As a fractional CFO and financial advisor, Carl Seidman, a returning guest, has worked with finance teams at some of the world’s most recognized companies, helping them strengthen forecasting, cash flow management, and strategic decision-making. He also teaches several top-rated online courses including the FP&A Mastery Signature Program.
- My first fire-drill, creating a cash flow in one week
- The under $50m revenue opportunity for fractional CFOs
- The power of an advanced (live) FP&A course
- Expectations and reality for AI in your finance career
- The catastrophe if AI gets something wrong
- What I learned about Copilot in Excel developing a LinkedIn course
- The Power of LET
Full transcript
Glenn Hopper:
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Glenn Hopper:
Welcome to fp NA today, I’m your host, Glenn Hopper. Today I’m joined by Carl Seidman. Carl is the leading voice in fp NA education and advisory with a background that spans PWC Turnaround Consulting and more than a decade. As a fractional CFO and financial advisor, he’s worked with finance teams at some of the world’s most recognized companies, helping them strengthen forecasting, cash flow management, and strategic decision-making. Carl is also one of the most sought after trainers and speakers in corporate finance. Through his workshops, masterminds, and online programs, he’s taught thousands of professionals how to elevate their fp and a skills, build executive presence, and think more strategically about their role in the business. He’s a certified speaking professional, a Microsoft MVP, and the creator of fp and a Mastery Signature Program. His company is Seidman Financial, and as you’ll hear today, he’s not afraid to challenge some of the assumptions in our field, whether it’s about ai, the future of finance training, or what it takes to lead a world class fp and a team. Carl, welcome to the show. Thanks
Carl Seidman:
For having me, Glen.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Um, really enjoyed. It’s funny, when we talked before the show, we’ve both been kind of buzzing around the same circles for a couple years and this, that was actually the first time we spoke, so I’m excited to have you on.
Carl Seidman:
Right. I really appreciate it. Thank you.
Glenn Hopper:
I liked hearing about your, your background. You started your career at pwc, and then, uh, when another thing you and I have in common is doing, uh, turnaround and restructuring work. You did that at Conway McKenzie. And now moving on into the training, I’m wondering what did those early experiences teach you about finance that maybe kind of still shapes the way you think today?
Carl Seidman:
So, when I first started it, uh, at pwc, I didn’t start and, um, audit. I didn’t start in tax. So a lot of people when they think, oh, you’re going into big four, you’re gonna be an auditor, you’re gonna be a tax professional. I loved the reach, the reputation, the support that I got at pwc, but I knew that I always wanted to go into finance, not your core accounting. What those early years taught me was really how to think a lot more critically, how to answer questions with imperfect information, how to support clients, dealing with some really difficult sticky situations that were not routine quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter of the same kinds of services. And so, very early on in my career, it was how do you advise clients that are going through crisis uncertainty, fraud litigation in a way that there is not perfect information, there aren’t perfect answers, but you still need to get them to the finish line. And so the combination of critical thinking, ambiguity and using finance tools was really the early stitching of my career. And it has really served me well throughout the next couple of decades.
Glenn Hopper:
You really nailed the difference between, uh, finance and accounting. And I think that that’s, I didn’t come up through accounting either, and I think that’s why, and I’ve, I’ve had some great controllers in my career and and loved them, but I think they all wanted to really choke me because as just coming up through finance, I was always like, directionally correct. Let’s not dwell on it. We’re gonna get close enough and, and move on. And that does not match the accounting brain
Carl Seidman:
<laugh>. You bet. I I also teach at the graduate school level at a university, and, um, most of the students are accountants by their educational background. And I teach more of a financial advisory consulting perspective, and it can make them very uncomfortable. And that they say, well, there are either right or wrong answers, right? We’re in school, you’re either right or you’re wrong. And I say, no, you’re, you could be all right. You could be all wrong, could be somewhere in the middle. And it’s just the reality of, of how finance is, is the way how, you know, future planning for businesses are, is, yeah, there could be some better or worse answers, but it’s how do you make good decisions with the best information you have?
Glenn Hopper:
I’ve gotta imagine that especially so early in your career doing turnaround work. I mean, if you’re in the midst of that kind of crisis and you’re trying to get, you know, exact and have your, uh, trial balance matched to the penny and all, you’re, you’re really spending your money on the wrong thing. And I, you know, they’re just so chaotic. And I think that in it’s kind of forged by fire, I guess. But in those, you can learn a lot. But I’m wondering, in that kind of environment, do you have any particular story or, or just a, an impression of your time there that really crystallized what fp and a is under pressure when you’re not, you know, you’re just trying to get in the ballpark and get close enough and know how you can make directional changes?
Carl Seidman:
Yeah, I’m, I’m grinning because immediately my very first engagement comes to mind. I can’t give too many details about it, but I can take you through the, the backstory of it is, this is a very high profile client. When I was on this client, it was me and a very senior leader at the firm, at, at my prior employer. And I remember it was, I think my second or third day at the firm, I had spoken with the executive assistant of this senior leader. And, uh, she said, you know, meet, meet him in this boardroom at, I don’t know, sometime in the morning. And so I go there, he just wants to talk about, you know, my background. And he said, alright, good luck. Go down to the client. And he didn’t give me really any context in terms of what this was, what was going on.
So I remember being like, wait a second, I’m gonna drive to this client super high profile. It’s like quite literally fire drill, all hands on deck situation. And I don’t really know the full context. He was just busy. He had other things to do, he had other clients to manage and was like, good luck. Go ahead. And so I remember getting there, it was a major crisis. And going back, Glen to the point I made of like audit or tax, where it’s like the same services again and again and again over time, and hopefully you have some lengthy deadlines. This was now Carl, we’ve gotta get a cash flow done in the next week. And I say, wait a second, I, I’ve never really done it the way that I’m expected to do here. And it’s like, good luck. Figure it out, <laugh>. So it’s like, you know, question that I get in my signature program and from companies I work with is they’re like, well, what level of detail should a cashflow forecast be?
