290. CFO Revisited | The Unconventional CFO with Jeremy Foster

0:00Jeremy Foster: Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance. The CFO role is changing rapidly, moving from cost controller to strategic visionary, and with every change comes opportunity. We are here to help you take advantage of this transition, to win at work, drive your career forwards, and lead with confidence. Join Hannah Munro, Managing Director of ITAS, a financial transformation consultancy, as she interviews key experts to give you real-world advice and guidance on how to transform your processes, people and data. Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance. Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of CFO 4.0.

0:52Jeremy Foster: Now, with me today, I have Jeremy Foster. So, Jeremy is a CFO over in the US, and I thought it might be interesting to explore a few different questions around the role of the CFO, particularly in fast growth companies, and also talking a little bit about organizational design. So, welcome, Jeremy. Fantastic to have you on the show.

1:12Hannah Munro: Thanks for having me here. Looking forward to it.

1:14Jeremy Foster: Brilliant. So, do you want to give us a bit of context? Tell us about the company. Tell us about what excited you about joining them, and maybe a bit about your history as well, be great.

1:23Hannah Munro: Yeah. So Talroo is in the recruitment marketing space. We are not the Goliath in the room, which is always indeed in the U.S., but we are very fast growing and currently we process over a billion job searches a month. We provide enterprise and mid-market employers with the ability to access a number of unique candidate audiences through a very targeted search platform. So we basically, you can almost think of us as effectively a search engine that helps match up both our owned property, which is jobs to careers, as well as some unique publisher partnerships that, for example, Amazon might need to hire a warehouse worker in Austin.

2:18Hannah Munro: And they're not going to have, you know, AustinWarehouseWorkers.com available, but we built all the tools, capabilities, and have machine learning search and match that will allow us to say, okay, Amazon's looking for warehouse workers. We're seeing some candidate flow over here at AustinWarehouseWorkers.com. We're going to match those up. And then we've also got our own site where we build candidate profiles and help make sure that both job seekers and employers are getting the right fit.

2:51Jeremy Foster: Awesome. So that's a little bit about Taru. Tell us a bit about yourself. So what was your background before you joined?

2:58Hannah Munro: Yeah, so I actually come from a pretty unorthodox background. I actually started in marketing. My undergrad degrees were in marketing and management and got my start, goodness, 20 years ago now for a$500 million community bank in New Mexico and West Texas and started out as a marketing director, then worked my way up to lead retail banking operations and marketing for them. I did that for a few years, then ended up doing a stint for a company called Accenture that you've probably heard of, leading curriculum development and management for a nationwide bank client. And then from there, I ended up working for a company called, at the time, Bankview, which became Kasasa.

3:43Hannah Munro: And what we really built out at Kasasa was a co-branded product suite of primarily deposit products, checking accounts and savings accounts that were distributed through a thousand community banks and credit unions. And so the easiest way to think of what we were doing there is you might go into the local jeweler and look for a Rolex. And we wanted to basically be the Rolex on the shelves of community banks and credit unions. And we did that with a number of reward checking style products, which either paid high interest rates or gave consumers iTunes credits, those types of solutions. and grew that very successfully, ended up selling that to private equity, then went and worked for a company, helped launch a company called Homeward in the property technology space as CFO.

4:37Hannah Munro: And then I'm CFO at Kasasa, sorry. And then helped launch Homeward as CFO and then had the opportunity to go work with that at Talroo and have really enjoyed it ever since.

4:50Jeremy Foster: And that's really interesting, obviously. So in terms of building the skill set and setting yourself up for success in that first CFO role, what was your strategy around that? Because that must have been a real shift.

5:03Hannah Munro: It was. So in some ways, maybe less of a shift than you might otherwise think. I think there's a tremendous amount of value in having a strong understanding of finance when you're in the marketing chair and of understanding marketing when you're in the finance chair, particularly if you're in technology or in a high growth company. Um, because a big part of what you really need to be able to do is identify where your investments can help the company grow the most quickly. And so, um, I'm, I'm a big believer in, um, in removal of constraints. And so if you think about a factory, for example, you might have nine machines that crank out 100 widgets an hour and you've got one machine that cranks out 50.

