Aarish Shah is Founder of EmergeONE a Fractional CFO firm for venture backed UK tech startups and scaleups (from Seed to Series B). He has spent close to two decades operating as a CEO or CFO, and now specializes in helping startups understand and act powerfully on their numbers. In this episode, Aarish shares his insights on financial planning and analysis (FP&A) in startups and the fundamental lessons he has learned in his career.
- His “worst budget ever” when one of his factories burnt down in Papua New Guinea
- Who he would most like to meet
- His Nothing Ventured podcast and key lessons talking to players in the venture ecosystem
- Why he likes the constant “challenges” of Series B startups over other stage companies
- The difference between “building” the playbook and “running” the playbook in startups
- How to consider your finance tech stack scales pre-seed to Exit
- How FP&A should consider their tech stack
- Why you need to spending your money at pre-seed
- Investing in early stage businesses in the UK
- How do we go about creating a budget and forecast for a startup?
- Key metrics I use to analyze startups
- How startups can cope with the drying up of cheap capital
- How to get your CFO to say yes
- Favorite Excel function
- How AI understanding is the one skill every FP&A practitioner needs
Links
hello@emergeone.co.uk (to contact Aarish)
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Paul Barnhurst:
Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Today, I am your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka The FP&A Guy. FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails, the financial planning and analysis platform for Excel users. Every week we welcome a leader from the world of financial planning and analysis. Today we are delighted to be joined by Aarish Shah. Welcome to the show.
Aarish Shah:
Hey, great to be here, Paul. Thank you for having me.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, really excited to have you. So, just a little bit about our guest today ish. He comes to us from the uk. He earned his bachelor’s in modern languages, Spanish and Italian. I have to ask him about that. He earned both his ACMA and FCMA certification for accounting, and he’s currently the founder and CEO of EmergeOne, a fractional CFO firm. So maybe if you could start by just giving us a little bit about your background and how you ended up where you’re at today.
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, I’ll try and whizz through it. It’s a bit of a <laugh>, it’s a bit of a hefty story. So yeah, as you said, look, I I graduated in languages some 20 odd years ago which I realized were useful but not essential. And as a result, ended up working with Pricewaterhouse, BPO Nortel Networks, and then Deutsche Bank. And I qualified along the way as a chartered management accountant. So I’m SMA qualified, as you said. And it’s interesting. I’ve never really been kind of an accountant in the traditional sense. I actually then upped sticks, I moved to Papua New Guinea where I spent 10 years running a group of manufacturing and trading businesses alongside a property portfolio. I’ve had everything from like, people coming to office with guns to one of my factories, burning to ground everything in between.
Aarish Shah:
And really an MBA by experience. I was like acting CFO often. I was heading up ops obviously doing all the kind of biz dev and sales and lord knows what else. And yeah, I, I came back to the UK in 2015 ended up as founding CFO in an EdTech Venture, which is a joint venture between Eaton College and Founders Factory, which is Brent Holman’s Accelerator out here in in London, Brent being the founder of last minute.com. And that was really kind of how I got launched into the world of tech and startups and, and started geeking out on hopefully a lot of stuff we’re gonna talk about today.
Paul Barnhurst:
I like that geeking out on tech. I do enjoy my tech, so I can understand that one. Well, thanks for a little bit of your background. So we like to start with kind of a fun question. ’cause Anyone who’s worked in FP&A or finance has had at least one, if not multiple of these stories. So what is the worst budgeting experience you’ve had in your career?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, I was thinking about this before jumping on the call as, as you know, and actually, you know, I mentioned just there that one of my factories burned to the ground when I was out in New Guinea after it burned to the ground. Like the experience of having to draw up budgets both for shareholders as well as for the banks was definitely not something for the faint of heart, right? Because we just had no clue what the future of the business was gonna look like. We didn’t know if we were gonna be producing, we didn’t know if we were gonna be trading. We didn’t, you know, we’d had to let go of a ton of staff. We didn’t know when the insurers were gonna pay out, if they were gonna pay out how that would look. We were, you know, trying to navigate bringing in material from competitors both sort of raw mats as well as finished product to, to sell to our clients and keep them serviced.
And, and equally trying to keep the banks at bay, right? Because we, we had working capital as well as debt facilities out with them. And so when you are budgeting under that sort of level of uncertainty, and, hey, look, I’m used to uncertainty. I work with startups for a living. But when you are, when you are budgeting on that basis where actually you really don’t know where the business is gonna be in the next, forget even the next, you know, 12 months, six months, you don’t even know where it’s gonna be in the next three to six weeks, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that, that was probably the, the toughest budgeting kind of process I’ve ever been through. And, and equally at the same time, you know, we were sort of reconstructing our previous account and obviously all of our accounts were held locally on, so we didn’t have the benefit of cloud sort of services back then. Certainly not in New Guinea, where, where you know, data infrastructure was really, <laugh> was really poor. So we’d lost a lot of our accounting backup. Fortunately, we had, you know, accounts from a few months prior, but we had to reconstruct all of that, feed that into budgets and so on and so forth. So, yeah, really, really tough tough experience.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. Normally I ask what made it so bad, but I don’t think I’m gonna ask that question here. I think it’s pretty obvious what, what was the nightmare there? That’d be a real challenge. I definitely say I haven’t experienced that one. I’ve had my challenges with budgeting, but I could see where counting date is a mess, businesses and shambles, so to speak, and you’re trying to figure out everything and how do you put together a forecast or a budget under that environment? So what did you learn? What was kind of the takeaway from that experience that you’ve taken with you?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, look, that’s a really, that’s a really great question. I think, you know, for me it was a, the importance of the team members. So we had a, you know, we had a controller at the time a gentleman by the name of Bija Agarwal. You know, he was a, died in the wool finance guy, right? Like from India. And he really worked hard on, you know, recovering that kind of lost information, working with the suppliers, with me on, on the numbers, you know, keeping, as I say, the banks away and, and, and trying to, you know, represent the business in, in the best possible way without becoming completely fatalistic about <laugh> what might happen and what might not happen. And so, yeah, I think, you know, le making sure that you know, that you have a team around you that you can lean on that team, that they have the experience, the expertise to help you move things forward is, is massively important. And yeah, I mean, I’ve carried that I think ever since, like, the importance of surrounding yourself with great people and nurturing your teams and making sure that they have your back because, you know because you’ve had their back in the past as well.