How far out should you go? What line items should be there? And I’m like, imagine you have five days to put this together. You have to put together whatever you can to the best of your ability to best support the company in five days. So you’ve gotta kind of hedge your bets in some ways of saying, this line item really matters. I’ve gotta be get extremely refined on it, but this line item over here, I just don’t have time. It’s not the material, I’m not gonna focus on it. And that makes people extremely uncomfortable where it’s like, okay, I’m just gonna kind of ignore a certain line item because it doesn’t matter that much, but this one over here, I’m gonna put 50% of my effort into it. So, you know, when it’s a crisis situation or a turnaround and it’s all hands on deck, it’s, you’ve gotta get something out the door and the best time to get it out the door was yesterday. And so if you have a very limited amount of time, you have to do the best that you can to support your clients in the best way where you can meet them and hopefully meet those expectations and just refine it over time. But with this world, especially in finance and fp a, you’ve gotta get comfortable with ambiguity, uncertainty, and oftentimes just good enough instead of perfection. God,
Glenn Hopper:
If <laugh>, I feel like if you and I were sitting at a bar right now, we could talk for hours, and if people next to us would think they were the boring conversation in the world, <laugh>, but, but we would be on and on because as you were doing that, I was, this was in the last 12 to 18 months, I was an interim CFO for a micro cap company that was running outta money. And the CFO before me left abruptly, meaning that I had no notes or anything. And, um, I, when I came in, it was like two weeks before the, uh, the audit committee meeting and then, you know, it was the series of, it was audit committee, then the board, and, uh, and they were trying to raise additional funds and, um, this is the exact same thing, give us a cash flow, and then trying to go unwind all their accruals, understand what was, you know, an annual expense and every, and just kind of a messy group of financials, <laugh>.
And then I had to, um, you know, and this company, I mean, money was tight. Like they were looking at their burn rate, their glide path. It was like, okay, we’ve got, you know, four months or whatever it was left and missed a, uh, a 20 5K annual, you know, software expense or something that wasn’t on there, but it was, you know, I dug through everything and it just, I don’t know. So then I had to, you know, reported it to the board. Then I had to figure out how to find the money elsewhere. It was just <laugh>. Yeah, just a mess.
Carl Seidman:
It can be like the wild west. And, um, you know, I, I sometimes share this, this too with people makes ’em very uncomfortable, but it’s reality is, you know, I’ve gone into some companies where they have been subjected to fraud. Like there’s a controller or a CFO who, uh, you know, was, was not not playing the way that they should have. And if you go into a company where your sole source of information is somebody who, from somebody you cannot trust, and the numbers you cannot rely upon, well, yeah, you could certainly resign from the engagement and say good luck to you, but you have to come up with solutions somehow. And it might be, okay, let me take the numbers where they are, but then I’ve gotta cross reference them with departmental leaders, interview people, people who might be more knowledgeable and more seasoned than we are. And, you know, sometimes your forecast is based upon a conversation instead of historical data, and that sometimes is, is good enough or at least, uh, what you need to start with.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Yeah. And I’ve spent a lot of time in my career in, you know, small businesses and it was very different being head of finance or CFO in a, you know, a company that size that didn’t have all the staff and didn’t have all the great reporting and didn’t have all the, the data and everything. It just, uh, glad I’m not doing that today. I am glad to be working with larger companies today. <laugh>. Yeah. Not just, uh, yeah, but you do, you have to just kind of live in this sort of, uh, we’re gonna get close enough. And ultimately still even with, uh, those small businesses sometimes had, you know, and a lot of m and a had to be audit ready mm-hmm <affirmative>. Which that’s, that’s madness is when you’re in a small business and you’ve gotta have audit ready financials, and you have no team to do that. And, uh, yeah. Now, now I’m having PTSD and we, we might need to change the subject <laugh> <laugh>. So speaking of small companies and, and CFO work, and when we were talking before the show, you, you noted that you were doing, you know, fractional CFO work before that was even the term mm-hmm
Carl Seidman:
<affirmative>. And
Glenn Hopper:
I, we’ll, we’ll talk a little bit more about that, but I’m wondering back then, how did you find your way into that role? And we talked a little bit about that gap between what companies thought they wanted and what they actually needed when they brought you in.
Carl Seidman:
Yeah. I’ll take you back to maybe the tail end of my, my former and formal turnaround restructuring years. I don’t often share this, but, but I, I, I do sometimes is towards the tail end of my time. I had some clients that would pull me aside and they’d say, Carl, why don’t you just go start your own firm, go start your own business. And I said, you know, well, why would I do that? And also, I, I don’t think I have the ability to do that. And they’re like, no, you’re doing all the work anyway. Of course you’ve got the ability to do it. And I said, well, well, why would I do that? And they said, because you can pick the kind of work you wanna do, the kind of clients you wanna work with, the hours that you work, your economics, all of the above.
And you know, it, it took clients to tell me to go do that, rather than the internal compass of myself saying, oh yeah, I have everything that I should be doing. I should go do that. So it was this, you know, kindling of the actual people I was working for who were saying, no, you should go do that. So I appreciated it. To take that a little bit of a step further, what I then did was I looked backwards towards some of my, you know, prior clients and I said, well, what is it that they struggle with that they don’t have? What are the gaps that have created a need for the services that I’ve been delivering? And what I came to realize was that most of the companies I’ve been working with, they had a CFO, they had a controller, they had a bunch of accountants and finance people, but there were two major disconnects.