5:52Hannah Munro: And if you add that one machine that adds 50, you've just doubled throughput for the entire factory. The same thing is really true of technology companies. It's just more complicated because you're not looking at machines. you're trying to understand people and understand where the resource limitations on the business are and what's the current constraint upon growth. And a lot of times the constraint upon growth is marketing. And so I think that if you're a CFO who's got background in that, there are obvious synergies. And then if you're a chief marketing officer or VP of marketing who's trying to ask for budget, it's obviously pretty helpful to be able to know where your ROI is coming from.

6:33Hannah Munro: And so for me, it was a pretty, I wouldn't say a seamless transition, but a pretty fluid one.

6:39Jeremy Foster: And do you think there's anything else in terms of a different viewpoint that sets you particularly apart from other sort of more traditional CFOs or CFOs from more traditional backgrounds? Is there anything else that you feel that you brought to the role that perhaps wouldn't have been the case if you'd gone through that usual route?

6:58Hannah Munro: Yeah, I think my background in operations helps a lot as well. I think, you know, typically if you look at what's going to make a business a viable and growing business, you really need to identify three things, right? What's the lifetime value of the customers that you're going to bring in? What's your customer acquisition cost? If the ratio of those is healthy, if you're going to, if you can land a customer that's going to generate$100 ,000 in gross profit and it costs you$30 ,000 in marketing and sales costs to get them, then, you know, you can put 30 grand in and 100 grand comes out the other end.

7:32Hannah Munro: And it's just a question of timing and financing at that point and running NPVs, right? Net present value calcs. And so if that piece of the equation works well, then the question is, how big is the total addressable market? and how much of an organizational support structure do I have to invest in to be able to reach it? If the TAM is big enough to build out an efficient delivery channel and an efficient, whether that's delivery from the perspective of developing and delivering the software products or delivery through your account management team or delivery through building out the right channels that you need to be able to distribute those products.

8:16Hannah Munro: If you can look at that as a piece of the equation, then it gets to be pretty easy to architect. I shouldn't say easy. It gets to be pretty easy to design. It can be difficult to architect and build, but the design function of the organization, it's a lot easier if you understand marketing and operations and finance.

8:40Jeremy Foster: Awesome. And when you make that transition, did you do any formal finance qualifications to build up your skill set in that area? Was it something you'd absorbed through marketing?

8:51Hannah Munro: So I'd already gotten my MBA. And so there was some formal training there. And then when I actually was in the process of getting my MBA, at the time I was working part time and reporting to our controller and vice president of finance at Bankview. and she went to the CEO and said, look, you know, when Jeremy finishes his MBA, we're going to lose him if we don't do something meaningful. At that point in time, our CFO left the company and our VP of finance went and asked Gabe, hey, you know, I believe in Jeremy. I want to work with him. I'd rather work for him than anybody else. Can you give him a shot and give him a promotion?

9:30Hannah Munro: And so they bumped me up actually the semester before I finished my MBA. So I was in a full-time program as a full-time CFO, as a first-time CFO, and a new dad for that last semester. So it's pretty busy. But we then brought on, I interviewed and hired an experienced CFO coach for a couple of months. And Manuel was just a terrific mentor for a couple of months to help me kind of get my bearings. and then you know i had a good a good team of informal mentors around me as well so our our president um you know several other and my former ceo at the bank um several other people that i could draw on for some expertise and help yeah so you had a good team around you to to support

10:27Jeremy Foster: that transition as well which is so very important awesome and in terms and yeah i guess in terms of your viewpoint because obviously you've worked for a lot of high growth. What do you think is essential characteristics of a CFO in a high growth organization? What are the elements that people need to consider?

10:49Hannah Munro: Great question. So I think it's really, I'd say, one of the most important is part of being able to help a company grow quickly is, again, kind of identifying and removing whatever is limiting that growth. And that may be that there's insufficient marketing budget to generate leads. It might be that you don't have enough of a sales force to handle the calls. It might be that you need a marketing development rep function to set discovery calls so that your sales team is efficient. It might be that you're taking too long developing software. And so once you discover what's limiting the company's ability to grow, So a lot of it ends up being about thoughtful resource allocation.

