FP&A Today Episode 30, Sruthi Lanka: Why Top Startups see FP&A as Central to Strategy

Engineer-turned-CFO Sruthi Lanka  was drawn  into finance after seeing her parents – themselves brilliant engineers – losing money in the markets. “I couldn’t understand how people who could solve incredible math puzzles in their head could not figure out how to make a return in the markets. And so that’s what led me down this path of navigating into finance.”

Today she is CFO at investing app, Public.com, the biggest competitor to Robinhood, famous for the “GameStop Frenzy” which rattled markets in January 2021). 

In this episode Sruthi reveals

  • Her vision for FP&A as central to business and executive leadership  
  • Her experience of The GameStop Frenzy in late January 2021 which coincided with her joining Public.com, helping it explode from “a relatively young startup to having over a million members”
  • The centrality of data or analytics partnering with finance and why some engineering and SQL is an important skill set for CFOs
  • Her founding membership of FSuite in which StartupCFOs meet to discuss everything from the best tools to complex challenges they are facing 
  • Why a regular monthly meeting with FP&A is “sacrosanct” – in order to optimize what is measured and show  progress against targets 
  • The importance of FP&A doing the “hard work” of building “simple” financial models

Paul Barnhurst:

Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Today I am your host, Paul Barnhurst, AKA the FP&A Guy, and you are listening to FP&A Today. FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails, the Financial Planning and analysis platform for Excel users. Every week we welcome a leader from the world of financial planning and analysis and discuss some of the biggest stories and challenges in the world of FP&A. We’ll provide you with actionable advice about financial planning and analysis. This is going to be your go-to resource for everything FP&A. As a reminder, the shows now have CPE credit. If you go to the Earmark app and download that, you can listen to the show and by answering a couple simple questions, you can get CPE credit if you need those. Also, if you enjoy the show, please leave a review on the platform of choice, apple, Spotify, wherever else you may. Listen today I’m thrilled to welcome our guests to the show. We have Sruthi Lanka with us today. Welcome to the show.

Sruthi Lanka:

Thank you for having me, Paul. Excited to be here.

Paul Barnhurst:

Yeah, no, I’m really excited to talk with you. So let me just tell our audience a little bit about Sruthi and then I’ll give an opportunity for her to introduce herself and give us a little more about her background. So she comes from Brooklyn, New York. She did her underground in India and her master’s degree at Duke University in North Carolina. She’s worked at investment banking. She was the head of strategic finance at Money Lion. She’s currently the CFO at Public.com where she’s been the last two years. She’s also a founding member of the F-Suite, a community platform for CFOs of leading venture capital funds and high growth tech companies. So we’re super excited to have her on the show today and an opportunity to learn a little bit from her. So could you start by maybe just tell us a little bit about your background and how you went from computer engineering to finance?

Sruthi Lanka:

Yeah, Paul, I’m happy to talk about that transition in a short version. I’ll give you the punchline before going into the details, but I do think it has served me well to have that dual skill I have a view to engineering, especially in my job as the CFO of Public working deeply with engineers all day. But before we go into my background, I just wanna tell you a little bit about Public. I think it in my specific experience also ties into why I work here. So Public is entirely new form of investment platform, right? Today it’s the only app where you can invest in stocks, cryptos, but also alternative assets such as sneakers or a fine wine collection or art that is typically out of reach for most retail investors. And the reason why we’ve brought together this platform is to ensure that we bring customers on who can invest in line with their goals in line with a modern portfolio theory that accounts for entirely new asset classes that frankly more traditional platforms don’t account for.

And the reason why this makes me really excited is it kind of goes back to my background, like you talked about. I’m an engineer and I come from actually a family of engineers. Both my parents are also engineers. So growing up the nerdy things that are probably unsexy to others were kind of my bread and butter. Literally, I think I learned calculus ahead of most people around me. But the thing that was completely unknown to me was really the world of finance. And unfortunately my parents, otherwise brilliant individuals, lost a bunch of money in the markets at the time when there was very little information and really just no education around finance. And so that really spurred me to learn a little bit more about this new world that I couldn’t understand what people who honestly could solve incredible math puzzles in their head could not figure out how to make a return in the markets.

