Taylor Otstot, Vice President Finance, Dashlane joined GoDaddy (now a $30billion valued) domain registry, domain registrar and web hosting company before their IP. In 8 years he climbed to senior Director of Finance running an FP&A team of 14. From this experience and as VP Finance at DashLane he says he hires for 3 things: curiosity, ambition, and finance leaders who are service-oriented. “If you bring those three things to the table, you’re able to wade through a lot of the ambiguity that comes with those decision making processes.”
Also in this episode:
- Finance and FP&A as antidote to the machine of Big 4
- 3- 4 years in audit as the “perfect amount”
- Getting to strategy in FP&A
- Partnership vs accountability as a false choice for FP&A
- Improv comedy having its moment in finance
- The Tarantino approach to finance presentations
Connect with Taylor on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/taylorotstot/
Subscribe to CFO Frameworks newsletter on Substack: https://www.cfoframeworks.com/
Glenn Hopper:
Welcome to FP&A Today, I’m your host, Glenn Hopper. Our guest today is Taylor Otstot, VP of finance at Dashlane, former GoDaddy finance leader and the author of CFO Frameworks, a sharp new newsletter focused on the strategy side of fp and a. He’s built and led high performing finance teams, and he is not afraid to call out lazy analysis, bad dashboards, or buzzwords that don’t mean anything. Taylor brings a clear point of view on how fp and a can drive real business impact, and today he’s here to break it down with us. Taylor, welcome to the show,
Taylor Otstot:
Glenn. Thanks for having me. I’m really excited to be here.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, it’s funny, I love what we called out in your intro of, uh, you know, lazy analysis, bad dashboards and buzzwords, because to me, being on LinkedIn a lot, I mean, you see these buzzwords and you just, it’s, it’s almost cringey a lot of times. <laugh>.
Taylor Otstot:
Yeah. There’s a lot of, uh, empty calories out there.
Glenn Hopper:
Yes, exactly. And everybody wants to be an expert too, so they <laugh>. That’s true. Well, speaking of experts, <laugh>, not that I’ve, uh, now, now that I’ve set the bar probably, uh, way too, probably too high or whatever, <laugh>, or now the audience is gonna be like, wait a minute. How are these two different seriously though? Uh, tell me about your, uh, your history and background and kind of where you started and and where you are today.
Taylor Otstot:
Yeah, you bet. So, like a lot of folks, um, I started my career in, in audit. Um, I did EY for the better part of four years, variety of, of clients from small to big to public, private. And, and really through that discovered that that was not for me. Love the, the people love the culture. I just did, did the work, didn’t resonate with me. And I think a lot big part of that is one, I I struggled with being presented with finding problems and not being able to solve them. And I also struggled with all the problem finding, lacked any creativity, right? There was a template for everything, and I sort of wanted to go off the beaten path. And that was not something that you typically do. You
Glenn Hopper:
Maybe don’t want your auditor going off the beaten <laugh>, maybe that <laugh> No,
Taylor Otstot:
Probably not. Right? And it’s one of those things where you, that’s how you learn. But the, the way that that mechanism works is it’s a machine and you want everyone to just follow through the machine and, and, and not tor it. Like, I think it’s a super valuable, uh, career or even start of the career. But I had hit that point where I was like, you know, I just want to go and do something a little bit different. And that’s where, you know, finance really, uh, or fp and a really appealed to me. So to get that fp and a job, I actually had to do like a stint where it was more of a hybrid role where I did some accounting and some fp and a and I did a, a real estate investment trust that had gone public the year prior. You know, not my favorite job that I’ve ever had, but super valuable in just learning what fp and a was and saying, yeah, this is what I wanna dedicate my time to.
And so through all that, I had gone through an acquisition that doubled our size. We were doing first year SOX, we were doing a whole ERP implementation. So it was like, great, I love the chaos, um, but real estate is not the thing that gets me up in the morning. And the one thing that I appreciated about my audit days was, I don’t mind working hard, I just wanna care about what I’m working on. And it was hard to get up and care about real estate. And so that’s when I decided to, you know, go make a pivot. And I went to GoDaddy and I joined about a year before their IPO. Uh, at the time there were about a billion in revenue, and I came in as a senior financial analyst and, you know, just kind of did the dregs and worked my way up over the course of eight years.
By the time I left, uh, I was a senior director running a team of about 14 folks running the fp and a support for a variety of business units, our largest p and l, all of our horizontal functions like marketing and sales and support, and then a bunch of, you know, attached, uh, acquisitions that were raging in size from, you know, 10, 20 million up to like 50 million. Same thing. Love the culture, love the people. Eight years is a really, really long time to be in one place. Uh, and I was starting to get that itch to go do something different. And that’s what ultimately led lead to Dashlane, where I’m the VP of finance here. Um, I run our fp and a group. I also do all of our investor relations and talk to our board. And I even did a stint where I was running our analytics team for a period of time. So over the course of all those years, you know, had the opportunity to see companies of varying sizes at varying stages. But like the, the crux of it, the core of it has always been, Hey, we’re here to help people make good decisions. How can the finance team enable that?
Glenn Hopper:
I love that you ran the analytics team for a while because there’s really such, I mean, the Venn diagrams from analytics and fp and a, it seems like they’re starting to eclipse each other.
Taylor Otstot:
It’s almost one circle.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Yeah. I love that background. And I, you know, I also love the audit background. I’ve talked to so many people lately who started out in, in audit and, um, made the switch. And I wonder, you know, you said you did it for four years and it was long enough to know that that’s not what you wanted to do. But I, I’ve gotta think that the, what you learned and sort of getting your reps in on accounting basics, I mean, that, would you, would you trade that for anything? Do you wish you had done it for a shorter time? Or do you, do you wish you’d gone straight into more of an fp and a role? What’s your thinking, looking back at it?
Taylor Otstot:
For me, it was perfect. And I think for most people it is. You know, I, I think the hardest thing is, is that if you don’t want to be an auditor or you don’t want to be high level accounting, there is a certain point where you could be in it too long. I think for me, the three to four years was perfect where I got that background. And not just the accounting background, but also being able to think about problems in novel ways, right? Like, depending on what engagements you’re on, you may be presented with a new accounting issue or a new line of business, and you have to figure out, okay, now how are we gonna approach this one? And we have to get comfortable with something that is by definition, someone ambiguous. And also, by the way, you can’t go to the level of detail that like an accountant would go because you can only be on the engagement for so long. So, you know, I I, I probably spoke a little bit too decisively about the lack of creativity. There’s some creativity where it’s like, how do we get comfortable with something without knowing it? We have to know it well enough, right? And I think that was a good, just broad base, especially when thinking about fp and a where more times than not, you can’t know until the thing happens. So how do you get comfortable with an appropriate level of ambiguity, and more importantly, how do you reduce ambiguity efficiently?
