Jeff Marx, VP and Treasurer of large global chemical manufacturing company Hexion, reveals how anyone in finance can land their dream job. His method is to encourage anyone in finance to adopt a method called “the finance passport”.
Rather than chasing “shiny titles that look good on LinkedIn” anyone in FP&A should consider the concept of a “finance journey” to become an all-round player. This means taking a trip through Treasury, tax, audit, and investor relations to be rounded and be able to talk confidently about all aspects of finance, improving your impact on whichever role you are in, but is especially powerful for anyone with CFO ambitions. “I’ve had roles in internal audit, financial planning and analysis, controllership” says Jeff revealing how this journey has transformed his mindset.
In this episode Jeff talks to Paul Barnhurst about:
- Understanding the finance passport and how to adopt this shift in your career
- Moving from a promotion-based to a growth-based mindset in finance
- The difference between a finance “athlete” and a finance “specialist”
- How Treasury and FP&A can work most effectively together to drive business efficiency
- His favorite Excel formula
- Why ability to communicate effectively remains the best advice for anyone in FP&A
Paul Barnhurst:
Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Today I am your host, Paul Barnt, AKA the FP&A Guy. And you are listening to FP&A Today. FP&A Today is brought to you by Data Rails, 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 today. This is going to be your go-to resource for everything FP&A. I am thrilled to welcome today’s guest on the show, Jeff Marx. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Jeff Marx:
Thanks for having me. Me with me.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, I know we’re excited to have you. So a little bit about Jeff. Jeff comes to us from the Columbus, Ohio area. He graduated from the Ohio State University majoring in business and he’s worked for Hexion for the last 21 years and a number of different financial roles. So maybe Jeff you could tell us a little bit more about yourself. Take us for your background in a little more on how you ended up where you’re at today.
Jeff Marx:
Sure. I’ve been with Hexion for 21 years. Hexion is a large global chemical manufacturing company headquartered here in Columbus. We’ve been through a number of mergers and acquisitions over the many years I’ve been here. I’ve had roles in internal audit, financial planning and analysis, controllership. I was the CFO of a business unit and now I lead our treasury organization. So prior to coming to Hexion, I started my career in public accounting as you mentioned, I have a bachelor’s in accounting and finance and an MBA from Ohio State and I’m a CPA and a CFA charter holder.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. So you have the CFA and the CPA?
Jeff Marx:
Yes, I do. It’s you both very challenging but both rewarding in the opportunities it has given me over the years.
Paul Barnhurst:
Well great. No that’s exciting. I’m glad it’s given you those opportunities and certifications definitely can help us stand out when needed. So that’s good. So maybe can you talk a little bit, you mentioned I think your current role is VP, your vice president and you manage treasury. So maybe can you talk a little bit about what all is entailed in your current role, what you’re doing today?
Jeff Marx:
Sure. We’re managing the capital structure, the cash flow, the liquidity of the organization we manage risk, and credit. Our organization also works closely with the business and our private equity owners and running a five year model and there’s a lot of work that goes into that and understanding the drivers and the strategic initiatives that we’re undertaking. And then we work with all kinds of stakeholders, investors, our creditors, our vendors in talking about what is going on with their business, what are the drivers, how we’re performing and making sure that we can clearly articulate the story of Hexion.
Paul Barnhurst:
Understood. So your private equity held and so I imagine a lot of your time is providing data with to the investors and helping them understand performance.
Jeff Marx:
Absolutely. So we have a great ownership team and we work very closely with them
Paul Barnhurst:
Now that makes a lot of sense. I could see where you’d spend a lot of time there. So I know a couple years, I think it was two years ago you spoke at AFP (Association for Finance Professionals) regarding the finance passport.
Jeff Marx:
Yes.
Paul Barnhurst:
Can you tell our audience what that is? Maybe give them a little bit of an overview of what is the finance passport?
Sure. Maybe you could back up for a second and talk about how we got to this finance passport.
That’d be great.