Paul Barnhurst:
I really love that about nurturing the team, making sure you have the team in place and you can trust them, and that you do trust them. Yeah, absolutely. Because yeah, when you’re in that environment, you have to work together. It’s the only way you’re gonna get through it. If you’re not a team, you’re just gonna fracture under
Aarish Shah:
That kind of pressure. Yeah. And it would really easy for him, as an example, as, as other people in the team may, may have done as well, to have just said, you know what, <laugh> like, we’re done. You know, this thing isn’t coming back from, from, from the ground for a while. Let’s go look for something else. But they didn’t, and, you know, a testament to them, and I, I guess to us in the sense that, you know, we’re able to retain these people throughout that sort of period and actually as it turns out, we were able to turn that business around and, and, and, you know, actually transformed it completely from profitability perspective as well,
Paul Barnhurst:
That that’s awesome. And that is a credit to you guys and to your team that they wanted to stay. ’cause You’re right, a lot of people have been like, all right, let’s dust off that resume and see what I can find, because I’m not sure if this is gonna last long. So this next section we like to do is one where I kind of call it, I get to know you questions almost a little bit of rapid fire, where you re relatively quick answer no more than 30 seconds on each question. And we have four questions we’ll just ask you in order here, then we’ll get to the main part of our interview. But first one is, what is something unique about you? Something not many people would know?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, that’s a hard one because I write prolifically online.I’m very, very transparent. But I, I guess the things that I would say is, you know, we mentioned earlier I’m a linguist. I speak three European languages, plus English plus a couple of others and not so, not so great a fashion. But I, I would say the, the thing that most people don’t really know about me is that I, I used to write poetry, pretty proli prolifically as well as sort of take photography. I, I, I am a very creative person outside of the numbers <laugh>, I’m not creative with the numbers. Let me just be very clear, <laugh>. But but yeah, I think, I think, you know, I’m a massive generalist and I think you know, I, I, I have a lot of loves outside of, you know, just, just what I do on the day-to-day,
Paul Barnhurst:
Great poetry, photography. Those are some great great hobbies to have. So thank you. So next one, if you could meet one person in the world, dead or alive, who would you meet and why?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, this is a, this is a like another really, really tough one. I think. Look, I, I would love to meet Mahatma Ma Gandhi and just understand kind of, you know, his perspective of those times under theEnglish rule. Back in those days. I, I, I think I would also love to meet Stephen Hawkin and just understand, you know, his mind and like how, how he thought about stuff. But again, I’m a massively curious person, so I, I, I guess the list could be pretty endless. I mean, like, I’m currently sort of studying the philosophers and I’m like, okay, well actually, yeah, Plato, Aristotle maybe Buddha <laugh>, you know, all of these guys. Confucius, I’d, I’d love to meet all of them. So yeah, anyone that could, anyone that could provide, you know, better understanding of the world as we, as we live in, I, I would love to meet them.
Paul Barnhurst:
So it’ll be a pretty long list. But Gandhi, we’ve had that one before. That seems to be a, a popular one. It’d be amazing to sit down and talk to him and understand his philosophy and his thinking. Next question, and I’m gonna modify this a little bit from what I sent you. What is the last thing you Googled, you know, looked up on YouTube or even used chat, G P T or generative AI for about finance fp and a or Excel?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, I <laugh> like a lot. I’m glad you added the, the generative AI there. So I had I had chat GP T write me a Python script for a DCF calculator. That’s probably the last sort of major thing I did. And that was just playing around trying to see how, how easy it would do that for me. But you know, I I would say typically when I’m Googling stuff around FP&A it, it’s always, I, I write a newsletter, so I’m always constantly worried about whether or not I’ve gotten something completely accurate or not. So, you know, I’m constantly checking, okay, did I get the definition of that metric or that, that particular kind of financial statement line or whatever, did I get that completely correct? So I do a lot of Googling around that.
But yeah, in terms of kind of the, the, the more esoteric side, it’s, it’s definitely just figuring out, you know, what I can do better, quicker, faster using generative and or Excel for that matter or Google Sheets because, you know, I, I love those tools. I think, I think they’re great. I, you know, a year ago, well, not, actually, not a year ago, about four, five years ago, I started trying to figure out how to use the sort of the, the SQL that you can write in, in Google Sheets. And it, like, it blew my mind what, what you’re able to do. And I would say, you know, there’s a ton of people out there operating in finance that probably don’t even know that that exists, let alone use it. Right?
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. Great. Those are great examples and I appreciate the DCF calculator and just testing them and seeing what you can do. You know, the reality, I’m not a big Google Sheets user. I pretty much have been Excel, but, you know, most people dunno, power Query or Power Pivot or all the things that are available very similar tolike you mentioned, the S Q L and Google and other things that are there. We use so little what’s available to us. And I think we’re definitely starting to see some of that change as it becomes easier and easier to use it. Hmm. So shifting gears here, appreciate those answers. I just wanted to start here with asking a question about the podcast you host. So I could tell you’re very comfortable behind the mic there. You host a podcast called Nothing Ventured, tells the stories of Operators and Investors. So maybe you could start by just telling us why did you start the podcast?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, so if you kind of rewind back to May, 2021 here in the uk, we were coming out of, I think it was like the third lockdown. I think there were people that were kind of bored sitting at home. They had a bunch of time on their hands. I was probably one of those people, if I’m honest. And I I, I realized that I’d built over the years, I’d built up like some really great relationships within the ecosystem, the early stage sort of entry ecosystem here in the UK and beyond. And I, I started off by sort of trying to record a bunch of webinars, right? ’cause I thought it would be a really cool way of learning for myself, but also getting other people you know to, to, to be able to take in that, that information, that knowledge from others.
So I started off with these webinars, firesides. I think the first one I did was an angel investor alongside a someone from the, the legal profession focused on early stage businesses. And then I did one with Rupert Popit, who’s an angel investor here in the uk and then with Hussein Kanji, who is a VC with Hoxton Ventures here in the UK as well. But why I realized was that those you know, it’s really difficult with firesides and webinars. You’ve gotta kind of g up the audience. You’ve gotta get a ton of people to sign up. You know, you may get a hundred, 200 people sign up, 50% of them don’t turn up to the podcast or to the webinar, rather. And you can’t promote the next one whilst you’re doing the previous one. If you’re doing them every week, that becomes really tough.