One, most of them were mid-market or, or what I might call low mid-market. So a hundred million, 200 million plus companies. And what it revealed to me was there’s this enormous space under a hundred million, maybe even under 50 million of companies that really need the same kind of help. They just don’t necessarily wanna bring on a, you know, big firm or a CPA firm, which is made up of mostly accountants. They want somebody who can speak their language of small business and not bring like the big firm environment. And Glen, what ended up happening, I, I mean this was a, a very stark realization, very early in the fractional CFO uh, services. I started, you know, a decade plus ago was I went to one company and I started bringing some really powerful tools and techniques and they pushed back on me and they said, Carl, we don’t need those things.
And they also said, leave your big firm experience behind, we’re a small family business <laugh>. So there’s this big contrast of like, I’m coming from this mid-market, high power, robust, you know, tools and techniques, background, and coming into these smaller companies sub 50, where they’re like, we don’t want any of that stuff. That’s why we’re working with you. And so it’s like, oh, interesting. Okay. So the size was one thing. And then at the same time is, well, I had mentioned that in the mid-market you’ve got your CFO, your controller and in your bench of accounting and finance people, and these smaller business sub hundred, sub 50, maybe you have a CFO, you probably don’t. You might have like a head of finance or a controller, no, fp and a maybe an accounting clerk. And so there’s this enormous opportunity for people who understand CFO services, fp and a functionality to be able to go into some smaller or low mid-market companies and provide this level of service. And then just one last point is, uh, when I first started, I didn’t really know what to call myself, you know, CFO services, maybe fractional CFO, that wasn’t really a term. And my clients were calling me an executive coach. And so I would call myself an executive coach, and then people would be like, wait a second, you’re a fractional CFO, you’re not an executive coach. I’m like, okay,
Glenn Hopper:
<laugh>, does it pay better <laugh>? Yeah.
Carl Seidman:
So, so I see titles as being pretty irrelevant, whatever your services are, it’s at PA advisory, it’s CFO services. It’s, you know, Glen, who’s our guy who’s helping us out on, on finance, it’s Carl. He is, you know, helping us build out our function. So, you know, we can get all obsessive about terminology, but I don’t think the terminology and titles really matters. It’s about what kind of services are you bringing and what kind of solutions are you offering?
Glenn Hopper:
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I was gonna ask, I think you’ve, you’ve pretty much hit it because you, you realized early on that niche where companies, you know, if you, if you’re a $10 million company on thin margins or whatever, and you wanna hire A CFO, it’s like, I’ve just taken 8% of our company’s EBITDA <laugh> to, to pay. Yeah. Yes. But why do you think it is now that there are so many people and I, and it’s, there’s a lot of more single shingle fractional CFOs than I’ve ever seen before, but, and obviously not just the, the Big four and other firms that do this kind of work, but there’s, uh, you know, whole firms built up that, that do a fractional CFO and kind of the full suite, I guess, you know, controller and bookkeeping, but the single shingle fractional CFOI, I’ve seen so many of those in in recent years, but maybe you already hit it, that they’re businesses are realizing, oh, maybe the friends and family accounting is not really gonna get me where I need to be. Why do you think
Carl Seidman:
There’s been an explosion in these? Yeah, I think it’s, it’s multi-fold and, and there’s a lot of different dynamics in play. One I I, I kind of addressed where we’re a small business or mid-size business, we don’t wanna bring in a robust accounting firm or consulting firm that the rates are high. We just don’t need that. In addition, and, you know, I could be wrong here, but I feel that when you have a small business and you hire a firm, chances are that firm is gonna staff the engagement with one senior person who may or may not be actively involved, and then some lower level staff. And so when you have a small business specifically that’s in an entrepreneurial space, those entrepreneurs wanna say, I wanna see, I wanna be with, I wanna experience the relationship that I get with my point of contact. And you’re just not gonna get that with most firms.
So that’s why I think that there is now more of an opportunity to say, I wanna connect with this individual than with a firm. At the same time, I think that with the move more towards virtual, I don’t often admit this, but when I first started my fractional CFO or executive coaching business, hardly any of my clients were in Chicago where I live. I was traveling all over the country and all over the world, but then I was also an early adopter of Zoom before Zoom really became a big thing. And I was like, well, wait a second. If all of the files I’m working with are digital and our calls can be done over Zoom, why do I have to live in the exact same city or even in the same country as my clients? And so it started to become clear that instead of focusing all of my work in Chicago, the entire world became the market.
And in addition to the whole world being, coming the market, exactly, to your point, Len of, well, I’m gonna hire a full-time CFO and all of the margin that I currently have is now gonna be going towards paying the salary of A CFO on a full-time basis. Well, what if I can get the talent, the experience, the access to that CFO, but on a part-time basis only when I need, as I need instead of 40, 50, 60 hours a week paying full salary and benefits. So I think all of those things together of a lot of the CPA firms coming from accounting backgrounds, that doesn’t cut it. Even the fp and a firms, you’re dealing with a lot of younger staff. We want a relationship to one person or somebody who’s a heavy hitter who’s got the talent experience, it’s affordable, and I can access them anywhere in the world, not necessarily just in my hometown.