Jeff Marx:
A few years ago we went down, we created a project with human resources where we were really struggling with how to articulate what a career path looks like at Hexion and especially for some of the younger people that we’ve brought in the organization saying here is your current role, here are the different opportunities that are available to you in the future. And we started with reverse tracing some different individuals saying, oh how did they get to where they’re and what steps did they take? And right away it was clear that that was gonna be a very difficult process and not necessarily very meaningful becaise everybody had somewhat of a different journey to how they ended up with where they are. We’re struggling with this. So we engaged Gartner and what we found is that we were not alone in having these issues with defining what a career path looks like in finance, especially in a modern present day finance organization where especially in a place like Hexion where through the challenges of mergers and acquisitions that the organization evolves many times in the course of the last several years, what we’ve found is that these traditional corporate ladders are really kind of a thing of the past.
Given that those organizations are flatter and leaner, people end up spending longer times in their current role. And that creates a challenge too because when it’s time to make that jump, it’s a bigger jump than it was in the past when you maybe had a little bit more ability to promote people more frequently and gradually take on more responsibilities. So with all that being said, it’s really the work that what we’ve found by working with Gartner is that these leading organizations are really taking a different approach, abandoning more of these corporate ladder type experiences and moving to more of these matrices where your next move might not necessarily be a promotion but you can go from say business finance or FP&A to treasury, you’re going to get a lot of different experience that you didn’t get in your previous role but that makes you a more well-rounded finance person and that helps you continue to develop your skills and work towards leadership positions that require you to have more exposure across all facets of finance and not just being in one silo.
So the challenge was how do you change this mindset from this corporate ladder type mentality to more of a journey. And what we developed is this tool that we call the finance passport. And the way we approach it is you have five different areas of finance. You have audit controllership, business finance slash FP&A, tax treasury slash investor relations. And within each of those groups you have different skillsets that you would hope to achieve if you spent some time in that area. And then top of that, you always have leadership skills you can develop that are broader, that can be really transferrable to outside of finance. Where we’ve had here at Hexion, we’ve had people move out of finance into procurement and HR and other parts of the business. Really you can develop your leadership skills from any place in the business. And ultimately the overarching part of the passport would be the CFO’s skillset.
And again, you don’t necessarily need to be the CFO to start working on those types of skills. Really developing a CFO mindset, you can do that from lots of different places in the organization. So the passport basically creates an inventory of all these skills that you would expect over to develop over a finance career. And you can rate yourself where you think you presently are on a scale of one to five and would you would like on a scale of to five. And it’s based on where you rate yourself and this is all do on your own. And it’s a tool that you say, here’s part where I’m really interested, I don’t have a lot of experience. How can I go get that? Or here’s the part just like a real passport, there’s places I wanna go. There’s places I know don’t, for example, tax some people want spend a lot of time in tax and have a career tax some people it’s a apparent right away that they have nothing, they have no interest in tax and all of that.
There’s no right or wrong answer, very individual. But it, it’s somewhat of a map that helps you think about your career where you’ve been. There could be things that you think you have a lot of experience in, but you don’t ever wanna do that again. Just like a place where you don’t really wanna on your real passport and there’s places that you’ve got to find a way to get to. So it’s really it’s been well received. It’s really helping to try to change that mindset be less promotion-based and more of a growth culture based.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you for sharing. I appreciate the explanation there. And if just kind of recap, I think you mentioned there were five areas, accounting, audit, tax, treasury and business finance, our FP&A as the five areas. Then obviously the CFO. What I like there is your focus of it no longer being a career ladder. That’s how we all think about our career. But sometimes it’s really moving and gaining different experiences and like you mentioned, sometimes a lateral as far as the role goes, may be a really good and the right move for your career because hey I need some experience as a controller, I need some time there If I wanna be a CFO and a lateral for 18 months is better than just continuing to move up this channel because it won’t get me where I ultimately wanna go. So I like that what you shared about Gartner, how there’s really, when talking to them there’s not one path through finance. Everybody takes a different kind of road. They wind their path through finance. So one thing you mentioned in there is you talked about one of the things you wanted was a growth-based culture and then you also mentioned a promotion based culture. So can you talk a little bit about the difference between the two?
Jeff Marx:
Promotion based is really more thinking about every couple years I need to get from associate, but need to be a senior associate and I need to be a manager, they need to be a senior manager. It’s very much that mentality can sometimes paralyze people when they’re thinking about their career. And there’s been a number of times where people have presented fantastic opportunities to get a different skill set than what they already have. But this concept of like, well I’m a senior associate now and that role is a senior associate, my next role really needs to be a promotion. Really trying to drive a different mindset saying that it might not be a promotion per se, but when you look at how you’re building out your resume, you’re going to be able to add all of these things to it and it is good for you in the long run even though from a title perspective it might not have changed.