11:33Hannah Munro: So it's not just about throwing money at it. It's about figuring out what the most efficient way to deploy the funding to remove the limit on growth is. And if you think about it from that perspective, first off, you have to be nimble because if the company is growing rapidly, you're going to hit walls at different points in time. And I would say one of the big challenges that one of the things that can make a really successful startup CEO, I think, is they identify whatever the most immediate limit on the business is and they tackle that thing and they wrestle it to the ground and they beat it into submission.

12:11Hannah Munro: Most of the time it's getting your first sale right or getting your first customer. The challenge that a lot of times happens then when you're helping transition a company to a scaling company is they're still looking for that one limitation. And the business is getting bigger and it can't, one, a business can't react to every single change that quickly, especially when you get to 400, 500. Like you just can't continue to pivot that fast. And so part of what the CFO has to be able to do is see those limits and those constraints coming in advance. Right. So some of it's about looking ahead and saying, OK, well, when we hit this number of leads, we're going to need to hire more account executives.

12:55Hannah Munro: And at that point, you've already started the process of bringing them on board so that you don't kind of hit a wall, waste six months figuring out what's going on and then lift the barrier. So that's one big component, I think, is helping the organization be more foresighted. The other is sometimes things aren't going to work out. You're going to have a marketing strategy that doesn't pan out, or you're going to have a key software platform that nobody buys. You're going to run into some of these challenges. changes and the quicker you can help the organization pivot, the better off you're going to be.

13:35Hannah Munro: So I would say the key things to being an effective growth-oriented CFO are one, helping the organization look further down the road and being more farsighted in your decision-making. Two, being nimble enough that when those decisions end up being right, you can capitalize on them. And when they end up being wrong, you can change quickly. And then three, helping to build out effectively the nervous system of the organization so that the organization can see when something's working or not and respond more quickly so that you can make the whole organization more nimble.

14:11Jeremy Foster: Absolutely. And when you say building out, do you mean processes, do you mean systems, do you mean people, or do you mean all of the above?

14:19Hannah Munro: Could be. So it depends on where the organization is when you start. If you're starting from scratch, then you know the company needs a model they need a business model and a design a plan to be able to execute to then you've also got making sure that you have the right people and that the people are organized in the right way and structured in the right way so that they've each got clear lines of sight everybody knows who's responsible for what and you're maintaining tight communication between people so that you don't run into organizational drift, right? Where one part of an organization was working on an initiative and they're still working on that initiative and the rest of the organization has pivoted to focus on a new initiative.

15:08Hannah Munro: Well, if your account reps who are managing your existing relationships are still talking about old products and you've got four new products that have been deployed that the sales team is talking about, you're going to have a disconnect. And so a lot of it is just making sure that everybody, one, knows what the organization's initiatives are. Two, everybody's having the conversations with each other to get better and better at delivering what their clients or customers need and communicating the value that the organization's creating.

15:48Jeremy Foster: Awesome. So, because I think there's some great points in there in terms of getting everybody aligned. And I think this is one of the interesting things about certainly how I hear you approaching the CFO role. It's very much in that strategic headspace, which a lot of CFOs struggle to make the shift into, not because they don't want to, but because they're struggling to find the time and balance it with everything else that they're doing. So how do you find the time? How do you create that space to focus on the strategic side?

16:17Hannah Munro: So one of the things is I make sure that I've got the right team supporting me so that I can focus on the strategic space. I have a phenomenal controller and I've been very blessed to have had three phenomenal controllers over the years. And so I don't spend a lot of my time thinking about accounting. Now that's obviously tougher If it's a true startup, right, you can't have a finance function that's 25 percent of the organization's revenue. That just doesn't work too well. And so, you know, some of that's about being in a space that's the right that's the right size. Right. I didn't enjoy being a startup CFO for that reason.

