1213: When Constructive Tension Yields Sharper Decisions | with Martin Uhrik, CFO, Third Bridge

0:00Martin Uhrik: Support for CFO Thought Leader comes from OneStream, Trusted Data, Faster Decisions, and Salesforce. Explore new research on the future of finance and AI at Salesforce.com slash CFO Report. This is Kevin Ettrick, CFO of Quantoscape, and you are listening to the CFO Thought Leader podcast. This is episode 1213.

0:30call it after 12 months you know six to 12 months um we actually improved the margins of the business and if anything um we didn't lose any creative spirit um in fact we we lifted the uh the energy in the in the organizations because people were shocked they had no idea that you know what they were doing wasn't as profitable as they thought um so the the the lasting lesson that I had was like, look, don't be shy to challenge the status quo. Don't stop if you get pushback. Because in fact, pushback and tension is all part of the game, right? You have to have tension, you have to have pushback, and you have to have your opinion and your conviction.

1:19And with that tension, you know, comes better outcomes.

1:25Martin Uhrik: Hi, it's Jack. On today's show, we speak with Martin Yurek, CFO of Third Bridge.

1:37Martin Uhrik: There's a moment in every transformation when the numbers are clear, but the organization is not yet ready to act. For CFOs, that may be the real test. Do you wait for broader agreement or introduce the tension needed to move while the business still has choices? Today's conversation explores what can happen when finance makes the economics visible, even when leaders worry the transparency could unsettle the people doing the work. The interesting part is not simply whether the numbers improve. It's how people respond. when they finally see the full picture and what that response teaches us about judgment, conviction, and the timing of change.

2:24Martin Uhrik: Our talk with CFO Martin Uric begins after this.

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3:27Martin Uhrik: That's salesforce.com slash CFO.

3:40Martin Uhrik: Hello, CFO Martin Urich is with us. His career has crossed industries and continents from business performance roles at Nokia and Australia and New Zealand to finance leadership roles at Technicolor in Paris, Hollywood and London. After returning to Sydney as Aura Group's CFO, he now leads finance at Third Bridge, where finance sits at the intersection of human expertise, AI-enabled research, and an evolving revenue model serving the world's decision makers. Martin, welcome. Jack, thank you, and it's a pleasure to be here. So please, Martin, take a look back for us and try to highlight some of those experiences you feel prepared you for finance leadership.

4:31Martin Uhrik: What would come to mind? Great. Just following up on your introduction. So I'm a CEO of Third Bridge, and I've spent the last 25 years working for technology-driven services organizations. and my path to get to where I am today had a number of key triggers and milestones which gave me the skills to progress upwards and you mentioned Nokia in New Zealand, that's one of them. So I was the business performance director, so a role outside of Finance, where I actually owned the P &L for our services outsourcing agreement with Telecom New Zealand in a fast ramping environment, which included negotiating rate cards with Telecom New Zealand.

5:29What I learned from that experience was, you know, profitability comes down to three things, the Raycard, utilization, and delivery excellence. Moving from New Zealand, as you mentioned, I jumped back to Australia for Nokia as well. And I had a great pleasure to actually be the sales director. So I moved to sales totally out of finance for about 18 months. And I was a sales director trying to sell hardware to a telco called AAPT. And what I learned in that experience was the deal doesn't just close because you have the best solution. It actually closes when you understand the problem your client is trying to actually solve.

6:22And that problem understanding has different angles depending on who you ask. So for example, the engineering head, he wanted the optimum technical solution. procurement of course wanted the best price operations wanted to make sure that they can actually run the network and marketing wanted to know the impacts on revenue per user so winning all these different stakeholders across to help me close those deals and what stayed with me after that experience was that every bid is unique and when someone asks me, hey, please drop your price, please approve a price reduction, the first question I ask is, have you answered all the stakeholders' questions in the different parts of the organizations before we talk about price?

7:19And the final one, which you also mentioned, Jack, is Technicolor Creative Studios or Technicolor. one symbolic experience that i had during my time at tech in color was looking back i joined as cfo of creative services in 2013 and the business had revenue around 800 million it's profitable market leaning and two-thirds of the business came from printing film so you know the classical old photochemical film that you have in cinemas. So on face value, the business was great. But underneath, we knew that the film business was disappearing literally overnight as cinemas turned into digital. And therefore, the cash cow that was, was going to be gone tomorrow.