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Thinking about that transition, and I talked to A CFO, he is actually become a good friend of mine over the years. He loves the accounting side of it to the point where like he loves, you know, sort of the, the credits and debits and matching the, um, uh, the TSheets and <laugh> that that is really appealing to him. And I think those are the people who stay and with, with that accounting focus, and I, we had a guest on a couple weeks ago, and we were talking about the same thing. She made the transition from audit into finance, and she said that for people who stay kind of on the accounting side, they’re, you know, a lot of times they do it because they’re not gonna be okay with being directionally, right. You know what? I’m like,
Taylor Otstot:
Yeah,
Glenn Hopper:
It’s not, it’s, we need everything to tick and tie and this, you know, best guess is, you know, that, that they’re gonna lose sleep over that <laugh>. That’s,
Taylor Otstot:
Yeah. I think that’s where it’s true is like what your personal working style is and like where if you’re comfortable with like, Hey, I just wanna know all the rules so that I can stay within it, that’s a perfect place. Like, and it’s needed, it’s super needed on the fp and a side, depending on what stage you’re in, right. And, and there’s certainly a point like where certain fp and a groups and larger companies, there still are a lot of rules and there are a lot of things knowable. But in the places where I’ve been where it is high growth or smaller or new areas of business, like those things are, most things are unknowable. And if you’re comfortable with that ambiguity, you’re comfortable with that uncertainty and just going into sort of a greenfield, then yeah, the accounting stuff is just not the right thing for you.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. So we, we, we could go on on that, but I do, I, I feel like it’s, it’s interesting ’cause I think maybe, maybe are the third or fourth guest in a row that made that switch. So I’ve, I’ve probably already beat this horse down <laugh> to death. So what <laugh> we’ll move on from it. But I do, you know, and I, I ask so much about that because early in my career, I kind of stumbled into finance. Like I wasn’t sure after my MBA, that that’s exactly where I was gonna go. I started out in marketing and then came over to finance and we were talking before the show on, uh, and talking about those moves. And you said something that really resonated with me because it reminded me of my, um, early career and it was, it’s great if you have a mentor and you have a team and you have a coach and you’re in an organization that has upward mobility and all that.
But sometimes, you know, or not, sometimes I would say, and if you’re not, you need to learn how to be this, but you’re gonna be the best advocate for yourself, and it’s gonna gonna be by one, the quality of work you do. And two, making it clear what you’re looking for. And, and I think you and I shared that in common. And so watching your career, career progression in eight years at GoDaddy and now where you are, can you kind of walk us through if there’s pivotal moments or, or really where being that advocate for yourself to get those new responsibilities, how can you sort of balance that with, you know, making what you want known, but not sounding like you’re whining or complaining or sounding too demanding
Taylor Otstot:
<laugh>. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, what I always coach my teams on, um, when they want to grow in their careers, is that growth is gonna be the intersection of opportunity and ability. And, you know, sometimes you’re like, okay, well, ability, I can control, but opportunity I can’t. And I would argue that’s not true. Opportunities can be manufactured. There are certain things that I can’t manufacture for my team, but most things you say, Hey, I’m interested in X, Y, Z, we can find a way to help you get into that. And that’s, as I look back on my career, those were a lot of those things. So when I first joined GoDaddy, I actually joined in the corporate finance department, so doing like travel and headcount, like, you know, all the typical staples. But within like three months of me joining the team that was supporting our sales and support organization had gotten moved off in large part because they had managed to run foul of the entire team.
The business had come to the VP of finance and said, we just can’t work with this group anymore. <laugh> like, you know, all they do is tell us no, uh, they don’t seem to really understand the business very well, you know, yada yada, yada. Uh, we just need a change. And my boss looked around and was like, okay, Taylor, you just got here. You haven’t really established yourself yet. Why don’t you like, hold on the fort while I figure out what to do? There’s opportunity and then you need opportunity. So, but you have to run with it, right? And so what I did was say, okay, like I, this sounds more interesting to me. Like I actually want to get embedded with the business. I’m gonna do everything that I can that’s gonna be silly to not choose me going forward. When I think about all the steps in the career, it was similar points.
When I had supported the sales organization for a number of years, I started to think to myself, look, if I’m not careful, I will only ever be a sales and support guy. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but my, my aspirations were bigger and I, I worried that like I, I don’t wanna be pigeonholed at this point in my career. So I went to my boss and said, Hey, look, this is the thing that I’m worried about. I don’t want to move away from sales support. I also don’t wanna lead everyone open and, and, you know, break the build like what we built here, but at the same time, I wanna figure out how I get other opportunities in there so that I’m not just seen as this one thing. And, and simply by advocating for it in that way, where it’s like, Hey, I’m not here to make your job harder, but I’m also trying to figure out how to make sure that my job is fulfilled. We were able to sort of manufacture little ones and then as opportunities came up, whether it was reorganizations or acquisitions, it, at least that seed was planted and I was able to get some of those things through. And then you have to deliver, right? So those are the opportunities. And then the ability, if you can show that you can do those things, you have a record of being able to take on new things, then you suddenly are given more of those opportunities, right? The the, the reward for good work is more work.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah.
Taylor Otstot:
And so, like, that’s the stuff that I think about constantly. And I, and I, I try to carry through, um, everywhere that I’ve gone, and even today at Dash plan and with my CFO, I have a number of conversations with him about these are my aspirations, what I wanna do. We may not be able to do all that stuff here, but you know, how can I get exposed to different things? And he is, even just by asking that, he’s like, oh, you know what? Lemme get you in contact with a few other CFOs in my network and you can go talk to them and just pick their brains. Like, never would’ve gotten that opportunity if I didn’t ask for it. Um, so I, I think the broad things to think about is if you don’t ask, you’re not gonna get, and then as you’re thinking about what you want to do, think about what abilities you can build up while you’re waiting for those opportunities to come through so that you’re ready to take those on, right?
If you want to be more of a business partner, how do you get more opportunities to speak in front of people and be able to give presentations confidently, competently, whatever, how will go to Toastmasters and practice speaking in public, if that’s a thing that you’re not great at, if you wanna be more on the analyst side, like build some Tableau dashboards, go through some Excel, whatever it is, right? You can do things in the background to show that you’re capable and then just win the opportunities present themselves. Throw yourself out there and ahead of those opportunities, make sure people know that that’s what you’re interested in. Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
And I think about work life balance a lot, and I think it’s not a work-life balance isn’t like a period of stasis where you just have everything perfectly balanced. And I, I think what happens sometimes is if you wanted to have that stasis when you had the opportunity to run a team, or that that had been <laugh> broken up and you were gonna be the interim person there, you could have just ridden that and said, okay, well I’ll just do this. Or you could have take, you could have taken the opportunity and leaned in, put in the extra time and effort in that, in that, you know, kind of a, a blast to make an impression there, to get, to move yourself up in there. And I think that’s a, you know, it’s, it’s easy to default and I think I’m, I’m an, I’m oldest dirt, so I, but I, a lot of people my age, when you talk to them, you, you hear that they just get fixed in, this is the way I do it, this is the way I’ve always done it.