So I kind of just said, well, actually, it makes sense to flip the whole thing into a podcast. And, and that’s exactly what I did. And I think we’re like well over a hundred episodes in, but, you know, back at the beginning, it was very much, as I say, exploring those ideas and, and the knowledge that came out of these various people that I’d been very lucky to have connected with over, over the last sort of decade or so. And, you know, I recorded one this morning as an example, and I’m, I’m still learning, you know, something new every time I speak to someone. So I’m very fortunate to be able to do what I do. Yeah,
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s cool. I like you love doing the podcast, and it’s great to talk to people, and it’s a lot of fun to hear different stories. So why, you know, the story of operators, investors, what is it that makes that story fascinating for you?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, so I, I, look, I think there are, I think there are a couple of things. I think, you know, I, I’ve been running businesses and working with businesses for the last, you know, 20 years of my life, plus minus anyone who tells you they’ve learned everything is lying through their back teeth, right? <Laugh>, like, there’s always something new to learn. There’s always something new to learn about how to sell. There’s always something new to learn about how to fundraise. There’s always something new to learn about what’s happening in the ecosystem at the moment, right? There’s, there’s always something new to learn in finance, like every day, right? And I think I, I’m one of these people, I, I have a firm belief that when you stop learning, you know, or if you think you’ve learned everything and you stop learning, then, then you stop living because there’s always something new that you can, you know, you can bring to the table.
And I think the, the stories are so interesting because actually for the most part, they are non, they’re atypical stories, right? They aren’t aren’t the stories of someone who are like, well, I got a job at Microsoft and I stayed there for the next 20 years. Like, that isn’t the story, right? Or, you know, I’ve been working with, you know, my sister’s an example. She’s gonna hate, hate me for saying this. I’m sure <laugh>, you know, she’s, you know, she’s pretty senior in the data team at British Airways, but she, she’s been working there since, you know, since her graduating from her master’s degree. Like, that was her first job, and it’s been her only job. She loves it, don’t get me wrong. And, you know, she’s, she’s great at it. But that isn’t a story that is, is necessarily gonna engage an audience.
But, but the things that engage an audience are hearing, you know, we’ve had VCs coming on telling us how they raise their fund, you know, in spite of the fact people told ’em they wouldn’t be able to, or, you know, we had Matt Conwell from Rare Breed Ventures right in the who, who essentially raised this fund after all of the you know all of the amazing sort of uprising that happened during the Black Lives Matter kind of period post mm-hmm. <Affirmative> Pandemic and so on and so forth. And, you know, these stories are compelling because they’re very human at their heart. And I think, you know, we, we as human beings are drawn to that emotion, into those stories. And when you then sort of wrap them into stories around businesses, which again, have their own life, they’re almost fairytales, right?
In their own right. I think they, they, they just spark curiosity amongst people. And of course, you know, for, for the listeners, you know, maybe one listener has built an eComm business and another listener has built a SaaS business, and another listener has built is looking to raise a venture fund. Each of those people will have, will take something different from each of those stories. And I, I just, yeah, I just find them really compelling. And as I say, I’m, I’m just very, very lucky to have such a broad, diverse and incredibly giving community of, of, of people around me that are willing to kind of sit there and talk with me for, for hours at a time.
Paul Barnhurst:
Agree with you. It’s amazing to hear those stories and yeah, like you said, venture startups, people who are trying to do things that often hasn’t been done or bringing a new thing to the market have unique stories. You know, one of my favorite in that space, and I interviewed their head of FP&A, he’s moved on since, but is a company called cotopaxi. Yep. Where the founder wanted to start and raise venture capital funds from day one, being a Corp B and having a mission other than just profit. That’s really hard to get to raise capital from VCs. He didn’t, but almost all his initial investors were females.Which I thought was really interesting. But recently, a year or two ago, they raised quite a bit of money from Bain Capital to take it international. Hmm. You know, just an amazing story. And they do a ton to alleviate poverty and sustainability and, and so I love hearing those stories. I mean, there’s nothing like hearing somebody who has a passion Yeah. And a story and sharing that with others. So I, I can totally relate to that. I think that’s a great, great example there. And, you know, if anyone hasn’t checked out the podcast, we’ll recommend it. We’ll make sure to put that in the show notes for people.
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You know, kind of moving forward, you work a lot with startups, right? I know fractional CFOs, that’s very common. You’ve worked from seed stage all the way through exit. Do you have a favorite stage you like to work with with startups?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, so I would describe myself as a massive generalist, , I get bored with routine. So the minute a business starts becoming process driven and very, very repeatable and predictable is when I start switching off. Which is why ultimately sort of post seed pro, pre-series B is kind of the really the right stage me, because there is always a problem to be fixed. There is, there is always some sort of a challenge that you gotta overcome some hurdle that you gotta, you gotta jump over. And I find, you know, that stage of business to be intellectually challenging you know, there, there’s a huge amount of uncertainty in the business. You’ve gotta navigate lots of different potential problems. And it allows me to, I guess, exercise that sort of problem solving part of my brain that enjoys those sort of challenges. And as I say, like I think, you know, as you get the later and later stage, you get, the more predictable those businesses become. And, and it becomes less about solving problems, more about, you know, creating process and routines. And frankly, for me, that that sort of stuff becomes anathema. So yeah. So really the early stage is what I love most.
Paul Barnhurst:
Sounds like when I hear the early stages where a lot of those problems are, you’re figuring out product market fit, you’re figuring out how you scale, you know where you’re gonna go in five years, kind of what that strategy is. And when you start to hit that series B, that series C, it’s really about scaling. Yeah. Now it’s about taking whatever you did, putting the processes in place and replicating it. Yeah. You really enjoy prior to getting to that part where it’s about process work and replication versus solving the problem, figuring out strategically what do we look like and how do we get to that point that we can scale? Is that a fair assessment?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s the difference between building the playbook and actually running the playbook, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. I like, I like building the playbook.
