Cross-Functional Collaboration in Finance
In this episode of "The Optimize Show," join Josh Rappoport, VP of Finance at Acumatica, and Anand Maniktala as they delve into the essence of fostering collaboration between finance and other departments. From defining cross-functional collaboration to its impact on organizational performance, this episode is packed with insights.
Finance is about driving business outcomes,
achieving the business goals, achieving the strategic goals.
I want my business partners to think of me
as being a problem solver for them, not a problem creator.
(upbeat music)
- Hey everyone, welcome to the Optimite Show.
I'm your host for the episode
and I'm an account executive at Spenflow.
Spenflow is a unified, fast buying and management solution
that enables high growth businesses
to buy, renew and manage task subscriptions
and save a lot of money in the process.
On today's episode, I'm super excited
to host Josh Rappapore, the Vice President of Finance
at Accumarica.
With over two decades of experience in finance,
Josh specializes in driving success for high growth companies
by building and leading effective finance team
and processes.
With the proven track record spanning B2B SaaS,
FinTech and online media,
he brings invaluable expertise to our discussion today.
Welcome, Josh.
It's our pleasure to host you today.
Thanks and I'm expect to be here.
- Awesome.
In today's ever evolving financial landscape,
savvy teams understand the critical significance
of fostering cross-functional collaboration.
We delve deep into unlocking the potential
of collaborative environment,
exploring the essential ingredients
needed to cultivate a harmonious financial ecosystem.
Moreover, we shed light on the invaluable synergy
that arises from collaboration
between finance and procurement departments,
enhancing efficiency and driving impactful outcomes.
So let's embark on this journey together
and uncover the secrets to building a resilient
and interconnected financial realm.
So Josh, to start out with,
why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself,
your experience as a financial professional,
the organizations you work with,
and your journey so far in finance?
- Great, we'd love to.
I laugh a little inside whenever I hear myself introduced
just having over two decades of experience.
Because somehow in my head, I'm still like 27 years old.
So those few things don't align.
But I'll go with you.
I think you're factually correct.
I've spent well over 20 years
in finance and related roles,
primarily in technology companies, big and small.
I started my career as an investor
and private equity and venture capital
for the first several years of my professional life.
I quickly realized that I really want to be an operator.
It was interesting for me to invest in companies
and play a small part in their growth and success.
But it was really far more interesting for me
to actually hands on try to grow companies.
And so relatively early in my career,
I made a transition from the investing side of the world,
to the operating side of the world.
I went to work for Yahoo,
who at the time was the preeminent online media brand.
And in what we call that the time operational finance roles,
really to help folks kind of understand what those roles were.
They were really what I think today
we would consider strategic finance.
But also today,
I'm seeing less delineation between kind of pure F-P&A
and strategic finance.
So let's just say they're a part of the F-P&A world.
From Yahoo, after several years,
I went to work for Microsoft also in finance roles,
supporting strategic partnerships for the Bing search engine,
supporting the relaunch and re-envisioning
of the business model for MSN,
and then made a transition out of online media
over to really commerce and enterprise software
for our own Microsoft online store,
as well as Dynamics 365 for retail
and now Dynamics 365 for commerce.
And then also I had a small thing working
with Dynamics for talent, which is the HRIS enterprise
software that Microsoft builds.
I think important in that narrative is to note
that through halfway through my career at Microsoft
does in pure finance roles,
I think one of the topics we'll talk about today
is cross functional collaboration
and through my collaboration with my business partners,
I was actually availed the opportunity
to transition my career and move out of finance
and move into product and business management
and strategy roles.
And that was particularly around the time
that I made the switch from online media
to enterprise software at Microsoft.
So I went from finance director roles
to business management, director strategy,
even product management roles at Microsoft.
And I think that first-hand experience working
in multiple functions was incredibly helpful for me,
but also not what people think of as a typical finance
career path.
And we can talk about the, at least what I've perceived
as the benefits of that non-traditional career path
as now a finance leader.
And so after Microsoft, I left the 200,000 employee company
to move to the 20 employee company
and started my career, my startup career,
particularly with two FinTechs,
the one in the online bill-based base,
one in the cross-border remittance base.