It’s very difficult because I think it’s a lot of pressure amongst everyone, especially when you’re looking on LinkedIn. Everybody seems to some fancy title, how do I get a fancy title? It’s it’s challenge. It’s not easy to convince somebody that you are better off with this lateral, sometimes it’s maybe even a lower level on paper but you are developing a skill that you didn’t have and that makes you more marketable both internally and externally. And that’s a mindset I think you need to have in an environment that is ever changing you. I’ll give you one more example that when you think about from my experience 10 years ago thought that great job would be a vice president of finance of a division. Well, through mergers and acquisitions and restructuring reor reorganization that position doesn’t even exist anymore. So if yourself focused one particular role with one title it you’re setting yourself up for disappointment.
You have to be pretty agile in today’s environment cause it’s on paper it always sounds good. Well I just moved somewhere. That’s how can continue to keep getting these titles and sometimes that works but in the reality it doesn’t always work that way. It can be pretty difficult and pretty disruptive to your personal life to keep changing jobs and cities, you have gotta find way, continue to grow within the confines of where you’re at. Sometimes making a move isn’t the best, the right decision but sometimes it’s gotta find development strategies within the organization you’re currently in.
Paul Barnhurst:
Your example there made sense to me of, hey 10 years ago I wanted to be this. Today the role doesn’t even exist. So being flexible and realizing that growth within a company can happen but you need to be patient and there’s different paths you can take and put everything together for the benefit of the long run. Not always that short term, that next role hopping every eight months so you can get a better title on LinkedIn or whatever it might be,
Jeff Marx:
<laugh>. Right.
Paul Barnhurst
Jeff Marx
So how was this received at first? Did you get a lot of pushback when you rolled this program out or can you talk a little bit of just how adoption happened, how you were able to ingrain it in the org and the culture?
Yeah, it’s say it’s voluntary, it’s 100% voluntary and it’s also a tool that you are going to get out of it what you put into it. And I think that’s one message that we’ve been trying to push here and is really a life lesson is that you have to own your own career. No one else is going to own it for you. So you have to put it the time and effort into it. And generally speaking your manager is more than happy to have these career discussions with you. But you’ve, you’ve gotta drive that and you’ve gotta say these are the experiences that I’m missing, how can I get them? And one of the other themes of this passport and this growth culture is that you don’t always have to change roles to get these skills. You can get these skills in different ways. You can be on projects, you can sometimes do a brief rotational program or volunteer to help another department for a brief period of time teaching a course or teaching a like lunch and learn or something.
All these things are ways that you can develop skill sets outside of your normal day to day job. So generally speaking, there are numbers of, are a lot of opportunities within a corporate environment to jump in on an HR project to jump in on an M&A project. Those things that kind push you out of your comfort zone that when you’re challenged, that’s when real development happens. And how do you find those opportunities to challenge yourself and continue to check off boxes and in that increase your skillset, the different experiences you have. That again like I said makes you more marketable both within and outside of the organization.
Paul Barnhurst:
That makes sense and I appreciate when you said hundred percent on your own right. It’s you that does it. You gotta own your own career. This is a voluntary program and you gotta be able to push yourself outside your comfort zone. As I’ve heard it said and we’ve all probably heard something similar. The magic happens when we get outside our comfort zone, that’s when real growth happens and we develop cause it’s real easy. We’re all to some extent creatures of comfort and it’s easy to get comfortable and not want to change. I like how you challenge people to do that within the program. So one thing as I was reading through the program that I noticed is you talk about finance athletes, and finance specialists. Can you tell our audience the difference between the two?
Jeff Marx:
Sure. An athlete is someone who can be dropped into a number of different finance roles and be successful. They have appetite for learning, continuing to get these new experiences to round out their resume to be a well-diversified financial professional, to be able to speak to the issues in audit, IT, FP&A, treasury, and compliance. The whole gamut really with that mindset of ultimately striving to be a CFO, really being a leader in the finance department and being able to speak particularly about many different facets of what we do as finance professionals. The flip side of an athlete is a specialist. So a specialist develops deep expertise in one area. And I’ll go back to the tax example. You know can be a world class tax person and really focus on all aspects of tax in international tax sales really focused in one area.