8:13The hard part of the job that I had wasn't to do the analysis like a finance person. and we can see orders going down, margins reducing and so forth. That was the easy part. The hard part was to convince everybody to move now and transform and shift the business while still making cash and closing down all the film factories around the world and then using the excess cash that we had before the actual cash cow disappeared and investing that into new business lines in visual effects, animation and advertising. So look, fast forward six years later, the business still had$800 million in revenues.

8:57So the top line, the same, but underneath it, right, a totally different structure from a film, physical film to a 100 % services organization. So what stayed with me, and I'll pause, was that the window of change has a limited time and it's best to act when the cash is still healthy. And it's also best to act when the organization thinks that perhaps we should hold a bit longer. The longer you hold, the harder it is, and the more it becomes a restructuring discussion rather than reinvesting the cash that you have. And that stayed with me for a very long time.

9:38Martin Uhrik: Well, the way you described that, it looked like you nailed the timing correctly. Can you give us a reality check? Do you wish you would have done things speedier or you really nailed this one? I think collectively as a management team, I think we nailed it. And look, nothing's ever, you can't time everything to a T, but at least we had enough of the backlog. We had 18 months when we knew the clip's coming and therefore we started early. And the earlier you start, the better it is. So I think all of us, we should be proud of that particular crossroads that we all tackle together. I found your story about at Nokia, you moved into a sales role there for a while and you shared that story with us.

10:28Martin Uhrik: Did you have to be pushed to do that? I mean, you were eager and willing to step into that role or did you? Because it seems like it's not the traditional finance path for sure. What was your thinking at the time? Was it a risk? Yeah.

10:47So working backwards, was it a risk? Sure, you could think about the risks to your potential traditional finance path role. For me, at that stage of my career, I was in my mid to late 20s. And I wasn't thinking, hey, one day I want to be a CFO or an X-layer role. For me, it was all about what can I learn? what can I get exposed to and how can I get a different angle of trying to understand a particular problem so when the role was available I put my hand up and it wasn't an obvious transition but purely due to being curious, being willing being energetic and knowing that you'll fail but you'll fix it up having the right attitude got me through and I can share many more lessons if you like during that period.

11:42But I learned a lot. And for that, I'm grateful.

11:46Martin Uhrik: Yeah. Again, I do think you put your hand up and I think maybe that's something you did throughout your career. I'm just wondering if during your career moves, did you ever misjudge something? And maybe it was a move in a geography or something you thought there would be greater opportunities here or there. I don't know. But anything you misjudged along the way or you were like, hmm, I might have done that move a little differently. generally I don't have any regrets and I do feel fortunate for the opportunities that have come about but I think you've nailed it Jack all of my roles, vast majority have been on decision points and inflection points the move from Sydney to Paris just got engaged um i'm an aussie so funny accent right we all have accents um my wife's from new zealand um so she's got her own unique accent um and uh just got engaged and uh i went to paris with my sales role for nokia and then i got asked to change companies um having dinner with someone that i knew at at technicolor and um and i came home and i said honey what do you think and voila, next year we're in Paris and conversely, I'll give you one more example we're living in Paris we bought a little apartment, little small apartment six square meters, it's Paris done a full renovation, had our first child Thursday night, having dinner I got a call from the group CFO at the time and she says to me, hey Mahdane what are you doing on Sunday night?

13:31and I said, why do you ask? She goes, I think you should think about going on a plane and there's a role to be the CFO of Creative Studios based out of LA. What do you think? And I said, well, can I think about it? And she goes, you had till Sunday. So Jack, just a bit of an insight, my wife and I had a chat and next, you know, as you saw in my profile, I ended up in LA with my wife. So that's been a story of my career.

14:04Martin Uhrik: sometimes leadership skills come in different places. As you shared with us sort of your trajectory and where you gain certain experiences, I'm wondering if maybe your leadership trajectory was a little different, whether there were certain, you know, you turned around and you realized this is the largest team you've ever had to manage and lead, and yet it wasn't perhaps the most innovative chapter of your career. Sometimes leadership lessons come from other places. Can you reflect on that a little bit for us? And maybe that's not the case. Maybe you'll closely parallel your trajectory with the number of people you led.

