In this special LinkedIn Live/ FP&A Today, join Paul Barnhurst and our all-star panel to answer your questions about hard-won experiences about data visualization and storytelling to get FP&A a seat at the table.
Our special guests joining Paul Barnhurst are
- Pooja (Laddha) Jaju, Lead Financial Analyst (6Sense and Accenture)
- Soufyan Hamid, Independent FP&A Professional (Proximus, Deloitte)
- Ron Monteiro, Founder KICT Inc (Campbell Soup Company,
The questions they tackle from around the world, include:
- How data visualization is important for your career and growth in the business?
- The first dashboard you created and what you learnt from that experience?
- Your favorite chart for making an impact
- The Absolute Worst chart in FP&A
- Getting your finance team to better understand the importance of data visualization when in a leadership role?
- How improving your presentation skills can advance your career?
- How can you best present month end financials using principles of storytelling?
- Most powerful advice to ace your next presentation
Watch the full show on YouTube.
Paul Barnhurst:
I just wanna start by welcoming everybody to this LinkedIn live FP&A Today. I’ll be your host for this panel discussion. My name is Paul Barnhurst and FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails. They’re the sponsor of this event and they are one of the premier financial planning and analysis platforms and they’re designed for Excel users. So for this episode, I have here with me three guests, and we’re really excited for these three guests. I have Pooja (Laddha) Jaju coning to us from California, Lead Financial Analyst, Ron Monteiro, Founder KICT Inc coming to us from Canada, and we have Soufyan Hamid, Independent FP&A Professional coming to us from Brussels. What we’re going to start with is we’re going to start by just giving each of them a chance to give us a little bit about their background and share a little bit about themselves. And why don’t we go ahead and start with Soufyan. If you could go ahead and introduce yourself here for the audience.
Soufyan Hamid:
Well, thanks Paul. Well my background is pretty vaaried and straightforward at the same time because I started many finance people in audit. So I started at PWC and I worked there during four years. And after those wonderful four years, I decided I finally didn’t really want to be an auditor, and that’s why I moved to interim management. So meaning working in finance departments, but as an external and doing that for Deloitte. And I worked there during five years and I learned many finance jobs, working in accounting, in controlling finance, business, partnering, even treasury, sometimes tax. So this is where I decided to become more a generalist than a specialist, but traveling from one side of the country to the other was not really what I wanted. So I decided to settle down and work for Proximus which is a telco company in Belgium as a finance business partner during four years in the B2B department, and then as a B2C finance business partner. But I needed to see, again, a lot of different companies and a lot of different functions. So I decided to again, become an interim manager, freelance, but this time for my own accounts. And so this is why I’m the proud owner of my own single man company, SouFBP.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you for that introduction. Appreciate it. And I could understand not wanting to travel across the country all the time, so I can appreciate that one. Pooja, would you go ahead and just give us a brief introduction of yourself?
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
Yeah, thank you so much for having me, Paul, on this discussion today. I’m so looking forward to being with all of you. So I’m Pooja. I have been working as a finance business partner for almost 10 years with organizations like Accenture, Capgemini, and 6Sense. So, as a child, I was really, really fond of numbers, mathematics and problem solving. So that’s where my inclination to start my career in finance came from, and that’s how it began. A little bit about myself. I’m a bookworm, so Paul and Ron, I joined you in the club reading a lot of books. I have a six year old who keeps me on my toes throughout the day and I love hiking. So I’m currently making most of the national and state parks here around. So loving every day here. Yeah,
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. Thank you for that introduction, Ron?
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, amazing. So for me, I’ll start actually, and I saw in the chats somebody from Kenya. So I group in Kenya and I moved to Canada. And one of the reasons I mentioned that is I had really underdeveloped soft skills and I actually landed a company called Kraft Foods. I spent 15 years there and I went from a very shy analyst to somebody who’s very confident presenting and I credit the managers, the trainers, the coaches who actually had more confidence in me than myself. And fast forward, I’ve worked at a few other companies after and I was never quite satisfied with it. I was always generally pretty good at finance, but I love training and development. So about a year and a half ago, I made a decision to start my own company, primarily training and development, a little bit of consulting, and had the good fortune of meeting Paul. So Paul, myself, I mean, we partner a lot on training and development and I really have a passion for, my main passion is communication for finance, where I feel like there’s tremendous technical skills and taking it to the next level with storytelling. And visualization to me, is a big part of storytelling, huge soccer fans. So World Cup games tomorrow, unfortunately Belgium and Canada and the US are out, so we’re all out and India. But good luck to the remaining countries. Paul, pleasure to be here.