That’s fine too that that’s an excellent career path. And again, there’s not a right or wrong answer but you have to know which one you want to do and you have to know the tradeoffs of both. So if you’re an athlete and you’re willing to jump in do a stint internal audit cause you think it would learn a lot about audit and operations do a stint in treasury or controllership and learn about the budgeting process and some of the accounting tools that we use in the software, you will have a lot more opportunities as an athlete to go do different things to where your promotions may come a little bit faster if you’re a specialist it’s a fine career path as well. But that you’re going to have a lot of time in one role, in your role is be a longer path to keep of moving up the ladder so to speak. That if that is what your goal is, it’s tougher. It’s just tougher. You’re not gonna get many different experiences. You’re have to spend a lot of time in that deep knowledge in one area. And again, both have fine career prospects.
If you are a rockstar in tax, you are gonna be a hot commodity but you’re probably not gonna be maybe in rare cases you might not have breadth to be the CFO if you’re not able to talk about some of the other aspects of other aspects of finance, the compliance pieces, the capital markets pieces, the FP&A pieces of it.
Paul Barnhurst:
Got it. Thank you for that explanation. As I was sitting there listening to you describe that, I was thinking a little bit how you can relate that finance athlete and finance specialist to sports, right? Baseball you have the pitcher that’s the closer, he just comes in for the ninth inning and that’s it. His job is very specialized, the designated hitter, very specialized. But then you have your utility one night he might be at shortstop the next night, he might be at second base the next night he might be on the bench. It’s changing depending on where they need him. Just like in football, right? Quarterback, very specialized. But you occasionally have that guy like Taysom Hill a player that comes to mind for me. He’s played tight end, he’s played on the defense, he’s played on special teams, just played wide receiver quarterback and running back, right? He’s an athlete, you put him where you can use him and you make him work. There’s just people that you want, you know, want both in any organization, like you said, one’s not necessarily better than the other, they’re different and they both have their benefits. It’s knowing what you wanna be and utilizing your strengths to accomplish your career.
Jeff Marx:
That a great analogy. And to your point, I mean a designated hitter can do really well in the league.The utility player is very valuable as well. But you kinda of to know which, what do you wanna be? Cause that’s to influence some of your career decisions, right?
Paul Barnhurst:
Exactly. No, knowing who you wanna be and where you wanna be are gonna help guide you so that you can get the most out of your finance passport and get, as you said, the countries are the roll stamp that you want. .
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Next question I have here for you. I know Hexion, you guys use a thing called the Future Resume. That was the first time I’d ever heard that term when I was reading through your program. So maybe can you talk to our audience a little bit about what the future resume is and how you guys use that?
Jeff Marx:
Yeah, that’s an extension of the passport and again we were introduced by this concept from Gartner and it is something that the Ford Motor Company uses and is really thinking about what do you want your resume to look like in five years and how do you work backwards to get there? So it’s very much the same theme with the passport, but if I want to be in a certain role, there are certain skill sets I’m gonna need to develop and how do I think about getting those skill sets between now and in that time where I want that role. And it’s a little bit still somewhat challenged, right? Cause you know, don’t always know that that role that you want five years is going to be there things, right? But it’s still, it’s more of a way of thinking about standing in the future. What do I need to do to get there? I think from a career perspective, especially in finance, we get stretched. There’s hard drills every day and you need to pause and think about what do I need to be doing to get, to keep myself marketable, to keep growing in my career. Sometimes you, you’re fighting fires all day. Those things can pass you by. And between the finance passport and the future resume you should be having good at least a mid-year discussion with your manager or maybe even more frequently that here are the things where I’d like to take my career.
Can you help me? What can I do to go out and get these? What can I do to help get on these projects that I to? What can do to get there? And really the whole of both the future resume in and Passport is thinking about how do I get those skill sets I wanna get to keep growing as professional?