14:52It's a good question, Jack. Like I, each role that I had, had its different leadership dimensions. And whether it was moving from Paris to LA where my team grew, whilst in LA, the role also evolved and expanded and I had more team in my responsibility. So I, it was a natural progression. but one of the things that I face and others have also faced is you just got to make sure you don't ever think, can I do this? Because you haven't done it before. So it's a natural sort of human pattern to challenge yourself and say actually am I capable but of course you are because it doesn't have your strengths and you got to surround yourself with people who compliment you and you learn that um and you can't do it all so so i think it's just you know not directly answering your question but uh it's just having a go doing it and backing yourself and knowing that nothing's perfect right nothing ever will be perfect again to point out

16:06Martin Uhrik: at technicolor um you made a 14-year investment and you had a lot of advancement along that way and you step into multiple sort of CFO unit roles and geography roles. When you're thinking about your next step, it seems like you want it to be CFO of an organization. And I'm wondering if headhunters are calling you and you're building relationships there to look for these types of opportunities where you can step in to be the CFO. in a sort of a global CFO? Yeah, I did start receiving, whether it was LinkedIn connections or emails from different agencies when I was in LA or when I moved to London.

17:04And it's very important to build those relationships, even if you are not looking because at some point at the end what matters is those relationships. But where I personally forged stronger relationships with recruiters was in fact when I was looking to hire for my team. And through those processes, you understand how the recruiter thinks. They understand how you think and who you are. And through those relationships, you actually forge, you know, a handful of good contacts. And therefore, yes, look, for many years, I've been fortunate to get a number of emails or calls. And then I look at the end, you know, for anybody to decide what's best for them at that particular juncture.

18:01Martin Uhrik: And here again, I mean, you're somebody who has held senior finance roles in, you know, three different parts of the world, is the way I would simplify it, it seems to me. So you're kind of a unique... Are you positioning yourself as, look, I could be based in London, I could be based in Australia, I could be based on the West Coast of the United States, or even New York. Were you that open to opportunities or no? Are you closing the lens on geography? I think one has to be open to possibilities. And then, you know, geography is important, of course, but, you know, what's really important is your connection and understanding with the CEO, which is your day-to-day, you know, aspiring partner.

18:56Do you believe in the organization and what it's doing? You know, do you believe in the market it's in and so forth? You know, how will you culturally fit in and can you have any impacts? All these things, I think, probably take priority over location. However, having said that, I have two children with my wife, and as they become older, the mobility starts to have certain windows of constraints which you have to work through. When they were younger, or just two of us engaged and moved to Paris, it's like, let's just go. So Mark got a 15-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl, and they're in high school, both of them.

19:39So then you sort of start to chunk up the options. But look, for the right role and for the right cultural fit and the right purpose, I think one should be open because you just never know what's laying on your lap.

19:58Martin Uhrik: Well, thank you, Martin. We threw a few extra questions your way, but you have an interesting career that stretches around the globe. So we always like to understand better how those decisions are made. We'll have a few more career-related questions for you, but right now we'd like to find out more about Third Bridge. For listeners new to Third Bridge, what do you provide? And who relies on this? Where's the opportunity? Tell us about it. Yeah, with pleasure. So Third Bridge is a global provider of primary research and expert intelligence. So what we capture is the qualitative judgment and the operational context behind financial numbers.

20:47So what does that mean? Before I answer that, I will just give a bit of a lens on who our customers are. So our clients are professional investors. They're advisors, corporates, or any other users of research. Specific examples are customers' private equity funds, our customers' investment banks, hedge funds, all consulting firms. So we provide the qualitative layer of what's behind the numbers to allow our customers who are investors to make investment decisions. So if I go a little bit more detail and say, well, okay, give us some more context. Look, we're a global organization spanning Europe, Asia, and the US.