I’m not trying to take on more. These are the guys who are able to go ride their bike for two and a half hours at lunch. Sure. Go <laugh>, you know, go, go to the park and all that. And that would be great if, I mean, if you’re, if you’re content where you are and you’re not looking to move or change anything, but right now with all the tech out there, and I wanna talk about it on every show, but with AI coming, I mean, if <laugh> if you have to work, if you’re not living off of <laugh> some trust fund, you probably is now one of those times to shift the balance into learning more and understanding the new technology
Taylor Otstot:
A hundred percent. And like realistically, the people who are in that camp are probably not listening to this podcast or reading my newsletter or doing anything else, right? Like they’re, but I, but I think that’s, that’s right. I think the other thing that holds people back, and I’m gonna use the word promotion. Promotion doesn’t necessarily mean like higher title. It could be into a different role or whatever else, but people tend to think about promotions as a reward for your past work. And what I try to convey to the teams that I have is no, no, no. A promotion is a bet that we’re saying you’re gonna be able to able to succeed at this next level. So you can be phenomenal at your current job, but if your bosses doesn’t think you’re capable of doing this other thing, it’s a risk for them to put you in that role, particularly when you’re moving higher up in the ladder, right?
Like difference between analysts and senior analysts. I don’t know, there’s not a huge distinction between those, but senior analysts and manager, absolutely. Manager, director, a hundred percent, right? And so when you think about those things, it’s like, look, you can be great at your job, but you actually have to show that you can go beyond that. And that’s where, again, like that looking for the opportunities to showcase what you’re capable of and then delivering on it, that’s how you move up fast. The folks who are just gonna say, Hey, I’m gonna write it out. I’m gonna get the tenure and eventually I’m going to get to that spot. Those people do eventually get promoted, but it’s typically not on the timescale that they’re happy with.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Yeah. And this kind of goes back to, you know, what I was, we were saying about buzzwords, you know, sometimes people, going back to my LinkedIn thing, I don’t know, I’ve been on LinkedIn a lot this weekend. Maybe it’s just top of mind for me, but I think sometimes people think that the way that they’re going to be promoted or get that next, you know, that next job is to really, with hyperbole and all the probably AI generated content, now go and just put all these thoughts, um, buzzwords and all on LinkedIn and, you know, and ex exert that they are an expert, they’re a thought leader, an influencer. What, what, whatever, when really, you know, the, the work has to be done. If, if I’m a boss and I see someone on LinkedIn that much, I’m thinking, you sure have a lot of time to <laugh> to be posting on LinkedIn versus <laugh> actually doing the, doing the job.
And I guess to that, I think there’s, I mean, there’s a fine line like if you of, of communicating that and, um, you know, bringing valuable information and not just adding to the noise. And I think a big part of it though is taking that and applying it in the real world. So thinking about everything that we talk about and what you talk about in the newsletter and what we try to talk about on this show, how do you apply this with your team? So I guess maybe the easier way to, to word that would be what principles are guiding you when you’re creating and leading your teams to be high performance so that you can get them past the buzzwords and, and get ’em to meaningful storytelling and all that. What, how do you put these ideas in practice? Yeah,
Taylor Otstot:
So the, the first thing you know, um, let’s define what high performing means, at least how I think about it when I’m building these teams. And it is, we want to help the business make good decisions confidently. And when we distill that, we can work backwards and say, now what are the things that we have to have in place in order to enable that? So first and foremost, it comes down to like the who is on the team, who’s on the bus, and what are, and, and what are their, their qualities. And the three things that I typically look for is I look for folks who are highly curious, folks who are highly ambitious, and folks who are service oriented. And if you bring those three things to the table, you’re able to wade through a lot of the ambiguity that comes with those decision making processes, right?
And so then when it comes to actually like putting in the principles of how do we make that team work, first and foremost is we have to nail the basics, right? We have to make sure that we’re not making a bunch of mistakes in the reporting that people are catching, that undermines the trust. If you think about what trust is, trust is ultimately high quality delivered consistently. So you wanna make sure that the table stakes are there and they know, hey, if the finance team has given me a number, or they gimme me an analysis that has been well done, there’s no formula errors, there’s no issues of ticking and tying, et cetera, that allows you then to build on that and say, all right, the things that we want to go do to be high performing is one, we wanna have enough space for everyone to be able to step up and deliver for their business partners, whoever it’s right.
Whether it’s directly with the business on a strategic finance role, or even from core s and trying to guide the overall like executive team. I tend to run my teams a little bit on the leaner side. One, because it gives people those opportunities to stretch and they’re not getting crowded out from, from things where they won’t be able to do. Um, but two, it forces them to think about the trade-offs that they need to make on a day-to-day, week to week basis, right? Because if you’re not careful, your time gets filled up with a bunch of empty calories. And so, going back to what we were just discussing of like, you know, if you think about your own career and, and, and what you wanna do to move up as a finance team, we wanna move up is we wanna be extremely outcome focused. And so in any given week, we wanna come into the week thinking, what are the things that I can do this week that will really help drive the business forward?
And, you know, good examples of this is like, one, we’re gonna be really thoughtful about the types of reports that we’re putting out. And if we think it’s not having an impact or because people aren’t reading it or because they’ve become just straight up numb to it, or it’s missing a piece, like we’re gonna not be afraid to constantly edit, reevaluate, try different ways to make sure that we’re breaking through the noise. And then the last point, which is just important, we think about that service oriented capability is be in the trenches with the business. What I’ve noticed, particularly with, with younger finance folks, is they’re much more comfortable behind the screen than they are on the phone or in the meeting room. But you have so much more impact if you just talk to people. Like, there’s just a, i I, I’m a huge believer in the written word clearly, because I spend a lot of my time writing stuff out.
But that is good for knowledge transfer. That’s not great for partnership. Partnership is give and take. It’s having a conversation. It’s seeing the body language. And I’m a firm believer that if you just spend some time like talking to your business, understanding what they care about, you can have a huge impact with them. Because one, you understand the business as well as they do, but two, they see you there and they know that you’re, you’re in it with them versus you’re just someone that swoops in and gives them a report and then swoops back out or swoops in and tells ’em, by the way, you’re overspending or whatever else, right? Like, it, it is interpreted differently when it’s someone who you feel like is on your team.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Fp and a today is brought to you by Data Rails. The world’s number one fp and a solution data rails is the artificial intelligence powered financial planning and analysis platform built for Excel users. That’s right. You can stay in Excel, but instead of facing hell for every budget month end close or forecast, you can enjoy a paradise of data consolidation, advanced visualization reporting and AI capabilities, plus game changing insights, giving you instant answers and your story created in seconds. Find out why more than a thousand finance teams use data rails to uncover their company’s real story. Don’t replace Excel, embrace Excel, learn more@datarails.com as you were going through the phases. So the foundation, you know, talking about the, the basic skills, the analysis, you have to blow that outta the water. Yep. Just, that’s, that’s table stakes though, that, but we have to be able to, uh, you know, build complex models, understand them and, and create these valuable tools.