17:02Hannah Munro: We ended up building a very successful model and the company's been very successful while I was there. and since I left. But the role wasn't what I enjoy. And so some of it's about if you're in a spot, the first thing you have to do is figure out how to create efficiency. And sometimes you may have to make room. So when I first went to Bankview, we didn't have an FP &A function. We had a good controller, but we were spending a lot of money on legal, outsourced legal. So the first thing that I actually did was I built out a very basic legal function that ended up saving us about$600 ,000 a year.

17:49Hannah Munro: Then some of that money went to building out an FP &A function. I was able to give 400 grand back to the business to help grow the business. And so we ended up putting more resourcing in to places that really needed it. And I ended up with a really terrific director of FP &A and a good analyst, and that allowed me to become more effective. So sometimes it's just about finding the opportunity to creatively think about staffing and structuring so that you can free up that time.

18:22Jeremy Foster: yeah i know that's that's a great piece and it goes back to what you're saying about focusing on resource allocation where are you spending your resource be that people or you know obviously money um and where does you know what does that mean in terms of impact on the organization so i'm actually going to pick your brains it wasn't on our list of topics to which we sort of sent through but i'd love to understand how you approach marketing investment because this seems to be a topic that a lot of CFOs struggle with in terms of understanding the value and the output. Just out of interest, how do you approach it?

18:54Hannah Munro: So the first thing to do is to get a good handle on your customer acquisition cost, right? And your lifetime value of your customers. So LTV is relatively easy to calculate if you're a SaaS business, right? You've got an attrition rate that you can track to. You've got a fixed monthly license fee that you can track to. you can calculate your gross profit margins and you can come up with a lifetime value of a customer pretty easily. After that, then you just need to get a feel for what your costs are. And a lot of times I tend to think of it in two, I think of customer acquisition cost in two ways.

19:30Hannah Munro: The first is what's our marginal customer acquisition cost. And in that I'm typically putting in the entire sales team and all of our direct lead generation spending. So anything that is intended to drive marginal activity goes into that number. And then it's really just divide LTV by customer acquisition cost and you're off to the races, right? Like it's pretty basic math. The other view is you may have a lot of marketing investment and spend that is not directly gen, right? You might have brand spend, you might have headcount, you might have strategic product marketing investments. And those I usually don't put in, in terms of evaluating whether the core business is acquiring customers rapidly, but I keep a view of it and I make sure that I'm taking a look at that so that I can understand if we're actually getting an ROI for it.

20:35And if it looks like we're

20:38Hannah Munro: not getting an ROI on that, then we'll start to dig in and try to really understand, okay, what's the purpose of the brand spend? Are we trying to build more underlying awareness so that are, let me pause and roll back. One of the challenges that can happen with direct lead generation is if you're doing it right, you're hitting your lowest lying fruit first, right? You're getting your cheapest new prospects or most efficient new prospects first. Part of what that means is that there's a diminishing marginal return on that spend. And so one of the benefits, one way to look at brand is that brand spend should be an investment that makes all your lead gen spend more effective.

21:21Hannah Munro: It's not the only way to look at brand, but it's a reasonable way to look at brand. And so if the argument is, well, we're making these brand investments to help push this down, then you go through and you look at KPIs around that. If the argument is, well, brand spend, we just have to spend it just because. Then at that point, the question needs to be, okay, well, what are the metrics that we're going to use to make sure we're getting some strategic value out of it right are we are we seeing more overall awareness are we you know those are those are the types of kpis that i would then start to go back and look for if i suspected disconnect in

21:56Jeremy Foster: that area yeah it's a really interesting piece because i think the roi behind brand is one of those harder to measure elements especially as you're a small to mid-sized space versus obviously a more established company there's there's a few options out there so but so do you have any top tips for measuring brands, you know, and like you said, you assess it. How do you approach it?

22:21Hannah Munro: Yeah. So a lot of the time it's one thing to do, I think, is make sure that the finance team is really partnering with the CEO, the marketing department and the sales department to make sure that everyone has thought about and agreed upon what the intent of that brand spend is and what are the outcomes that you're looking to achieve. And that may be something that is highly measurable. Like you can conduct a survey in a specific market. If you want to go into that market, you can conduct a survey and say, all right, I think in this area, we've seen awareness go from X to Y over a year or two years.