21:45We cover all those key markets. And practically, what do we do? So each year, we facilitate hundreds and thousands of expert conversations across sectors, geographies, and different stages of a company's maturity. And that gives us breadth of continuously refreshed view on three key things. One, which markets and companies and questions matter to our investors? two which experts hold credible answers and three which topics warrant further research and what we do is we convert all that into proprietary content and every expert that we engage every client interaction that we have creates an enduring record and that compounds in value for our content over time

22:44Martin Uhrik: well third bridge remains and you can correct our facts here but third bridge remains founder led with astorg as an investor and we wonder how that ownership has shaped the firm's investment priorities um so the um the maybe a bit of history and i'll come to the direct question jack about the capital structure so yes found the lid um commenced the company commenced almost 20 years ago um and initially there was angel investors like any startups and uh for almost a decade the company grew organically in terms of it's finding its own growth through cash generation and late teens early 20s as you know Astog invested so Astog and also IK partners they're the minority shareholders the the founders still hold a big chunk of the of the investment and so it creates a nice balance sheet and structure and in terms of your question, how does that shape the investment decisions, I think there's healthy discussions between the shareholders.

24:14You know, the founders know the business very well. We have a very supportive sponsor. You know, they do trust in the management team. Of course, they put forward their suggestions and ideas as they should, creates a natural tension as they should be. But fundamentally, they backed the founders, and it's the founders and the CEO who drive the strategy, and that's how we operate in this environment.

24:42Martin Uhrik: Now, if I understand customers buy expert access and research content, and I'm wondering which side best explains sort of the company's economics today? So we engage experts where there is directly commission for our clients and our clients can speak directly to experts on any particular topics. They want to go more in detail to help them form an opinion and collect facts for their decision process to invest or not in a particular organization. So that's one revenue stream. That revenue stream is very much tied to our content stream. So we have annual recurring revenue for our content, so ARR.

25:39So the services business is very much tied to the content business because the same experts also provide insights into content and then you get signals from the services side and then you figure out which content to research on. So we have a team who does, we have a bunch of analysts, very bright analysts who do research for our content. And then so we have recurring revenue and our clients can choose to either commission their specific research or through our research team, they can get a subscription to our content and do their own research whereby we plug into their workflows with the help of AI and MCP, which MCP is a new protocol, and they themselves can do on their desktop research to help fill their investment thesis for their investment committee.

26:37But they both are very much linked because, again, experts are at our core and the flywheel of the services and the content is very much integrated. So that's our business model and that's our revenue streams. We always like to talk a little bit

26:57Martin Uhrik: about your visibility into the business and we're always curious about sort of those early signals that finance leadership has, whether it's looking at client research activity or library usage or just renewals. What do you watch? What are you watching?

27:19so first and foremost what do I watch whether it's that client research

27:27Martin Uhrik: activity, that library usage and again renewals these are all things I would imagine we would imagine you're looking at indeed, it starts with your revenue so what's our ARR doing annual recurring revenue what's our upgrade rates what's our churn rates, the classical SaaS metrics you have on any content business, what's our usage, and which is what you mentioned in one of your statements, which is how frequent is our content used. Also, obviously, on the commissioned connecting our experts to our clients, we look at utilization the capacity so there's a few key KPIs I look at regularly but just to name a few top of mind I wonder about I want to touch on AI with you and we wonder particularly for a business like this where you're placing the research inside these AI platforms that are out there.

28:44Martin Uhrik: I mean, what do you have to protect? What's top of mind for you when you're considering AI strategy? Yeah, so as you mentioned, Jack, so our thesis is to ensure that, you know, we connect to the workloads of our clients. We don't have a closed four walls strategy where we lock our clients into coming on our portal, we're very happy to, and actually we're encouraging it to go beyond our own portal and into the client workflows. And what's allowed us to do that is the MCP, which is a new protocol that's been created. It's like a, call it, it's an API for the AI world. It's a connector. But the MCP, you know, you can have an MCP that is basic or you can have different layers of MCP.

29:44And, you know, we have quite an advanced MCP which allows us to connect to clients. So with that, in terms of what we try to protect is just to ensure it is our proprietary insights and content that we generate. And therefore, we need to ensure that the connection to our clients is protected. and of course our clients that we engage with also are going to protect what they receive from us. So our clients are sophisticated investors, large PE funds, hedge funds, investment banks. So they also have a high degree of compliance requirements. So for us, we just need to ensure that from both parties, we have the right connection in place so that we have no leakage of data and we protect our core IP but also we protect our clients that they get the right insights from our research.