But then the ability, so analysis, then presentation of that. Because if you have this just wall of, of data and, and numbers, but you can’t tell a story around it, it’s gonna be, it’s just too much information. It’s, it’s, it’s, what’s that quote by Clifford Toll? It’s like, data is not information, information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom and wisdom is not understanding. But if you go back, like where we add value is moving a, moving what we’re reporting higher up the chain, and truthfully, that lower level we’re seeing with generative AI and with classical AI as well, that, that, and just automation in general, but the automation of turning data into information, that’s kind of, I mean, that, that’s not really adding any value. That’s just running a, a report out of NetSuite that gives you your monthly, you know, uh, performance to budget or whatever.
But being able to then select out of all the, even out of all the KPIs, what are the, the key KPIs to focus on here? And, and you know, what, what is the narrative here? The presentation. And then I guess, I dunno if it’d be a layer above, or if it’s, if these two are kind of tied, but the business partnering, that strategy that’s understand, that’s getting out of the ivory tower of finance and accounting and saying, no, I get it. I’m a part of this business and what I’m doing here, yes, I’m partnering with you, but we’re all working together to come up with strategy <laugh> for the, uh, to drive the business forward. And I’m thinking, getting to that strategy point is, is the toughest part, especially because I think a lot of times fp and a people were kind of like engineers, like you said, early career. If I had my choice between spending all day in meetings or spending all day building a really cool spreadsheet, I think I’d picked the ladder 99 times out of a hundred
Taylor Otstot:
<laugh>. Although, but you’re, you’re later in career. And I think what I’ve noticed is like, there’s this, this arc where it’s like early new career, oh, I just wanna be in the room, I wanna be in the meetings. And then you get to a point where it’s like, oh my God, I’m sick of the meetings, I just wanna be in my spreadsheets, <laugh>,
Glenn Hopper:
Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. Absolutely.
Taylor Otstot:
But yeah, so to your point of like, how do you, how do you foster that? We need to give folks perspective. And so if you’re one of those individuals who’s like, I wanna be a better partner, but I don’t know how, if part of the issue is, is that you are more often behind the screen if you don’t ask, you don’t get asked to be in the room for a couple of discuss, like hear how the executive team talks or hear how the, the leaders above the leader that you support, like talks to them, what kinds of question they ask, what they’re interested in, get that perspective that makes all the difference in the world. The thing that I think about a lot, and, and, and, and like, whenever I take on a new team, I get one of these questions of like, okay, well how do we balance, you know, being a good partner, but we also have to hold everyone accountable because they have targets and they have cost numbers.
And I said, that is absolutely the wrong question because we’ve fp and a do not hold anybody accountable. We are, we are at like, at best in that world. We have the scoreboard, but we’re not making the decisions about who is going to be reprimanded or who’s going to be replaced or, and those are not our decisions. We’re not holding anybody accountable. Our job is to make the rules of the game and the placement on the field as clear as humanly possible, and then help guide them to move the ball further and further down. And when you flip the script where it’s like, my job isn’t to tell them whether they’re right or wrong, my job is to help them understand the context of which they’re in, and then how do I help them understand where they are and where they want to get to and what the gap is between those two things.
And I’ve found more times than that, when you frame it that way, that helps start to open up a little bit. I typically then kind of work through like a five stage, uh, or, or not only five stage, but five different qualities of, of partnership, right? So one is you wanna have that aim to assist, you wanna make sure that people are, you’re going in there, my job is to make this team successful, to make this team look great, my partner to, to, to blow the socks off of whoever their boss is. Then you want to build clear boxes to your point, like the models, the reports, everything has to be perfect. But also by the way, you wanna make sure that everyone understands what’s in those numbers. Because if, again, if you want to make your partner successful, they need to understand how the business runs.
However, they think, if they’re really detailed, give them more detail. If they’re really high level, help them intuitively grasp it so that you can actually partner with them because they have some base level knowledge of the things that you’re gonna be talking about. Third point then is you want to be able to just consistently close the loop. One of the biggest things that I see with finance teams is they don’t come back and give like, the follow on, right? And the example that I typically use is, if you think about like the, the innovation of Uber, it wasn’t just, you know, the, the cars or the software, whatever else it was. I’m going to tell you when the car you ordered is going to arrive. And if you think about that, like, hey, if someone asks for an analysis or they ask for, you know, something to come through, are you telling them when to expect it?
What it’s gonna look like? And then, by the way, if it’s not, if it’s gonna be late, you’re giving them a heads up, it’s gonna be late, here’s the new deadline, right? There is something powerful about letting people know what’s coming, because when you don’t, there’s just more anxiety and more frustration, right? Like, imagine like calling an elevator and not having the little dial at the top that says what floor it’s on. So you’re just sitting there being like, I don’t even know if the elevator’s moving. Like, I hear a sound, but I don’t, I don’t know if that like, it’s stuck or whatever else. Like, you wanna think about how does the team know exactly what you’re working on and what to expect from you? The last couple things then is going back to our point around not holding people accountable, but you wanna help ’em be successful.
The thing I I, I preach consistently is use. Yes. And this is a super powerful popular thing in, in improv comedy, right? Where it’s like, hey, to, to build on the scene, don’t like dissuade what the, the previous actor had done, build upon it. Same thing with all this stuff, right? Like to avoid the office of no, don’t tell them no, you want to agree with, with the premise of what they’re driving, and then add context on top of it, right? So, you know, simple example, if the sales team wants to have a spiff for an extra, you know, bonus on this thing or that because they’re worried about missing targets, they’re like, yeah, that makes sense because it probably would help drive some incremental performance. And I wonder about how that’s going to impact our bottom line targets because we’re already behind on this thing and that thing, right?
You can bring the context in without shutting them down. And that simple trick of agreeing and, and not, not falsely agreeing, like find the actual good in what they’re talking about and then adding the context on top of it. That’s what a partnership looks like, where it’s like, yeah, I, I’m riffing with you, it’s a good idea. And what else? And then the absolute last thing that you wanna do is you just wanna make sure, like we were talking before, is you wanna reduce ambiguity where you can. If we’re thinking about the purpose of finance is to help make good decisions confidently, the thing that everyone gets stuck on is they don’t know. And if they don’t know, they’re not going to decide. They’re going to ask for more data, more analysis, whatever else. And so what you wanna do is help get ’em over the hump that you’re trying, just keep moving through the progression of information to, to knowledge, to insight, to whatever, and say, look, here’s the things that we can know. Here’s the things that we don’t know, but we can learn later on. And here’s the things that we will never know. And so let’s figure out what to figuration of these things, what level of confidence we have to have in order to move forward with this so that we keep moving because we have expectations, we have targets, we have a business to run.