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s a good analogy. I, I, I like that. I think everybody can relate to that one. So, you know, one of the things I’ve noticed you talk a lot about, I know you write quite a bit, you have a, a newsletter is helping companies with the tech stack, how they scale that. So maybe can you take us through how the finance tech stacks scales from, you know, pre-seed, through exit? What do you typically see? What’s your experience of how that kind of grows over time?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, I mean, there is no one, I, I think the first thing to say, it’s always there is no one, one size fits all, right? And finance is one of these things where people think that there is just a solution. Like, and, you know, people look for unicorn employees that look for C F O that will give them strategic advice and do their fundraising, but who will also be happy to do the books. And like, clearly that’s not <laugh>, you know, that person. So, you know, at pre-seed, a spreadsheet is good enough, like for almost everything. In fact, I would say for 99% of things, the only thing I would recommend you don’t use a spreadsheet for is, is actually running your, your accounts. And either your accounts will do that, or if you are doing yourself, you’ll, you’ll use something like Xero, or QuickBooks or, or, or whatever the equivalent kind of cloud package is, right?
And at that stage, you know, finance is all about, you know, limited cash and taking very, very small precise bets learning from them, moving quickly on from there, right? Like, you know, in, in the current environment where it’s difficult to raise, pre-seed is the one place where you shouldn’t be holding onto your cash for dear life, right? If you aren’t spending your money at pre-seed, then you’re not able to prove out quickly enough what you need to do to get to product market fit. And actually, that, that’s a, that’s a negative signal. And we’ve had a couple of guests say that to us previously on, on, on the podcast as well. As you kind of progress from pre-seed to seed, you’re still using a lot of the same infrastructure. I’m still using, as an example, Google Sheets to run my, my, my forecast, my budgets.
Why? Because it’s flexible, because I can import data, I can manipulate that data. It works, it’s easy for, you know, the founders to understand. You can change it on the fly. It doesn’t require lots of kind of messy logins and figuring out different stuff. And because your business is still not predictable, you need that flexibility because you need to be able to change things regularly, often and, and, you know, at a moment’s notice. But what does start happening is you start building in certain tools to make some of those processes better, quicker, faster, right? So you may use Google Sheets for your forecasting, as I say you may still use Xero for your, for, for, for your accounts, but you may implement you know, a tool to do budgeting, right? Which is more about setting like fixed buckets of spend and expenditure for mm-hmm.
<Affirmative> for departments, if you have such departments, right? You might implement a tool like SpendDesk for spend management or Clio, right? Credit card, credit card management, so that, you know, employees can start expensing stuff without having to do loads of expense spends, et cetera, et cetera, right? Obviously, you’re starting to use things like Hubdoc to, you know, push invoices into Xero and so on and so forth. So you just start automating or productizing some of the, the, those processes as you continue to scale, that’s when you start looking at more significant solutions that we’ve talked about you and I before. But, you know, and, and, and others. You may start looking at, again, it depends how data heavy the operations are, but you may start looking at solutions to both you know, act as an ETL, you know, your data pipeline, get your data warehousing or data lake template, like just the infrastructure around that.
And then how you report back on that data. And you may be using tools like Tableau, you may be using tools like Microsoft power bi, et cetera, et cetera, right? As you continue to scale, what I often see, and, and this is a really interesting thing, I often see, because software products have, you know, we, when we build software products, we are trying to abstract away to the most common denominator, right? So you wanna solve for as many people as possible. And in doing so, what ends up happening is you don’t solve for the one problem that really, really hurts my business, right? And my business may need X or Y or Z, and that product that I’ve bought off the shelf can’t do X, Y, and Z. And so what tends to happen is you see especially in software businesses, you see finance teaming up with the engineering team and building internal products to solve some of their problems, right?
You can guarantee that Uber was not using off the shelf systems to monitor the finance side of things, right? But and, and understanding what driver pay was, what, you know, average fares were, they would’ve built those tools and that and that sort of dashboarding internally. And I think as you scale, you see a lot of that. And often those products can be become, or those, you know, those tools that they’ve built can be become products in their own, right, right. Much in the same way that Slack, you know, span out of a of a gaming kind of product, right? So so I think as you’re scaling, you start building solutions for yourself because the solutions you get off the shelf aren’t good enough. And then you always end up going kind of back to the big players.
So, you know, whether it’s SAP, whether it’s Oracle, whether it’s Microsoft, right? You start implementing big ERPs, you start having to roll out because you’re no longer dealing with a team. And we talked about this. You’re not dealing with a team of a hundred or 500 or a thousand. You’re dealing with 5,000, 10,000 people. And at that sort of level of, of enterprise, you need enterprise solutions, not only because you need something that’s robust that can deal with your data and with your, your, your information, but frankly, you need something that can also deal with you know the security and making sure that your data is secure and that it is, you know, able to cope with the demands of enhanced reporting and everything else that comes out of potentially going through an IPO or an exit of, of some nature.
Paul Barnhurst:
Sure. You know, as you scale, yeah. As you get close to exit that data security is huge. You know, I worked for American Express and right, how, how tight they were with data security. You could only imagine, I worked for the Navy, again, you could imagine how tight they were. And then I also worked for a cybersecurity company. So I’ve definitely seen tight, tight security where it’s like, can I do anything that I want? And I worked for one other company that was pretty lax. I was like, you mean I can install something on my computer? <Laugh>, you’re kidding. <Laugh>.
Aarish Shah:
But, but, but I mean, the interesting thing there is, right? And it, it’s like in the startup world, we rail against Teams, right? Like, I, I hate Microsoft Teams. I’m sorry, Microsoft, I, I really don’t take away my Excel license, but no, like, you know, I’m not a fan of Microsoft Teams, but the reason that enterprise uses Microsoft Teams is because it comes bundled with everything else. They use, it’s enterprise grade, and they, they don’t have to change any of their systems to deal with it, right? And they are the, the big players that matter. And this is why Teams, you know, outpace Slack in terms of downloads, et cetera. ’cause It’s just bundled in, right? E even if it is not as good a product, it’s good enough. And I think, you know, one thing in early stages, you know, security is massively important, but is probably back of the, you know, back of the queue when it comes to the priorities for any founding team. Until a client says to you, what do you have in place? And then a mad scramble to get something sorted.