And so that’s what led me down this path of navigating into finance. So after graduating from engineering, I worked at Goldman Sachs and then came to the US to pursue my MBA degree at Duke. And after Duke worked in investment banking at the Royal Bank of Canada and while at RBC I got to learn a little bit more about the fundamental business models that were driving many financial institutions. And then I really wanted to take that experience and bring it to bear in building a company that did better by their customers. And that’s what brings me to why I am at Public today.

Paul Barnhurst:

Got it. And I appreciate that. That’s great sharing that background. And I imagine watching your parents lose money and seeing them not having that financial savvy ability and understanding of that shaped your learning and how you thought about finance. I’m going to guess.

Sruthi Lanka:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think key to honestly being successful at finance is one, to find a platform that brings education around entirely new assets that people may know nothing about but does it in a way to serve long term goals. So many of the other platforms that you see serve honestly day traders who are moving in and out of positions all day, or very passive investing where you give your money to this black box and it just gets invested over time. But what we’re looking to serve is someone who wants to engage with their portfolio and learn along the way and do it in a way that serves essentially their retirement goals, their education goals, et cetera. And so that’s what we’re building in Public and that’s what we’ve been successful at over the last couple years.

Paul Barnhurst:

That’s great. I appreciate you sharing that and be interesting to continue to watch and see how you grow and how you solve those problems. So appreciate you giving a little bit of background there and kind of color around that. So I’m curious, you know obviously made the transition from engineering came from an engineering background. What would you say has helped you most in finance from your engineering background?

Sruthi Lanka:

I think there’s two aspects to it. One, I will caveat this by saying startup finance is very different from large company finance. So all of my answers, you should view it from a startup lens. And I think to be a compelling startup finance executive, you need to have a very deep understanding of the fundamental data and metrics that drive the business. In a startup, you cannot really work only on what are lagging indicators, which is gap accounting, like revenue, net income, et cetera. These are great metrics but they tell the story after, not before major company events. And so it’s extremely important to understand what really moves the business. And the way to do that is to be deep in the data. And so in my role at Public, I also oversee the data and analytics team and I did this at MoneyLion as well. And I think the reason I could do that is because of my engineering background and that plays a very large role in ensuring that I’m keeping the company strategically focused on the things that matter and that eventually lead to the success of those lagging metrics, which are revenue and financial metrics.

Paul Barnhurst:

I appreciate that answer and I agree with you about that importance of leading indicators. One thing you mentioned, it looked like at your last company, in current one you have ownership over data and analytics. And I have questions this came to my mind around that I’ve had a lot of discussion with people and I’ve seen a lot of debate of people saying, Hey, data and analytics should sit in finance, sit under the CFO , no, it should sit outside. And I think there’s a lot of arguments that can be both ways. What’s kind of your thinking on that and why have you felt like you’ve wanted that under finance and with the CFO and the finance organization?

Sruthi Lanka:

I wanna be really clear that there is no data or analytics organization that can be effective without deep partnership with engineering. So I think that it cannot be done in isolation for sure. And there are very heavy engineering skill sets in doing it successfully. Having said that, all analytics is, it’s a very powerful tool. And the question is what do you point that tool towards? Now in the early stages, especially of a company where day-to-day decisions affect outcomes in large ways, it’s really important to stay focused on the business questions that matter the most. And that typically tends to be driven by the CFO at companies our size. And so this is why I think the analytics team sits nicely in the CFO office, it’s because there are so many good questions to answer. But you need to know what is important to your investors, to your customers through long term success. And you need to solve only the most pressing questions first. And so that’s easily done when you’re close to the business.