30:45Martin Uhrik: Wondering where you perceive AI as creating the greatest customer value at this place and time? I mean, is it helping customers find the right insight? Is it helping them you know come forward with answers you know synthesizing answers i don't know how to put it yeah um if we if you just look at the ai landscape um all of us right we're flooded with um content we've you know different llm driven answers um yeah like i myself uh yeah i'm on my personal the journey of using AI. I'm sure everybody else is. And AI is there to give you an answer, right? And one of the things is, you know, how can we research and that the answer you're given is actually factual.

31:39And it's not one of hallucination or embellishment and so forth. So one of our core value propositions vis-a-vis of our clients and the benefit our clients get is we actually have a very strict compliance process of verification, meaning when we interview experts, when we speak to experts, they are who they say they are. I mean, it sounds obvious and simple, but it's really important. Secondly, the other key important benefit for our clients is when a client does a search, tell me about company XYZ and whatever question they have for the particular company in their investment research, the answer they get back, if they have a connection to AMCP into their, say, Claude or ChatTPT instance, if they get an answer back, they actually get a citation from us to say, here's what we believe it is, to answer your question, Mr.

32:43or Mrs. Customer. And you actually get a citation to say, right, it's come from this content, from this particular transcript and the customer can actually click and see what the transcript was, when it was published, etc. So we actually are very proud of what we've created because again, in this world of abundance, trust and verified insights providing the judgment that we provide based on our content is pivotal, is vital.

33:20Martin Uhrik: we're wondering the types of trade-offs that different businesses have to make. And for this business, as AI makes research perhaps easier to consume, we wonder what remains hardest to price or to forecast. I would imagine it's still unclear. um yeah um i think we have we all need to be you know humble when there's such rapid change and uh there's a lot of questions that are unknown um and um like and what do i mean like in a traditional sas model content model your your pricing model generally your pricing model is is is per seat or per user. But with the, you know, increased usage of AI, you know, when you had previously 10 or 20 individual users paying a, you know, individual license to connect, all of a sudden with AI and with MCP, again, you say you connect to our platform, you know, the amount of content you can consume accelerates because a human can read one for one, but then if you ask the machine, hey, this is my thesis, here's the questions I have, bring me an answer.

34:52The AI can read much faster than any human can. So what that does is it makes you reflect how do you price for this? How do you evolve your pricing model? And how do you ensure you also protect the value you have that you create. So there's a lot of questions to be answered, Jeff.

35:13Martin Uhrik: Yeah, well, thank you for answering our AI-related questions. Hey, we're up to what we like to refer to as our finance strategic moment question. This is where we ask finance leaders to share one moment of insight along the way that they've experienced. And as I think I mentioned, we get all sorts of answers here. But what would you like to share as a finance strategic moment with us? Yeah, and thank you for giving me yesterday internally to get this question, just thought about it. There's been a few, but the one I would bring to this call is during my time at Creative Studios at Technicolor.

36:02so as i joined as the cfo for creator studios going through that transformation story we we also went on a m &a spree to uh to you know buy revenue in the strategic framework that we that we that we set ourselves to achieve and we actually bought a company called the mill and the mill was a visual effects advertising company and by that acquisition what happened was inside of our portfolio we had a number of brands and we had two of the best brands for visual effects advertising and that was mpc mc mpc um and also the mill and then one of the things i did early on was compared the the margins of each of the brands because they had separate leadership separate structures and will run standalone part of a holding company so I compared the margins and one of them far exceeded the other and I started to question why and one of the brands which I will not name but it's two so it's a 50-50 chance you'll get which one it is and one of the brands actually what they were not doing which the other brand was they were not showing the full profitability of each projects meaning in the visual effects world each brand did about 3 000 projects per year and each brand had a you know revenue cost associated and we could track profitability of each project and one of the brands only went down to direct margin and and of course at direct margin level if you were a receiver of of that information it looked rather healthy so when i when i when i discovered this i went to the ceo of that business unit and i said to this person why are we doing a fully absorbed all the way to ebta um you know profitability visibility by project why are we showing the creatives the true state of the business um and otherwise we'll never fix it and and um the reaction from the ceo was one of you're crazy right you can't do this you know we're a creative business um we're run by creatives we're premium brand and if you show the creatives that actually we're not that profitable at the bottom line you know we may lose them we may lose the luster and you know and and the shine of the business um and then you know and then we won't be able to be as successful as we are and so there was pushback and uh and And we acquiesced and I insisted and I said, look, no, we have to do this.

