Andrew Lynch, Head of FP&A at UK card discount scheme for public service employees, Blue LIght Card, is known to his nearly 11,000 Twitter followers as The SMB Finance Guy.
The FP&A leader also runs the highly popular Net Income newsletter regularly posts small business opportunities, scaling companies, systems, strategy, “with a few shitposts thrown in for good measure” (His writing has also been picked up by Business Insider).
In this episode Andrew reveals:
- The power of mentors in transforming his finance career from a “struggle to find someone who would take me” to high-profile roles at Anabas, Capital One, and Blue LIght Card.
- Starting a new budget from scratch and building an FP&A team at Blue Light Card
- Negotiation and sandbagging with sales and how FP&A can deal with the challenges
- How FP&A best practice saw Andrew deliver one SMB £10 million a year in revenue and from £8k in profit to £23 million
- Being Fired by Four times Bestselling New York Times author Tucker Max the day before Xmas Eve
- Skill stacking – getting to be the top 25% in the world at four or five different related things – rather than trying to be the best
- Being one of the few FP&A leaders on the comedy circuit
Subscribe to Net Income at https://www.netincome.co/
Follow Andrew at https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewglynch/
Full blog post and transcript
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 welcome to the show Andy Lynch. Andy, thanks for joining us.
Andrew Lynch:
Thank you very much, Paul. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me on.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, no, we’re really excited to have you. So lemme just give a little bit of information about Andy and we’ll give him an opportunity to share more about himself here shortly. So he is coming to us from the UK. He’s currently head of FP&A at Blue Light Card. He is a prolific writer with his own website. He writes quite a few articles, both some personal as well as some business ones. He, he earned a degree in economics. So we’re gonna start with a question we like to ask everybody. What’s the worst budgeting experience you’ve ever had in your career?
Andrew Lynch:
<laugh>? Well, uh, this is quite a timely question ’cause it’s entirely possible. The answer is the budget experience I’m going through right now. Um, and that is, um, no slight on the organization at all. Um, it’s a phenomenal company. Everyone’s working incredibly hard with a quite a valuable mission. Like say it’s a, the company is Blue light card. So we provide discount card for emergency services workers, NHS staff, police, fire ambulance, and a few of the member groups here in the uk. So it’s only open to those in those important professions. And through becoming a blue light card holder, they can get discounts at various retailers, online stores and things like that. So it’s really good helping, um, you know, the people who look after us save a few pounds and helping the, uh, retail partners as well, um, connect with that audience and ultimately drive more revenue.
But the FP&A team itself is new. Um, so there’s a couple of us who are new in the team. Um, and we are dealing with all of the standard Excel problems. And separately, we can talk about how Datarails might be able to solve this. Um, but we’re going through, you know, budget version over here. There’s a different one over here. Someone’s copied and pasted some numbers into a different SharePoint doc over here. We did some retargeting midway through the financial year. So now some people are kind of calling that the reforecast or some people are calling it Target. Which one do we wanna benchmark to? How do we flow that through into next year’s targets? And we’re trying to do all this and, and start off this budget process now, while also because the fp and a team is fairly new. Build out all of the, um, modeling and forecasting tools that we need so we’re not just picking up a model that someone else built.
Um, refining it, you know, uh, adjusting the assumptions and taking it forward. We’re rebuilding it all completely from scratch. Um, with me, who’s been in the organization for two months and my team have been there for, you know, a month and a half. So it’s fun. It’s really good fun, but it is challenging, um, you know, going through the budgeting process itself while also building out all of the tooling at the same time and all of those models from scratch. Um, it’s a lot of work, but it is really good fun in terms of slightly less positive experiences or slightly less positive challenges I do remember a couple of times where, um, I was working for a company that did like outsource services. So we had contracts with various different, um, customers of ours. So we agreed to like provide a certain level of services to them into like cleaning, uh, reception, security, that kind of thing.
And they’d give us a fixed fee for that. And all of those were kind of costed on a tender model basis. And part of that tender model, you have to submit to them how much you’re actually, um, adding as you know, a profit margin. And ultimately the game is to keep that number very low. So the the potential customer thinks you’re not making a tremendous amount of profit and you look good. And the, you know, the plus in the cost plus contract is quite low and that looks positive, but hidden within that is a bunch of other costs that kind of bump up the price a bit that may or may not actually be reflected in that thing. So when we came time to budget, we had a couple of, contract managers who we asked them, you know, how much do you think you’re gonna generate in gross profit on this contract this year?
And they would say, well, you know, the cost model says it’s, uh, 50 grand a year, so, so we should be at around 50 grand a year. I had to point out to them that, you know, year to date, only nine months into the year they had already generated 80 grand or a hundred grand. Um, so you’re coming at me and telling me that you’re gonna generate half the amount of profit next year. And they were going, well, that’s what’s in the model. I’m like, yes, but you know, and I know that the model doesn’t exactly reflect how we account for it internally. So what are you gonna do? Or how are you gonna close that gap and what’s realistic? And they came at it with the point of view of what, well, you know, your finance, so you are gonna tell me a high number and I’ll tell you a low number and we’ll negotiate and meet somewhere in the middle, won’t we?
Um, at which point the owner of the company jumped in and said, stop. That’s, that’s nonsense. Whatcha talking about? We know what the performance of this looks like. We’re reporting it in the same way now as we will in the future. So we’re actually just gonna start with this year’s actuals as a base and go, is it gonna go up or down from this year? And he was like, well, it’ll be about the same. But trying to negotiate with and push the like business partners towards, um, recognizing how we were thinking about and how we would report on the performance rather than just picking a number out of a model that frankly they know to be spurious, but they’re using it as a kind of negotiation and debating tool ultimately because their, you know, comp and performance reviews and bonuses depend on how much profit they generate off these contracts.