Glenn Hopper:
You had the experience, you had the niche, you had the focus there, and then at some point you sh shift heavily into training and lecturing. And I’m wondering what drove that transition? Was it organic or you saw another opening more market opportunity, and was it something that you fought it first or did you just see it embrace it, grab, hold, and, and run with it? I, it’s, I’m curious to see, because there are, you know, you and I run in the same circles and it’s really interesting to me how many people make that transition from, you know, the former host of this show, Paul Barnhurst is doing full-time training these days. But what led you to see the opportunity and, and to follow that transition from, and I don’t know, maybe you still do the other, the fractional work as well, or, uh, are you just doing training now or
Carl Seidman:
So? I still do both. Um, but it has shifted over time and, and I’ll explain. I, I think my answer is, is yes to all of the above that you just, you just raised. So in the very beginning, I’ll keep the story short, is back in my turnaround restructuring days, I had a colleague who was like, Carl, I’m taking a few days off. I’m gonna go to this advanced financial modeling forecasting training for these three days. And I was like, oh, I didn’t even know that those things existed. Lemme know how that is. And he comes back a few days later, I ask him, and he was like, honestly, you should teach that. And I was like, I should teach it because it was that bad, or do you think I’d be that good? And he is like, no, I think you’d be really good at doing it.
The the training was great, but I think you would be really good. And I was like, okay. So I went to the website of this company and coincidentally, one of the positions they were looking for was a instructor for advanced financial modeling and training. Like they teach a, like a over a hundred different courses. And that was one of the very few they were looking for. And I was like, okay, well I’ll put together my resume, I’ll put it into the online portal, and then I’m probably never gonna hear from them. Six months later I hear from them, it was the director of education. She says, you are exactly what we’re looking for. And I was like, okay. So what I did, Glenn early on, is I would actually take vacation days away from my job to go teach. And then I would come back and people were like, where would you, where did you go on vacation?
I’m like, oh, I just kind of stuck around. And I did a, I did a workshop and they thought I was crazy. But what started to happen was not only did I discover I really had a knack for facilitation, um, but it was also this other avenue of I don’t have to go into a company and do the work for them. I can teach them how to do the work. And when I was starting my own fractional CFO advisory practice, a lot of my clients, which was totally different than the middle market, a lot of these smaller clients were like, Carl, we don’t want you to do the work for us. We want you to teach us how to do what you do. And then ironically, maybe is you work yourself out of a job. So I was like, well, wait a second. The consulting model is you always find more needs, you always find more solutions that you can be offering to this client.
And then when it’s done, it’s done. But these other clients were like, no, we don’t want you to give us fish. We want you to teach us how to fish. And so the combination of, I’m good at teaching, but I teach from a practitioner standpoint instead of like a training standpoint. I teach my career, I teach the solutions that I do on a consulting basis. That combination of like practitioner focused education with these are companies where they want their professionals to be educated and sharpened and right at a ba basically do what you’re teaching them to do. It just became a win-win win. And over the years of discovering, well, there’s a need in not just advanced financial modeling and forecasting. There is an excel, there is in financial communication. Now there is an ai, there is in valuation, there is an accounting in all these different fields. And I look back to my own education, like I didn’t learn any of this in school. I didn’t learn a whole lot of it through training on the job. I learned by doing on the job. And I asked myself, how can we take what we learned through doing on the job and craft it into practitioner focused education that can then elevate people in the way that MBAs, executive MBAs and certificate programs like we can.
Glenn Hopper:
I think I’m seeing a theme here. When you mentioned doing the turnaround work versus your kind of your normal path of in, in accounting where you’re, you know, closing the books, closing the quarter or whatever. I think <laugh>, if I’m reading between the lines, you would get very bored if you were just doing a consulting gig where you were just selling someone the fish every month and you’d much rather <laugh> teach them how to fish and let them do
Carl Seidman:
<laugh>. No, it, it’s, again, it’s kind of ironic because you know, a lot of firms, a lot of CPAs, uh, are gonna say, wait a second, you’re working yourself out of a job. Isn’t that counterintuitive to you growing your practice and growing your firm and growing your revenue? And I say a hundred percent and they say, wait, hold on a second, that that’s completely opposite of, of how we should be building. And I say, but here’s the thing. If you do a great job teaching these people how to fish, instead of giving them a fish, if you teach them how to do their jobs more effectively so that they don’t need you, you have given them the greatest gift that you possibly can is you’re not only giving them the solution, you’re teaching them how to get to the solution themselves instead of you doing it for them.
And what ends up happening is you end up getting referrals, you end up getting introductions, you end up getting a tremendous amount of brand cache and reputation in the world. So that business starts to come in. And just as my, you know, long time ago client said is, you get to pick your clients, you get to pick the type of work you do, you get to pick your rates, you get to pick your schedule. And to me, that’s really been the essence of the last decade and a half of I get to direct the, you know, the, the structure of my work instead of having to hire a bunch of people. ’cause I’m just selling, selling, selling as much business as I can.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Love it. And let’s, let’s talk about your training. ’cause we did talk about this a bit, uh, before the show too. And there’s, it’s a noisy marketplace. There’s all kinds of training out there for an fp and a and there’s a lot of just off the shelf kind of just recorded stuff that’s out there. But I feel like your reputation is more live, customized, interactive learning mm-hmm
Carl Seidman:
<affirmative>.
Glenn Hopper:
And I think that, uh, when you go to market with that, that’s, that’s gotta be a differentiator to, well yeah, you can have ’em go, you know, get this certification or whatever and follow these courses, but then when you come in, it’s a different approach. And I’m wondering how that sort of resonates with your clients compared to off the shelf courses and why they’re like, no, no, we want you to come in and just do an intensive rather than letting everybody go do it on their own time and do recordings or whatever.