Paul Barnhurst:
Here. Thanks Ron. Thanks for joining us. We see someone else mentioning that they’re a single man company or should say a single woman company. So thank you for sharing that, Mary. We have some fun comments in here. I like the people who recognize my jokes. Nothing beats an excellent pun. Thank you, Adam and Hector, I’ll keep them coming. I’m glad you’re a big fan. All right, so we’re going to move to the next question and the audience, please feel free to chat your thoughts about this as people give answers and we’ll kind of have this interactive. So why don’t we start with Ron with this question. Can you tell me when you realized data visualization was important for your success in FP&A? when was that moment that you realized that do data storytelling and data visualization process was really important?
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, it’s interesting. Sometimes you learn a lot when it’s pretty bad, right? The opposite. So I remember being in this meeting, it was a finance director and he was my direct manager and he was presenting a concept called FAS106, an accounting concept. I don’t even know what that means, but I remember the audience just kind of backing away and being almost scared because he was doing it in very technical terms with a spreadsheet without visualization. I realized he completely lost the room. And then I’ve seen other people who are able to take non-financial audiences on a journey with visuals and think about it with all of us, I mean, you’d rather see a visual to communicate than not. And so I’ve seen the bad and I’ve seen the really good and I’ve seen the difference. You really get to the business conversation when you get everybody on the same page. So for me, good and bad experiences help me get there and say that is a way to advance the conversation.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you, Ron. Appreciate that. Great point there of how it advances the conversation. Let’s go next here. Pooja, you wanna maybe take that question?
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
Yeah. So maybe I had a similar experience like Ron, but it was something about me. So I was in this first job as a fresher and I had to present. So I had this big event wherein my manager says, go ahead and present the forecast you have been making to your leads. And what really happened on that day was I just put an Excel screenshot in the PPT and I read the line items one by one, so I could see that the stakeholders were not clearly engaged, they were not asking any questions, they were not even having an eye contact. And that’s when I realized something’s wrong, I need to really work on it. So I started observing people, I started observing my mentors managers. And that’s how I started really working on the journey. And once this working on the presentation, the baby steps started, I realized that I was getting more closer to my stakeholders. I was developing a bond, I was connecting what points I wanted to convey. I was doing that well. So I guess it gets better every time when you start working on data visualization.
Paul Barnhurst:
I agree. It definitely is a process and the more you do it and the more you focus on it deliberately, I’m a big fan of deliberate practice. You have a purpose to it. It’s amazing how quick the improvements can happen. Soufyan, you wanna talk about your experience?
Soufyan Hamid:
Well, I did it in two steps and Contrarily to Ron and Pooja. I discovered first the visualizations and then the presentations later on. So the visualizations, it came with one of my clients who wanted information, but he received it from business subjects in a big table with a hundred columns and approximately 2000 lines. And he wasn’t happy by about that. He asked me put it in one page. So at that time I was not really at ease with visualizations, but I did give it a try and it became better and better. And I understood that with visualizations you could get the message quite easily compared to tables because it’s visual. You see directly what’s going on. If it’s wrong, bad good or not, its self-explaining sometimes. And this is when I started to use it that use that more often.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you, appreciate that. And I’ve seen a number of comments coming back and forth about learning Power BI, or Tableau and definitely visualization tools you need to know. And I think BI tools, it’s very helpful to have an understanding of them. Power BI and Tableau are the most common, but there’s others. And we won’t go through all the different vendors, no need to do that list here. But there’s lots of opportunities to learn about visualization. So speaking of that, next question here, and we’ll start with Soufyan on this one. Can you tell me about the first dashboard you remember creating and what did you learn from that experience?