23:07Hannah Munro: It might be we want to look at the impact that moving into this market and spending this brand investment, what impact did that have on our actual customer acquisition? And that gets a little less precise when you're dealing with smaller numbers, right? If you had eight customers sign the quarter before you spent the brand money and you spend a million bucks in brand and you get 10 customers that sign the next quarter, you don't necessarily know what the impact was, but you can at least start to go back and look at it and say, you know, is this worth continuing or should we just kill it? And, you know, a little bit of that is intuition.

23:48Hannah Munro: It's, it's, is this bigger than a bread box? Some of it is measurement, right? If you do have the customer acquisition cost measurements tracked on a regular basis, then at a minimum, you can see whether or not it's going up or down.

24:04Jeremy Foster: Absolutely. Absolutely. So you incorporate brand, do you incorporate brand in CAC or do you keep it separate?

24:11Hannah Munro: I keep a separate view of it, but I calculate it both ways. So I actually have a graph that I, one of my favorite graphs is actually one that looks at our customer acquisition cost. And then it has two lines, one line that does not include brand, one line that does include brand. And what you can see is if there's significant drift in those lines, if you start to see the brand line going up a lot, your overall customer acquisition cost is rising pretty rapidly if you're including your brand investments, and you're not seeing any improvement in your CAC without brand included, then you know that you may not be getting that marginal reduction in customer acquisition and direct lead gen costs.

25:00Hannah Munro: And if that's the case, then you need to see whether or not that brand spend is something that you want to continue making.

25:08Jeremy Foster: Absolutely. That's a really great insight. And final question before we shift away from marketing in particular. And I'd love to know, are there any questions that you ask or ways in which you challenge the marketing team, perhaps, that's slightly different from a typical CFO? Have you had that conversation with your team?

25:30Hannah Munro: In some ways, I'm probably less challenging of marketing and sales than the typical CFO. I think most CFOs actually bias towards prove that we should invest in sales and marketing. And I think that's a really candidly not great way to grow a business, right? The real question should be, we need to invest in sales and marketing. let's prove that the investments that we're making are the most efficient and the best ones we can make. And that's a very different approach, right? I think the heads of sales and heads of marketing that have worked with me in the past would probably tell you that they spend less time having to fight with me about their budget and they spend more time investigating with me whether or not specific initiatives are yielding fruit.

26:31Yeah.

26:32Jeremy Foster: That's a really great way to think about it. And I think you're right. I think there is a tendency to say, prove to me I should invest this money, then this is the budget. Tell me where you're going to spend it and why you should spend it there. It's a really, really great point. I think that should be one of our catchphrases for this podcast, to be fair. Yeah.

26:50Hannah Munro: Yeah. I think it makes a huge difference. Just the difference in mindset becomes less about, you know, proving that the organization needs to grow and and it puts the sales and marketing team less on the defensive of like what I remember at one point I had to go back and I actually built a market by market regression. to identify the correlation between marketing spend and growth in that market. As a marketing person, I did that. And I think that it was a good exercise. But also, what was really more important as the marketing exec was for me to understand which initiatives were working. And so I think if you go into it from the perspective of telling your sales team and your marketing team, you know, cross my arms and well, I, you know, we're profitable.

27:52Hannah Munro: Tell me why we should take away some of our profit to grow. The answer is that the CFO should know whether or not it makes sense to make a growth investment because the CFO should be looking at lifetime value and customer acquisition costs. And the CFO should be the one saying, hey, our customer acquisition cost is out of whack to our LTV. How do we get LTV up, right? Or how do we get our CAC down? And if the CFO is not having that conversation with themselves six times a day with no one else in the room, then they're doing something wrong if they're trying to grow a business. But then the next conversation that needs to happen is, hey, you know, marketing, sales.