Paul Barnhurst:

I see what you’re saying there in the sense of being able to finance as close to the business and really knows what the pressing questions are, what are the investors wanna know, what are the key things that are really going to drive the business forward? And making sure there’s alignment between the engineering and the analytics to ensure that’s where the focus is spent. I can definitely see where that drives a lot of value. That makes sense to me. I appreciate that answer. So I noticed we talked about this in the intro, you’re a founding member of the F Suite. Can you maybe tell our audience a little bit about that, how you started it and what you hope to accomplish with that?

Sruthi Lanka:

So the FSuite is a great organization that was started by the team that actually founded Tech GC and before the group was brought together, they involved me and a couple of other CFOs in order to really figure out what was relevant to the startup CFO community and how best to serve it. And the reason why I love being involved with the FSuite is that I get, as much as I put into it, I I’m able to share learnings, things that you pick up along the way after years of being a startup finance professional. But at the same time, if I have a pressing question or if there’s a very niche problem that I’m looking at that may pertain to, for example, an FP&A Tool or a corner of accounting guidance that has recently come out, there’s a ready community of experts that I can lean on in a confidential manner. And so my involvement in FSuite is really both to lean on those experts but also honestly share the expertise I’ve built up over the years. And I really do love giving back.

Paul Barnhurst:

I can understand that and I can see that and it sounds like a great way to give back and also to benefit you meeting with a lot of experts like you mentioned in accounting, something new comes out and asks me how others are implementing it or how they’re thinking about interpreting it, whatever it might be, technology, different things I could see where having that network could be invaluable. So you’ve been CFO of public.com for two years and I know you guys are private and so limit on how much you can talk about. But maybe could you talk a little bit about what are the key things you’re looking at at Public? What are you trying to track in the way a metrics or their key leading indicators and things you really look on that help you get a good insight into how the business is performing?

Sruthi Lanka:

Yeah, I think it’s incredibly important when you’re at a company this size to get extremely proficient with what I call startup metrics or cohort metrics. So in addition to looking at very traditional financial metrics like we talked about revenue, profits, margins and losses, which you know look at it as January versus February, it’s extremely important to track the usage as well as behavior of a set of users over their lifetime and then compare that against the next set of users. So these cohort metrics really I think make or break most startups success. And this I think is the number one thing. So even if as CFO, obviously you have to stay on top of GAAP metrics, but even if you don’t, I would say the more important piece really is a success or failure of your cohorts. That and cash, cash is king, especially most startups are not profitable. And so managing cash closely, having an effective treasury function is the second biggest area that I maintain focus on.

Paul Barnhurst:

And how do you, and not just have public, but just in general, how have you typically thought about cohorts mean? Do you have a way you like to segment them? Is it usually time based, is it demographic? How are you typically segmenting your cohorts for that analysis?

Sruthi Lanka:

That’s a great question. I think so I think cohorting on other demographics is best done by your product design marketing teams. I think in order to drive the business forward, the thing that matters the most is really time-based cohorts. And the time that you look at in finance, it tends to, it depends on the context for your board. You may look at quarterly or monthly, but really in order to move the business you have to be looking at weekly. And this is the other big difference between a startup finance executive and at a larger company it’s rare to find CFOs and FP&A professionals working on a weekly and daily basis. But this is absolutely imperative at a young fast growing company.

Paul Barnhurst:

Now I could see that the much shorter timeframe, like you said, weekly, monthly. And I can exactly relate to what you’re talking about at a big mature company, not looking at it near as often. I managed the travelers’ check for American Express about six, seven years ago. Not exactly a growing business, obviously in fact declining rapidly. But we had to look at all the cohorts around what we call abandoned property and trying to figure out what would be in cash for liabilities. We were looking at those one year at a time by currency 40 years back, that’s going to be very different than a startup environment. It was all the way back to 1980 or what I think it was 1979 at the time, I think one of the years or something. And

Sruthi Lanka:

That’s amazing

Paul Barnhurst:

It was pretty amazing. And you’re trying to figure out then after 40 years we just assumed they weren’t going to cash and if they did, you just brought it back on the balance sheet. But that was another story. So that was really interesting and just shows the spectrum of the difference you can get between a startup and a real long term mature company and how you’re looking at things. So I appreciate that of those metrics and I can totally understand leading, really focusing on those things that derive the financials versus looking at the financials cause they’re after the fact. You want to influence it before the financials come out and make sure it’s healthy. The other thing you mentioned is cash and obviously the economic environment we see right now everybody concerns of it being in a recession or recession coming, higher interest rates, inflation. Do you have any advice you’d offer for people in FP&A and a particularly startup around just managing cash, the burn and runway in the environment we’re in?