So get dealing with those kind of, to a certain degree, conflicts of interest. But as with any budget process, you know, try trying to arrive at a target number that is both realistic but also a bit challenging. You know, just challenging enough to push the organization, not so challenging that you get one quarter in, in your miles behind target already and everyone gets disillusioned and playing around with that tension, um, is, uh, is always fun. But yeah, that was, um, a particularly challenging experience trying to get those business partners on board with that idea.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. I can still remember one time we were trying to get, you know, the profit on different, uh, programs we had. And one of the guys said, Hey, I think the number will be x, like, you know, throughout like a hundred thousand. And it ended up being like two or 3 million. And I pointed that out when he gave me a low number the next time. And, you know, the head of the sales team is like, we’re not sandbagging by chance, are we? You know, and so totally know what you’re talking about. ’cause the incentives and they wanna exceed the number. And so you try to come in with something that isn’t realistic. And it’s one of the big challenges of budgeting is often you’re tying your targets to your budget process, right? And so it leads to a lot of game playing, as you mentioned, misaligned incentives, and it can be a real challenge to work through that.
Andrew Lynch:
Yeah. And it’s ultimately like part of the, um, part of the fun of being an fp and a right, is that you get to be in all of these conversations and you get to see like, how does the sales team talk to the ops team, talk to finance. Talk to hr, ultimately talk to the CEO or the leadership team. And you know, you kind of see how the sausage gets made in terms of financial planning, target setting, how that cascades down through the organization. And, um, it’s great to be a fly on the wall in those. And it also highlights just how important it’s for FP&A to kind of play the, almost like the policeman role or kind of the neutral arbiter. So like, you know, we have a plan and we have a model that says, you know, all being well and good, and if all these assumptions hold, like we should end up at this number.
It’s up to you as the business to tell me like, which of the assumptions in my model are wrong or are gonna change or what, um, you know, management action, are we gonna take, that means the future is gonna be different in terms of trends from the past and then working with them to arrive at that. But, but at FP&A you do have a, a sort of, yeah, good cop, bad cop role sometimes where you can, um, or well, you can either choose to be the good cop or the bad cop depending on, you know, how your CFO or your CEO wants to play a particular meeting. But again, it’s all, um, it’s always good fun. Ultimately, you’re always trying to get to the right answer. Right?
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, I know. Definitely it can be a lot of fun and it’s interesting to watch. So next question we have for, for you is, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? I know you’re heading up FP&A for a company now, but maybe how you got started in FP&A and just a little bit of your journey.
Andrew Lynch:
Yeah, sure. So, um, like you mentioned earlier, so I graduated from, uh, the University of Leeds with an economics degree. I remember start, I started that econ degree in September, 2008. So I think like our first like econ lecture, we were just walking in and we saw on the news about either like Lehman or Bear Stearns collapsing just as I was, you know, heading off into the world of economics, that was good fun. So it wasn’t, wasn’t necessarily the best time in the world to get into the market, but, um, yeah, didn an econ degree for three years and then graduated and joined, um, an insurance company on their finance graduate scheme. So the idea was that over the three years, you know, you, you rotate around in a number of different placements. So we would do one in finance, which is a mix of kind of accounting and FP&A uh, one in like regulatory compliance, one in governance and risk management, and then one in internal audit.
And then ultimately like pick and choose where you wanted your career to go after that. Um, so I started out in finance, uh, really enjoyed the finance placement, got my start, you know, posting journal feeds to our ERP, which was division back in the day of the old Microsoft for the precursor to like, uh, Dynamics Business Central as it is now. Um, so did that for nine months. Um, it was good fun. Learned a lot, um, got involved in a lot of things. Moved on to my next placement in regulatory compliance. Um, and then while I was in that role, um, uh, a permanent role became available in that team, um, which was a bit more money and a chance to jump off the ground scheme. So I took that, uh, and I did that for about two years. Uh, at which point I was still doing all of my, um, accounting exams in the background.
So I’m, I’m now CIMA qualified, the, it’s a UK specific, uh, accounting qualification. It’s not quite the same as being a CPA, but it’s not far off. It’s definitely the best one if you wanna be an fp and a. Anyway, so I was doing all my accounting exams, but I was actually working in a completely non-finance role, and it’s kind of regulatory, like compliance advisory role. Got to the end of all my accounting exams went great. I can be a qualified accountant now as long as I, um, have the relevant experience, which was three years requirement of experience with at least 18 months in these core finance roles, which I went, oh damn, I’m nowhere near that. I only have nine months. Uh, finance experience, experience’s, not very good. So I started looking around for, uh, another finance role to jump into, at which point outta left field, I had the opportunity to go and join a startup over in the US.
Um, so I went to work as the first full-time hire for a company called Scribe Media, um, which was then called Book in a Box, um, which helps people write and publish their own books. So it’s kind of a, a boutique professional, a boutique services company essentially. So we had, you know, writers and book cover designers and people like that on staff, kinda once in a lifetime chance to just go and join a startup as the first full-time employee and help build something from scratch in a completely non-finance role. It was very much kind of operations building up processes from scratch, um, which was really good fun. I did that for about a year, um, and then came back to the UK and was looking for my next opportunity, um, at which point I went. Well, I, I was kind of good at finance. Uh, this was like four years ago now, but when I was in that finance role four and a half years ago, four years ago, I was pretty good at it.
I quite enjoyed it. Maybe I should look around for another finance role. Um, and actually like struggled to find somewhere that would take me, because at that point in my career, I was probably 26 and I was applying for, you know, management accountant roles or finance analyst roles, and they would say, you know, tell us about your finance experience. And I would say, oh, I did nine months in finance four years ago. And they would go, what, why, why do you want a finance role now? So it was actually a bit of a struggle to get back into it, but I got a little bit lucky in that I came across a guy who’s now, um, became a mentor and a friend who was finance director of a small company. This is the, um, facilities management company that I mentioned. So it was a little SME, it was turning over about $20 million a year, and it had a, you know, a finance team of four or five people.
He was brand new in as the, the finance director, the CFO, essentially, and needed a, a number two and for whatever reason, decided to take a chance on me. You know, the guy who had only nine months of finance experience four years ago. So I was a bit green and new to it when I jumped when I joined. Um, but I learned a ton from him. Um, and he kind of quickly trained me up. I got qualified, uh, got promoted to be head of finance, started line managing, started doing everything from kind of treasury management relationships with auditors, every, all the budgeting, all the forecasting, all the reporting, kind of owning that soup to nuts in a, in an SME environment, which was really good fun. And did that for three years. So over that time, we kind of doubled the revenue of the company and took it from a sort of break even ish place to a million pounds plus in net profit.