28:36Hannah Munro: I think that if we do this, we're going to get our customer acquisition costs down. Can we explore this idea? Yeah, great. Awesome. Now your ratios are right. Throw money at it, right, in an efficient way. But get the engine working the right way so that when you pour, you know, you need to pour a dollar in and get$3 out. And if you can do that, then it becomes about figuring out how you can continue to funnel more and more in to the system without having that ratio fall off.

29:10Jeremy Foster: Absolutely. And in terms of figuring out where those ratios should sit, are there particular benchmarks that you work to? Does it depend on the organization? How do you think about it?

29:19Hannah Munro: I really think about it in terms of time sensitivity. So the typical private equity and venture capital rule of thumb is kind of three to one, right? And three to one gross profit to CAC is a reasonable metric. You can do different treatments to it, like discount it back so that you're at least taking into account the sensitivity of the cash flows. I think there are some businesses where if you have a fast cycle time, so for example, one of the models I helped build out, the biggest advantage we had was a very fast cycle time. So the total transaction time was five months. You didn't have this really long five-year lifetime value.

30:10Hannah Munro: And normally, that's a drawback in the eyes of private equity and venture capital, right? Show me what your recurring revenue is. What's your ARR? That's always the question. But there are some businesses where the advantage is that the cash flows are fast. And so we were able to build out a model where every five to six months, we were effectively tripling the value of the marketing spend. And so if you can do that every five to six months, now your annual number is 9x, right? Because your cycle time is quick. And so we have a lot of traditional finance tools that work great with a little creativity for adapting that, right?

30:59Hannah Munro: It's an old school discounted cash flow can tell you a lot on what you need to do. Um, but I think that it's really important to think about the, the risks associated with the cash flows, the time that it takes to generate them, um, the long-term potential. So another one of the businesses I worked for, the big advantage that we had was we land a client and they didn't pay us a lot up front.

31:34but we could predict to a high degree how much that would grow over a five-year period.

31:41Hannah Munro: So it's kind of the opposite, right? The big benefit at that point is you've got this highly predictable model. And so part of where that really weighed in for us was we were able to change our pricing structure to de-risk for clients so they weren't paying us a bunch of money up front, it was a more variable priced model. And as they began paying us, based on the performance metrics that they cared about, making it a success-based metric that they cared about, dramatically reduced our sales friction. So our customer acquisition costs plummeted. And we ended up keeping 97 % of revenue and 94 % of gross profit with our pricing change per client.

32:22Hannah Munro: but our customer acquisition costs got cut by two thirds right and if you can do that you can really you can really change a business pretty quickly awesome now and i think there's some some really

32:32Jeremy Foster: interesting um pieces that in this in terms of figuring out like you say how where do you hold your value and like you said it depends on it it depends on the lt obviously the ltb but also like you say your cycle your acquisition time all of those things as well as um cash acquisition so um so very aware that we are rapidly running out of time so and we talked earlier about this nim being a nimble cfo in creating almost this agile finance function talk to me a little bit about how you structure your finance functions when you're going into these high growth organizations

33:08Hannah Munro: yeah so typically i i like to have a controller and i like to have an fpna function i like i like an accounting function and an fpna function and if you can afford to have them separate it's great to have them separate. Sometimes it makes sense to have them together. But the key thing is making sure that you have both kind of your traditional gap financials covered in a reliable way, and also making sure that you have all the management financials that the organization needs. Really, I do, I kind of alluded to this. I do think of the finance function as the nervous system for the business, right?

33:45Hannah Munro: It's a coordination function that should help each hand know what the other hand is doing. And a lot of that shows up in your management financials and in making sure that the metrics are there for people to be on the same page. I would say that part of being agile is being consistent, as weird as that sounds. So if you are, on the one hand, it's important to have a budget, right? It's important to have an annual budget that you can set and that you can measure yourself against. So you can say, how good a job did we do predicting 13 months in advance of what was going to happen? It's an important accountability metric.

34:30However, if you're running

34:32Hannah Munro: the business off of a one-year plan that gets updated once a year, you're not going to be agile. And so part of what I try to make sure we do is build out, first of all, a recurring and consistent cadence for effectively a quarterly re-forecast process where everybody gets fully realigned, any major strategic decisions get made, captured, recast, and you've done a full-fledged re-forecast. The other thing that's really important is to have good, if your budget's your map, it's important to have a decent set of GPS and altimeters and speedometers. You need KPI measurements that help you identify what's happening on a month-to-month or even sometimes on a daily basis.