Carl Seidman:
Yeah. So I, I’ll answer this in a few ways is, you know, when people are looking for education, they’re going onto the internet, they’re typing in some terms, and they’re getting what the response is, oftentimes that’s driven by SEO not necessarily reputation. And they see, here’s training courses, here’s videos, I’m gonna do that. ’cause all I have to do is go click, put in a credit card and I’m done. And because, you know, there are some other companies that have also gone through that path, they assume that it’s good. What tends to happen, at least in my experience, I don’t often share this, but I’ll I’ll share it here, is I will then get those companies coming to me or I will get those individuals coming to me and they say, I went through this video course, it was good, but I honestly can’t tell you what I took away and what I’m now implementing.
So what I’m getting at here, Glen, is it’s one thing to get knowledge, it’s one thing to get education. If you read a book, you learn something. But when you go back to your life or your work, there’s no guarantee that you’re actually implementing anything that you read. So it feels good upon the conclusion. But so the reason why a lot of these companies and people come to me is they say, alright, well we didn’t get what we were looking for from there it was a good foundation, but now we want something that’s higher level. Okay? And the higher level is a higher level, not just of doing, it’s a higher level of thinking. And when you’re watching videos, it’s not teaching you how to think. It’s teaching you how to follow a recipe that some instructor wrote, they recorded. And you can’t ask any exceptional questions around the nuance.
The reason that I do almost everything live granted, we record it so people can go back through again, is it’s discussion, it’s nuance, it’s questions, it’s exceptions. It’s what happens in the company when this happens that they didn’t even talk about in the video. And so it, you know, a lot of people who come through my programs, these are not young people, these are people who are mid-career. These are people who are at a level of saying, alright, I can either go spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an executive MBA or I can spend money on a really expensive certification, or I can actually be with somebody who’s done all of this work for two decades and I’m gonna be surrounded by all of these other people who are in their mid-career too. Private equity professionals, CFOs, director of finance, global heads of fp and a financial analyst students, everybody. And so it becomes a much more experiential, uh, immersive learning experience than one where you’re sitting in front of videos and hopefully you’re going through it and you’re learning something and then apply.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, it feels like that’s gotta be almost a two-way street too, because there’s, if you were just in the ivory tower of education, the the critique it gets is, you know, that’s fine in theory, but it doesn’t work in the real world. But because you are in these interactive conversations with these teams, you’re seeing what’s working out there and, and what’s not. And whether you’re doing the consulting or training, I feel like you’re probably getting good feedback is from them on just kind of what’s working and what’s not. So I, I guess in, in your work with these groups, are there some areas that you see of, okay, this is kind of what everybody gets in fp and a right now, and maybe there’s an area though where there’s some commonality where, man, how do we still not have this right at this point? <laugh>?
Carl Seidman:
Yeah. What I tend to try to do is, you know, as I just mentioned, there’s lots of nuance, but if you cater only to the nuance, you end up resonating with 5% of your audience, not 95%. And so there is a whole lot of mean, I’ll call it foundations, but then there are also a lot of skills or techniques or, or functionality within fp and a that you can probably cover 80% of what you would deal with at a Fortune 100, a startup or a mid-market company. When you’re talking about forecasting. Forecasting is forecasting regardless of what size company you’re at, the levels of forecasting could be remarkably different, but the whole purpose of forecasting and methodologies don’t necessarily have to be, you know, totally black and white modeling, excel communication skills, analytical skills, cash flow. I mean, these are gonna be the common threads across any company, any industry, any size.
But then again, I mean, part of the value, I think that, that comes with this experience is, well, what happens when you have to color outside of the lines? Who do you go to for help? Where do you learn about this? And you gotta have somebody who is not a lifelong trainer. You gotta have somebody who’s been in the trenches. You gotta have somebody who’s actually practiced this in real life. Not, you know, a a an academic who’s spent the last 40 years in academia. You don’t want to go to, you know, somebody who says, oh yeah, I, I teach fp and a, but I’ve actually never really done fp and a before. So there are lots of different places to learn, but what I ask people is, how do you want to learn? Who do you want to learn with in what style and what’s gonna make you accountable as well as being able to translate this over to your work. It, it bothers me a lot, but again, it also creates a lot of opportunity for me where, you know, somebody will say, I went to this training program. I, I felt like I learned a lot. It was really engaging, but I can’t tell you that I transitioned any of it over to my work. And I think that’s the biggest loss.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, like on, on LinkedIn, you post a lot about more complex Excel stuff, and I know, you know, people, I’m not one of those that thinks Excel’s dying and uh, <laugh> and all that. But I’m wondering, ’cause I, I think, and I think maybe we, we might have talked about this before I, I talked about it a lot, but this is what ai what I’m seeing come with it, is it’s kinda like the way that it lowered the barriers to entry for coding for, if you wanted to do data science, pre generative ai, you could understand the fundamentals all you wanted, but if you can’t write Python, you’re not coming into the data science club. But now being generative, AI can write Python for you. And I I see we’re, we’re lagging. And actually I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. I’m gonna put that in my pocket for a later question, but I feel like copilot and Excel is not where maybe a lot of people thought it would be at this point, but you are still talking about those fundamentals and they’re, when you and I were coming up in our careers, it was how you differentiated yourselves.
