning accounting and FP&A on the job in my first online retail startup in New York – which eventually became public 
• Getting hired at sports startup Appetize (B2B SaaS)- combining my passions for sports and finance + getting to exits 
• The power of rebuilding a financial model as central to my career 
• Going to market as a sports FP&A fractional CFO at  Point The ideal balance and differences between accountancy and FP&A
• Secrets to rebuilding the financial model 
• Being honest on my journey with AI and FP&A

Connect with Jason on LinkedIn

Check out Point at www.pointfpa.com 

Evgenia Elezova, Head of Regional Finance, Lindström joins us to talk about FP&A and finance transformation at the 175-year old textile giant.  Helsinki-based Lindström is one of Europe’s leading textile service companies employing over 5000 people in Europe and in Asia with turnover of 496€ million in 2022. Elezova herself has transformed the finance function during 14 years, during which time she’s driven M&A initiatives, to leading finance projects. Highlights include a two year development program for business controllers at Lindström, designed to move finance from back office roles to strategic co-pilots for management. 

In this episode: 

• Being responsible for M&A Due diligence and integration 
• Experience in successful M&A
• Business Partnering at Lindstrom
• Focusing on future scenarios  
• HowControl assists strategy at Lindstrom 
• Our two-year long finance training Lindstrom Finance Business Development Program
• Moving from back office in finance to having impact on business 
• Lindstrom’s approach to budgeting/target setting 
• Core KPIs in a global textile company 
• Seeing change in controller work 
• Coaching finance leaders

Connect with Evgenia at https://www.linkedin.com/in/evgenia-elezova-513ba12/

Jarad Backlund is VP of FP&A at JFrog, a DevOps platform streamlining software development and delivery. In this episode Jarad provides frank insights and lessons from over 18 years of experience in FP&A spanning Apple, Google, and Facebook (as well as at bootstrapped startups). From overseeing multi-billion dollar capital projects to leading finance at cutting edge startups, he reveals his secrets to  building top quality FP&A teams, bringing strategic insights and creating a builder mentality.

In this episode: 

• My journey from failing as an architectural major to FANG FP&A 
• Canned reports vs the ability to create new processes and systems 
• Facing an “impossible” project at Facebook/Meta
• The skill needed to win an interview for FP&A at a FANG company
• From Bootstrapped FP&A to billion dollar companies 
• Raising the cap on Apple Care Products helping it become a $2billion+ business
• Clean data and analytics  
• LLMs contextual awareness and FP&A
• Skills and education in the age of AI 
• Becoming a builder in finance
• How VLookUp almost cost me a job 

Connect with Jarad Backlund: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaradbacklund/

I speak with Anna Talerico, the CEO of CFI, a powerhouse provider of training and productivity tools for finance and banking professionals (serving 2m finance professionals, offering 5,000 on-demand lessons and 200 courses) including the famous – including the famous Certified Financial Modeling & Valuation Analyst (FMVA®) accreditation. She is also CEO of Macabacus, a top  enterprise productivity add-in on for finance teams. 

In this episode:

• why anyone can be a world class financial analyst 
• leveraging technology to democratize education at CFI. 
• Giving finance leaders “Desk Ready Skills” from financial modelling to AI cryptocurrency and risk management (and what’s hot right now)
• CFI acquiring Macabacus and the opportunities and challenges of being a dual CEO over 2 companie
• How Excel remains the backbone of finance 
• Are you losing sleep over the AI revolution in finance?
• Basics of coding in finance 
• Best courses to stay relevant in finance and ride the wave of AI

“I transitioned into FP&A when I realized that it wasn’t just about crunching the numbers, it was more about telling a story and trying to influence the future. Working with Fortune 100 companies has given me the fantastic platform to leave transformative projects in finance, procurement, and supply chain. I saw firsthand how FP&A acts as the strategic backbone of any type of organization”

– Enrique Rodriguez, Finance Director, Walgreens Boots Alliance  

Enrique Rodriguez is a multilingual finance director and business leader. With more than 15 years of experience in Fortune 100 companies, he has worked collaboratively with global functions directing FP&A, accounting and treasury teams. He’s headed finance departments overseeing $7 billion in annual spend and managing operational budgets of up to $750 million in billion dollar business units and is a passionate believer in Zero Based Budgeting revealing how he implemented this – despite challenges.