35:19Hannah Munro: So we've got a daily income statement that we can look at and see how did we do today? And it's not gap, but it's close, right? There are daily updates on sales and marketing activity that's happening every day. We review it as a team every month, maybe twice a month, right? So some of being agile is just making sure people are communicating and coordinating and you keep the map, you keep the budget, right? But you use your compass and you use all these other tools to help you know, you know, we just walked up on a big mountain that wasn't on the map. Do we go around it or do we go over it or we dig through it or do we tunnel, you know, tunnel under?

36:08Hannah Munro: And if you've got the right tools and the right team, that's a lot easier to do.

36:15Jeremy Foster: And you also talked about your team structure. So obviously FC plus FP &A, so basically operational and the FP &A elements. And you mentioned tools. So without, you know, we do try and keep products product free on this podcast. But what sorts of tools do you find essential to be able to create that agile?

36:33Hannah Munro: So we really historically always Excel, right? And I don't know anybody that doesn't use Excel in the finance space. It's a very versatile tool. um you know cluvio or other visualizers other dashboard you know applet functions that you can use to help the business see what's going on are important and then in two of the places i've worked it's been really important to have um call it data and etl governance tools so uh things to help manage multiple databases and make sure that you've got consistent treatment so at one place It was MicroStrategy. And then we've just deployed Sigma. And so there are some tools that can be used to help normalize and standardize data.

37:23Hannah Munro: And that's really important, too.

37:27Jeremy Foster: Awesome. So lots of pieces in terms of obviously separating out the functions. Are there any other top tips that you think are really important for CFOs and high growth that people should be thinking about?

37:40Hannah Munro: focus on focus on what matters which is for most people people right and then focus on identifying whatever your bottlenecks are and figure out the most efficient way to remove it i mean it's you know i i kind of i kind of uh i joke a lot of times in in our weekly revenue meetings um that you know my job's pretty easy the direction we want to go is up and to the right like let's just figure out how we keep revenue going up and to the right

38:16Jeremy Foster: you know it's not rocket science we need up into the right yep yep what's hard is figuring out how to get everybody aligned to do it i was gonna say that i think that's always the challenge isn't it it sounds super simple but it's actually sometimes super simple is actually quite hard that's right right awesome well thank you so much jeremy for joining me on the podcast today for anyone listening um i'm sure they find it incredibly valuable particularly i think your viewpoint um on marketing and as an you know it is an investment and an expectation versus a an ask and i think that's a really great shout out um for anyone that is listening um i'm always open to new ideas for podcasts and guests and this has been really i think really insightful on a different shift.

39:04Jeremy Foster: So if you have any questions, this is a shout out to our listeners, or thoughts on topics to come up, please send them through. You can find me on LinkedIn. Just send me a quick message. I'd always love to hear feedback on the podcast. What's worked, what you like, what you want more of, and maybe what we should change. So please keep it coming. I want to say a massive thank you to Jeremy for joining us on the podcast today and sharing his insight and also his unconventional background as well. I think it gives hope to those that are perhaps not in a typical CFO background, that those opportunities are there.

39:37Jeremy Foster: And it's been great to hear your insight on all things fast growth and, of course, marketing. So thanks, Jeremy. You've been a brilliant guest. So thanks for coming on.

39:46Hannah Munro: Really enjoyed it. Thank you so much for having me. You have a great day.

39:54Jeremy Foster: now for the one million pound question what is the best finance software for your business

40:02Hannah Munro: is it a sage 50 is it b sage 200 standard c sage 200 professional or d sage intact

40:16Jeremy Foster: An impossible question to answer without a lifeline. But we have the perfect lifeline for you. Our free quiz, which Sage product is right for you, will tell you which product is the best fit for your business in just five minutes. All you need to do is head to www.itassolutions.co.uk and answer a few simple questions.