Ultimately, that was a successful exit for the founder as well. I think they exited about 18 months after I left. So at that point I was a, you know, qualified accountant, had a bit of line manager experience looking for the next challenge, um, but had only ever really worked in this SME apart from my brief grad stint in a bigger company. So I went to work for a big multinational. So I went to work for Capital One uk. So obviously ev everyone in the States and in the UK will know Capital One in the States. Obviously there are a complete set of financial services, so retail banking, credit cards, consumer and auto loans, small business banking, business credit cards. It’s a huge organization in the us the UK arms a bit smaller, so it’s just, uh, like a mono line credit card business. There’s no retail banking or anything like that, so it’s just a lending business.
Um, but I joined them as their head of finance analytics, which is in the fp and a team, but it was almost unique inFP&A roles in that I had no, almost no input into the regular forecasting and no input into, um, uh, month end and reporting and things. So I was, we would, my team and I were like just working on long-term, like strategic scenario planning stuff. So five in 10 year financial modeling, um, reporting kind of big changes to strategy. And if we went after this customer segment of that customer segment, what does that do to theP&L l over the long term? It’s really, really good grounding in fp and a. Um, I learned a, a ton from a really, really good team there. And that was really kind of my first proper, proper FP&A role with any kind of, you know, responsibility and activity.
Um, it was really good fun. I did that for two years, then jumped over to join another an SME as their finance director. Again went back into the SME world and helped them put together proper budgeting and forecasting, variance analysis, the right set of KPIs, reporting them on the right cadence and kind of driving that financial improvement there. Again, that was, another sort of two year stint. And then you might be sensing a bit of a two year pattern here. Got a call about another role that came up, which is the Blue Light card role, um, which ultimately where I’m now, um, so it’s been a kind of a bit of a circuitous route, a very non-traditional finance route. I’ve had large stretch of my career where I’ve been in non-finance roles, and I’ve kind of jumped from big company to startup to small company, to big company to small company.
And now to sort of maybe I’ve found my, my level at a medium sized company, <laugh>. Um, so yeah, it’s been quite a, a long and securous route, but FP&A is ultimately aware of, um, uh, where I really enjoy spending my time. It, like we said earlier, you get to see every part of the business, you get to be involved in the important conversations that happen in every level. And for someone who’s both curious and a bit nosy like me, as well as very know, analytical and commercially focused, there’s no better place to be than FP&A in my mind.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thanks, appreciate sharing the background and agree with you.FP&A is a great place to be. You get to see the whole business, you get to be involved in things. It’s a, it’s a great role, like you mentioned for the analytical side, for the business partnering, for being involved. You know, kinda stepping back, you mentioned, you know, someone took a chance on you and when you and I chatted, you talked about that mentor a little bit and the role they played. So maybe talk a little bit why mentoring or mentor’s been so important to you in your career.
Andrew Lynch:
Yeah, I think, like I said, the immediate importance of him was that at that time in my career, I was, to a certain degree struggling to find a finance role. And he was, I guess, happy to accept the risk that it may or may not work out, but for whatever reason, he saw something in me and thought, you know, I like this guy and I can work with him and I can train him up in the way I need to. So first and foremost, without him, you know, deciding to take on a chance on me, my career would probably look quite different to where, where it is now. I’ve also got very lucky in that I guess this was, so this was pre covid, so it was very much the, um, era of five days in the office working. And I was lucky enough that, uh, he himself had a background in, organizations of all sizes.
So he’d worked in audit, he’d worked in huge public companies in reporting and FP&A roles, you know, private organizations, PE backed companies. But the, the company that we found ourselves working in together was a sort of 300 person company, and the finance team was only five or six people. And so for pretty much five days a week for three years, I was sat next to him and in every meeting that he was in and constantly kind of learning and soaking up from this person at a very close level. And I think particularly when you’re early on in your career, that kind of learning by osmosis or like tacit learning and picking up how to act and how to talk in a meeting, how to, um, model something in Excel, how to deal with senior stakeholders, like just by working closely with someone and observing them, you can kind of learn a lot of those skills, you know, almost by osmosis and by, by role modeling or by, by having a good role model that you can learn from.
So it was, it was just such a, an impactful time in my career on me. So being able to work with someone of his caliber that closely for so long made a tremendous difference. I think to your point, more generally in your career, there’s always, and you know, unless you’re the CEO or the founder or something, there’s always someone who’s a couple of steps ahead of where you are. And they are one level above you, or two levels above you. And you’ve gotta think, okay, what, what, what do they do differently? How do they think differently? How do they act? How they talk? What issues are they thinking about? Or what level are they thinking about things that’s different to how I’m currently working? And then how can I, you know, turn myself more into that, or how, what can I pick up from them and what can I learn from them?
And how do I need to be thinking about things as a, you know, an FP&A manager versus a head of FP&A or a VP or A CFO, and what are the differences at all of those levels? And you can, if you’re observant and smart about it, you can kind of see that while you’re on the job, you don’t necessarily need someone to tell you in a, a performance review or a one-to-one. You know, if you wanna go from manager to VP, here’s what you need to do. You can see how the VPs act differently to the managers or the senior managers, for example, and pick up on what those differences are and learn from them as well as obviously you can just directly ask people, you know, when you were in my shoes five years ago or two years ago, what did you do to get from this level to that level? Or what did you d do differently? Or what were the things that you were thinking about in how to manage your career? You know, over the next five years, having people tell you that openly and honestly in a one-to-one or over a cup of coffee or a beer or something is invaluable. You know, it’s the kind of stuff you just can’t read in books or blogs or see on YouTube. You have to be, you know, in it and you have to have to hear it from the horse’s mouth sort of thing.
Paul Barnhurst:
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Paul Barnhurst
Yeah. So something you said there reminded me of, uh, you know, something as you mentioned, you know, watching and seeing how someone that’s at a higher level, you, how they act, how they behave, how they do things. You know, I’ve once heard it said that you should always act, behave for the role you want, not the role you have. Right? Same kind of idea. What are they doing that I can implement so I can get to the role I want? So, you know, a little, uh, follow up question here around mentoring. So what’s your advice for someone to kind of find a mentor or has a mentor, someone’s listening and they’re thinking, you know, I need a, I need a mentor, I need someone to help me. Any advice you can offer there?