Paul Barnhurst:
That makes sense to me. And I think the way I look at it is you’ve described that is really this whole program is designed to help the employee own their career and to get where they wanna be and take away the idea that hey we’re just a promotion, we’re just a ladder company. Because that’s not reality anymore
Jeff Marx:
That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. You’ve gotta own your career and your manager should be able to support you and help provide tools but ultimately it’s something that you need to drive.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, I would agree with that. Everybody needs to drive their own career. A manager’s there to help remove roadblocks where he can enable you to get the opportunities but you have to deliver and you also have to let ’em know what you want. They’re not gonna be able to tell what you want outta your career.
Jeff Marx:
That’s right too. And it’s also a great mechanism to get you and your manager on the same page.
Paul Barnhurst:
I could see where this could be very beneficial to get the manager and you on the same page because you’ve gone through and thought about where you wanna be. You’ve done a future resume, you’ve rated yourself and they can also look at those ratings and offer advice and it’s very great way to start to help you develop those plans for the year and to make sure you’re really developing versus just in a seat with the job. So since you’ve implemented the program, what would you say is the main benefit you’ve seen at Hexion?
Jeff Marx:
Yeah I think you are starting to see a change in mindset. It is driving a culture where, and I think it is maybe in my career, if somebody would’ve said that a little more explicitly, you know, own your own career. No one’s just going to figure it out for you. I think that would’ve been helpful to kind of figure that out a lot earlier. So I think it is driving a change in the culture. I think that it also, it helps when you have some of these conversations too. You say get some people are little frustrated, I don’t know what’s next? What is it well have you filled out the passport? Well no that kinda as a manager or a mentor that also tells you something that they’re not really owning it. So it is definitely helped to drive great discussions between managers and mentors and associates. It helps us to think differently as managers of how to get people involved in projects that will help get them some of these skill sets.
We’ve done things like guest auditor programs that where people express interest to the passport how do you get some audit exposure and you know, can go participate in some internal audits and not necessarily have to go into internal audit for a couple years. It’s really helped us think about how do you get different opportunities, on the job experiences with not necessarily always having to create a formal change in position. So I think we still have a lot of work to do in terms of driving that culture. As I mentioned earlier, it’s human nature to wanna be promoted. There’s a lot of pressure, there’s a lot of peer pressure and that won’t go away. But the reality too is in a flat organization it’s just not always possible to do that.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, exactly. Like you said, it’s not always possible to promote people in the flat organization. But as I listen to you talk about the benefits and as you’ve talked about the program so far, I wish I would’ve had something like this earlier in my career. I’ve done some different programs but not this explicit and this well laid out. I think it would’ve really helped me and particularly focusing on those special projects like you mentioned, carving something out to go over to audit. I have no interest in being an auditor but if I wanna be a CFO I have got to understand audit and working on some special projects. Would it be a great way to get that experience without spending two years in auditing? And that is a great way to think about it and to do those special projects to help people round out those skills without having to have a formal role. So for someone in our audience who is going, this sounds great, I would love to use something like a finance passport in my career. How would you tell them to get started? Or what advice would you give somebody who wants to implement something like this in their career?
Jeff Marx:
Really thinking more about how do I grow my resume, how do I grow the skills on my resume versus how do I limit my opportunities? Just because there’s a title, so you may new, you’re getting a lot more experience. There’s some merit to that but I think there’s often more merits saying if I go take this other, take this job that has a promotion, I might add two bullet points to my name or to my resume. If I go take this other one, I’m going to add seven different skills that I could add. Just changing that mindset to, especially when you’re early in your career, how do you grow your finance skillset? How do you develop a broad spectrum? And not always just chase just be so focused on what is my title. Am I a senior associate or manager or how do I focus on more on the experience? Am I growing as a professional, as know what is my title?
Paul Barnhurst:
It’s easy to get caught up in the title game and focusing on that. I can remember being there early in my career and I remember I took one role and I tried to push for a senior manager title in the job and they weren’t willing to do it and I took the job anyway and I was really glad I learned a ton in the experience. And a couple years later when I left I’d been a director and manage a couple different divisions and I got a lot of experience I wouldn’t have had somewhere else. And so I can totally appreciate sometimes taking the lateral and letting go of the title is worth it. It can be really beneficial when it checks the right boxes and allows you to gain that experience you need in your career. But early on it’s hard for a lot of us to recognize that cause we’re such a culture moving up, driven career ladder society, that people just get caught up and I gotta be in the name and I gotta have the title.