And especially when I was before I was A CFO when I was in larger finance groups and we were learning from each other and geeking out on all the different, um, tools that we’re using. But if I’m straight outta school right now, MBA program or master’s in the accounting or finance or, or whatever, that just let’s keep it finance, I guess for now, what are the most important skills that if I know I’m, I want to go the fp and a path, what do we need to be focused on right now with all this change and what’s going on in, in software? Is it still, do I still need to know those hardcore Excel fundamentals and, you know, dynamic index array and all the crazy stuff that you can do in Excel? Or do I say, eh, I bet AI is gonna fix that for me in a couple years? <laugh>,
Carl Seidman:
You know, I can’t predict the future with any level of certainty. I can only guess what it’s gonna be. I do think, you know, we’re, we’re not going back to a, a world the way that it used to be. AI is gonna be very much a, a part of our world, if not completely stitched into the programs that we’re doing on a daily basis. I would strongly caution somebody, uh, against saying, oh wait, I don’t need to learn skills. I don’t need to learn analytics. I don’t need to learn formulas because AI’s gonna do that all for me. Maybe an analogy that I’ll use is think about healthcare and the evolution of surgery over the last few decades. So much surgery now is done through the augmentation of robotics. And if you turn the clocks back 30 years ago, a lot of that just didn’t exist.
So do you teach physicians not to understand anatomy, not to understand the complexity of the human body, not how to do surgery by hand if they may need to do that at some point? I don’t think the answer to that is yes. I I think that you still need to go through motions of understanding, complexity, nuance, relationships, some aspects of coding because you may find yourself overseeing, maybe it’s a junior person, but you may be overseeing what AI is doing. And Glenn, I’ll be totally candid. Uh, if you turn the clocks back several years at the very beginning of the explosion of what I’m gonna call, um, consumer accessible ai, you know, so AI’s been around for a very long time, but now it’s in everybody’s hands with that initial explosion I was pushing the limit to. So I’m like, oh, this is nowhere close to being where it needs to be and I don’t have to worry about my irrelevance.
But in the years that have gone past that, I’ve actually changed my tune because it has gotten so much better and will continue to get so much better. But I still don’t think that that means I don’t need to learn how to do finance. I don’t need to understand how the financial statements work. I don’t need to understand excel. ’cause the, the AI tool’s gonna do it all. I think it just will augment and change the way that I do it. But I still need to be knowledgeable enough to be able to oversee, troubleshoot and understand when something goes awry. My big concern, and I don’t think we’re have we have seen it yet, but I think we will, is I think we’re gonna see travel disasters. I think we’ll see industrial disasters. I think we’ll see financial disasters where somebody has delegated the responsibility to AI and they’ve said, I can trust it. I don’t need to oversee it. And then you end up with a disaster.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. And that’s, it’s so weird out there right now because there’s this mix in the end, not just in finance, but kind of just across the business world of there’s all the buzz where obviously we’ve jumped a cliff on the, uh, hype cycle around AI and agents and, and what it can do. But I think all the optimism is right. We’re just on that early sort of jagged edge of it where there’s some things that are really cool and in some big mistakes that’ll happen. So to your point, keeping a human in the loop is very important. And I think about the best example I can think of something similar is with classical ai, with machine learning, I was with a really big group, well, I had access to a, a dragon drop machine learning platform that was, uh, really incredible. Uh, you, you didn’t have to hit the code anything, and you could do, you know, clustering prediction, all any, any sort of, you know, classification, any sort of machine learning problem, you could bring in your dataset and uh, click a couple levers and and have no idea what algorithm was running in the background mm-hmm <affirmative>.
So you could be, uh, thinking you were, uh, doing a forecast, but you’re actually running a, um, you know, a, a classification algorithm, you whatever the example is. But if you don’t have those fundamentals, you’re just like a, a baby with a bazooka, you know, you’re just firing off and then, and you turn over a model and say, well, the black box magic said this. And if any management asks, well, uh, you know, how did, how did the black box come up with that? You can’t, and you just throw up your hands. I have no idea.
Carl Seidman:
<laugh>. Right, right.
Glenn Hopper:
That’s sort of the thing. If you don’t know coding, even if you can see the code, uh, that that AI wrote for you, or if you see some massive let formula that’s, you know, six paragraphs long that AI wrote for you, how do you know it’s right if you don’t understand a single word that’s in it? So I’m, I’m there with you and you’ve got any other fundamentals, it’s maybe you don’t have to be fluent as you used to. And you can get, like for years I had to write, you know, you just have to write SQL as part of your job. But I was terrible at it. And I would, I would write, it would take me, you know, four hours to write a SQL query and then another four hours to find where I left out the comma
Carl Seidman:
Mm-hmm <affirmative>.
Glenn Hopper:
And now with ai you can sort of fix it <laugh>.
Carl Seidman:
Yeah, well, you gotta be smart enough to know, okay, well how do I write this in the first place? And, and where might it be wrong? How can I coach AI to help me? You know, I I get a little frightened just of maybe some young people who are growing up with this as, as just a natural part of their lives of saying, well, if I don’t have to invest all of this time and all this effort and all this money to learn it, why would I do that?
Glenn Hopper:
You know what though, as you were talking, I was thinking also it’s, it’s almost like learning logic. If you know the functions in what they do, you treat problems differently. And if, you know, if you’re an Excel power user, you think of different, what you, you have this big block of, of data and you’re trying to do something with it. And if you know all the capabilities, it’s a lot different than if you’re just like, well, let me see. I could pivot this and I <laugh>, you know, or, you know, whatever. So it, it does make you think more broadly. And then if you have that domain expertise, even if you are using generative ai, you can prompt it better. Right? ’cause you’re, you’re guiding it the right way.