Glenn Hopper:
I love all that. And I, it’s funny, I I’ve hung up on when you mentioned yes, and, and being that being a, a tactic from improv. So every now and then happens, it’s either serendipities or it’s a glitch in the matrix. I don’t know what it is, but you’re the third guest in, I don’t know, the last five weeks to mention improv comedy. Uh, one of somebody brought it up as, uh, something about them and uh, that, you know, in, in the segment where we asked what something not people, not many people know, and they said they did improv comedy. Someone else brought that up too. And I think it’s so interesting though that it would just ran come, come up three times. But if you think about that idea of being a true, like helpful partner, so the the yes and and improv is because if you say at any point say no, then you’ve killed the whole momentum of this, of the sketch. So, you know, yes. And, and just thinking of that mentality. So I think the secret lesson for our listeners is find the improv comedy club in town and go take some improv comedy to get better at business. I
Taylor Otstot:
Think <laugh>, I, and I think that’s right. And, and not to mention that also helps you with like the uncertain situations or when you get caught up. ’cause again, like most finance people are not naturally comfortable in public settings and speaking or speaking out of turn or whatever else. And like, but that’s where you have an impact. That’s where you build your brand, is with the audience. You don’t build your brand with your spreadsheets, like to a certain point you do, but then you kind of teeter out. And if your goal is to move up in the world and, and to be more strategic or be a leader, you need to look like a leader in those rooms.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. I mean, if, you know, if you’re only focused on the technical part of your job, you’re gonna be the, you know, world’s best individual contributor for the Exactly. Rest of your career. That’s exactly
Taylor Otstot:
Right. Yeah. And that’s okay, that’s what you wanna do. But if you’re, if, yeah, most folks that I coach, like they, they typically want to be in that leadership position. It’s like, great. You, you have to show up in the room. Like,
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah.
Taylor Otstot:
Because if you, if you look un unconfident when you’re talking, people are gonna wonder, well what, like, what else do they, are they not confident? There’s something about like, you actually take a lot based on how people present themselves, and you apply that to how you think about the work.
Glenn Hopper:
And maybe I need to reel it in because I feel like we could talk soft skills all day. Mm-hmm <affirmative>. But I do wanna have them mix. And because when you and I were talking before the show, and, and I get, we’ve been talking a while and we know we both share, uh, a lot of, uh, the same interest, especially on, on the data side. But I do, I wanna get a little bit technical to the technical part of our job here. And well, you talked about smart segmentation or, um, when you were talking about most actionable insights come from segmenting data correctly. Yep. Walk me through that. Tell me what great disaggregation looks like in practice and what you mean by that.
Taylor Otstot:
Yeah, and so be, before we jump into like what it looks like, I, I want to give like the, the example that kind of helps paint the story. And, and, and it’s one that I had in my, in my post about it. So back in the 1940s, the US Air Force had a problem where, uh, their planes were crashing a lot, like way more than they should. At the worst. There were like 17 crashes in one day, which is insane, especially when you’re talking about like on the eve of America going into World War ii. So what they did is they were looking at it and they said, okay, well maybe what the issue is is that the, the cockpit, ’cause when the, the original cockpits were designed back in I think 1926, they had designed it for the average palate then. And they thought, well, maybe what happened is is that our pilots are just a little bit bigger, or they’re different sized and they’re having trouble controlling their planes because of that.
So they went and did a huge study of 4,000 of their pilots on like 140 dimensions. I mean everything from, you know, not just height and weight, but also like the fun length, the distance from your eye to your ear, just a bunch of crazy stuff. And ’cause they were like, we’re going to fully develop what the pilot looks like in the Air Force, and then the cockpit will be designed exactly around that, and now they’ll be able to control the planes. And then there was one guy, <laugh>, who was on this research group going, I doesn’t make sense to me. Uh, and his name was Lieutenant Daniels. And what he did is he said, look, I, this, something’s not, not jiving with me. So what I’m gonna do is I wanna take just 10, 10 of those 140, and I’m going to look at all those 4,000 pilots and I’m gonna see how many of them fit within the confines of those average metrics for those 10.
So out of 4,000 pilots on those just 10 dimensions, exactly zero lined up with all of them <laugh>. And so what they were finding was like, Hey, these averages don’t actually work. ’cause there’s a bunch of different shapes and sizes. And that opened it up because now they’re going, oh, well, what we actually need is not a pilot, a cockpit designed for the perfect pilot. We need a cockpit that can be designed for any pilot. So the advent of things like adjustable seats in and, and, and steering columns and all this different stuff came from this one person who was looking at this and saying, I don’t wanna be confined by these average dimensions that you’re throwing at me. When you think about that, then in how we run a business, we do this all the time, not just jumping to a conclusion saying, oh, it must be because the pilots got bigger.
Which like in hindsight does seem a little bit silly. But on, on top of that, like we just, we use things like, okay, well what’s our average churn rate? What’s our average contract value? And then we try to build on top of that, but that’s not where the actionable things are in large part, because most of these companies, when you’re talking about these buckets, they’re too big and they’re actually an amalgamation of a variety of different things, whether it’s a bimodal distribution where you have a bunch of stuff on one side and a bunch of stuff on the other. And so when I think about the segmentation, you, you have a couple of buckets that you can go through. So one, there’s just like the natural segmentation things like, you know, geography or if you are a, like a hybrid business or like we are a dash lion, you have B2C versus B2B, but then you wanna go level deeper and think about from a customer lens, what are some defining features that help me break these things down?
And you can do this for, for just overall business metrics. And it’s certainly helpful when you’re trying to de deliver on particular initiatives, right? So like if you think about, um, most like a, like both goad date and Dashlane sort of variety of, of of business clients, if you were just looking at the average order size it, you would think, oh, okay, well for goad date it’s a few hundred dollars, or for, for Dashlane it’s x ml, right? But reality is there’s this big spreads. And if you think about it in terms of those buckets, you can start to design specific strategies that attract each, or even better find opportunities in those segments that go, oh, hey, look, normally our turn rate for, you know, customers of, uh, you know, this particular size or this particular contract value is X. But when I look at this group, it’s y And as you think about your role as a finance partner and fp a person, like that’s where you start to build your credibility and your brand where it’s like, Hey, look, have we thought about this subgroup? ’cause in all reality, like most of those teams are looking at broad dashboards that aren’t built for this. They’re looking at their nat, like they’re just the natural segments, but they’re not looking at the actionable segments. You,
Glenn Hopper:
We put people into bands that make sense for us, and that they’re kind of, yeah, it’s not quite lazy analysis. Maybe it’s even more heuristic. So like if we’re looking at churn and we divide our customers, we may do it by this is the industry they’re in, this is the size they’re in, this is the number of, you know, what their revenue is, this is how many employees they have. And we segment ’em that way. But that may not be a natural segmentation. And, and you know, I, I’ve, I’ve been long been a proponent of machine learning and finance, and granted, you have to have the right amount of data to make this work work. But assuming you’re at a big company with a lot of customers doing clustering with machine learning, don’t, you don’t define the clusters. You just find like, you know, like entities and let the machine learnings, you know, figure out, okay, there’s five different customer clusters here and we can’t figure out what they are. We run the model, but we see that they’re, you know, they’re segmented in a pretty interesting way that completely changes the way that we think about, um, our, our customers. But maybe a lot better way to predict churn. And I don’t know what those features are, you know, it’s gonna differ by company, but that is a different way to, uh, disaggregate and, and look at the data.