Soufyan Hamid:
Well, it was for that exact same client because from the first visualization, it was also the same time I learned about Power Pivot. So there I created a dashboard not only with nice visualization, but together with the power of Power Pivot, the possibility to use slicers so that your graph could adapt according to the selection you made. And so the request of the manager, it was an operational manager who was following up the hotel’s contract, and he wanted to have a view in which he could select by country, by hotel chain, by hotel and so on. So I saw that as a complete new world for me. It was really great to see that with just one page, one graph, you could just analyze, and I say analyze because we are speaking about dashboards, but for me, dashboards is really the start of your journey. It’s not the end product. The product is the presentation and the recommendation you give, but the dashboard here as a starting point of your analysis was for me a complete discovery. And since then I always use that and not tables anymore.
Paul Barnhurst:
Got it. Thank you for that answer. And yeah, I’ll share it real quick. My first experience I remember is building a graph in Excel and using dark background with bright colors because it was one of the defaults and thinking it was cool. And I mean the distractions on that thing, it was awful. I look back now and I’m like, what was I thinking?
Soufyan Hamid:
It’s good that you changed.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yes it is. It’s a good thing I’ve made. I’ve grown up. Thank you Soufyan, I appreciate
Soufyan Hamid:
That. But we, we’ve all been through that worry. Yeah,
Paul Barnhurst:
I’m pretty sure we’ve all had those moments. So why don’t we go to Ron next on this question.
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, no, I think it links with your comments, right? Because the same thing, first time you go and you actually think the doing the dashboard is actually the work and you may go down that path you mentioned, which is very kind of charts which are too distracting and things like that. So I remember getting to the point where, okay, you unveil the dashboard and there’s more questions coming at you than anything else. You almost feel like you’re at the end line. But what what’s interesting is I think you gotta step back and say, who are your stakeholders? What are you doing the dashboard for? And then use it and do the preparation ahead of time to ensure you can kind of talk intelligently about it rather than thinking it’s a finish line.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great point about knowing who your stakeholders are. So important because things are going to be designed differently if you’re doing it for an operations person versus an executive. They’re going to have different needs and different focuses. And so understanding that really makes a big difference. Pooja, would you like to share your thoughts on this question?
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
Yeah. So one of the very first dashboards I remember creating was compressing 80 PPT slide sorry, 80 slide PPPT I’m sorry into a two pager. What was very challenging about that report was every time, so basically I’ll give you just a background. We were sharing the actuals of a business unit and we were breaking it up by department and that needed a lot of analysis, which made us share the report by 15th of every month. So what really we really wanted to do was share a report at the beginning of the month in the first five days so that actions can be taken really early. So the most challenging part of that change was to compress the large amount of data into a shorter version and decide what’s more important and the more important things like for one particular month, if certain KPIs or certain pointers were more important in the next month, they were different. So I guess adapting to change was the second learning I had. And less is more. I realized when I made shorter versions, they were more effective. This I could easily sell them to the audience rather than the longer versions. So these were the two learnings from that incident.
Paul Barnhurst:
I love those two learnings, adapting to change. So important with dashboards, it’s very easy for them to become stale and nobody uses them. And then less is more, right? I don’t know how many have seen the cartoon, it’s by Tom Fishburn, but he has this big dashboard and down in the very bottom corner there’s one that’s going down like this, just an arrow pointing down and he asks everybody or one of the guys asks, well what’s that new chart on there? And he goes, well that’s how well everybody understands this thing and it’s just heading toward the ground. And when we do that overload, that’s really what happens is it gets to the point where nobody understands it. Cause you have so many key metrics that you can’t make sense of it. So we had a couple comments in here. One person just saying, I think until it becomes the only option to do visualization as finance professionals, we are just reluctant and rely on Excel.
Yeah, there’s going to be some that will always rely on Excel till they’re forced to do otherwise I wouldn’t disagree there. I like the one person who commented it must be actionable data. Great point there. One person asked specifically about industry.I think we’ll hold that till the end. That’s a little bit of a difficult question to get into specific industries at this point, if that’s okay? We’re definitely seeing a lot of different chat there, so keep em coming on. This next one, we wanna give a minute for you guys to throw out your answers and then we’ll see our panel, what they have to say. So what’s favorite visualization to use? Do you have a favorite graph? The bar chart, a heat map, a pie chart, a line chart. Whatever. Why don’t we get a few comments from our audience and then we’ll pull the panel here And yeah, I’ll just as we’re waiting for those answers to come in, we’ll read a couple more of the comments here.