In both instances, I was, if not the one
of the first finance hires and built out
the full finance organizations for both companies.
And that was a very interesting experience
coming from a very large stable, mature,
operating companies to, you know,
the typical startup environment
where everybody roles up their sleeves
does everything and your purview is not necessarily
well-defined, that's actually kind of a good thing.
'Cause for me as a finance leader,
I got to weigh in on really driving the strategy
of the company as opposed to, you know,
being a simple finance person.
And then lastly, after a year break to spend with my family,
I joined AcuMatica about six months ago
as the VP of Finance leading our FP&A team,
helping support this, you know, incredible enterprise
software company, ERP staff company.
It's actually, you know, tremendous growth
and continue our growth and success.
So it's been a fun journey.
I like to say now at AcuMatica,
I'm in a Goldilocks situation,
not too big, not too small,
and so far really, really loving it.
- Thanks for giving us the context there.
And it sounds like you worked for,
you need us to say like the best offer companies
in the world, household names,
but Microsoft and Yahoo.
And I'm very excited that, you know,
you agreed to be on the podcast today
to share your wisdom with the audience.
And I'm sure they're gonna reap a lot of benefits
from all the things that we have planned for today.
So Josh, you know, given, you mentioned that
with your career path, you worked with other teams as well,
not necessarily in finance, you were in product as well.
But I'd say that sort of gives you an edge
with cross-team collaboration, right?
So let's start by laying out the groundwork.
How would you define cross-functional collaboration
in the context of finance?
And why it's so vital for organizations?
- I think increasingly, we hear a lot about modern finance
as a term, and modern finance to me really just embodies
this idea that finance teams today,
in order to be most impactful,
deliver a whole lot more value
beyond reporting financial results.
So I think to understand cross-functional collaboration
within the context of finance,
we need to understand that finance's role
is no longer to report the past.
And that's a small part of it, but not the foundation,
not the fundamental role of finance.
From my perspective, the fundamental role of finance
is to be able to inform and enable business decision-making.
And it's often, it's almost always decision-making
that finances I'm making is the decision-making
that our business partners are undertaking.
And so to me, cross-functional collaboration is the idea
that we as finance professionals
work across functions to set guardrails
and really define the desired business outcomes.
And then on a day-to-day basis,
really advocate and work with our business partners
to help them achieve those outcomes.
I have a very business impact, business outcome,
centric view of what finance does.
- Understood.
And while we're on the topic,
can you share an example of how effective
cross-functional collaboration and finance
has impacted organizational performance
across the years you executed?
- Sure.
Yeah, I'm gonna reach back a little bit
in my career history,
because I think, and I'm gonna talk about
an experience at Microsoft,
because I think it was really one of the first times
I saw how powerful the finance role
and the finance function was
in order to achieve business outcomes.
And so we have to kind of roll back
and I'll do a little bit of the inside baseball view here.
In 2014, MSN,
what people don't realize is a multi-billion dollar business
from Microsoft.
Today, people might not value it as much,
but it's still an incredibly large business at a scale
that like, you know,
some of my startups or companies I advise
could only dream of reaching that scale.
So, I'm of course, you know,
MSN is really, you know, at a crossroads,
both from a business model standpoint
and a technical standpoint.
I think the word on the street was we were in 33 markets
on 19 different code bases.
So that was a technical challenge.
- Oh, wow.
- And moreover, we were in a business model challenge.
So it was, you know,
at the time we were developing
and creating our own content.
We had writers and editors,
we were basically a journalism business.
We were creating our own product
and selling it to consumers.
The challenge of that is that's a very expensive model
and a model that was significantly different
than most of the other businesses at Microsoft.
And so, you know,
the company undertook to transition MSN.
First of all, get onto one unified global code base.
It'll make us much more agile,
allow us to do much more from, you know,
a novel and innovative, you know,
ad format standpoint and the like.
But more importantly, we were thinking about
how do we really provide the best product to our users
and how do we do so in a financially appropriate, you know, way?
And so we thought about,
let's transition from creating our own content
to aggregating the best content
across all of our verticals and all of our markets.
And so the idea was, well, we're Microsoft,
we can do things at scale.