Taylor Otstot:
Yeah. But
Glenn Hopper:
Data guide you, I guess. Yeah.
Taylor Otstot:
And I’m glad to saw machine learning. ’cause that’s actually an example that that’s precedent for me from, from the good okd days. Um, so, so one, like I think where people get trapped is they, they try to operate on their reporting segments. And reporting segments are really useful because it’s a way for us to tell the broader business or tell the, the investors about how the business is doing. It’s natural, but that’s not necessarily how you operate. The, the operating segments are probably one or two clicks down below that are potentially a mix of it. And so good example at GoDaddy, when I was supporting the sales and support team is we have departments, right? So like, hey, if people are calling in about their hosting plan as you go to the hosting department, versus if they’re calling about their website, but they should go to the website department, right?
Those all make sense. But what we were finding, we were going through all this stuff was saying, Hey, look, you know, we’re seeing weird things in like the handle time, for example. So like e every call service rep is, is managed based on like how long each call lasts something. These calls are getting a little bit longer. And so some people were saying, oh, well we need to do is we need to clamp down on this and we need to like get that back because it’s gonna ruin our efficiency, whatever else. And we said, well, hold on a minute, let’s figure out why that’s happening, right? Because it, the, there may be a product issue, there’s something else, right? And, and what we found was because GoDaddy was serving largely SMBs and, and, and like micro, um, entrepreneurs, is it, it doesn’t make sense to have like a fully dedicated sales support department for each of these things.
And so you have a lot of mix of calls coming in. Um, and sure enough, there was, there was this influx of support calls, but there’s a lot of value in retention in, in handling those calls. So what we needed to do was not think about them just in terms of departments, that’s the reporting segmentation. But now we, you think about how those calls are being handled based on what the intent of the customer was, right? Again, typically your operating segments are gonna be based on something with the customer. And so we actually did have a machine learning model that would start to go through and sort of predict, Hey, is this customer calling in for support or for sales? And then route it to different places within the department based on those features. And you started to see some huge improvements where it’s like, okay, now I understand how we’re managing this and we can think about things not just in terms of the hosting department, but now of hosting department and ratio of support calls versus sales calls, and how are we performing on each of those. There’s a lot of cool stuff that happens when you just go, you’re willing to go one level beneath the surface.
Glenn Hopper:
Well, it’s like you said, when you’re building your team, you have to have you be mentally curious Yep. And have the basic understanding of it and asking the questions. You have to have that partnership thing because if you’re just passively taking in the data and putting together your reports and not looking, you know, you’re not acting like a, an investigator, then you’re never gonna uncover something like that because you’re always just, you know, here’s our data. This is, I bundle it up and and repackage it and, and send it out. You
Taylor Otstot:
Have to talk to people. Like that’s, that is the only way that you find these things out. And like for, for me, for a good part of my career, when I was supporting the sales support org, my desk was on the sales floor. Like, I, I was embedded within it because I wanted to be able to hear what was going on. I wanted be able to talk to the, the, the frontline managers from time to time. And it made sure that I, I stayed grounded in what was going on there. And so, and, and you know, going back to our discussion about like, you know, how do you advocate for yourself? That’s one thing. Learn the business better than anybody else. Like you’re not stopped from talking to people and just having those conversations, whether it’s a Zoom call or a happy hour or whatever, and getting to know what’s going on. You have perspective about the whole business that you’re gonna be able to apply to the anecdotes that you’re hearing from individuals, and you’re gonna be able to draw connections that no one else has.
Glenn Hopper:
You know, Warren Buffet says that accounting is the language of business. And I think as the CFOs have evolved, it’s kind of interesting right now to see, I think we’re gonna see more CFOs moving into the CEO role because think about right now, if you’re an fp and a, you have at most companies, most people I talk to, this is the case. You’re expected to be able to report with all the business partnering and everything, you could walk into any other division or department or geography in the company and get information. Um, un unlike imagine if you, you know, if you, if you’re sales and you’re trying to go into ops or HR trying to go into marketing and ask questions, it’s, you know, they’re, they’re not gonna have that level of insight. And it’s really the more embedded we become in these other groups. And the more if, especially if you fashion your career to bounce around and understand holistically the whole picture, what a great opportunity to be exposed and, and learn all this. And whereas maybe finance 20 years ago, you could have just stayed in this ivory tower of I’m just the bean counter and I just make sure that our numbers are right versus, and so what, what do I care what the business actually does to now? There’s nobody thinking like that.
Taylor Otstot:
Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, I think more and more you’re seeing these like CFO plus roles, right? Where it’s like C-F-O-C-O-O type thing, which is a natural extension then into a CEO role at, at times. And, and I think it is that combination of, um, one, there’s so much more data now that can help drive our financial models and how think about the business. And you can’t be a consumer with that information without understanding the context around it. And then also just the environment that we’re in right now where, uh, look for a while it was really easy to sell. There was a lot of money out there and like you could have a preponderance of, of software or whatever else, and like it wasn’t that big of a deal. It’s much harder to operate today than it was a few years ago. And so I think more and more teams, executive teams boards are looking for the finance team to weigh in on the decision making to make sure that whatever is being done has the opportunity to scale
Glenn Hopper:
Scale. Okay. So that kind of leads me to the, my next question. And I think we get that view and un understand across the business and then, but we have to, again, we have to craft a story and take it’s right brain, left brain. We have to take this in depth curious analysis that we did and then turn it into this high level narrative. And we have to present it differently if you’re talking to the board versus the line managers, but we need to be able to communicate with both of them. I mean, how do you sort of balance that?