Sruthi Lanka:

I think that this is a portion of the business where you simply do not wear your rose colored glasses. So all FP&A and professionals in general have to think in terms of scenarios because we all know that no model is perfect, right? So we’ve gotta maintain humility around that and know that you can be completely wrong about many of your projections, especially in a recessionary environment, which is why it’s extremely important to look at your runway in the absence of all revenues as well. So I like to run three scenarios. The base case, this is what we expect, this is what we’ve generated in revenues in the past, this is what we expect to generate in the future. All reasonable assumptions make sense. There should absolutely be an upside case. And we, we’ve experienced that a couple of times. For example, I joined public in late 2020 right before Game Stop, which happened in January, 2021.

And it was kind of the perfect confluence of a few factors. One people were home with COVID. And there was a huge interest in really this short squeeze activity which led massive retail inflows. And seemingly overnight we went from relatively young startup to having over a million members. And so that was greater than any upside case we had factored into our model. So I think every model should also have an upside case. But for the purpose of managing cash, assessing runway, I also looking at a no revenue or low revenue case, only your firmest contracts, only your firmest revenues are included. And what if you literally collecting checks would, and laying out the scenarios not only for yourself but also for the CEO, is extremely important because you need to be on the same page about what the various options the business are in scenarios.

Paul Barnhurst:

I appreciate that. And I like how you said having that the bear case where you’re just looking at the minimum, what you’re pretty much guaranteed to make and say, okay, now what do we do in this environment that means cash runs out here, that means we have this much in expenses and we’re losing this much or whatever that case is. And I also, like I said sometimes,

Sruthi Lanka:

Sorry Paul, I interrupted. I would one thing I think that, look, we talked a little bit about cohorts and how they need to be managed weekly, but the reality is most FP&A teams are run monthly. It’s unlikely that it’s frequent than that cash has to be managed weekly. And if CFO’s managing cash weekly would be worried.

Paul Barnhurst:

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Especially in a startup environment and any environment, you gotta manage your cash more closely than your GAAP accounting. Yep, exactly. Makes a lot of sense there.

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So obviously being in the CFO position, you now kind of have ownership for a number of different departments within the finance organization. But in particular, how do you think FP&A can better support the CFO and the senior leadership team? What advice would you give to people in FP&A is the best way they can help support the team?

Sruthi Lanka:

Yeah, I think so. I think FP&A  is one of the most important functions, frankly the entire finance function. But the reason FP&A is so key, particularly for senior leadership, for executive leadership is because of this forward looking angle, this view on what if this launch goes well, what if this launch goes poorly? So that scenario planning and putting it in the context of the business while partnering deeply with various kind of business counterparts to make goals and targets clear as well as drive the right inputs into the model is what FP&A adds the most value through. So said another way, for executive leadership. It’s extremely important that FP&A clearly lays out the options and the path forward. What moves the model the most, what moves the model the least. But in order to do that effectively, FP&A has to partner deeply with product managers, business owners, people in the business to ensure that the formula that’s represented in the Excel model is accurate and you’re driving the right inputs. And frankly I think this is what makes the FP&A a job fun particularly at a startup because a lot of times you’re coming up with what is the right view for this particular business. It’s not set in stone, there’s room for creativity and that’s what makes I think FP&A fun, particularly at companies our size.