Someone said it must be at a glance. I think there’s good enabled drilldown, all good things. Another, I think that it’s tricky to manage it because when you’re so great in creating dashboards, accompanying colleagues see you as an analyst and not as an economist. Yeah, there’s definitely, sometimes you get known as the visualization person. Someone said they love the table visual, the waterfall chart. All right, the end depends on the data, what they love. So we’re seeing a few different answers come in. We’ll go ahead. One vote for line chart another one for waterfall chart. Yeah, line charts are great for trend analysis, so we’ll let those keep rolling in. We’re going to start by asking everybody in the panel what their favorite chart is and then we’ll move to least favorite. So for this question we’ll start with you Pooja, what’s your favorite? Do you have a favorite visual you like to use?
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
Yeah, so my personal favorite is a waterfall chart. I feel like things are not always in one direction. So any change from one point to another is beautifully represented by a waterfall chart. I’ve kinda used them more often to show all the ups and downs in the life of a project maybe or a business from one point to another. And I really like the positives and negatives that waterfall beautifully captures. So yeah, my personal favorite,
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s a common one among finance, I think all of us have done more than a few waterfall charts. I know I’ve done quite a few over my career. So next we’ll go here to Soufyan. What’s your favorite visual?
Soufyan Hamid:
Well it’s not a surprise and I won’t be very original here, but it’s also the waterfall charts. It’s elegant it almost explains the story by itself if you just decide on which category you put so not just the revenue costs and so on, but if you calculate well the volume effect, the price effect, the mix effect, and here and then some one-offs, it almost tells the story. So if the audience knows how to read a waterfall chart, you could almost not say anything and they would understand from one point to the other what happens. And this is why I love it so much.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you for sharing that. Well, we got a comment here, definitely supporting the waterfall chart, although Soufyan is turning me onto the same key, so there you go. All right, Ron, what’s your chart?
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, no, so I was going to say the same but I’ll actually change it up because I wanna be a little different here. So Paul actually showed me a variance chart which actually has the materiality of the item and the variance on the same chart. It’s a modified bar chart and I thought it was wonderful. And I think to build on Soufyan’s point, I think it tells the story but also conveys the size of few different components. So this could be the customer size, the product size, and also the variance. So I think it’s a wonderful elegant word. I’ll use the same word as souf and simple to show those two things where you’ve capturing materiality and the variance. So modified bar chart is my vote.
Paul Barnhurst:
All right, great. Well we’ll go through and read a few more in here that we had from people year over year line chart, we add a modified waterfall only showing the variances, not the starting coming in from Scott. That’s an interesting one. I haven’t used that one, but I may remember that in the future We have Pareto from Depa and a few others for the waterfall. We have one that loves the pie chart. We have line, so we have, histogram is good for ranges. So yeah, lot, lots of different charts. And even if we have a favorite, an important thing to remember is that doesn’t mean we should always be using it, right? There’s definitely context that goes into each of these charts. So now we’ll go ahead and we’ll ask the next question, least favorite chart? And let’s start with Soufan for this. Do you have one you don’t like?
Soufyan Hamid:
Well, all charts that are too complex to be understood quite easily. For example, the skater chart, the different plots and so on, those are really complex to understand and to you spend more time explaining how to read it than to explain the content. But if I have to tackle one that I don’t really love, that would be what’s it, what’s its name now again? Yeah, the stacked bar chart. It’s not really my favorite one, although it’s fairly commonly used in finance. I think there are too much dimensions to be analyzed correctly and presented correctly. It’s a pie chart that you replicate by the number of columns. And so here all the critics that you put for by pie charts, you could just duplicate it for the stack stack chart.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you, I appreciate that explanation. I can totally see that I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it makes sense that a lot of the criticisms to the pie chart could also apply to the stack bar chart. So go ahead everybody put your least favorites in the comments. We have a few coming in. We have a vote for pie from Nate. He, he’s a kindred spirit cuz my least favorite is pie chart. Ganesh says scatter plot is his least favorite. Ron, what’s your least favorite?