Let's go and aggregate content from the top five publishers
in every vertical in every market,
which you can quickly do the math
and that's well over a thousand content acquisition partnerships
that we were working on.
And at the time I was the finance partner
for the CVP who led MSN.
And we needed a way to define the architecture
or the framework for these content aggregation deals.
You had really large publishers like a New York Times
or Wall Street Journal that wanted their own B Smoke deals.
You had really, really small publishers
and a particular niche market or niche, you know,
content vertical that, you know,
probably didn't have the same sort of business savvy.
But we needed something that we could go and operate
and rinse and repeat very, very quickly.
And so as a finance partner, first of all,
I mentioned cross-functional collaboration
one of the roles that finance plays is setting guard rail
setting the framework.
So the first thing we did would say, okay,
what are our target kind of financial metrics
that we want to achieve in each deal?
In effect, it was really, you know,
what is the contribution margin called floor
that we need to achieve for each deal?
And that allows us to assess, you know,
these were generally rev share deals,
like how much revenue could we share with the publisher
or how much could we pay in a flat fee
based on some pretty thoughtful, well-informed,
but standard assumptions around
how we would monetize content.
My first job was to kind of assess
the overall business model and then create these guard rail.
So what are the floors for profitability
that we need to achieve?
And that's a great first step
in enabling your business partners to go out
and in my case, negotiate deals with content providers.
But that's still like, there's still a whole lot of opportunity
to make my partner's life a lot easier, right?
So set the guard or set the framework, that's great.
Now it's like, okay, how do I create tools
for my business partners to actually go and execute
and execute quickly and repeatedly?
So, you know, think of it as almost a sales enablement tool.
In this case, it was probably a partnership enablement tool
where, you know, built a very standard model with, you know,
you know, it was robust enough that it could handle
slightly different variations of a, you know, deal structure,
but was easy enough and straightforward enough
that like literally on the road,
a business development person could be sitting
with a potential partner and enter in
with just a few keystrokes.
You know, the key assumptions and understand
whether the construct of the deal that they were talking about
kind of fit our own internal requirements or not.
So, you know, another way to enable, you know,
effective cross functional collaboration.
And then the last piece of it all was, you know,
bringing it all home, you know, I also, or my team also
orchestrated, actually, I built and then we orchestrated
our own internal governance process
for how deals got, you know, final approval to move forward
and actually get executed.
And so this all sounds like pretty non-standard finance stuff.
Like, you know, I didn't talk about a P and L ever.
So a balance sheet or cash flow.
I wasn't, you know, in today's world,
I wasn't mentioning ARR at all or just.
But, you know, when I think, you know,
I was intentional on that because, look,
I could probably give you plenty of examples of things
that sound like more traditional finance.
But the reason I chose this example is to give
both core finance and the bodies cross functional,
you know, collaboration is we're basically as financing
as meeting our business partners where they are
with their needs.
It's not about, you know, I kind of have joked in my career.
Like one thing I really hate is finance
for the sake of finance.
Let's create a bunch of finance or financial reports
because, you know, that's what we think
we're supposed to have to do,
or we're the only audience for them is internally
with the finance team.
There's at times there's reasons for that.
But I believe in finance for the sake of the business.
So whatever we can do to put our financial frameworks
and our financial understanding to work
in order to help our business partners
achieve their goals, their outcomes,
that to me, from a finance perspective,
is cross functional collaboration.
- Understand.
Now that is a really powerful case study
of the magic that can happen with
effective cross functional collaboration.
So Josh, I appreciate it.
- But by the way, to understand the impact of that,
we executed hundreds, closer to a thousand deals
and 500 deals in under a year.
- And at that scale as well, at Microsoft scale.
- Yeah, I mean, the funny thing about Microsoft
is it's giant and so you would think it's slow moving.
But it's also so giant that for a lot of us,
we would scratch our heads at what becomes a rounding error
and what becomes meaningful from a financial standpoint.
So I used to joke, when I was at Microsoft,
like if I could afford it personally,
like nobody at Microsoft care.
It just was well below the threshold of materiality.
- Yeah, very interesting.
And Josh, the collaboration sounds fantastic, right?