Paul Barnhurst:
<Laugh>, I a hundred percent agree. And I even saw that with a, you know, fairly large company that I worked at where we weren’t meeting some of those requirements. It was a mad scramble to figure it out and to make sure we had it. ’cause We’ve met certain ones, but there’s so many out there sometimes. So yeah. When the customer starts asking security, all of a sudden becomes really important. I mean, or you have the breach, right? There’s a few different few trigger points that can cause that a breach a customer. But generally, like, it’s not high on my priority list right now as a startup, a business of one. I mean, obviously I try to be careful, but it’s not like I’m sitting there thinking, okay, what are all the things I need to put in place to make sure I’m a hundred percent secure?
Aarish Shah:
It’s like, you don’t have the time, right? There are, there are more imperative priorities that you need to deal with, whether that’s finding new clients, winning new business, servicing, whoever you have at the moment, or, you know, implementing something that is gonna make you more efficient. Like obviously that’s gonna take precedence over, well, you know, an undefied period in the future. I may have a data breach, or I may not. Yeah. It’s kind of Yeah. <Laugh> a little bit, a little bit late in the day.
Paul Barnhurst:
E Exactly. So, just one more question here around technology that I wanna ask, then we’ll ask switch gears. So let’s say we have an FP&A person. They’re the first hire in a company. So, you know, they’re early stage, maybe they’re bringing ’em in series B, you know, somewhere in that, that area. What advice would you offer them as they start to scale technology? How should they think about that? Any pitfalls they should look forward to avoid as they’re helping kind of build out you know, the FP&A technology and finance? ’cause Often FP&A gets involved in a lot of that ’cause they need to see all the data.
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I often say like, the office of the CFO is becoming, you know, more and more like the office of data, right? We, we are <laugh>, we, we are responsible for the data that flows in and flows out from, from the business. But mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, but like in direct response to your question the one piece of advice is, is the same piece of advice I give to everyone. Do it manually first. Like, if you don’t do it manually, first, you don’t know where the problems are. If you don’t know where the problems are, you don’t know what solutions gonna work. You know, there is no point implementing, you know, a massive ERP if actually you haven’t figured out how to stock take in your warehouse for argument’s sake, right? Like, there is, there is no point putting in a shiny piece of software if you haven’t got the basics.
Right? If you don’t have a process for recording your invoices, you don’t have a process for forecast if you, ’cause remember, right? Forecasting, doesn’t it, it, it doesn’t happen in a vacuum, right? You use data, you use prior numbers, you use intuition, you use mm-hmm. <Affirmative> conversations with other people within the business, within finance, within operations, within sales. That is how you build out your forecast, right? And just implementing a tool isn’t gonna somehow solve for all of that. It may make the process slightly slicker, but it doesn’t actually change any of the things that need to be done as part of the process. So doing it manually first helps you identify where there are gaps that could be solved with technology and help you understand what are the best gaps to solve with that technology. Is it actually bringing in that full blown kind of FP&A system? Or is it actually, first off the bat, I need something, I need to find something that can clean the data, right? Or I need to find something where I, you know, something that is a better store of, of the data or a dashboarding tool or whatever it might be. Those might be the more important steps. And just going out and, and, and buying the big sort of all singing, all dancing FP&A tool day one,
Paul Barnhurst:
Couldn’t agree more is first understanding your process, having done it manually. Two things I like to say when it comes to technology is, one, it doesn’t solve your problems. It’s an enabler. It enables you to be more effective, enables you to streamline. And the second thing I like to tell people is, new technology plus old processes equals expensive broken processes. Review your processes, make sure you understand them. And that you, you know, you have that to be, and that as is. ’cause If you don’t do that, you’re at the whim of basically the consultant that’s helping you install that. And you don’t wanna be in that situation.. So next question here is, I know you’ve talked a fair amount about options around raising capital mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. So what are some of the options for a startup beyond the typical route, angel venture debt, you know, some of those type of things. What are some other options they have?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, look, I mean, I think it, it, it obviously depends on where you are for a start, right? So, so I, I’ll talk mm-hmm. <Affirmative> specifically more specific about the which is where obviously I’m based. But so I mean, let’s talk about if, if we talk about all of the the various options there are, right? So, so in the uk you can get something like the Virgin Startup Loan, which is a government backed loan for 25,000 pounds, which you take out on, on your personal account. But it’s for, for, for business growth. With that loan comes some obligations. You need to take on a mentor business mentor for I think it’s a, a a year, if I’m not mistaken, have monthly kind of calls with them so that they can just mm-hmm.
<Affirmative>, make sure that you are, you are going in the right direction. But, you know, that’s a great way of getting, you know, for a small business to just get itself off the ground. Maybe you need to, you know, buy in some inventory or, or, or your first piece of equipment or whatever it might be. So that, that’s a good start. Angel investing here in the UK is made more easy by the fact that we have these tax efficient schemes called the SEIS and the EIS schemes. So the seed enterprise investment scheme and the enterprise Investment scheme which are, are government schemes that effectively allow to get an offset on their tax bill, right on their income tax bill. Sure. By investing in these early stage businesses. So that is a really good route here in the uk.
And, you know, a lot of those investors aren’t necessarily looking for unicorn size outcomes. They are looking for great businesses founders that they can support and back and they want to give back and so on. And, and ultimately they know that they’ve got that tax ri write off as as a benefit in any case. And then obviously you’ve got the VC sort of side of things. In between, you have obviously great solutions in terms of working capital. So you have things like revenue-based finance or inventory financing. So revenue-based finances obviously you know, really kind of exploded with Clear Bank or clearco as it is now, I think. Which, you know, essentially will advance your cash on the basis of, of, of, of your revenue and then recover that revenue out of fee. And you know, we’ve seen now a few solutions like that here in the uk.
You know people like out fund and, and others and they’re really good solutions because again they’re non-dilutive. I e you know, you aren’t selling equity as as a result of taking on this financing and you can roll them over, right? And you can keep sort of growing or they, they will grow those facilities as you grow, right? So they’re, they’re a good option. You know, things that people don’t think about, you know, here again, we have r and d tax credits in the UK. Obviously a number of countries have these and, you know, you claim the once a year from, from the tax man, it’s gone a little bit difficult here in the UK. I don’t wanna go into too much detail for fear of, you know, jeopardizing any of the claims that we’ve got in process.