Jeff Marx:
Yes. And I mean part of this project too was really based on my own experience, my own journey. And so much of your career is based on timing, on external factors, event driven business needs mergers, acquisitions, divestitures. The organization is a dynamic, growing, shrinking, changing organization. How do you strike this balance of supporting the company continuing to advance in career. And trust me, I’ve had title discussions too in my, it’s not on me, but it it’s one piece the puzzle. You have to find that north star. Do I wanna be a CFO? Is this career path, is this next role? Is this gonna help me on that journey or is it going take me off that journey? And there have been times where there’s some jobs with fancy titles that aren’t really gonna help you grow anymore. You kinda then they’ve done that or it’s not really something that’s gonna keep you on that path. It’s a great title. You’ve find that filter your own personal filter that helps you sort through all that. And if it’s the only filter, is this a higher level than the last level? That’s not always the right approach. Am I growing my skillset set? Am I on a long-term path versus am I taking this next role because it’s more money, a higher title promotion, not demotion or promotion, not whatever it is. How do you change that mindset to more of a skill based as opposed to just this corporate ladder that isn’t really always there anymore.
Paul Barnhurst:
I’m going to repeat what you said for the audience cause it’s a point that anyone earlier in their career really needs to listen to. Is that idea of stop just thinking about the title, the money, the next promotion. Those are all important, but if you have a path and where you wanna get and you focus on getting the right skills and taking advantage of when the opportunity comes along, you’ll be just fine in the end. As long as you do do good work, you’ll get promoted, the opportunities will come. So don’t chase the promotion. Chase the growth experiences that will allow you to become the kind of leader in the role you wanna be in.
Jeff Marx:
A hundred percent.
Paul Barnhurst:
Next question here. What would you recommend for a company, if somebody’s listening out there maybe VP of finance or a CFO and saying, Hey we need something like that at our company. We need to be more growth-based and implement a program like this. What advice would you offer them?
Jeff Marx:
Oh, first thing I would say it is hard. So all those things that we mentioned, it, it’ll take time, it’ll resonate with some right away and then you’ll come back to these title discussions and it’s human nature and it’s very difficult. But really, it’s creating an environment that thinks about development and annual goals. An annual goal would be more short-term focused, more specific in terms of meeting the plan. What are you going to do? Development goals aremore around education growth, more long term, developing a professional finance person. You have to have a balance of both those business initiative goals that you set each year versus these development goals that are more educational around finding the right opportunities, challenging people, finding those projects that are going to allow maybe somebody who’s an individual contributor on the org chart an opportunity to lead a team by running a project. You know, might not have the capacity to give somebody three direct reports in a normal day to day role. But you have the opportunity to make them project leader and there’s people on that. How do you keep growing the professional in the context of not always being able to change roles especially in an organization that is flat and is lean.
Paul Barnhurst:
That makes sense to me is really, if I’m hearing you’re right, one, it’s hard. It’s a lot of work. You need to really be thinking about it. But two, the key is really focusing on the development side. You know, you should have the short term goals in place. Most companies are pretty good at focusing on the goals and the numbers that need to be hit. But really spending that time to figure out how you help your employees and put that program in place to help with the development side of the career.
Makes a lot of sense. So I know you work in treasury today. Can you talk a little bit, kind of switching gears here, I appreciate all that on that program and it sounds like you’ve done a great thing there by implementing that. But maybe can you talk a little bit about how treasury and FP&A work together, now that you’re in treasury, how do the two coordinate and then what makes a good partnership for treasury and FP&Aa or business finance?
Jeff Marx:
Sure. We work really well with our FP&A team. Our FP&A team is largely embedded in the business unit. They do a great job of really understanding the drivers of their business, ripping apart the P&Ls every month and delivering forecasts that we roll up into our forecasts where we’re doing both short term cash flow forecasting and then more of the longer term strategic model. So the businesses we partner with them, they do a great job in terms of helping to articulate what their different initiatives are. They kind of own the P&L l aspects of it. And then we’re putting it more into a statement, cash balance sheet perspective. More of a three statement look. We work really well with them, we challenge them at times. They challenge us at times. Really we communicate well with each other. We’ve got a great team. So the other thing that we work with them a lot is just understanding working capital, and trying to understand the drivers. Working capital has a huge impact on our cashflows and we are really trying to work with the business, work with supply chain under making sure we’re all on the same page and really driving efficiency there where we can.