Carl Seidman:
Yeah, yeah. You know, as a little aside here, you know what I struggle with? I mean, it’s just like this constant battle is I might go into a, a tool with an Excel problem or a modeling problem and say, well, you know, I could do this on my own, but it would probably take me about 15, 20 minutes. Let me go use generative AI to do it. And then 40 minutes later, I’m still trying to get an answer outta it, and I end up in this like back and forth battle with it. I’m like, this is wrong. Please fix it. And then it’s like, you’re right, it is wrong. And I’m like, well, why would you give me this explanation in the first place? So I’m like having this, it’s conversation with a robot and I probably could have done this far more effectively and far quicker myself. And instead I’m like, well, I’ve already sunk all this time in, we’re gonna get to the finish line.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. And I’m, I’m right there with you. ’cause you don’t even, it’s not sunk cost fallacy because you feel like, dude, this is so close. I, that’s when I start calling the ai, I’m like, listen to me, man, <laugh>, uh, but it’s so close. It’s like, okay, I know I could have actually written this formula, written this code in the amount of time that we’ve been going back and forth, but I can tell by looking at it, you’re very close and I can either give you the right prompt and you’re gonna respond correctly right now, or then I’ve gotta start all the way back over at the beginning. Yeah. But that happens all the time. And then it just seems like the, the day, you know, and I don’t know if it’s the context or the how much, um, you know, server capacity they have on a given day or the model selector in chat GT five, but sometimes you’ll come ask it a question and it’ll come up with a, you know, write excellent code for you and, and come back with a response.
And then you come back and it’s like, I don’t, I’ve never heard of this. Right. What, what are you talking about <laugh>? Right. I guess along that note, are there misconceptions that you hear when you talk to finances that are kind of on the other side, uh, when you talk to finance leaders and what their sort of expectation is with ai? Are there places where, I’m going back to my comment on the AI hype cycle, jumping the cliff right now. And you see all these studies come out all the time about all the failed AI projects. But are there areas where just because people don’t fundamentally understand it or what its capabilities are, but where finance folks are setting themselves up for disappointment right now, thinking that they’re gonna be able to offload
Carl Seidman:
Ai? I look back to, you know, the last couple of years of what, again, I would strongly attest to as the hype cycle where there’s so much promise of what it can do. And, and it’s not that I think that we won’t eventually get better, but I just don’t think that we’re anywhere close to where some of the buzz is today. In addition, I have the great privilege of of getting to work with some very influential and very trailblazing companies. So one Fortune 500 that I’ve worked with for years, they’ve been using AI for a decade, not really in a finance context. And interestingly, my work is mostly with the fp a team and they say, yeah, we’ve been using machine learning and AI for a decade plus outside of finance, but we’re not gonna use it in finance. And I know you and I have had conversations in the past of, with a lot of generative AI that’s stitching language together.
Great. It’s helpful for contents, it’s helpful for writing, it’s helpful for narratives, but with finance, the risk of getting it wrong is immense. If you get a wrong answer in a financial calculation, it can be catastrophic If you put a word in the wrong place in a executive summary, okay, whatever. So there are a few companies, I’m not gonna mention them by name, but one of them is at the forefront of finance and accounting. They’re a big software company. Um, I’ve asked them, I’m like, what are you doing with ai? And they say, you know, we’re investing in it, but we are not getting aggressive, uh, and trying to over promise something that it cannot do. There’s another company that’s also a software company, arguably a, a competitor of the one I just mentioned. And they have said to me that we are doing ai, but we are capping its capabilities.
So even though we could be pushing it further, we wanna make sure that our clients are 100% comfortable, are getting 100% of the answers that they would expect to get. And that I see with AI is the lack of traceability, the lack of vouching, the lack of ability to say, where did this actually come from and how do I find the root source? In addition, what I would love to be able to see, and I hope we go there, but I don’t, I don’t know that we will, is Glenn, imagine that I do a, uh, prompt generative ai and it gives me an answer and I say, how much can I believe this? What I would love for it to be able to do is to say, with 90% confidence, you can believe it. But then if I do another problem and say, what’s the confidence level?
It says 10% confidence. So it can calibrate us to say, based upon the response that I’ve just done, where do I weight it in terms of believability or lack of believability? And either one is us, the 10% is still helpful, it can give us ideas, it can give us data points, but then the 90%, I might take my guard down a little bit and say, okay, I don’t need to vouch a hundred percent. I need to vouch some of it because, you know, the, the engine has said that it’s high quality. So in finance, you know, I, I think that there’s a ton of promise, but I think most of the companies that I’ve encountered are playing it smart. They’re de-risking and saying, we’re not going all in. We’re going as far as we feel comfortable with, so that our customers and clients are getting a valid return instead of a speculative return.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, yeah. No, we’re, we’re definitely aligned there. I wanted to come back to this copilot in Excel. It’s, you know, Microsoft puts 15 billion plus into open ai. They did their acquihire, they, you know, I don’t know what, what they’re up to. Uh, I’ve just heard they’re building, um, a new data center. Everybody’s building new data centers, but they, you know, another billion dollar data center across the river from me here where, where I am <laugh>. But now you’ve got all these plugins that are letting you use generative AI in Excel, that kind of are, they’re, they’re still nascent stage and there are issues with them, but I think Microsoft is, is behind, uh, where, where I think they probably wanted to be at this point. What are your thoughts of copilot and Excel or the, is it the new copilot function? I guess it’s probably still in beta. I don’t know if you’ve got it Jeff, to even play around with with that, but what are your thoughts about AI and Excel and where they are versus where they should be versus where you think they’re headed? Yeah,
Carl Seidman:
So to begin with, I would make the distinction between co-pilot as a tool and copilot as a function. So even though they share the same name and probably share some of the same engine, they’re really different tools. A couple of points to your point earlier, Glen, is I think that when copilot, the tool first came out very underwhelming, where a lot of Excel users were like, oh, this is gonna write my formulas for me. It’s gonna give my answers, it’s gonna build my models. Uh, and when LinkedIn learning tapped me to develop the copilot in Excel for fp a course, um, admittedly I was learning it and going through the different applications of where it’s most useful. And as I was building the Corps, um, I had experimented with it for months before, but it was through that journey of developing the learning experience that I saw A, what’s it capable of?