Like you can purely see it has benefits for sure.
But we know it comes to challenges, right?
People are part of different kinds of teams
and different kinds of companies.
- Across your career, what are some common obstacles
you'd say you've encountered
when trying to foster collaboration
between finance and other departments?
And what advice would you have for other financial professionals
listening to the podcast today
and how they could overcome some of those obstacles?
- So I'm gonna use a recent example.
I'm gonna hope that the person who,
he will remain nameless.
I hope the person who I'm using as an example,
takes us in the good spirit that it's intended.
But I have a current business partner
who also acknowledge that I'm very new to AcuMatica.
I'm very new to my role.
Next week will be six months.
So this probably happened three months in.
And I mentioned that because so much of finance
and ability to collaborate is built upon trust
and trust is given.
You need to develop and build it.
So acknowledging that I hadn't yet had the opportunity
to build the trust of this person.
But we had a marketing leader who wait in 23
as we're going to the budget process.
I suggested that a team was working with his team
and his leads to really kind of build a bottoms up view
of all their marketing activity for 2024 and cost it all out.
I suggested, "Hey, why don't, why don't, you know,
I join your meetings, your conversations
or one of the folks on my team
who directly supports marketing?"
And the answer I got was,
so that feels a whole lot like, you know,
the principal, you know, watching up on the playground, you know,
and they're being called to the principal's office.
And, you know, I had to smile and laugh a little bit
because, you know, frankly, the sentiment was not surprising.
But I also, you know, I also articulated looking,
you know, I've done this a very long time.
He had done this a very long time.
I acknowledge that that can be a perception for finance teams.
I said, you know, you do what you need to do this time
around my goal.
This is my goal.
Is that my next year's budget cycle?
You're proactively asking us to join the conversations
as the folks are asking them to join them
and then make both of them.
And so now we kind of have a, you know,
sort of a mutual goal for partnership
for the upcoming year.
But, you know, I think it's funny.
It's easy to think of finance people as a people
to say no.
I mean, I think in a traditional world of finance,
that very much was the case.
It was, you know, finance with the holder of the budget,
let's say, I mean, maybe kind of finance operated
a bit in a silo.
But today, finance is about driving business outcomes,
achieving the business goals,
achieving the strategic goals.
And so for me, like, it's about, you know,
kind of showing interest in your business partners,
you know, in their activity, what their function is.
You know, your ability to understand their world, really,
their objectives, their challenges, you know,
and exhibiting that you seek to solve their problems, right?
So like, I want my business partners to think of me
as being a problem solver for them, not a problem creator.
And so, you know, the old worldview is, you know,
finance can be a problem behavior,
sorry, a problem creator.
Today, I want us to be problem solvers.
And there's a little bit of an aspect of the double agent here.
Like, I'm working on behalf of the partners,
but I also need to keep in mind the full view
of the financial performance of the company.
So of course, everything is within kind of guardrails
and envelopes that, you know,
hopefully we're setting and communicating
and being transparent about so that, you know,
we can all operate within that construct.
And so, so yeah, you know, it's finance
is the school principal,
frankly, I mean, I think cold words.
Back in my Microsoft days,
I think we were going through a significant reorg
or potential rep.
And I think I was referred to as a grim reaper at one point.
Like every time you come by,
somebody gets laid off and like, no, it's not,
that's not work.
But, you know, the perception is reality.
Yeah, I think it's really important to build that trust
and kind of disarm back distrust
in order to enable partnership.
And you do that by kind of really exhibiting
that you either understand or seek to understand
your business partners priorities and challenges.
Of course.
And one of my favorite teams in today's episode,
Josh has been how you showed us the evolution
from the old school traditional finance to, you know,
finance 2.0.
Maybe you have a more funky word for it,
but that has been one of my favorite teams
of the podcast today.
And I'm sure our listeners are going to derive
so much value from hearing how that role has evolved from,
you know, like you said, being the principal in the room
to being, you know, cross-functional, effective business
partners and helping them achieve their goals.
And talking about the future,
how do you see the role of finance leaders evolving
from here on, right?
Particularly in terms of driving organizational success
and further collaboration.