Taylor Otstot:
Yeah, so one, I think it is helpful to make, like, to align how we talk about the business to whatever the broader strategic narrative of the, like businesses overall, right? Especially when you’re talking about going further down the line where people maybe have less financial acumen or, or less exposure to it. You want to be able to tap into something that is familiar as you’re telling the story so that they can go, okay, I sort of get where it’s going, right? So if the broader narrative of the businesses, Hey, we’re gonna grow and we’re gonna get to profitability, then the way that you talk about the business is going to be against those two vectors. Here’s how we’re doing on the growth side, here’s how we’re doing on the profitability side. And then as you go and work your way down, I, I would argue the overarching story for each of those groups is gonna be largely the same.
And the detail underneath is gonna be somewhat dependent on what kinds of questions that they ask. One of the g the guiding principles I give to my team more often than not is start with less detail than you want to. ’cause you can always follow up in the questioning with what those things are. Um, certainly if it’s a presentation, and then if it’s an analysis, like make sure the bottom lines up front say, here is the conclusion, here’s the thing that I want you to know. And then here’s a bunch of supporting materials. And I, I think it’s, it’s counter to what our instincts are, which is I did all of this work. I want to take you on the journey of my work, and here’s how I built it and here’s the things that I got. I say, no, no, no, no. Start at the end, right?
Like this is a Quentin Tarantino movie. You’re gonna start at the end and then you’re gonna work your way backwards and time is just a construct, but when you do that, it’s, it’s easier to pull people’s attention because you no one’s waiting for the, so what I had this really phenomenal example at, at Good Eddie, where a business operations team was presenting to us about some analysis they did, and they were just dragging it on. And the whole time there was this giant, um, like whiteboard that was covered up with a piece of paper and we’re like, we know there’s something that you want to tell us behind that piece of paper. But they insisted that they had to walk us through the whole journey. And we would, I mean, for years we would joke about the grand reveal where they eventually pulled it off and we’re like, why didn’t we start with that?
Because now we have questions and it’s full time. We’re wondering about, so if you think about like that principle of like, no grand reveals, start with what you want able to know. And then what you’ll be able to know is gonna dependent on like what, where they sit in the organization. So for the frontline teams, it may just be, Hey, here’s perspective on how we’re doing as a business versus s and for the leadership of the team, it may be, here’s how we’re doing and here are the opportunities for us to go get back on track. Or opportunities for us to get even up further above those numbers. Right? And you can start to build the story based on that, that core finding of here’s what we’re trying to accomplish as a business, here’s the status. Now what?
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. I love that. And I, I kind of wish somebody had given me that advice before my first CFO role. I was not used to speaking to boards. And because I’ve worked with a bunch of engineers when I was in telecom before that, I was, I, I think, I think back in those meetings and they had to have been brutal. And it just, because it’s a bunch of engineers talking to each other, and then you, you throw a couple of finance guys in the mix too. And it was, um, but where it’s all we did was just, you know, ball of numbers and, and talk through everything we did, and then people would pick it apart. But my first, where I had to have quarterly board meetings and I’d go and report on the financial state of the business, I would always want to do that and just show, look, look at how, look at everything we know.
’cause we’re a very, very small company then. And, but I wanted to show how good we were and how we knew everything about all of our locations and all that. And, um, but the, there was this one board member, um, who no matter how much detail I gave him, would always drive questions that were two levels deeper. So one, it was too much information upfront, took way too long to give, to tell the story. And two, it set me up every quarter until I, maybe after a couple quarters I figured it out. But wait, let me just present the tip of the iceberg and I’m gonna have all this down here if he asks for it. But what if he’s gonna ask some deeper level? Anyway, I’m, I’m not giving any more value other than trying to make myself look smarter and my team look like, you know, we, we have it together. When really if you get to the so what, then we can save a lot of time. I,
Taylor Otstot:
It’s, it’s so great. I, so the, the greatest, uh, one of the greatest advice I ever got, um, was someone told me, imagine that the first slide is the only slide you get. What do you want to say? And like that, that clarity really forces it because you’re like, okay, based on, you know, even if it’s like a monthly review, what are the things that you want that team to know? And it’s, it can’t be like a next card for an open book test that you had back in high school where you’re trying to fill in every line, whatever, right? Like the slide has to be pretty and, and, and readable and all that. But it forces you to distill what is the core thing that we need people to know. And then it becomes a lot easier to fill in the blanks underneath that slide and say, okay, well now if someone asks about this, what are they gonna ask? And you can sort of build the story in reverse.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Perfect. Well said. On, on that. Uh, and I’m, I just looked at the, uh, at the clock. I, I think I’m over time turning fp and a today into one of those four hour podcasts, like Rogan or l or something. I, there’s no bongs or on set here. It’s like, I don’t know. I, uh, it’s funny, they, they ke they keep reminding me we’re trying to keep this to 40 minutes. That’s the ideal time for a podcast. And Well, if I can get, maybe I’ll get through the intro in 40 minutes, <laugh>, but I, before we go, I mean, there’s the canned questions that kind of the standard we ask everybody, but there’s one that I really want to want to get to because I think your, your insights and your experience and you speak with, with great clarity on this, and it’s obvious that it’s a passion for you. I do wanna talk about your newsletter. So for our audience, tell ’em about your newsletter, kind of what inspired you to start it and, and what kind of topics you cover with it.
Taylor Otstot:
Yeah, so the newsletter is CFO frameworks of cfo frameworks.com. Um, and, and, and really the impetus was a lot of stuff that we’ve been talking about, which is, as I thought about not just my own career, but also the folks that I was, I was leading and mentoring and coaching, the, the technical aspect of it largely was there, but a lot of these, these soft skills or these ancillary skills that we’re talking about were things that people had to learn on the job. And depending on your opportunities, you may not have gotten it. And so what I wanted to do was say, all right, let’s like broaden this out and, and, and talk about things about how to be effective in the finance role beyond just the basic blocking and tackling that’s required. And so I, I, I use the acronym frame because I, I think about it in terms of those five buckets.
So there’s focus, there’s relationships, there’s analysis, there’s messaging, and there’s execution. And so I try every week, and it’s getting harder to do it weekly, to be honest with you, but to, to, to create a post around one of those ideas to kind of help build it out. And the in intentional really is not just to help coach people, but also just help me clarify my thinking. ’cause as I find, as I get higher up in the leadership positions, it’s harder to distill this information for my team with the time that I have. So this is a way for me to think about, all right, what’s the NCES that I wanna deliver? I’ll write it down for myself and then it becomes much easier to repeat it as I go along and, you know, added benefit if my team or anyone else actually reads it. But for me, it’s just a way to clarify my thinking and get thoughtful about like, what is the core thing that helps this job get a little bit easier.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, I love the newsletter and I one of the first ones. And just to give the our audience a, a flavor of it, one of the first ones that really jumped out to me, I mentioned it to you and we talked before, is the montoya matrix from the Princess Bride. Tell us, tell us about the, I was gonna do it, but you’re right here. Why would I talk when you’re here <laugh>, tell us about, uh, the, the montoya matrix. Yeah,
Taylor Otstot:
So, you know, it’s one of those things where, um, I, I’m sure we’ve all experienced this where we hear words and then down the line, it turns out that there, there was a misinterpretation where someone thought it was one thing and it was another thing. And that’s why when we think of, of the princess bride where m is like, you keep using that word, I don’t think you know what it means. And, um, you know, like really good example that I’ve seen a lot in the finance side is the word incremental, right? Hey, this is gonna be incremental revenue for us. But then when you dig into it like, well, is it incremental for this division or for like, is it incremental new, but maybe it, it, it eats into our existing BA or, or like less expansion down the line. Like what does incremental actually mean to you?