But, you know, it’s slowed down a fair bit from, you know, processing times used to be about five weeks, you know, nowadays that, that they are taking months if not over12 months to, to, to secure a claim or, or to approve a claim rather. And so some of the options, therefore, you, you then have, are R&D financing companies. So they will six months ahead of your R&D claim going in on the assumption that you’ve filed successfully in the past, and recover that, that credit from HMRC. They will advance you a loan against our r and d, which you pay interest in principle on, on receipt of the loan from HMRC. Then you have, you know, I think you mentioned venture debt. So venture debt obviously sits alongside VC funding.
So typically in a larger equity round of series A, series B and beyond you may raise some equity financing and alongside that, so it’s to not take too much dilution, you’ll, you’ll raise venture debt. But I think the point is, like, it, it just depends on the type of business you are. Like, so the sort of financing that’s available for an e-comm business will be different from a SaaS business, which will be different from a deep tech business, which will be different from a manufacturing business. Like we’ve got clients at the moment in the manufacturing space, which are obviously taking out lease financing or you know, fixed term loans against the equipment they’re that they’re buying in potentially. Or you know, we have other businesses that can take on SaaS financing, right? So there are, again, in the same way you have the re revenue-based financing for e-comm, you also have for SaaS, right?
So they’re essentially paying for your recurring revenue upfront at a discount. And you know, that allows you to grow efficiently. So like, there are a ton of potential kind of sources of capital out there. And, and like, as the world gets more and more innovative I think we’ll see more and more of these, like, you know, in the same way we now see buy now pay later almost everywhere. Um I think you, you’ll continue to see, you know, a huge number of, of different solutions. And, and that’s, you know, above and beyond the traditional ones of, you know, getting a credit card, getting an overdraftyou know, getting a, a business loan. And, and look, let’s face it, not all businesses are venture businesses, and therefore you’ve gotta think about how you can grow efficiently. And I always say that debt is not a bad thing to have in your business because it forces you to become efficient. It forces you to, to think about your business in a certain way. So yeah, I mean, look, there are plenty of solutions out there. You gotta, you gotta go out and look for them.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. Appreciate that. And I’d agree with you on the debt. Debt isn’t necessarily a bad thing. One, you keep ownership, and two, it forces you to make sure you’re efficient enough that you can make those payments.
Aarish Shah:
Precisely.
Paul Barnhurst:
So there’s definitely some good things there. So when you first start working with a client, a startup, how do you help them go about putting a, the budgeting and forecasting process in place? Because I know many startups, they may have some high level estimates, but there’s generally a lot of challenges around that in the early days. So how do you think about that?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, so I think about the forecasting process less about how do you build a spreadsheet? It’s, it’s actually just about how do you have a conversation, right? So I would spend a good, you know, couple of days just understanding the business, talking to the founders, what are the motivations? Where are they go? Like, what are they trying to do? How does it work? How is it currently working? How’s it gonna work in the future? Who are the key partners? How do we achieve, you know, how are we gonna find revenue sources, right? Like, not only in terms of what is our principle line of revenue, but do we have any ancillary lines of revenue? What are the costs that are associated with that? What are the overheads that are gonna be required to support that? Which sounds like obvious, right? But the point is, you’re not at this stage actually building out the forecast.
What you’re doing is, is just having the conversation that will enable you to build out the forecast thereafter. Because if you don’t have a holistic view of the whole business, you can’t really build a holistic budget or forecast, right? Mm-Hmm. Because you can’t do these things in isolation, and at the very early stages of the business, it’s likely that you aren’t going to have a ton of people that you can go, you’re not gonna have like a separate COO, C T O head of commercial, head of this, head of that that you can necessarily go to. And, and you’re definitely not gonna have data, right? So it is all about <laugh>. It is all about like, how do you have that conversation? The minute you start getting data, that’s when you wanna start feeding that back into the process. And you know, I always talk about the fact that forecasting and budgeting at very early stage should never be a static enterprise.
Like you have to be rolling those on a regular basis. You need to be checking in with ’em on a regular basis because things change, right? They, they constantly change. Like if you’re in the B2B world and you’ve budgeted or forecast, you know that you’re gonna have an average of six month lead to contract timeframe for, for your enterprise client, well guess what? That might be nine months, or it might be 15 months, or it might be 20 months. Like, and you know, every time something changes, you need to make sure the forecast is being changed so that you can update your own assumptions around where cash is gonna land, how you know how much capital you’re gonna have to deploy whether you should be investing in the same places that you, you were going to invest and how you manage that capital. So I think it all starts with a conversation about the business and everything flows from there.
Paul Barnhurst:
Okay. So if I was to recap that, it really, there’s a couple things I heard there. First obviously is the conversation. Get to know the business, talk to the people, make sure you really understand what’s going on. Two, you’re gonna need to be agile and flexible. Constantly monitoring and adjusting. Yeah. That can kind of, that continuous process. That’s not enough to build a budget. And then, alright, well it’s the end of the quarter, we better look and see how we did. Oh, well, we didn’t realize all these things. Now we’re short on cash or whatever it might be.
Aarish Shah:
Yeah. And not only that, like, I mean, I’ve been in situations in the past where I’ve had someone say, oh, well, you know, I, I had a budget of X to do Y and I’m like, yeah, you set that budget six months ago, things have not gone the way we expected them to do. That budget is no longer what it was. Like, let’s have that conversation. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I think, I think that there is this distinct problem when you have people that have come out of larger scale organizations where they are used to having a budget given to them. And that is, once they have that budget, they spend that money, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, that isn’t how it works in startups, right? <Laugh> like a a, a budget doesn’t exist in a startup. A forecast is at best a finger in the air, right? You make decisions about capital deployment, <laugh> on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis.
You are not doing it a year in advance. Like, I can’t tell you today, like I’ve got a client you know without giving too much away you know, that they’re in the enterprise space. You know, they may have a contract that that goes, you know, if it goes one, one month, one way or one month, the other way, it potentially has a significant impact on, on what they do with their money, right? Sure. So mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, you’ve gotta you’ve gotta think you’ve gotta be, as you said, very, very agile about this at, at this stage of, of, of businesses. And you know, you’ve gotta come out of this fixed mindset that, okay, once I’ve had a budget set, that’s where it’s gonna stay.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, a agree. I’ve heard a lot of people talk about, you know, using things beyond budgeting or I think one, you know, kind of portfolio optimization, just trying to get out of that static nature. ’cause You’re in a startup, you gotta make quick decisions. And what you planned for three months ago could be totally different and an opportunity may come up that’s not in the budget that makes sense. And you just have to figure it out
Aarish Shah:
A hundred percent.