Paul Barnhurst:

I would agree with you working with the business and help shaping it so to speak, and figuring out what those key drivers are and how you move forward. I think that’s the fun part. I love the business partnering and learning that and thinking about the unit economics and those different type of things. So you talked a lot about really understanding business, the forward looking, partnering with them, a deep understanding of the drivers. How do you ensure that the financial, the operational and strategic plan that all hangs together? Cause at the end of the day everything’s kind of judged on how you perform financially, how you achieve those targets. So FP&A doesn’t necessarily have responsibility for setting the strategy. Obviously they can input it, they’re not doing the operational planning, but how have you found the best way to make sure FP&A helps ensure that that’s all aligned and that you don’t have disconnects in that process?

Sruthi Lanka:

I think translating the strategy to FP&A, that is honestly my job as CFO I need to ensure that if we’re making any strategic shifts we are accurately involving FP&A counterparts, so it is really is on the CFO to be the bridge between what is the strategy to how is that represented in the model. And on the other side, translating the operating to the financial, this goes back to some of the partnerships I talked about. So building deep partnerships across the business but overarching all that you need really strong process. And what we do here at Public is a monthly FP&A meeting. I think regardless of what’s happening in the business, regardless of the number of things that are going on, whether there’s a board meeting coming up, whether there’s other things that may put pressures on time, we treat this monthly FP&A meeting as sacrosanct and I think that’s the way it should be because you optimize what you measure and so you have to measure your progress against targets and that leads to optimizing them automatically. If you do those periodic check-ins,

Paul Barnhurst:

I really like what you said there about you optimize what you measure and if you don’t have the periodic check-ins, you’re not going to be able to do that optimization. So that makes a lot of sense of treating that as critical, having those meetings and really making sure that everybody’s on the same page. I appreciate that. So one question we like to ask everybody here is about maybe what we call a failure they’ve had. And the way I’ve always tried to look at failures as their learning experiences, not really failures, but maybe can you tell us a time in your career where you had an experience at work, something that failed, maybe an analysis that went wrong, a meeting, an implementation process, whatever it might be, and what you learned from that experience, maybe how it helped shape you?

Sruthi Lanka:

Yeah, absolutely. So prior to my role at Public, I run strategic finance at MoneyLion, which basically included FP&A, but also product pricing and a couple other pieces. And what was interesting about that company, and to some extent this is of Public as well, is we had a mixed business model. It was a consumer lender that also had also subscription also other user-driven revenues. And it was going from being just a consumer lender to more than that. And so we went through, I think it was before one of the capital raises. We went through most of our prep with essentially an old version of our model. But then we found that the storytelling wasn’t quite working. We could not really forecast effectively some newer portions of the business with the older lender-driven model that we were running. So it forced me to really rethink the structure of the entire model and change it to be flexible enough to drive kind of longer dated cohorts, which is typical with lending but also shorter dated cohorts with subscriptions and other pieces which can see changes on the fly and you don’t have contractual waterfalls around payments in the same way that you would with the loan.

And so I think the failure there was not recognizing that the business had changed so much that the model had to be completely redone bottoms up to account for the various business models. And the moment I took two or three weeks to step away, start from scratch, which is always daunting, it’s like building the plane while flying it, but I took the time and worked all night you know how that goes. But the moment I did that, something clicked and it was much easier for both internal and external stakeholders to understand what the key drivers were and what the outcome would be. And so that taught me that particularly at startups, you need to look bottoms up at your model frequently because what worked yesterday may not work today.

Paul Barnhurst:

That is great advice. And I could see where, you know, definitely learned that lesson of the reminder to look at things. I can remember one company I was at, we built a new model and it was pretty good at forecasting, but the business really couldn’t understand it because the products weren’t right. We had a lot of mess with the data and it took me quite a while to figure out, I’m like, I gotta rebuild this, but you mentioned flying the plane, but I’m into budget season and this thing is, it was just a monster of a model, do it. And I can remember I was spending 10 hours and why isn’t this line tying? Why isn’t that just working through it? And once they got it done, it really drove the business forward. Cause I could help them understand each product, where things are growing, how the transactional and the subscription and the call center and all the different pieces played together. And so yeah, I can definitely relate to that and the challenge that can be, that’s definitely a good learning. Because I’ve had more than my fair share on those things with different plans and stuff where you’re like, right, that was an expensive learning experience.