Andrew Lynch:
It’s a good question. And I guess, um, to a certain degree, like the people I’ve found as mentors have ultimately ended up being people that I’ve been working with. Obviously some companies offer slightly more formal and slightly more structured mentorship schemes. Um, I’ve done a couple of them in my time. They’re hugely valuable, particularly if they partner you with, you know, a mentor who maybe works in a different line of business or works in a different function or something like that. Just to get kind of an outside perspective. So if there are any formal mentor schemes or more structured mentor schemes like that, that your company offers, a hundred percent, take them up on it. Some professional organizations also do this as well. So I mentioned CIMA, the, uh, chartered Institute of Management Accounting here in the UK have a, a mentorship scheme where you can, you know, as a qualified accountant, you can opt to be a mentor to people who are studying or part qualified, or you can, you know, grab a mentor who might be a CFO or, you know, 20 years experience to your 10 or something like that.
On a slightly more like informal basis as you, you’ve gotta be observant to, um, the people in your organization. So if I think about, say, um, you know, an FP&A team of sort of 40 or 50 people at a big company. So within that, if you’re an FP&A analyst who’s, you know, relatively junior, sort of three, four years experience in that department of 40, there’s probably four or five people who are sort of manager level and then another couple at sort of director level and maybe a, an a head of FP&A or a VP or something. So within that set of kind of six to seven people, one of ’em is probably your direct line manager, which is great. Maybe they’re a mentor. You can ask them that advice. Hopefully they’re open to giving you, you know, career development advice.
But if there’s also someone else in that manager set that you admire or that you think is incredibly helpful or open, those people are, and I’ve been this person in the past, super happy and super receptive to, you know, you pulling them aside or just saying, Hey, can I just grab like 20 minutes with you to talk through something I’m thinking about? Or, you know, some career advice or things like that. I’d be more than happy to do that for anyone. I’ve done it a number of times in the past, and most people who are at the store manager or senior manager level or even VP level are more than happy to pay it forward. So first and foremost, you just gotta ask for it. And then secondly, if someone does give you some advice or says, you know, go and think about this or think about this, the follow up is incredibly important.
So being able to go back to them in three months time and say, oh, thanks for that advice. You know, you said, uh, A, B and C would be good. Uh, I did them and here are the results incredibly useful. Great, thanks for that. I’m thinking about this now. What do you think? And kind of keeping that loose connection going over time ultimately is kind of how you form the really, really strong mentor relationship. But I would say most people, um, are more than happy to provide a bit of advice if you want to, as long as you make it a little bit easier for them. Don’t walk up to someone and go, hi, I’ve, I’ve been watching you from afar and I would like you to be my mentor. Uh, I need 90 minutes once a month for you. Uh, you know, from now for the next five years, they’ll probably say no. But if you start off on a slightly more informal basis and kind of build it slowly over time from there, that’s kind of what I’d recommend.
Paul Barnhurst:
Good advice. Yeah, I agree with you. I wouldn’t recommend going up and asking for a five year, 90 minutes a month might, might not work out in your favor. No. If it does, I guess more power to you, but I wouldn’t expect it to.
Andrew Lynch:
No. Or if it does, you’ll probably get an invoice from them for their time beause people like that are quite busy.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, exact. Exactly. Here’s the bill that will be 400 a month or whatever, right? <laugh>, you know, there’s a term you and I talked about before this interview, that you’re a fan of the concept of skill stacking. So can maybe talk a little bit about that, that concept, what that is.
Andrew Lynch:
Skill stacking refers to the idea that it’s usually both easier and more lucrative to try and generate. Like if you’re trying to generate a living or be good at your job or do something, it’s usually easier to try and be sort of top 25% in the world at maybe four or five different related things than it is to try and be, you know, the best in the world at one specific thing. So like, I’ll take a non-work, for example, a non-work example first. So like, if you are, if you like chess, if you wanna be the best chess player in the world and make, um, you know, $2 million a year or something, you probably have to be the best chess player in the world, which is incredibly difficult, incredibly competitive. Um, guys like Magnus Carlson have been playing chess since they were two years old.
If you suddenly decided you wanna try and beat them, that’s very, very, very difficult. And it’s gonna be incredibly hard to make a living as a chess player unless you are, you know, the top 0.01% in the world. But what if you are a top 20% chess player in the world? Um, and you’re also quite good at public speaking and you’re quite good at internet marketing. Well, you could probably make a pretty good living live streaming chess on Twitch and doing YouTube tutorials and stuff like that, which a number of people do pretty well. The being the best in the world at chess is incredibly hard. Being top 20% in the world at that and also being a very good, you know, video editor and communicator is probably easier or is, is definitely easier than trying to be the best chess player in the world, but is just as likely to lead to, you know, a positive outcome or, uh, at least a good way to earn a living.
So I think about this in terms of, you know, my career. You know, I’m pretty good at Excel, but I’m not the best in the world, that’s for sure. I’ve watched the Excel World Championships, those guys are a lot better than me, than I’m <laugh>. Um, I’m not the best, uh, accountant in the world. You know, I’ve never worked in audit, I don’t know accounting standards like the back of my hand. I don’t really care that much about specifics of, you know, tax whatever, or tax optimization strategies, that kind of thing. I’m not the best, but I’m pretty good, you know, I’m qualified. I’m, I’m fine. I’m quite good at communicating. I’m happy presenting in front of an audience and I’m a reasonable writer. And if you can combine all of those skills together, actually what you get is a, a pretty good head of fp and a.
I don’t need to be the best in the world to know everything there is to know about tax ’cause someone else does that. Someone who’s a specialty in tax. Um, I don’t need to know how to do, you know, everything to the nth degree in Excel, but I know enough to do a pretty damn good model. Um, and I can speak well in eloquently enough in front of an audience that I’m comfortable, you know, presenting that, that analysis or a forecast or something to a board and a set of senior stakeholders. So I’m not nowhere near the best in the world in any of these specific skills, but combining a bunch of them on top of each other, I end up in a pretty good place. That’s kind of broadly the idea of skill stacking.
Paul Barnhurst:
It makes sense, right? Taking three or four things you’re good at and using ’em to make yourself unique and stand out, right?