Paul Barnhurst:
And so being being flexible is huge. That makes, that makes total sense to me. So, you know, next question here. When you’re first analyzing a business, obviously other than those conversations where you’re sitting down and looking at the data, are there some key metrics you like to start with?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, it, this is an interesting question. I like, so I, I always say it depends, right? So it depends on the business, it depends on the business model, it depends on the vertical, it depends on the stage of business. But ultimately the things that I’m always looking for are, you know, so if it is, if it is a business that is generating revenue, then I wanna understand you know, how that revenue growth looks like, what it looks like, what the kind of lifetime value is, what the acquisition cost of a customer is. So I can understand what the unit economics look like. I wanna understand the gross profitability, I wanna understand the value drivers in the business. I wanna understand like how much revenue do we book per employee, right? Especially in software heavy businesses. ’cause There’s a tendency, especially with deep tech to just keep hiring engineers.
If you see your revenue per employee flatlining or declining, then you know you’ve got a problem, right? Like, why are you investing so much in engineering when we’re not seeing that kind of improvement in efficiency either in costs or in revenues? , I tend to look at balance sheet metrics all the time. So working capital metrics and, and kinda debt metrics, right? Because you know, most of these businesses don’t have debt, but, but they certainly have liabilities, right? And understanding kind of your working capital and your, your ability to service your liabilities is critical. And especially in, in the current environment where, let’s face it, it is not easy to raise capital, right? Or it is, or I should, I I should rather say it is not as easy as it has been over the last several years, and it’s not as easy for businesses that really shouldn’t have been raising capital in the first place to raise capital <laugh>.
So if you’re a business that you know, was, was being afforded, you know, that that kind of fire hose of cheap, cheap capital, don’t expect that to last. And, and, and if you don’t expect that to last, what are the things that you need to be looking at? Well, the one thing is you need to be looking at your burn and your runway. So, you know, I think you, when I come into a business, I look at how much cash they have in the bank, what their current costs are, what their current burn is, and I figure out their runway and then I plan accordingly, right? And planning accordingly may be, Hey guys, your seven months, eight months from cash out, we now, and we need to be starting about a fund, thinking about a fundraise in the next two months. Or we need to figure out like where we can secure additional cash.
And by the way, revenue is the cheapest source of finance. So, you know, best thing would be to get some, some revenue in there, <laugh>. But yeah, look, I mean the, the, the, the sort of KPIs and metrics that matter from one business to another change, and I think those North star metrics always change. Like I work with a business that is you know kind in the charity space is probably the best way of looking at it. It sort of deals with donor spending and alumni spending for like higher education institutions and like their North star metric, maybe something like dollars raised as opposed to and by dollars MA raised, I mean dollars raised as a result of their product as opposed to dollars raised into their business, right? So, so dollars raised by the users of their product, right?
So, so universities that are running a given day or something like that, right? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which is not a financial me metric in the sense that it is a financial metric that impacts a business, but it is the right metric to to, to understand how that business is moving forward. And I think the final thing I’d say here is, it’s about looking at the leading, not the lagging, right? So in finance, we have had, we’ve always had this tendency to look at, I, I always say, you know, if you split finance als from strategic finance, finance ops is what looks backwards and inwards. It looks inside the business and it looks at what’s already happened. Whereas strategic finance and FP&A, for that matter, are about looking outwards and forwards, right? It’s about what’s happening in the, what’s happening or will happen in the business and outside the business, right?
So what is happening with the competitors, with the market with the overall overall kind of environment. And, and so if you’re looking at stuff that’s already happened that only tells you about what’s happened, not what is going to happen, you can never influence the future. So if you’re looking at lagging metrics and lagging metrics are like what we did in revenue last month as an example, that’s not really gonna help you figure out what you’re gonna do this month. But if you’re looking at, well, okay, what is my, I dunno, what is my acquisition cost and how, how many dollars have I spent on marketing this month that could actually help influence how, how you grow next month or the month after, right? Because you can then decide to outspend or change the activity that you’re doing to you know, to maximize that spend. So I think it’s al always again, about really having that intimate understanding of the business, understanding what makes it drive, what are the levers that you can pull, and then figuring out what are the metrics that you should be measuring very specifically for that business that allow you to to, to gauge how to take it forward.
Paul Barnhurst:
Makes sense. And I’m a big believer, like just said, in leading indicators, really understanding those. If you’re just looking at lagging, you got an issue and it’s just a matter of time until you discover it. Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, too long because you’re looking at lagging indicators, <laugh>,
Aarish Shah:
Well, by the time you realize you’re like, oh, I should have, I should’ve been looking at something else by it. But yeah, unfortunately. Yeah,
Paul Barnhurst:
Exactly. It only, it only takes once to learn that and then hopefully it’s not fatal. So. Exactly.
Aarish Shah:
Exactly.
Paul Barnhurst:
One more question here and then we’ll kind of move to the wrap up section. About a year ago you hosted a LinkedIn live called How to Get your CFO to Say Yes. So my question is, what is the secret to get the CFO-No or CFO to say yes?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, so actually that was last week. It wasn’t last year. But oh, why did
Paul Barnhurst:
I have last year? I’m sorry about that. That’s
Aarish Shah:
Okay. That’s not a problem at all. So this is interesting ’cause that was specifically a a LinkedIn live talking to CTOs, right? Hosted by, you know, someone who works with fractional CTOs and CTOs at, at startup and at enterprise level. And really what, what it was, was about, I guess, getting people to understand that when you are talking to a CFO, you have to make the business case, you have to make the financial case. If you want an investment in a product or in an employee or something, you need to tell us why it matters. And importantly, what the return on that investment is gonna be. And that return doesn’t necessarily need to be purely financial, right? It may well be a non-financial return, right? So if you’re investing in employees, it means that, okay, that employee is gonna have better understanding of, you know, maybe it’s it’s technical training, maybe they have a better understanding of the tech stack, which means they’ll be more efficient, which means we’ll produce more code and ship more products and more features quicker.