I mean I heard one the other day. Yeah, exactly. Well I heard one the other day where, I can’t remember where I read it, but back in the sixties at IBM, the CEO there was somebody who had made a mistake and it cost the company 10 million. You got called in the CEO’s office and figured he was going to get fired. And he goes, I’ll go ahead and pack my bags and goes, why would you pack your bags? I just spent $10 million training, I’m not going to fire you now S you’re a going to make that good you a mistake again. Really

Sruthi Lanka:

Good point.

Paul Barnhurst:

And I really love the way that it was a very expensive learning experience. I’ve spent my money now I know you’ll do better

Sruthi Lanka:

Exactly right.

Paul Barnhurst:

So can you talk a little bit, as you look at FP&A and you look out to the future, what do you see as the biggest opportunity for the profession and then also the biggest challenge?

Sruthi Lanka:

Yeah, good question Paul. It makes me think fundamentally about what are we building in Public and what can we do better? So if you look at our business model, we looked at the brokerage demo landscape and said, yeah, we have a lot of competitors who’ve built new technology but they’re all doing it in the old paradigm. So why don’t we rethink that? And we went in and said, okay, we won’t accept payment for order flow because it doesn’t incentivize us to align our outcomes with our customers. And so the day we stopped accepting payment for order flow, essentially an entirely new way of operating a trading platform and investing platform was born. And so if I apply that philosophy, which is what can we do better than anyone around us? I think the biggest opportunity for FP&A professionals is one, to move to simplicity.

It is much harder to build a simple model than it is to build a complex one. And the day we did that at Public, the day we moved to simplicity and transparency by saying we will build a business that aligns our incentives with our customers, it made it much easier for our users to know what we stood for. For our board to know what we stood for and for us to make decisions day to day around the product. And you will find that this is the case, even with your forecast and your model. If you choose simplicity, you will know what to include, what to exclude, what level of detail you need to have. And forcing that simplicity will honestly make you understand your business better. In terms of the biggest challenge, I mean the obvious challenges, the environment we’re in! Who knows what’s what is to come not even over the next 12 months, over the next six months. There is interest rate uncertainty, there’s frankly just the threat of more serious war. This is a difficult macro environment and that leads to challenges for everyone, but particularly for anyone who’s trying to forecast the future. And so I see that as a challenge, but again, I go back to lead with simplicity and lead with transparency. And it’s the only way you can message your various stakeholders why you’ve made certain decisions around what you’re forecasting.

Paul Barnhurst:

So if I hear it on the two sides you have on, the challenge is the macro environment is one of the biggest. All the uncertainty, like you mentioned, interest rates, inflation, war, are we in a recession, are we not? All those different environments that you don’t control, but you need to be able to manage. You have to help the business manage. And then I really like just said, the opportunity is really focusing on simplicity. As I’ve heard it said, complex is easy and simple is hard. I am guilty of it. It’s sometimes really easy to build that complex formula in Excel for your model. And then nobody understands it. They’re like, what in the world did you do?

It works.

They’re like, yeah, but nobody can understand how it works. All right, rethink’s it. Yeah. So I get that and I struggle sometimes with that myself of wanting it to be overly complex and reminding myself, ok, keep it simple. That’s what people like. So I think that’s great advice cause I definitely see an FP&A we all have a tendency, I think sometimes we over analytical and get a little too deep in things and sometimes sipping stepping back and just looking at it through a lens of how can I simplify this? What’s really the key factors here in this story?

Sruthi Lanka:

Yeah, that’s exactly right.

Paul Barnhurst:

Great, I like that. So one question we like to ask all our audience, and this is one where we get a little more personal is what is something that is unique about you? Something they wouldn’t find online that you could share with our audience?