So first, I think it's important to understand that,
you know, finance today is the language of business.
And I think very much of the finance organizations role
as being that translator, right?
And it's a slightly different kind of view
of what finance does, right?
I think kind of there's this idea of translation,
of understanding activity, let's say that's happening
in your engineering or being able to translate that
to financial impact.
There's also, you know, it's bidirectional translation.
So I could also say, like, for example, like,
hey, we're gonna allocate, you know,
a $10 million marketing budget.
And let me translate that financial language
into kind of business activity or help to translate
that financial language into business activity.
And so like, what does that mean for my marketing team?
Well, it's, you know, it means, you know, $100,000
in demand-gen activity and $200,000 in sponsorship,
et cetera, et cetera.
And even going, what would that demand-gen look like?
Who would we sponsor?
How would we participate in events, et cetera, et cetera?
So there's the translation role that finance plays.
And it's typically a one-to-one translation
when you're talking about an individual finance person
to their business partners and their partner teams,
functional teams.
But finance as an organization,
because it's ideally an aggregation
of these many translators, like at the normalization,
we can act as the roger that a stone of an organization.
So imagine, you know, engineers,
that, yeah, and maybe I'm unfairly picking
on these particular functions,
but imagine engineers have a hard time communicating
with marketers.
- Yep.
- I mean, not that I'm taking that example out of real life
at any point in my career, but, you know,
this is the engineers have a hard time communicating
with marketers.
Well, is finances role to help translate engineering,
it's called engineering language to finance language?
It's also finances role to translate marketing language
to finance language.
Now, you know, we're, as an organization,
hopefully fluent in multiple languages,
and it could be marketing and engineering,
or it could be, you know, HR, it could be, you know, IT,
it could be any function really that you can imagine.
Our role is to translate back and forth from finance
to those other languages.
Well, it's not a huge leap to say,
if we can translate from that language to finance,
and finance to another language,
why can't we translate from one functional language
to another?
And so we, you know, so, you know, I had this concept,
this idea, and I talked to my team about it a lot of,
like being the roger that a stone,
helping tie together different activity
and different understanding that's happening
in different functional organizations.
We sit in the middle, we can really play this role,
and really not only collaborate with multiple functions,
across functions of the financing,
but how other functions collaborate with one another.
I think that's really, really powerful.
Moreover, as finance people, we need that centralized view,
like in order for us to be really, really effective,
we need to be able to see everything that's happening
within reason.
And so I say, you know, like, we have this privileged perch,
we sit in the middle, we have a view to everything,
we have visibility into far more than most functions have,
and as an organization, you know,
finance is typically, you know,
you typically get much, much more visibility earlier
in your career than you would in other functions,
and you know, there are many folks in finance that have
as much visibility as a C-suite,
but at, you know, much, much earlier in their career development.
I think that's really exciting and interesting, frankly.
But because we have this privileged perch,
we're also, you know, we need to make good with it.
So it's also our responsibility to be that translator,
to be the Rosetta Stone.
So, you know, I think that understanding that framework,
at least in my mind, and, you know,
I've been called crazy before, so you can,
maybe get our leave it, and if it works for others, great,
this is how I think about it.
If we think of our role as really sitting them
and all translating, tying together all the pieces,
understanding, and then speaking the language of business,
when we think about the role of finance leadership
and going forward, it's really about kind of setting forth
the business outcomes that we're trying to achieve,
and I mean business outcomes,
like the financial outcomes will come.
But if we, you know, we talk about,
we want to grow our customer base,
or we want to, you know, deliver more features,
or we need to get more efficient with the way we build,
etc, etc, these are business outcomes
that all have a financial impact.
So, like, being able to articulate the business outcomes,
then kind of orchestrate the strategy to achieve them.
Like, that is actually the role of finance now,
because we have this central, you know,
positioning within the organization.
We kind of, we use financial centers,
the framework both to set expectations, set goals,
and then also kind of be able to report upon our attainment
of those goals and the progress that we're making.
But, you know, again, to me, it's less about financial outcomes
and more about business outcomes,
the financial outcomes will flow from the business outcomes.
And then, you know, then there's a feedback with, of course,
because your financial outcomes will indicate, you know,
where and how you need to deliver your next set of business outcomes.