38:54There's no other way. I can't figure out how to solve this. Obviously, you can't figure it out, otherwise you would have. So we need to do this. A lot of resistance, but we did it. And after several months of showing the true profitability by project to the creatives, in fact a few months of deep diving we looked at how do we price things you know what's our rate cards what's our utilization are we capturing the client's requirements correctly are we doing change requests right because in a creative world a lot of changes come through and therefore are we capturing that to price it and pass to the customer we went through this whole exercise and call it after 12 months, 6 to 12 months, we actually improved the margins of the business.

39:43And if anything, we didn't lose any creative spirit. In fact, we lifted the energy in the organizations because people were shocked. They had no idea that what they were doing wasn't as profitable as they thought. so the the lasting lesson that I had was like look don't be shy to challenge the status quo don't stop if you get pushback because in fact pushback and tension is all part of the game right you have to have tension, you have to have pushback and you have to have your opinion and your conviction and with that tension comes better outcomes and as proven in this example, we actually lifted the margin substantially and a parting note on this particular learning that I had, don't be too quick to assume what others will think because in fact, that will just surprise you as they surprised the CEO of the reaction that we received when we showed the actual state of the business.

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42:30Martin Uhrik: Some great insight there for us. Thank you, Martin. We are up to our mentoring round. This is where we want to ask you about your first 90 days in a CFO role. You had observed CFOs during the course of your career, knew quite a bit about the role, but we always think there's something you wish you knew before you stepped into that CFO role, what would it have been that you would tell yourself if you could go back in time, let's say? Yeah, going back to my grasshopper days, and actually one of my former CEOs used to call me Boy Scout when I first started as my first CFO gig. and um one of the things that i that i learned and which is which has stuck with me um and i will show you a little earlier but um but you have to go through these things was you know i i was a firm believer having a finance training and uh you know cpa background and all those wonderful things you do um that you had to get the business case spot on right that you you had to get the to work, you had to get the proper payback, the return on capital employed, you had to have the right WAC, it's so important to get the WAC inputs, where the average cost of capital.

43:58All these things for me at that stage, so important and having scenarios, base case, high case, slow case, all important stuff um but my first experience in presenting a key business case to the CEO was you know he looked at me and says very good um however we're going over here um and uh and I was like taken back and here I thought I had this wonderful analysis it all stacked up and it all made mathematical sense but uh you know the one key ingredient which takes years to to develop and learn is is the business judgment um and um you know at that stage i didn't have enough context about the business um you know my maths made sense of course my my training made sense but i i didn't spend at that time um enough of an investor in my time talking to people right so my my learning and personal advice to myself if i'm back in time was spend time talking to as many people as you can ask a lot of questions um and people love to talk they love to give you their perspective and that's how you get more insights and that's how the business comes alive right the numbers start having a meaning um and i would encourage you to spend a lot more time asking questions than coming to an Excel business case conclusion because that's not how things always work.

45:36But, and I say the word but gracefully, also very practical advice to myself going back, don't overthink, don't overanalyze. And there's a big power in just do it, right? Just do things. get stuff done and look the more you do the more energized you will feel from your accomplishments right and the more you will grow and learn so you know that package to me is is something that i had to learn myself um and we're doing we're moving forward yes you make mistakes yes you learn yes you ask questions um but that's how you will form your understanding and that's how you become more competent in understanding what's actually driving those numbers.

46:25Martin Uhrik: Great, great reflection for us. Thank you for that. We always like to ask our guests to reflect a little on the personal side of things. What's something many people don't know about you, Martin? Two things. I'll just mention one, but I'll go a little bit about the other. So I was actually born in what used to be called Czechoslovakia, which no longer exists. So I'm often a Slovakian side. And my parents were immigrants to Australia when I was eight. So I've got a few passports which allow me to travel around the world. So that's one snippet. But the other snippet, which personally I'm very open to share, is I love pushing myself and having a purpose in life.