Andrew Lynch:
Like, for example, you could be really good at FP&A, but also pretty good at, um, conversing and interviewing people and pretty good at writing content. And you could create a pretty good career as the FP&A guy. You know, it’s not something that stands out or something that immediately comes to mind, but when you combine in a few different skills, you end up in a pretty good spot and almost a unique spot using you as an example.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, it definitely has put me in a unique spot. And it’s fun. I enjoy interviewing people and I was okay at FP&A, so, you know, I combined the two together and it works. There you go. We won’t say how. Okay. I was. We won’t go <inaudible> <laugh>. No, I think it’s, I think it’s a good point. And I think, you know, for anyone out there who’s thinking, Hey, how do I, you know, go about this is, you know, ask others what you’re good at, think about what you’re good at, try new things and over time you’ll figure out what that right combination is for you. And that can change sometimes, right? What that combination is at one point in your career can be different at another. But, you know, try to make yourself unique and stand out. It always helps with moving up the, uh, food chain, so to speak. And it helps with, uh, your compensation the more unique you can make yourself.
Andrew Lynch:
A hundred percent. And just to, um, build on the point you mentioned there, like asking other people what they think you are good at is so important. Like, I know, um, like for years I didn’t think of myself as a particularly good writer because to a certain degree it comes kind of naturally to me. And we all have this terrible bias towards, um, undervaluing our own skills and undervaluing that which comes easily to us. So if it comes naturally to you kind of assume, oh, this is just easy. You know, I wouldn’t say I’m, you know, good at brushing my teeth or putting my shoes on. I just do it. I wouldn’t say I’m good at writing. You just sort of do it. Everyone does, don’t they? And when you ask other people and they say, oh no, we think you’re really good at that. And you go, oh, right, yeah, you, you can’t do that as easily as I can. Or that doesn’t come naturally to you. This feels like play to me, but it feels like work to you that’s interesting. And you, you know, be observant of those and take note of those. ’cause they can be really good hints for where you should, you know, start to spend your time and start to move your career towards.
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s really good advice. I, I appreciate that. And yes, asking others is really important. And like you said, you often realize, oh, I’m good at something that you don’t think you’re good at. So, speaking of writing, you know, I know that’s something you do quite a bit. You’ve, you wrote previously about how you were fired by Tucker Max the day before Christmas Eve. So can you tell our audience, for those who don’t know, who Tucker Max is, who he is, and then maybe tell us a little bit about that story and what you learn from it.
Andrew Lynch:
Sure. So, um, yeah, for those who dunno. So Tucker Max is, uh, I think a four times New York Times bestselling author. This may or may not be true anymore, but I remember at one time said there were, there are three writers that have only ever had, uh, that have had three books on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. There’s Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, and Tucker Max. Uh, those are the, those are the three,
Paul Barnhurst:
Not not Bad Company is what you’re telling me.
Andrew Lynch:
It’s pretty esteemed company <laugh>, um, as a fan, as a fan of all three of those. So Tucker wrote a bunch of books in the sort of, I think mid noughties to late noughties, um, a genre of book that’s sort of broadly called fratire And it was essentially, you know, comedy stories about him and his friends in college and in law school, getting drunk, going to parties, doing the, the things that you do when you’re 23. And, um, you know, having got a tremendous amount of real work to do hilarious books, sold millions of copies, and made him incredibly successful. Ultimately turned more of them into a movie as well. And kind of after he’d retired to a certain degree from writing, he, he had a few different entrepreneurial ventures and then started a, a company that was then called Book in a Box and then became Scribe Media, which was essentially, um, like a gold plated, um, professional publishing service.
So if you had an idea, you know, take yourself as an example, you are running the fp and a guy, you have a ton of really good ideas about, um, you know, how to make it in the world of FP&A, but you don’t have the time or necessarily the expertise to actually sit down and write, you know, 65,000 words into a book. But you’re well aware that a book might be a really good marketing tool. It’d be great for your career, it’s something you can sell, you can own the rights to it, all that kind of good stuff. Um, scribe Media would help you write and publish that book. Essentially do a bunch of interviews with you just like this, turn all that into a manuscript, help you edit it, help you, uh, design a really good cover, publish it on Amazon to the world.
So that was the company, that was the company that I joined as the first full-time employee in January, 2015. So Tucker and his , co-founder, Zach started it in, I think late 2014. I joined in early 2015 as the first full-time employee flew out to Austin, Texas. And the three of us sat around a coffee table kind of figuring out how to build this company, which was really, really good fun to start with. ’cause I enjoyed the kind of greenfield space chance to build out a company, build out some processes, what do we think this looks like, what should the customer journey look like? How do we make all these different systems interact so that the proofreaders get what they need at the right time? The cover designers get what they need at the right time, and it’s a great client experience from end-to-end. And also it’s profitable for everyone involved.
So that was really good fun for about the first six months. And then in the second six months, we kind of did most of that to a certain degree. And my role shifted into more of a kind of, I guess like client management or account management kind of role where I was just kind of making sure everything was happening. You know, keeping in touch with all the different, uh, authors and clients that we were working with, keeping in touch with the different freelancers. I was essentially kind of living in my email inbox from 8:00 AM in the morning till 8:00 PM at night. And I was doing this while working remotely. Um, so I was the only employee in the UK so we, no one else, no one else in the company was even kind of logging on onto Slack or onto emails or anything until about 1:00 PM in the afternoon.
You know, I’d finished work at sort of six or seven, but then constantly be pinged with, um, emails and slacks throughout the night. Essentially ended up in a place where I, I was doing a role that I wasn’t very good at. I’m not particularly suited to it. My skill sets don’t suit trying to do, um, you know, a thousand little things in a day. Um, and know we talked earlier about potentially hiring VAs and things like that. That would be the worst possible job in the world for me. I’m terrible at it. I like having large, you know, chunks of unbroken time to sit and analyze some data and pull together a model or a report or something. I don’t like answering a thousand emails a day on one little thing. So ultimately it was fairly apparent to everyone in the company. I wasn’t doing a very good job.