So, it's, it's, you know, cycle types of goals.
- Yep, yep, for sure.
And, and tying it back to something you had said earlier,
that, you know, trust has to be earned, it has to be gained
in order to get a seat at the table with different teams.
I think one of my biggest learnings from today's episode
has been that one of the most effective ways
to gain that seat at the table
is to be that rosetta stone for different teams, right?
Help them understand each other better,
to help achieve their goals and, you know,
the overall business goals.
And, and Josh, shifting gears a little bit, you know,
what are your top three finance tools in 2024
that you would recommend to your colleagues
that have teamed in for today's episode?
- You're gonna laugh.
I'm like, I'm, I'm going to, I'm gonna betray my old person status,
my elderly status, you know, it'd be kind of great
if I kind of talked about some of the third generation
that P&A tools are to set on the other,
but I'm still of the age and mindset
and I'm smiling because I'm laughing at myself,
I'm gonna say this, my top three tools are Excel, Excel, Excel.
I still think it's, you know, maybe I'm biased
but my perspective is I worked there for so long,
but I still think it's the most flexible utility out there
from a, from a finance perspective.
There are other great tools, of course,
Acnematic is one of them.
Typically, you know, we're, we're ERP, a software company,
but our customers are typically more in the main line
that's into distribution, manufacturing, instruction,
you know, wholesale, retail, et cetera.
So not usually in the conversation amongst my technology
finance peers, but I have to put it in a plug
for Acnematico, which is like a great, great software.
- And then, then, then there are others like, you know,
for example, like we're implementing an F&A tool
right now, Planful, for our reporting and our planning.
I think it's an incredible compliment
to the flexibility of Excel and a lot of the ad hoc work
will be able to do an Excel, but, you know, having our,
you know, automating our reporting and having, you know,
great scenario analysis capabilities from a, you know,
whether it's budget or forecast, you know,
kind of from a planning capability.
I'm really pleased with that.
And I hope to be fully up and running soon on Planful.
So, you know, put in a plug for them.
But, you know, I've also been, you know, I've also been CFO
or Finest Leader of some startups,
and they're like, you know, just have different needs.
So I think kind of the best tools are dependent upon
what needs you have at what point in time.
And so, in my last startup, like we absolutely, you know,
had an environment where, first of all, we had about 200 people,
but they were all spread geographically around the globe.
No offices, you know, very little central planning, so to speak.
And so, spend became a really significant issue.
And so, there are two tools that we use that were great.
At the time we were using BRACS for spend management
and virtual card issuance and even some banking.
And then, you know, a tool like spendflow
to help us understand, like, where are we spending
all the money, particularly in SAS?
And particularly with, you know, consumption-based business models
for SAS.
But even things like, you know, if we had, you know,
we had 200 people all over the globe and one person, you know,
like one particular software tool and another,
like another particular software tool,
but really their features that are overlapping, you know,
we were very often paying for both.
And, you know, some like spendflow
helped us kind of really rationalize and understand
where the spend was going and really make decisions to say,
you know, I don't even need 100% optimization of our spend,
but at the very least, it's not spend quite as much money
on effectively the same thing than we need to.
So I think, you know, kind of what tools are effective
and useful are, you know, much like everything
that are contextual.
I could say the thing for metrics and the like.
But, yeah, you know, if you ask me,
I just happen to live in Excel all the time.
So that is my favorite tool as, you know, oddly,
you know, strange place in my heart,
but there are great tools out there as well for specific needs.
- Absolutely.
I appreciate you sharing that wisdom with our audience.
And the subtle shout out for spendflow as well.
And my next question is a quirky one, Josh.
I'm sure you have more than a few, but what is one financial
jargon that you find absurd and wish you could swap it?
- Oh, man.
Be careful in case my private equity investors are listening.
(laughing)
- I'm getting, please.
(laughing)
You know, I don't think anything's absurd,
but I do, I just chuckle at like adjusted EBITDA.
It's an incredible metric and really useful.
And the intent of it is very, very, very powerful.
But I just think it's funny, like if you read, you know,
financial statements and financial reports,
particularly public companies, like the, you know,
everybody defined, everybody has different adjustments.