47:17So what does that mean? On two occasions, I actually did the Oxfam charity walk in India, in Bangalore, which is walking 100 kilometers or almost 62 miles for American audience. where you start at 6am in the morning and you walk through villages, you walk through rural areas and you walk non-stop, if you choose to, in your team for 24 hours until the next morning. And so I've done it twice. We raised money. We had lots of fun. We were chased by stray dogs at early hours of the morning. we were greeted by smiling children at schools coming up to us and wanting to say hello very vivid memories of two memories actually one of talking rubbish at 3 in the morning because you're so tired but you have to keep going and the other one actually which has also stayed with me was at the 40km mark I went holy moly when I went in 40 and I said it out loud and our team leader who was also the CEO said to me um he looked at me and said grasshopper one step at a time right um and you know per my other comments my prior learning about to just keep doing you know that that stuck that stuck with me don't overthink and and just keep moving and if you keep walking you you end up getting there what how how many hours would that take normally um so it depends on on how fast you want to get it done um some people some groups took them two or three days because you can actually sleep along the way for our team we're a bunch of you know very competitive um high achievers um it took us 23 hours um on the first attempt and then i think 21 hours the following year um and um yeah so So 24 hours, just under 24 hours, but no sleep and lots of adrenaline towards the end.

49:32Martin Uhrik: Is it a global event or is it, you know, who's on the walk? What types of population? Yeah, so for the Oxfam charity, so they do this event at different locations around the world. and what happens is corporate teams join and then donate to specific charities and causes. During the years we were there, donations were made to women's charities for domestic abuse and we also donated a bunch of equipment and books to schools for kids who are underprivileged but it's corporate and you're in groups of 5 to 6 and then depending on the size of your organization, you may have three, four, five teams and therefore there's several hundreds of people who walk this charity walk.

50:28Martin Uhrik: And again, the charities are local though, so it could be in different parts of the world, but India benefited from Indian charities. Yeah, it's Oxfam. It's a global organization, but it's local benefits. Yes, it was specifically to the India part of Oxfam. Wonderful. Thank you. I personally hadn't heard about it, so I appreciate the extra detail there. We're up to our final question where we're going to ask you to look forward finally. We'd like to know what your priorities for the coming 12 months are as a CFO. Yeah. We have done a lot of work to create our business plan like most organizations.

51:12and so my three priorities are the following one execution two AI enablement and three my finance team so if I give a bit more color on each in execution so we got our priorities we set out the architecture the financial architecture we have KPIs you know we have initiatives we have points but the most important part is now to deliver. So working along my counterparts in the business, we need to as a team deliver. So my role is to ensure that we are delivering per our commitments, so execution. Next layer down in one of our initiative is AI enablement because for us we see AI as a key enabler for our business, whether to grow revenue, and revenue is just to expand the breadth of the companies we cover, or to drive operating leverage.

52:11As our revenue grows, we're a fast-growing company, our cost base will not grow as fast, because we're embedding ways of working to eliminate manual tasks, and really empowering our teams to focus more on the higher added value activities so number two ai and three finance itself so you know i want to make sure that us and my finance team we are not just looking backwards right um that we are actually looking forwards that we have the right business judgment you know in our finance seat we're actually very privileged because we're right in the middle of sales delivery operations cash and so forth so we can see things faster than anybody else.

52:56So what I expect of my team, and this is the benchmark that I set ourselves, is yes, we can look backwards and explain what happened. That's nice. But what's important is tell me what's going to happen and then create the conversation, what are we doing about it? And that's the challenge I've set ourselves for my team. And that's what I want to focus on in the next four months.

53:18Martin Uhrik: Martin Urich, thank you for joining us on CFO Thought Leader. Jack, thank you very much. It was my pleasure.

53:53Martin Uhrik: CFO or senior finance executive contribute your experience. It takes just a few minutes and you'll receive early access to the findings. Visit cfothoughtleader.com slash benchmarking.