And then just before I get to my least favorite, I always kind of provoke Paul a little bit with the pie chart because he detests the pie chart and I’m actually, not that I don’t mind it a good pie chart with the three or four slices. Good for me as long as you can tell the materiality. But Paul, we we’ll spend the whole LinkedIn live talking about how bad pie charts are if we give him a chance. But I think for me it’s around charts that have way too much information, whether it’s a line chart, a bar chart, too much color distracting. I think what a visual should represent is a quick understanding where you start talking about the story. And so while I like Soufyan’s point on, hey, the waterfall tells the story in itself. So any chart that has way too much information, too many colors cluttered, to me doesn’t get the objective done. And it could be any of the charts we talked about.
And I would agree with that. That is really true, that anything that doesn’t tell the story in many ways is the least favorite visual as I like to say about pie charts. Pie are good for two things, eating and Pacman. So there you go. All right, Pooja, what’s your least favorite?
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
So I’m with you Paul. I hate pie charts. I feel they take lot of space in a presentation. Sometimes I end up slicing them a lot and sometimes the labels are too small to really read them on a screen. So maybe something opposite is what Soufyan said. But a stack bar chart might just do the work and take less space. So something I hate it’s pie charts.
Ron Monteiro:
You really scored some points there with Paul hates them too.
Paul Barnhurst:
One of my favorite Excel people, Lila Gani has a great YouTube video that explains alternatives for pie chart. She’s also the one I learned the variance. Ron, as yous listed that as your favorite. So if you ever want some great ideas around visualization and some fun things to do with charts, I highly recommend checking out some of her video. She has a lot of good content
Ron Monteiro:
And Paul actually shared that video with me and actually used it because I, all joking aside, I do agree that that chart is way more effective and I think the spirit of learning. So Paul sent me that video, I learned it. If I could do it, anybody can do it. I’m not, as Paul would say, I’m not the best with the technical part of it, but I was able to communicate that information in a more effective way.
Soufyan Hamid:
But there is a thing that’s important with pie charts now because a lot of people hate it. It’s really bashed on LinkedIn and so on. But the thing, it’s one of the charts that most people understand. So here you have to balance the benefits versus the disadvantage of using it because although it might be confusing, on the other hand, you don’t have to explain what a pie chart is. So here again, it’s a question of context and if the audience you have in front of you is more used to have simple charts like bar charts, don’t hesitate to use it.
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, no, I think it’s a good point and I’m a big fan of what you just said because if it’s a simple way to communicate something that everybody understands, I think there are occasions where it could be an effective way to do it, right? Paul and Pooja ja may not agree, but I think the two of us are. Yeah, we’re not detesting the pie charts the way you guys
Paul Barnhurst:
Are. No, I agree. There are times it can be used. I choose not to use it, but I recognize as long as you understand the context, your audience, it can be effective in limited cases with small amounts of pies or where you’re trying to really show one dominates compared to the others. Just make sure you understand what it’s trying to say. If you’re asking somebody to compare all of them and be able to tell the numbers and you have a lot of slices, it’s just context. It’s cognitive overload, right? We’re not good at doing the comparison. So it really is, Soufyan said, I joke that I despise them, but I get it’s about context. I’m not going to be one of those that, no, it never makes sense even though I try never to use them. But that’s another story. All right, so moving on here to the next question.
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This one was going to be for Ron. Ron, you have worked at multiple companies in leadership roles. I know you’ve been a director for a few consumer goods companies and different leadership roles. How have you helped your team understand the importance of data visualization? How have you gone about making sure the whole team makes it a priority?