And they, you know, the walk from, you know, gap to adjusted
is always, you know, six pages long.
And I just, I think it's just kind of a funny,
it's occasionally funny at like how much we can contort
to move stuff below the line and get it out of an adjusted
EBITDA so that we can prove that we're in fact more
profitable.
So I think that's an interesting one just because of
how divergent the definition is by nature.
Another one that very, very powerful concept,
but absurd in the lack of consistency in how it's defined
is ARR. I forget who it was, but it was one of the,
you know, kind of LinkedIn finance thought leaders
recently kind of published a list of how kind of top 20
publicly traded SaaS companies all define ARR.
And there were 20 different definitions.
But I think like the idea of ARR is incredibly powerful.
I think the fact that we are all able to define it
a little bit differently is on one hand is good
because we can customize it to our specific business.
But on the other hand, it makes a metric kind of
probably more useful for internal purposes
than it does for true comparison across an industry.
So again, not an absurd, it's more of an interesting view.
- Me too.
- You know, I do think it's kind of absurd that we,
you know, I talked about us being, you know,
finance being the Rosetta Stone and translators.
But I do think it's absurd that we sort of have our own
language that like, unfortunately nobody can understand
if we all want them to.
- Yeah, but I think all these things is not to say,
like it's not to say that the jargon isn't appropriate.
It is to say, you know, very much like the tools question,
like the jargon needs to be appropriate contextually.
So, you know, use the language that people can understand
internally within finance, if we're using finance jargon,
we all understand it.
We have a universal understanding of what we mean, great.
When you're talking like, you know, I'm not going to talk
to my mom about our, you know, our family adjusted even,
like that just doesn't make sense.
Although we are talking about, you know, financial planning.
You know, you know, I just think kind of using the right
terminology for your audience is important.
And being able, there's a little bit of an aspect of all
of what we've discussed, you know, from a finance
and business partnership standpoint
and a cross-functional collaboration standpoint,
like it's necessary.
It's almost a requirement these days for finance people
to be a bit of a chameleon.
I need to show up differently and speak differently
and understand differently depending on who's in the,
the proverbial room, very often now the virtual room.
And having lots and lots of language to draw upon,
being multilingual actually really, really helps.
Now, I wish I were multilingual in real life.
I've tried so many times.
I really, you know, ironically, I really get stuck
with languages.
And so please don't ask me to speak much more
than a few words outside of my native English.
But, you know, when we're talking about business languages,
you know, I think I'm very multilingual and fluent
and can, you know, use those languages
for the right audiences and therefore kind of avoid
the absurd jargon that is, that maybe meaningful
to one audience but not to another.
Of course, that makes a lot of sense.
Folks, I think one of our greatest learnings
from the episode today has been that, you know,
be the result of stone for your different business units.
And that's a really great way to gain and see
at the table, so to speak.
And of course, gain the trust of your superiors
and also your colleagues.
Josh, that brings us to the end of the episode.
Thank you so much for joining us today.
It's been an absolute pleasure to host you
and understand what the future of finance holds for us.
What an amazing episode.
I'm sure our audience will have learned about
integrating a strong culture of cross-functional collaboration.
Any parting thoughts, Josh, for our audience?
Well, we have.
- Well, no, just a nod.
I wanna thank you for having me, you know,
giving me the platform to wax poetic a little bit.
You know, it's really been a pleasure.
And I think, you know, the more I'm able to share also,
the more I'm able to learn, which is, you know,
also foundational to being a great finance leader
or a great finance professional.
You know, if we can't learn from each other
and learn from our peers and our colleagues,
then we're not gonna really be able to
be great business partners.
And so, you know, it feels as though I'm sharing
a lot of my thoughts, but my hope is that, you know,
we get feedback and comments and hear from the audience.
And I'm gonna get a chance to learn from them as well.
- Awesome, very well said.
And guys and girls, you can connect with Josh
on LinkedIn to continue the conversation.
Check out the episode description for his LinkedIn
and any additional resources mentioned.
Until next time, stay informed, stay inspired,
and keep thriving in your financial journey.
Thank you for tuning in.
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