B, what is it not? And in the course, 95% of the course is what can it do? But 5% of the course I say, I’m gonna give examples of where it’s wrong. So if you think back to my last answer of 90%, you know, confidence, 10% confidence, just like any tool, it’s not perfect. It’s gonna get you a further distance, but it’s still possibly gonna get it incorrect. And so what I’m gonna suggest to people who are experimenting with copilot is one for people who are very seasoned users, it’s probably not gonna push you that much further, but if you think about all of the non seasoned users, the billion people around the world, the majority of people probably are not seasoned. And copilot will help them. Instead of having to go onto Google or instead of going to YouTube, or instead of going to LinkedIn learning and trying to find your answers, it’s all within Excel.
Now on the copilot function, and there are, I assume, additional capabilities that are gonna take place is because Excel can be connected to OneDrive or to SharePoint or online. So it’s, it’s cloud-based is my assumption, is that Excel’s gonna be able to take a look at a bunch of your different files, a bunch of your different worksheets and say, what do I see here? And so I think that where AI and finance will go is if you have models, if you have analysis, if you have data, it’s gonna be combing through all of it. And instead of saying, I’m gonna wait for you to prompt me, it’s gonna give you recommendations of what it’s seeing, what it’s not seeing, trends, what you might think about that you haven’t thought of before. And more. And I believe especially with what you’ve seen with copilot, is it’s gonna sit inside of the product instead of having to leave. If we take a look back years ago, people were like, oh yeah, I googled that. Oh yeah, I went on YouTube. I’m pretty sure that Microsoft is gonna say, we wanna serve you here. We don’t want you to have to leave this suite.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, that makes complete sense. Are we gonna see Clippy 2.0? Is that what we’re <laugh>? Man, I can’t believe we’re like already almost at an hour here. I guess I should, uh, wrap it up with our, our kind of our our standard closing questions. So the first one we always ask is, uh, what is one thing that most people don’t know about you?
Carl Seidman:
Oh, that’s tricky. Well, I, I, it might go back to a part of our earlier conversations. So when I left my former and formal turnaround in restructuring employment, I took a year off, year off. I went down to South America, I went down to Southeast Asia, I went to the Caribbean, I went to Europe, I went all over the place. Um, and part of it was I wanted to be able to have the space to build my business. Part of it was, uh, I looked at the project based nature of consulting and I said, consulting is project to project to project. Why do they have to be all next to each other? So I took a year off. Uh, I told it my first retirement, uh, NPR found out about it. So they interviewed me nationally on NPR. Uh, and then, uh, I ended up doing a TEDx talk about it too, where people were like, this is remarkable. I’ve never heard anything like this. And so the whole concept was, you know, take little interim breaks throughout your life. You can call it a sabbatical, you can call it a retirement, whatever you want, but it’s the opportunity to recalibrate, refresh, and reposition for what’s next. Very cool.
Glenn Hopper:
I’m, uh, I’m a little jealous now. I, I want to take a sabbatical. I’ve got a lot of travel coming up, but it’s all, we work traveling all <laugh>. Yeah. So, uh, yeah. Super cool. So I, I did learn something new about you. I’m guessing your, your TEDx talk is still out there too. It is.
Carl Seidman:
It’s uh, I think at the time of this recording, it’s got like a half million views or something like that. It’s only nine minutes long. It’s not a full 18 minutes, but it’s called why I retired at 32. And, uh, and I guess a little unknown fact a lot of people wouldn’t know is that title I did not come up with Adam Grant actually came up with that title.
Glenn Hopper:
Wow. <laugh>. So very cool. So, alright, I’m, I’m checking that out. So, um, alright. This is one I’ve been dying to ask you. Um, we ask everybody what is your favorite Excel function and why?
Carl Seidman:
Okay, so that has changed and you had mentioned earlier, let, so let is a fairly new function. It’s not that it’s robust or, or super advanced. It basically just allows you to create labels or names for cells, constants, or variables. And then use those labels and names throughout multi-layer calculations. And the way the people have always done Excel is, oh, let me do a nested gift statement that is six lines long, or let me break this into eight different calculations and eight different cells. You don’t have to do that anymore. So with let, you can create something that is clean, auditable, traceable, albeit it’s in many steps, but it just makes things so much easier.
Glenn Hopper:
I love that you said that because I really, I just wrote my, my first with the help of AI too. Yeah. Wrote my first successful, let that actually cut down on a lot of, ’cause I used to be, you know, nested ifs are just the world that I lived in, so Yeah. Love that. Love <laugh>. So last question, I wanna be sure that we let our listeners know. How can our listeners get in touch with you and, and follow your work?
Carl Seidman:
Yeah, I would say the two best ways is one, come to my website, seman financial.com, you’ve got all kinds of resources there. Uh, announcements of events, downloads and more. Uh, and then also I share content techniques, videos, files almost every single day on LinkedIn. So I encourage you to follow me at my profile on LinkedIn. And then there’s also a handful of LinkedIn learning courses. Uh, now I wanna say at least 15 hours of recordings and there’s gonna be a new one coming out very, very soon. It’s gonna put you almost to 20 hours of recordings.
Glenn Hopper:
Awesome, awesome. We’ll be sure and put all that in the show notes as well. So, um, Carl, I’m so glad we got to do this and, uh, after bouncing around the same circles, it was really fun to hang out with you for the last hour.
Carl Seidman:
Absolutely, Glen, thank you so much for having me.