And so Tucker and Zach, quite rightly, um, made the decision to let me go on, yeah, December the 23rd, I think it was on the 22nd or the 23rd, 2015. And it was one of those where I, I was kind of surprised and shocked when it happened. But the overwhelming emotion I felt when they said, you know, sorry mate, we have to let you go, was relief because I, you know, when you, when you’re in a role where you’re not doing a very good job, you know, you’re not doing a very good job and everyone around you knows you’re not doing a very good job. And which is why they took the difficult decision, which is like I say, absolutely the right decision for them and for me to say, look, this isn’t working. This has to stop. So like I said, the first thing I felt was relief.
And then ultimately I’m incredibly grateful for that because that meant I sort of took stock of my career at that point where I was sort of 25, 26 and said, you know what? I should probably go back into finance. I was pretty good at that actually. That does seem to suit my skillset. It seems to suit, um, what I like doing the way I like to work. And so went from there and kind of ultimately, like I said, I struggled to find a, a role for a while, but then after a couple months when my old mentor took a chance on me, and from that point on, my career has just, um, taken off and accelerated and I’m, I love what I do day to day, it’s great. And it couldn’t be more different from how I felt back then when they fired me. Um, so I’ll always be incredibly grateful for that.
It was a, it was a great learning experience to go and do that role and join a startup. And it was also very good experience for me going forward and also for me as a manager going forward to realize, realize kinda what a situation looks like when it’s not a good fit for you or for the company or whoever. And kind of the value of taking that hard decision, even if it wasn’t me who took the hard decision, ultimately it was them, but it was the right decisions. Yeah, it was tough to deal with, but it all, um, I’m like, I’m, I’m always grateful for it.
Paul Barnhurst:
Perfect. Thank, thanks for sharing that story. I appreciate it. A few more questions we’re gonna run through for you. This one we’re gonna have a little bit of a fun question, then we’ll get back to FP&A. Sure. I’m gonna do one or two here. So I know you’re a big fan of comedy, obviously Tucker Max, as you mentioned, that fratire type stuff. And so I know you’ve done a comedy standup routine. I did. So the first question is, do you have any good jokes you could tell us that you might use in our routine? Something we could tell our audience?
Andrew Lynch:
<laugh>? Uh, nothing comes to mind. The, the person that comes to mind when I think about this is if you ever watched Parks and Recreation, um, the character in that Ben Wyatt is played by Adam Scott. So he’s, uh, he’s what I described as like an outgoing accountant. So he strolls into this, you know, very straight, tight laced, uh, accounting firm. And he says something like, formulas are my formula for mula kind of rubs his fingers together. Like that <laugh> and all these accountants just fall over themselves laughing ’cause it’s the funniest thing they’ve ever heard. Um, because there’s not a tremendous amount of comedy that happens in an accounting firm. Also, the show would have you believe, I don’t entirely believe that, but
Paul Barnhurst:
Yes, there’s definitely a stereotype for accountants. Yes. Whether it’s uh, true or not, it’s out there. And I know I have a little fun with it from time to time as well. I think we all do kind of the jokes and different things that you see at the, uh, accountant’s
Andrew Lynch:
Expense. Yeah, exactly. Like I’ve got a pen, I’ve got a pen or a notebook on it that says like, it’s a cruel world. But accrual, A-C-C-R-U-A-L, I’ve got a, a notebook here that says I was into pivot tables. Pivot tables before they were cool. Former boss used to say like, you can tell an outgoing accountant ’cause he looks at your shoes rather than their own when they’re talking to you. Things like that. So I know the stereotype, I don’t believe it, but
Paul Barnhurst:
Yep, exactly. No, I have a few stickers down here that, uh, embrace some of those. And I even have a book here in front of me that has Excel jokes. Sure. So I, uh, I totally get it. You know, so it’s like the one of what does a data analyst, you could say an accountant, but what does a data analyst put in their hair?
Andrew Lynch:
Come on
Paul Barnhurst:
SUM Product.
Andrew Lynch:
Nice. Love it.
Paul Barnhurst:
There you go. Love
Andrew Lynch:
It. <laugh>,
Paul Barnhurst:
I now I need, I need the, uh, laugh button, right? So I can get my courtesy laugh <laugh>.
Andrew Lynch:
Yeah. I dunno. Where’s, where’s the, the live studio audience for the fp a guys, the obvious next step mate.
Paul Barnhurst:
I’ll, I’ll work on that. Sure. Alright, so I know in addition to comedy, you’ve been quite a prolific writer. You have your, personal blog and a work blog. One of the articles you wrote is you kind of shared some lessons you learned from helping a company increase their revenue and profit. You talked a little bit earlier about that, but maybe could you talk about what the key lessons were you learned? I think you boiled it down, if I remember right, there were four or five kind of key lessons. Could you just talk a little bit about that?
Andrew Lynch:
Yeah, sure. So that, the company I mentioned earlier is a company called Anabas that was a, a facilities management company. So essentially they do cleaning, reception, you know, maintenance, security, all that kind of stuff for companies who rent large boutique office space. So if you think about, if you have a, you know, a hundred thousand square feet of office space in downtown Manhattan, ’cause you are a, a law firm, your expertise is in, you know, writing memos and arguing in court and whatever it else it is lawyers do. You probably can’t be bothered to figure out, you know, how many times a year do I need to get the windows washed or clean out the air vent? Or how do I get someone on security? You just outsource all that to a third party company. And Anaba was one of those third party companies. Yeah.
So when I joined, it was doing about 10 million pounds a year in annual revenue. Um, and kind of breaking even that, that’s a ’cause it’s all outsource services. They’re all super thin margin, um, contracts. So we would always, we were tendering out and bidding our contract at about a sort of 10 ish percent, uh, gross margin. So you can imagine how important it’s to kind of control your costs and to also kind of bid those accurately. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>. So when I joined the, the fin, the amount of fi financial reporting was pretty high level and it wasn’t necessarily granular enough to an app to allow the company to make proper decisions. There’s also just a ton of issues with things like costs being coded in different, you know, GL codes and nominal codes every month. So if you’re trying to look at a trend of like, how much am I spending on, you know, third party labor for my security, you have no idea.