Sruthi Lanka:

Oh man. I could think of a couple things but I used to be ambidextrous for actually a large portion of my life and then I became majority right-handed. But there was a long time that I could do a lot of things with both hands and I think this is one that you cannot find easily online.

Paul Barnhurst:

Yeah, I would agree with that. So did you just naturally tend towards using your right hand more and you kind lost being out dexterous or how did that

Sruthi Lanka:

Transition?

Yeah, I think it was honestly cultural, right? I think most cultures actually place an emphasis on using your right hand, which is somewhat unfortunate. So I think it went away over time, but I was very young I would write with both hands. I had a slightly different handwriting but they were actually surprisingly similar. But it’s still better on my right? Because there’s a lot more focus and then as you get older with so many other things, this is one of those skills I lost. But yeah, this is a little known fact.

Paul Barnhurst:

No, I like that one and I can definitely see there is, as you said, in most societies things are built for right-handed people most of the time we’ve got better at now accommodating left-handed people so to speak. But definitely overwhelming majority of things have always built for people who are right-handed because that’s the majority. And unfortunately that can cause some challenges for those who aren’t. Yeah.

Sruthi Lanka:

So yep.

Paul Barnhurst:

So this next question, this is one Datarails likes to ask all of our customers we’re sponsored by Data Res and they’re a big fan of Excel. Their platform is built around Excel. So we like to ask everybody what their favorite Excel formula can be, formula, function, feature, any of the above, what it is and why?

Sruthi Lanka:

My favorite index match, which as you know is not one formula but two. But it’s way more efficient than VLOOKUP, it runs much faster. And I hate VLOOKUP and I know that is a very controversial statement, but yes, Index Match all the way.

Paul Barnhurst:

Yeah, no we’ve definitely had a most, I’d say that’s probably one of our most common answers. We’ve had a couple of XLookUp , I think we’ve had V lookup once. But yeah, anytime you go into the what look up should you use in Excel, you get people come out with their pitchfork sometimes you’re like really? It’s not as long as it gets the work done is what I like to say. But I do appreciate Index Match. It’s definitely a more flexible formula for sure than some of the others. So I can appreciate that. So last question here, I’ve really enjoyed our time together, we just have one more question and if you were to give some advice to someone starting their career today, who wants to work in FP&A, what advice would you give them?

Sruthi Lanka:

Yeah, I think that there is no successful, at least start up FP&A candidate who’s not deep in the data. So actually my advice may be, I don’t know, you’ll tell me whether this is routine or not, but I would say learn SQL if you can. You need to be data literate to be really effective at understanding whether you’re looking at the right metrics, whether you’re pulling the right numbers. And that dual skill will help you honestly partner better with your technology counterparts. Most companies today have large engineering and technology teams and that’s a simple language to learn.

Paul Barnhurst:

Yeah, I like that answer. Obviously you get a lot of people have different opinions. I think a lot of it depends where they worked at large companies, small companies, what background they came from. But I learned SQL in my first role and a little bit before I moved into finance and FP&A. And it’s served me. It’s been invaluable in my career. It’s really helped me a lot with the data. I learned power query, I have a master of science and information management to go with my MBA. So I tell people they should learn SQL. You should at least learn the basics. You need to be able to work your way around data and have the conversations. You may not be the one pulling it. You need to get all detailed and be able to write a 20 page query. No. It’s not, your job isn’t to sit and pull data, but you gotta at least be literate is what I tell people. And learning the basics of SQL is not hard.

Sruthi Lanka:

Totally agree. I’m glad we agree on this

Paul Barnhurst:

Yeah, when I’m on the same page as you, I’ve had that discussion. There’s one other guy that is big in the space on LinkedIn, he’s kind of always on the opposite end and we go back and forth on this debate. So yeah, I’m glad I have someone that’s on my side. That’s always good. Well we’ve really enjoyed having you on the show today, appreciated you carving out some time for us and I’m really excited for our audience to get the opportunity to listen to this. So Sruthi, thank you for being on the show. Appreciate it.

Yeah, thank you so much Paul, and I look forward to more great content from you.