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, so interestingly enough, one of my last roles, I was brought in this as a senior finance director of corporate finance. And we had three business units. And frankly the leadership team, which the monthly presentation was aimed towards, was extremely frustrated because they would go into meetings and they would not come out with a common understanding of business performance and business action going forward. And I went in and I noticed that each business unit was presenting different visuals and different slides every month. So what was happening is the audience was trying to orient themselves to the charts rather than understand what the business is. So I did a very simple thing and to use what Pooja said, less is more. So we trimmed the deck from 60 slides to 15. We had 5 slides per business unit, the same visual for each business unit. And we got to common understanding very, very quickly. We ended up having a very functional meeting and really good business discussions. So interestingly enough, I mean sometimes we overcomplicate things by adding too many visuals, too much clutter, all those type of things. So it’s really a simplification and consistency exercise. And honestly we got to into a flow where everybody understood the deck and it became more of a business conversation. So to me, wonderful example there that people were frustrated and they went to, hey, now we can actually talk about the business.
Paul Barnhurst:
I really like how you pointed out the importance of talking about the business, right? Driving to where it’s not a distraction, everybody’s frustrated, but using the visuals to help with the story, the analysis, the conversation versus a deck with a million slides turning into a conversation about, well why is this one different? Why is this one right or wrong? And it can quickly, you’ve lost the whole meeting. So we’re going to ask one question here, Pooja and Soufyan . But as I’m doing that, I want people to throw in. We’re going to kind of mix it up here and take a couple questions from the audience after we do these two. So please, if you have a question, go ahead and put it in the chat and we’ll get to it here in just a couple minutes. So we’re going to go next. Pooja with this question, how has improving your presentation skills helped you during your career?
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
So every time when I worked on the presentation skills, the visuals I presented to the stakeholders, I felt I was one step closer to getting a seat at the table. So I felt my stakeholders realized that I understand the business, I’m trying to present it to them in a way they could understand it and I’m trying to give some action items. Things became easier. The conversation during the meetings was more open ended. There were a lot of questions from their end, from my end, lot of suggestions. So I think in order to make things interactive, working on my presentation skills really helped me. I always feel that it made my bond with my stakeholders stronger with every coming presentation that I did. And for an introvert or a shy person like me, it was a great booster every time doing it, at least putting it the hard effort behind making it right was something that boosted my morale. So I guess it worked both the ways. One was to improve my relationships with my stakeholders, and second was something for myself. Wherein no, I felt more in my work experience became more enjoyable for me.
Paul Barnhurst:
I really liked the comment about stakeholders as well and how it made the work more enjoyable. So thanks for that. We got you here. Next, you know, provide regular nearly daily content on LinkedIn about, and it it’s mostly about the importance of presenting advice around presenting what made you so passionate about presenting data, the data storytelling side of finance.
Soufyan Hamid:
Well this is a story of when I felt attacked by a finance VP because I started at Proximus in the telco company I worked for. And there I was really great with the dashboards, visualizations, reports, I was really on the top. And each month we had to review our slides with the finance VP and each time he was completely lost. And one day he told me, Soufyan, your a technician, people in front of you won’t be technicians. And I really took that personally. And at that point I just said, yeah, okay you want me to be something else? I will do that. And so I started training first on my soft skills, my communication skills. And then really I took a training program in order to develop my presentation skills, not only the slides but also the way I spoke. I could speak in public the way I could present body language and so on.
And it was a program that was aimed at making experts able to communicate their findings to audiences that were not experts. And one way of doing so was teaching us the way Ted Talkers prepared their speech. And this is where I completely understood that there was something to develop for finance professionals because I must not have been the only one in that case. And according to what I see on LinkedIn, this is really widespread. We are not trained to do so from the start. So it’s really a development we have to take during our career. And generally we are directed towards Excel, even PowerPoint, Power BI and so on. But not a lot of people tell finance professionals you also have to learn how to present. And this is why I’m so passionate about it because this is something I discovered and I want to share it with the community.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you. I really appreciate that answer. And it’s clear that, you know, put in the time to learn how to present, you know, did the training, you did the work and you’ve seen the benefit of it. And so thank you for that answer. We’re going to go to a couple questions here now from the audience for a minute. And the first one we’re going to go to you with Soufyan. And this is from somebody earlier they asked as a finance business partner, what are the key focus points to have dealing in the telco industry? So I know this is a little bit off subject, but they know you work in that industry, so they wanna take advantage of your knowledge. So if you could talk to that for maybe just a minute or so.