And when you, when you go and you try to define words that you think you know what they mean, and you actually find out what people are interpreting as, you can save yourself so much headache down the line by getting really crisp on those things. And so I, I built this in, uh, this montoya matrix to, to try and segment the words that we use every day between the access of, of impact, right? So like what sort of impact could a misunderstanding on the words mean, you know, high versus low? Um, and then also if you think about like the, the level of alignment that’s required. So like, like, um, does everyone understand what it means or does everyone think they do, but not quite so much. The intention is not to, to like be pedantic and, and try to get like every single word defined, but it’s to be on the lookout for things where it’s like someone says something and it seems important and you’re like, well, I interpret this way, but I actually could see where it’s interpreted somewhere else.
Um, and in the post I gave an example, there was this HBR article, um, about this same phenomenon and they had this infographic where they did a survey on all of these really general words, words like always, never, sometimes. And then they said, what does, like, put a probability percentage on this and what does it mean to you? And then they drew all the curves. And it’s mind boggling that, at least to me, where like words like always could be below a hundred percent or words like never could be above zero or sometimes could be anywhere from 25 to 75%. But like, if you think about how often those things come up where it’s like, I know what that means, but I know what I mean when I use it. But it’s actually not a defined term. If you start to be more methodical about those things, incremental, even, you know, the difference between a forecast and a budget or a latest estimate, like what do those things mean? It becomes so much easier to operate because we’re all truly using the same language versus words that we think we know what the name, but we don’t.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s funny. ’cause now I’m picturing like you’ve got, uh, a couple of documents, you’ve got your data dictionary and then your just glossary of words that we use at this company within <laugh>.
Taylor Otstot:
But, but you know, but the great thing about it though is like once you start doing this, it, it teaches other people to do it. And everyone’s much more careful once they, like, once someone gets exposed to this idea, they become more familiar with it and then you don’t have this problem anymore. So it’s, it’s one of those things that regardless of your level in the organization, you can have a huge impact simply by reducing the, like going back to what I was saying, eliminate ambiguity is one of the partnership skills. That’s an easy way to eliminate some ambiguity and save a ton of pain down the line by just being really clear as to what things mean.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, yeah. Love the newsletter. Uh, I, I definitely understand trying to keep up with that while you have a, a busy day job. But, uh, uh, keep cranking out the content. We’ll put a, we’ll put a link to it in the show notes too. Thank you. I guess to try to stick the landing here and not, uh, keep us on for more than four hours. Let let you get back to your day job. <laugh>. Let, let’s wrap it up with the last couple of questions that we, that we ask everybody. So first off, what is something that, um, not many people know about you?
Taylor Otstot:
Yeah, so a lot of people don’t know that I actually, when I went to college, I was going to be a psychologist, so I was a psychology major, I was going to be a therapist of sorts. Like I was, I was, I’ve always been interested in how people make decisions and I wanted to help make better decisions. And then I, I had this epiphany in my sophomore year, I was like, oh no, I don’t have the mental fortitude to deal with everyone’s problems on a daily basis. Uh, and so then I, I kind of flipped and went to business, although I’m still dealing with everyone’s problems on a daily basis. It’s just probably lower stakes <laugh>. But you know, I, I think once folks learn that about me, they kind of go, oh, I can see where you have that brain, or you have some of those, those terminology that kind of permeates through however you talk about things.
Glenn Hopper:
Did you, uh, did you end up, as you were shifting away from it, did you ever hover on io on industrial and organizational psychology before you decided to leave it or, you
Taylor Otstot:
Know, I, I, I thought about it. Like I said, I had it on there and, and, and the great thing about like the, the coursework is it got to do a bunch of different things like sports psychology and like clinical and, and children’s and all this stuff. And I, and I, I did love the organizational aspect, but then I kept coming back to it. It’s like, well boy, like, you know, I was a little bit prescient, but I was coming up on the 2008 crisis when I was graduating and would’ve been really hard <laugh> to find a role on that <laugh>. So I, I think, I think the, the accounting part of my brain, the conservative part was like, you know what? You should probably find something where you for sure will have a job and then you can figure out how to get into the things that you’re interested in. And I’ve been very fortunate that going back toward the thing of like manufacturing opportunities, getting into the stuff that I like to do. Um, and all I had to do was do accounting for a while.
Glenn Hopper:
Yep. Yep. Alright, so now everyone’s favorite question. What is your favorite Excel function and why? Oh
Taylor Otstot:
Man, there’s, there’s so many. Uh, so I, um, I am a huge user of Index Match, especially when we’re thinking about like the amount of like data points that we’re pulling from different dashboards and different things and trying to bring it all together and going to our point around segmentation, I’m gonna categorize things my own way and there’s just something so magical about like, hey, you have your tab of, of various tables for index match and you just run it through and then you’re like, oh, you know what? I actually wanna segment it differently into it this way. I way better than, you know, how I used to do it was either, God forbid, nested if statements or <laugh> or a V lookup that slows it down like hell
Glenn Hopper:
Yep, yep. God, that’s the, see I’m, I’m dating myself, but nested ifs and vlookup, that’s where I made my money back in the day, <laugh>,
Taylor Otstot:
We used to have a rule on my team at GoDaddy where it was, if you had more than, I think it was like two or three if statements in one formula, I was going to delete it. So <laugh>, so you had to go, you had to find another way to make it work, but we were not going to have like 15 nested if statement there was always going to break
Glenn Hopper:
<laugh> Back in the day, there was actually a max, I can’t remember what it was, but there was a max on how many, uh, levels of nesting you could do in that. I, it was less than 15, I think it was. Yeah, <laugh>. Well, Taylor really appreciated you come on the show. I guess one more thing before I let you go, um, just one more time, I know I think we covered it, but how can our listeners connect with you and, and your newsletter? Yeah,
Taylor Otstot:
So me, I’m, I’m on LinkedIn, so you can find me under my name, uh, Taylor OTs dot, um, and then the, the newsletter cfo frameworks.com. And I, I think I have my contact information on there as well, but please go peruse, subscribe, um, and then if there’s anything that I can ever do for someone in the community, just lemme know. Taylor,
Glenn Hopper:
Thanks so much
Taylor Otstot:
Gwen. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