’cause one month it’s in this GL code, then it’s up here and then it’s down here. It’s doing any kind of that trend in us, which is absolutely horrendous. So first and foremost, we’re trying to clean up the books a bit and kind of can we just get an accurate, accurate picture of our financial performance on a month to month basis? Because all these contracts are basically the same. You know, we do the same amount of cleaning every month, the same amount of man hours on reception and security and things like that, and the client’s patterns. A fixed fee, like every month, our gross profits should be basically the same. Uh, and it wasn’t, it was all over the place. So there’s a bit of investigating why that was going on, and some of it had to do with like accruals and prepayments for things like, um, you know, a quarterly deep clean of your carpet in your big meeting room.
You know, are we accruing for that properly once every three months, then the invoice hits, then you start accruing for it again. It’s kind of getting the, the nuts and bolts and the basics, right? Like that. So firstly, getting the basics right in terms of the financial, um, performance of the reporting. We, we did that, that took a few months and once we had that, you can then level set for a budget and a forecast for next year, I think. Okay. I, I know what a steady state looks like. I can get an accurate budget. I can set it, like we said, just at the level where it’s challenging enough that people who’ve gotta strive to try and achieve that budget. It’s not so unrealistic that we’ll never get there. We put in place proper budgets, then we started doing regular, you know, finance review meetings with people who owned each of those contracts.
Um, so there was ultimately someone who was responsible for delivering the right amount of gross profit on each of those outsourced contracts, sitting down with them every month and going, okay, your budget was here and you are here. That’s better because of a, b and C reasons. It’s worse because of this and this. What are we gonna do about it? Okay, great. I’m gonna write that down. I’m gonna follow up with you next month. Okay, next month comes around, you said you were gonna do this. Did you do it? Yes, you did. It’s had an impact on the numbers. Um, doing that constantly and getting the organization in the habit of that regular finance reviews. Firstly, just making sure people are actually paying attention to it. And secondly, making sure they know we are looking at it, they need to be looking at it and their boss is gonna ask them about it.
So they need to be close to the numbers. Kinda driving that cultural change over time. And then ultimately, um, being confident enough in our numbers that firstly the, the CEO could stop worrying about all this all the time and focus on, you know, driving new business and having a good enough picture of how our contracts performing, that we feel confident, um, aggressively bidding for new business and then ultimately winning that new business. Managing it in just the same way rigorous, regular, everyone’s bought in and everyone’s target on the performance. And doing that for three years in a row, you know, completely transformed that business. So we went from, yeah, 10 million a year in revenue and sort of, I think it was about eight grand in profit to 23 million a year, uh, in revenue and probably 1.3 million in profit after tax. Um, and ultimately the, the founder then exited it a couple of years later for probably somewhere in the, you know, five to 10 million pounds range, something like that.
Um, I dunno for sure off the top of my head, just taking a random guess at a multiple. Um, but it just, it was a really eyeopening example of the, the power of basically, you know, the regular fp and a cycle reporting actions, reforecast report actions, reforecast, and driving that performance and driving that fp and a cycle through the business. The, ultimately the, the thing that really drives results is the cultural change, right? And people actually changing their behaviors. It’s not my numbers on a spreadsheet that made the business perform better. It is pushing those conversations and pushing that ultimately the mindset in front of, um, or throughout all the people who own the performance. Um, yeah, that was, it was a really, really good example of just the power of, you know, clean books and uh, and proper budgets was great.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. As, as I listened to you talk, you know, there are a couple of thoughts that came to mind, but I almost wanna sum it up is, you know, creating that culture of accountability with the basics of finance, it starts with having clean data from there. It’s okay. Creating challenging budgets, learning to hold people accountable by having regular meetings and creating a culture that says, look, I got the finances taken care of. Your job is to make sure we deliver on those finances. I’m here to help you to discuss the numbers, to challenge you. And ultimately, you know, creating that culture and that trust so that everybody could do their job from the CEO to the sales team to increase the business and there, and he is not worried is this month that gonna show I got zero profit on my contracts? And so he is digging into it, trying to figure out why, because the accounting wasn’t correct or whatever the reason might be. So that, that all makes a lot of sense to me and I really appreciate that. It’s that great reminder that often, you know, the things that make the biggest difference are the basics. It’s the simple things, you know, I always like to say Go ahead, go on.
No, keep going.
Andrew Lynch:
I was gonna say it’s the old, um, the Charlie Munger quote about take a simple idea and then take it seriously. You know, that’s the key to success. So I always think, you know, like you say, if you get your transaction reporting right, um, your P&L’s correct, you’re driving a budget and a target and then the accountability piece. But it all starts with like, are we getting the basics right and are we doing the basics very, very well? And if you do the basics very well for a long time, you know, it, it really pays off.
Paul Barnhurst:
It’s very true. It’s amazing how much that can make a difference of just doing the basics. So we have one more question then we’re gonna move into our Get to Know You section and wrap up here. So you, you had an article that was picked up by Business Insider called The Reason Billionaires Keep Working. So I’m curious, what was that experience like having an article picked up by Business Insider?
Andrew Lynch:
It was weird. I think that was in, was in the kind 2015 or so, 2016, something like that. Um, and like back then I, I wasn’t writing as much on my blog, but like I was writing a lot on Quora. If you ever like, remember when that was big pre you know, ChatGPT, it used to be the thing that you would ask Francis answers and it would provide them for you, but in a matter of days and weeks rather than, you know, in seconds like chat GT <laugh>. But I, I, I think the, the question was, you know, something like, um, why doesn’t Warren Buffet quit? Or like, why, why do billionaires keep working? Why don’t they just enjoy their money? And my, my point was, which I wrote somewhat succinctly, is that, um, you know, someone like Warren Buffet or Elon Musk, I think were the two, you know, names I picked to have a hat.
They’re not, you know, striving to get to a number where they’ve got enough money in their pension so that they can go and play golf for the rest of their life , that’s obviously not what they’re doing. And if it was, they would’ve quit years and years and years ago. They’re, they’re doing what they do because they love doing it. You know, like Warren Buffet for example, plans to give away the vast majority of his wealth anyway. He doesn’t care about spending the money on himself. That’s not what he’s doing. He’s doing what he thinks he does best, which is, you know, capital allocation and the numbers. And ultimately his net worth is really just a way of keeping score. Like, but that’s the score of the game that he is playing and he likes playing the game. So he is gonna keep playing the game.