• My background in Guatemala 
• When I realized it is not just about crunching the numbers 
• FP&A as the backbone of the institution 
• Main financial metrics bio biopharmaceutical companies, medical devices, and healthcare companies
• How FP&A departments are set up at the companies you worked for – and the philosophy and the outputs expected from FP&A
• producing outputs like dynamic scenario planning and  specific KPI dashboards  guiding decisions at the highest level.
• Zero based budgeting – the why and how of our experience 
• Biggest challenges I have seen in budgeting in my career – managing budgets during a turnaround
• How finance business partnering has changed in my career 
• The problem solving aspect of FP&A
• The opportunities and challenges of fast-growing technology 
• Saving $8million on inventory write-off in a country on a health product 
• Financial Executives International (Chicago)
• The power of a great mentor and books: Hit Refresh Satya Nadella (Microsoft) and Shoe Dog (Joe Knight)
• supporting a procurement organization in, in an early level of maturity – my toughest challenge 
• Index Match – more flexible and scalable for complex analysis 

Connect with Enrique Rodriguez on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/enrique-a-rodriguez/

Lindsey Martens, VP Finance at fintech company, Valera (Formerly PSCU/Co-op Solutions) talks about her transition from accounting to finance- and how she manages a remote FP&A team that has business partnering and storytelling at its heart. “Business partnering is my favorite thing about FP&A” Martens says, “I love being the translator. I think of myself as taking all this data, accounting data, and then all these other sources that come into it, and I’m packaging it up in a way that is very digestible by the rest of the organization, especially the leaders who are making decisions.”

In this episode:

• Making the pivot to FP&A – why and how 
• Starting off in coding and the link to FP&A 
• My career at Valera (ex Co-Op solutions)- a fintech leader with clients that are credit unions 
• Opps and Challenges of managing a remote FP&A Team 
• Small talk at the beginning of meetings (not so small) 
• Using rolling forecasts at Valera 
• Challenging budget experiences 
• Why business partnering is my favorite part of FP&A
• My biggest FP&A success: rooting out the source of at “rise” in profits
• Storytelling in finance 
• My biggest mentors and what they taught me about management
• My biggest mistake and how it still leaves me shaking 
• Favorite Excel Function

Connect with Lindsey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lindseymartens/

In more than 12 years at PepsiCo Tariq Munir, has held roles including FP&A Manager, Head of Integrated Business Planning, Head of Finance Supply Chain, and more recently APAC Finance Transformation Lead (based in Australia) delivering Financial Planning process simplification. This included founding the first-ever APAC Finance Digital Academy to build a digital mindset and culture. Tariq is sought out as an international keynote speaker and is a regular columnist for CFO Magazine ANZ, sharing insights on digital trends, strategies for digital resilience.

In this episode:

• Running digital transformation at large companies • The opportunities and challenges in your data • Core problems faced by finance teams including transactions • The big headache AI is causing for finance teams • M&A and AI Transformation • retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and plugging into external data source for your organization • Framework and governance for digital transformation

Laurynas Zabulis, CFO at Nord Security, is playing a starring role at one of Lithuania’s most famous success stories. Cybersecurity unicorn, Nord Security, went from being bootstrapped to a $3billion valuation in 12 years. Laurynas became CFO after a stint at Surfshark (which  merged with NordVPN in 2022). His achievements at NordSecurity include leading the first funding round for $100m – technically a “seed” round he says  (unusually the bootstrapped enjoyed revenues of over $100m when it approached investors). Laurynas is also building a purpose-driven finance team of 90 talented people across the department to deliver a “forward looking finance function” that propels growth at the leading startup. Laurynas has set out a powerful mission for FP&A whose vision to “earn respect from stakeholders at the company”, “have a seat at the decision-making table”, and use data and detailed knowledge of growth drivers to “make strategic decisions that drive our business”.

In this episode:

• Moving back to my home country of Lithuania, from London. after success in investment banking (and not listening to those who tried to talk him out of it) 
• Battling the “negative connotations” of VPNs when talking to investors and and building conviction around the management and culture of the company 
• Bringing finance to strategic decision-making at the company including  a CFO tech stack focused on “availability of data and of analytics in a more timely fashion”
• Investing in building finance relations with stakeholders in the company (from engineers to product development)
• Building a finance team of 90 people based on data, tech, and stakeholder engagement
• FP&A analysis powering painful decisions to sunset certain products 
• Our FP&A team structure at Nord Security and the results we expect
• Benefit of working with founders and the culture this provides
• The Lithuanian tech ecosystem and finance opportunities 

Connect with Laurynas on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurynas-zabulis-0206333/