Paul Barnhurst:
That makes sense to me, I appreciate you elaborating a little bit there and it sounds like it works well and you have a good structure and your FP&A is mostly embedded, as you said, mini CFOs. I’ve filled that role a few times. That’s typically where I’ve been in FP&A versus corporate. And that’s where I like to, that’s where I say the fun happens is when you’re down there working with the business,
Jeff Marx:
It is a very fun role. I had a similar role in the past. You know, you get to be the co-pilot of the business. Really like I said, ripping apart that P&L, understanding the drivers, helping, making recommendations, making decisions. The FP&A function is really highly valued in our organization.
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s great that they have high value and they’re respected. That’s what we like to see. Cause I think they can play a key role in businesses when they’re allowed to and they’re given those opportunities to really partner and work with the business. So we’re going to kind of shift gears here. We just have a little bit of time left. We have a couple standard questions we ask everybody and we’re gonna go ahead and run through these. And the first is we like to ask everybody to describe a time or an experience where they had a failure at work, something didn’t go the way they wanted, we’ve all had ‘them and what they learned from the failure. Maybe it could be an analysis that had gone wrong in implementation or change management that failed. And what was the learning or takeaway from that experience?
Jeff Marx:
Yeah, I’d say I think about some of the failures in my career. There were probably times where I was slow to speak up or maybe not as forceful. When I did speak and think about one time we were heading into a budget review. I had a conversation with my boss where we had recently inherited a business that the other business had already done a lot of work on their budget and the conversations says these guys aren’t ready. They didn’t really address the issues that need to be addressed. They really need to redo this. And you kind of of got this pause from my boss. He says it’s theirs, they can own it, we’re just gonna go in there and we’ll support them.
As I predicted it was a disaster. I thought the CEO throw out the window at the end it was like, why didn’t you fix this? Not the guys that made the mess? It’s why didn’t fix this? Like, well at that point you can’t just, oh well I thought about it but I brought it up. So you have to think as professionals, be very analytical, sometimes you think the numbers speak for themselves. You think the issues are black and white or you’ve done all this analysis and issues there, but you really have to be forceful in your persuasion, in your softer skills to say, here’s what the data says and now I have to smack you over the head with it. I gotta drive it home. And that is my role. Not just to put the numbers together because not everybody interprets those things that you now think are black and white because you spent so much time on it. So you’ve gotta what, you’ve gotta sell what you’re seeing and you gotta tell them that’s what the data says is this is the call to action. This is why we need to change our course. And if I think about the regrets I’ve had in my career, it’s like intuitively, at some point I knew the right answer. I was there. It’s like I didn’t do enough to stop that train. And you’re not just a finance person, you’re a leader. You have to change course.
Paul Barnhurst:
What I’m hearing there is speak up. I like how you mentioned when the numbers don’t speak for themselves. We have to use persuasion and when we’re sure something’s wrong, we have to make it very clear that our opinion’s heard. They may ultimately go ahead with it, but we wanna do what we can beyond just being this squeaky wheel but really being persuasive And yeah, I’m reminded as you shared that story, I had one similar in my career where we had interviewed this person and I had had the role previously. So they asked me to interview and told the hiring manager, he goes, well what’d you think? I said he checks all the boxes but one, there’s something not right about his resume and I can’t give you an exact reason but everything tells me you should not hire this person. I would not hire him if I was you. He said, oh well that’s nice. But they checked all the boxes, they went in and I hadn’t hired him and it was a complete disaster and I wish I would’ve found one, been more forceful and found a better way to articulate what had been going on because it put everybody back six months. Because now they had somebody that they put in a role that failed that shouldn’t have been in the role and they weren’t getting the work done on top of that. So it was impacting not just that person but everybody else.
I really appreciate this speaking and Being persuasive. Cause sometimes we let things slide like, well I can’t really do anything. Or they’ll recognize it when it’s a train wreck.
Jeff Marx:
That’s right. That’s right. Need you to see how it’s your job to stop the train wreck. Not to tell him why I saw it coming
Paul Barnhurst:
Nobody wants to hear. I told you so after nobody
Jeff Marx:
Hear, I told you so. That’s right. That’s right.