But, but the point is, it starts with, you know, being able to rationalize what that return is. Because as a CFO, we are working with competing competing calls on our very limited resources, right? So especially in a startup where you don’t have infinite capital, you have limited resources, you only have, you know, a number of bets that you can take, you’ve gotta really make sure that you are taking the right bet, because the problem is if you take the wrong bet, you don’t have that capital, that capital is gone. You don’t have an you know, a a an absolute infinite amount of resource that you can then channel into something else and, you know mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, the way I’d say it is, you know, if you’ve got a CTO that comes to you and says, Hey, look, I wanna hire these two engineers and you’ve got a C CO, a chief commercial guy that comes, says, I wanna hire the sales person.
Unless you can rationalize really, really well why those two engineers are gonna improve our top line or make the business more efficient and save us costs, then I’m always gonna go for the, for, for, for the sales guy. Why? Because that improves the top line immediately, which has an impact on the business immediately. So I like to think of, I, I’m definitely not a CF-no, I’m the first person to spend money. I will always spend money on the right things. And the reason I say that is because as I said earlier, in a startup, it is all about taking a series of educated bets and then doubling down on the ones that work. But the key word there is educated, right? If that bet doesn’t come with backup, then why should I take it Right then? I’m just, just risking on a, on a, on a hail Mary. So I think getting the CFO to yes is not hard. You’ve just gotta be able to speak the right language. And let’s face it, the language of business and the language of finance are intertwined. So you have to be able to speak that language.
Paul Barnhurst:
Got it. Thanks. Thanks for the answer. Appreciate that. One question I failed to ask earlier that I’m gonna ask now, when we were going through our get to know You questions, this is one we always like to ask our audience, what’s your favorite Excel feature function? Favorite thing about Excel
Aarish Shah:
<Laugh>? I I was, yeah, I was slightly disappointed you didn’t ask, ask that to me, but I I thought I’d let it slide. So index, match, match, every time
Paul Barnhurst:
You’re an index match, match guy got it.
Aarish Shah:
It’s, it’s, it’s the one function that, you know, I think solves for 80 to 90% of the problems that I ever have in a, in a, in a, in a Google sheet or an Excel. And, you know, I like the reason I got into spreadsheets in the first place, and there’s a slight aside, was I learned how to do vlookup and I reconciled something like 30 bank accounts in one night which hadn’t been reconciled for like three years or something. So <laugh> I was, yeah, I, I, I, I think I, I think one of the reasons that I love excel, Google Sheets, et cetera so much is because for me, it, it is very much like writing code, right? Like when you are building an Excel spreadsheet, you are breaking things down into their, into their component parts and solving them using functions and functionality, a lot of which is kind of transferrable to, to a lot of languages, programming languages. And what index match match just allowed me to do was 10 x the output, right? So I was no longer having to write as many formulas or nested formulas or anything like that, you know, it was, it was kind of a one and done. So yeah, I use it all the time everywhere. In fact, I would say I probably haven’t tried to up my my Excel formula game in a while because I’m scared that there’ll be something even more geeky than index match match out there
Paul Barnhurst:
Much. There’s some pretty geeky stuff this, these days. That’s, that’s all I’ll say. You can go figure that one out. <Laugh>. There is some fun stuff. A lot of things coming. So. Alright, as we wrap up here, here’s our final two questions. First one is, if someone was wanting to start a career in FP&A today, what advice would you offer ’em?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, if you’d asked me this eight months ago, I’d probably given a different answer. So today you’ve got to learn the language of AI. You’ve gotta learn how to prompt these generative models. You’ve gotta learn how they integrate with the tools that you’re using. You should not look at them as you know, as something that is going to take away your job. But for sure it is something that will enable your job and enable you to do your job better. And if you aren’t, then I can guarantee someone else will. Right? you know, I think we’re already seeing a reduction in the number of people entering kind of the accounting fields, both in the US and the UK. And, you know, it’s not seen as sexy or, or whatever, but realistically, it’s like one of the core functions in any business.
And, and that ability to look forward and forecast what the business is gonna do, I think is, is, is is definitely one that is not going anywhere anytime soon. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. But the tools that are available today that will make your life easier if you just learn them really well are, are incredible and, and will to evolve. And I, I think this is the one thing like for, for about 20 years, all you need to do is learn Excel and you’re done. Those days are gone. You need to be able to work with these sort of tools. So I would say that, and also the second thing is you’ve gotta learn how to communicate, right? I always say that 90% of my job is, is not about the numbers, it’s about how I communicate and it’s about the narrative, not the numbers. So you’ve gotta be able to take data, turn it into information so learn how to communicate with all stakeholders at all levels.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great advice. So first is learn to be productive with technology and that includes generative of ai, learn how to use it to be more productive. And second, and I couldn’t agree more, is learn how to communicate, build those relationships, learn how to talk to the business and tell that story. So great, great advice there. So last question. If someone wants to get ahold of you, what would be the best way for them to reach out?
Aarish Shah:
Yeah, I’m prolifically notoriously online, so you can find me on LinkedIn. My handle is, there is. That’s the same handle on Twitter, on Instagram and on threads if anyone’s on threads these days. But LinkedIn is almost only the best place. Obviously check out the podcast. Nothing ventured tech or nothing ventured pod on YouTube. The newsletter has just been launched. You’ll find that kind of in, in, in the links in my bio as well as kind of in every post that I put out there. But it’s on B Hive and it’s the nothing ventured newsletter as well. But yeah, look, LinkedIn’s your best friend and if you are, you know, someone that is looking for some support from a CFO at seed through series B do reach out to us@emergeone.co uk or simply by emailing us at hello at emerge one co uk.
Paul Barnhurst:
Alright, well thank you. I appreciate that and I really appreciate you being on the show with us today, Aish. Thanks for carving out some time for us.
Aarish Shah:
No, it’s been really, really enjoyable. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate
Paul Barnhurst:
It. Well, thanks and good luck with continuing your podcast, your newsletter, you know, your C FO business and everything you have going on. Look forward to seeing exciting things from you.
Aarish Shah:
Amazing.