The game happens to be, go and sit in an office somewhere in Omaha, Nebraska and read annual reports and decide which companies to invest in, which companies to buy. But that’s what he loves doing. And if he retired, you would say, what do you wanna do with your time? And he would say, I wanna go and sit in an office in Omaha, Nebraska and read annual reports and allocate money. That’s what I wanna do with my time, so I’m just gonna do it. And someone like Elon’s doing it because, you know, he feels a, a deep kind of responsibility to push for the change he wants to see in the world. Again, it’s not about, you know, once I got Tesla to a market cap of this and I’m worth $250 billion, then I’ll have enough to retire and, you know, buy the, you know, private jet and the yacht that I wanna buy.
He feels a, you know, a deep mission and that’s how he wants to spend his limited time. So that’s why, uh, that was my thought on why billionaires keep working, speaking as someone who is not a billionaire, but speaking for them. That was my answer. So I, I put that on Quora and, um, it just got, it got a ton of traffic for whatever reason I think it got sent out on one of their Daily Digest emails. I think it’ll end up being read something like 4 million times or 5 million times. And at the time Business Insider, um, and the Huffington Post and other people would essentially just troll Quora for really popular answers. It was the, you know, the 2016 equivalent of accounts on Twitter that just find really good memes, just repost them over and over again for the Traffic Business Insider saw me put that on Quora and said, oh, that got 5 million page views, let’s stick it on our website and hopefully it’ll get, you know, a few hundred thousand there. Um, so they, they DMed me and said, do you mind if we republish this on, um, business inside? And I said, yeah, sure, no problem. I didn’t get any money from it, but it was, you know, nice to see my name up in lights and take the, take the logo and stick it on my uh, my own personal website and say as seen on. .
Paul Barnhurst:
Thanks. Thanks for sharing. I appreciate the answer. And you know, if I get to 250 billion, I’m not sure, I’ll keep working. I might just go do something else for fun, but you know, it won’t
Andrew Lynch:
Be, I don’t
Paul Barnhurst:
Won’t be the pension is pension issue as you mentioned for sure. Yeah,
Andrew Lynch:
Yeah, exactly.
Paul Barnhurst:
Alright, so this is the Get to Know You section. This is a short section. You get no more than 30 seconds to answer each question. So we’re gonna, the goal here is to keep these succinct and we’ll wrap, run through ’em kind of almost like a rapid fire type approach. So what is something interesting about you that makes you unique that not many people know?
Andrew Lynch:
Um, I think we mentioned it earlier. I I would bet there are very few people in the world who are accountants who have ever done standup comedy in front of a live audience.
Paul Barnhurst:
I would agree with that. I like it. So if you could meet one person in the world, dead or alive, who are you gonna meet and why? It can’t be Tucker Max.
Andrew Lynch:
Yeah, not Tucker Max. Um, so I think the two that came to mind were Charlie Munger and Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton because like prolific writer, incredible mind, what a period of history he saw in his life and profoundly influenced. And Charlie Munger just ’cause he is the, you know, one of the wisest people I’ve ever come across. Someone I consider a mentor sort of from afar from reading his writing. So I would’ve loved to, uh, meet him if I could have,
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, Charlie had a lot of great quotes, he’d be a great one to meet. You gotta love him. Um, so what is the last thing? And we’re gonna say you used chat g you asked chat GPT related to finance, Excel, FP&A or you can generative AI if you like a different platform.
Andrew Lynch:
Sure. Um, it was SQL code, so I was trying to pull some data from our data warehouse and this goes thing back to the skills stacking thing. I know a little bit of SQL, not enough to be a proper data analyst, but enough to help out an FP&A a little bit, but not enough that I didn’t keep getting a error message for some reason I had no idea how to solve it <laugh>. So I just copied and pasted it into chat GBT and said, what the hell’s going on here? Um, and chat GT pointed me in the right direction and helped me out very nicely. So I, I was very
Paul Barnhurst:
Thankful. Nice. It’s de it’s definitely good for those type of things. So what’s your favorite, uh, feature function? Favorite thing about Excel?
Andrew Lynch:
The one I use 50 times a day is X lookup. You know, the V lookup is old hat X lookup these days is the most useful thing you’d find on in, uh, Excel by
Paul Barnhurst:
I do like a good luck X lookup. That’s a great one. Alright, so if someone’s starting their career today in FP&A, what advice do you have for
Andrew Lynch:
’em? So I think, think we’ve touched on the key points there. I guess firstly have in mind the idea of skill stacking. So to be really good in fp and a the, you know, the analysis and the modeling, the quantitative side’s really important. So is the communication business partnering, being able to present to an audience. So have an eye on both of those and make sure you’re focusing on developing both of those. Another point you mentioned earlier, you know, do the, do the basics really well. Make sure you’re checking your work for errors, run things by people before, um, you know, you stick something in front of someone’s boss, make sure maybe you run it by them first, make sure they’re happy with it or make sure your analysis isn’t completely off base ’cause of something you haven’t realized. Work hard attention to detail and then, you know, always be looking a couple of years ahead of you in terms of your career. Who’s where I wanna be in a couple of years, what can I learn from them? How do they think about things? Can I ask them for advice? What do I need to do to get to that next level? And always have your eye sort of, you know, 6, 12, 18 months out in the future. Those are the main things from my mind.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. Thank you. Appreciate that answer. I think there’s a lot of good advice there. So last question before we let you go. If someone wants to learn more about you or get ahold of you, what would be the best way for them to do that?
Andrew Lynch:
Sure. The best way is probably Twitter or X, I’m not sure what we’re supposed to call it these days, <laugh>. Um, I still call it Twitter ’cause I’m old school. Um, so you find me at Twitter, I’m at Andrew G. Lynch, A-N-D-I-E-W-G-L-Y-N-C-H. Uh, you can check out my newsletter, which is net income. Do co uh, you can find me on LinkedIn. Um, my personal website andrew lynch.net, which I occasionally update. Um, but yeah, Twitter or net income are probably the two best places to find me.
Paul Barnhurst:
Alright, great. Well we’ll put those in the show notes and thanks for joining me today, Andrew. Appreciate it and appreciate getting the opportunity to chat with you. You know, try in the future to uh, not get fired right before Christmas if you can. Sure. And we’ll, uh, chat with you again soon. So thanks for being on the show.
Andrew Lynch:
Awesome. Thanks Paul. Absolute pleasure.