Paul Barnhurst
That makes a lot of sense. So next question here, this is one kind of personal that we ask everybody to just get to know him a little bit. What is something unique about yourself that we wouldn’t find online? Something you could share with our audience.
Jeff Marx
So I’ll go with we talked a little bit about college football before. So it’s the hundredth anniversary of the Ohio Stadium, the horseshoe, this year. So that was actually my dorm room in college. I lived, actually lived in the stadium for four years, so it was it’s not there anymore. But they had a dorm that hung from the west side of the stadium and there’re about hundred people that lived there, it’s actually a co-op. So it was a scholarship. It’s a combination of financial need and academic achievement. So you were in that dorm for seven to 10 hours a week in you for fraternity. It was cheaper than some of the other dorms on campus. But yeah, so I worked my way through college. Part of it the way was living actually in Ohio Stadium.
Paul Barnhurst:
That is a cool story. So I have one follow up question to that. Sure. Did you see the game from where your dorm rooms were you able to look down on the stadium and watch a game?
Jeff Marx:
No. So most of the rooms did not have windows. So the one there were rooms that were kinda of facing outside towards the parking or towards the south end of the, that it actually point there. But yeah, you actually had to of leave the dorm and go into the stadium to actually see the game. Still, there are ways to sneak in, but
Paul Barnhurst:
College students sneak into a game. I can’t see that happening.
Jeff Marx:
Exactly.
Paul Barnhurst:
No, that makes sense. Right. So next question here, what is your favorite Excel formula?
Jeff Marx:
So seeing some of your other guest responses here. So I’ll try to go with one I don’t think was picked yet, but was I would go with the IF statement, good old fashioned IF. So that, I think that’s been really helpful in creating a lot of versatility in some of the spreadsheets we’ve created, especially the scenario analysis and there’s some other ways to do that. But you’ve created some cool things largely based on the IF function.
Paul Barnhurst:
I like that one. I don’t think we have had that one. And it’s a simple function to use and it’s very versatile.
Jeff Marx:
Yeah, yeah,
Paul Barnhurst:
I like that. All right, so last question we have for you before we let you go is, what advice would you offer to someone starting their career in FP&A or finance in general today? What would be the advice you’d offer to that person?
Jeff Marx:
Maybe a little similar to the theme of my failure. Don’t forget to focus on the communication skills is it’s very important. Again, as finance people so many times dive into the data really deep and you think you have the answer, but that’s really being able to articulate that to someone else can be a challenge. Especially in finance, I think. And many times I see, you know you ask a simple question and you ask what time it is and someone wants to tell you how to make the watch. Or in finance especially, sometimes you just want a simple yes or no question. You ask a yes or no answer, you get 10 megabytes and nowhere is the word yes or no? So mm-hmm <affirmative> got to find a way to take all that data you manage and all the analytics and find a way to simplify that and give people crisp, clear, answers and understand what is your intent. With that answer, you is a call to action, is it to inform what do you want people to do with that information that you’re giving? I’m a big fan of the pyramid principle too, right? So you start with the punchline and you can drill down in more details, but the reader should know what you’re getting very quickly and give them the opportunity to continue to drill down, especially in a world where we’re drowning in emails and drowning and megabytes of data. You have got to simplify the message.
Paul Barnhurst:
I like that. Simplify the message. I had a manager, the way you described, you mentioned the pyramid principles, he called it BLUF (Bottom Line up Front). It’s like, give me the bottom line up front, put it in bold, tell me what I need to know. Then you can get to the details afterwards. And he calls it the BLUF method. And that’s always stuck with me. It really helped me learn how to take it up to a higher level. Cause I struggled. Because I think many people in finance do getting into the details and wanting to tell the nitty gritty and it’s like German, I don’t need to know the nitty gritty. Let me know what I need to know to influence the business. You learn and work on that stuff. So I appreciate that answer. Well, thank you for being on the show today, Jeff. We’ve really enjoyed having you and I’m excited to share this episode with our audience and give them the opportunity to learn a little bit more about the finance passport and the exciting things you guys are doing at Hexion.
Jeff Marx:
Thank you. You’ve been a lot of fun.