Soufyan Hamid:
Well, this is really where I learned to be a finance business partner because when you work in a telco industry as many other industries, the figures themselves, the financial figures themselves don’t say much. You have to put them in the context, in the context of what matters for a telco company. And a telco company will be mostly generated by two things. First one is the number of clients, the number of customers you have, and those number of customers are followed up by the new customers, the acquisition, the churn, the retention, all those kind of things that you have to develop in your dashboards, but also in your presentation so that the sales people can follow up. And so this is where I really decided to calculate the impact of those different movements in financials. So the revenue was split into the acquisition, then the revenue lost by the churn, the mix effect, and so on. So all those kind of things were really a focus in the telco industry. You have many others of course, but if I have to speak about that, we are there until the end of the night for me.
Paul Barnhurst:
Well you know what, it’s early day for me, so we’ll call it, call that answer. Good. You
Soufyan Hamid:
See behind me eats the night.
Paul Barnhurst:
I can tell it’s already night for you. So you’re done talking. All right, we got that covered? No. All right, next question we had here, and I’ll go ahead and take this one. It said in simplification, what is a good tip for deciding what information is important and unimportant? So I think the most important thing to ask yourself is what’s the story you’re trying to get across? If you have a chart where there’s one thing that really jumps out, make sure you highlight that. Use color sparingly, have as much white space as you can. And in the simplification, get rid of everything that isn’t going to enhance what you’re trying to tell. So if the grid lines aren’t needed, maybe there’s really only one data point you need to emphasize. You put that data point in and take out the grid lines, take out the axis.
You can even take out the legend sometimes. Do you need a title? Does it make sense to have dark borders. Cause remember every color and everything you add to a graph, our mind has to process. And the more you have on there, the more cognitive load you have. So I think the key is asking yourself with every single thing on a graph, is this enhancing the story? Is this the best way to tell the story? Does it get across the point I want? And a good thing to do is to ask somebody what their takeaway is. If they have a different takeaway than you either need to be using a different chart or you need to simplify it or a combination of both potentially. And so that’s what I would say to that one. Anything you would add to that one, Ron?
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, no, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head in terms of simplifying, right? Because you want to get to the story and you wanna get there fast. So a lot of times even we’ve talked about less is more is a really powerful thing. It’s hard to do to take a whole bunch of data and simplify it to one message, right? Because sometimes you’ll see a chart and there’s multiple messages going out, multiple points on the chart. It really becomes complex for stakeholders. So it’s about putting yourself in their shoes. Context is important as we’ve talked about. And quick understanding. They say it takes I think milliseconds to understand a visual. And do you get to the same point? So the point you mentioned about asking for feedback, just say, hey, what are you seeing from this? And just see if it’s a common understanding.
Paul Barnhurst:
I like that. Thank you. So another, we’ve had some other questions come in, we’re going to hold those for a few minutes and just go to another question or two and then we’ll come back. So please keep your questions coming, we’ll get back to them before we finish here. So the next one I wanna talk about is finance has a reputation for being great at analysis, but often struggling with what we call the last mile of analytics, the presentation. And so I’ll tell a brief story that kind of highlights this from my own career and if anyone’s followed the podcast, they’ve probably heard me share this before. I still remember one time finishing a meeting with the C F O and things had gone wrong and asking my boss what went wrong and he said, your analysis was brilliant but your presentation lacked. I was like, ooh, ouch.
And it was true. I’d spent a lot of time on the analysis, not much on the presentation. So the question I have for you, why do you think that is that we’re so good at the analysis, but we act often lack at the presentation, which is really key to the whole thing. Without the presentation, without really telling that story, rarely do you get people to understand and agree to the insights and recommendations that come from the analysis. So for this one, why don’t we start with Pooja? We’ll go ahead and start with you on this question.
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
Okay, so one of the things that I find is very challenging and a lot of finance professionals face is they have to do a lot of manual stuff basically maintaining a large volume of data doing that in spreadsheets, and that gives them a very less time to do the critical thinking and analysis that is needed for good presentations. So what is really challenging is we have deadlines to meet and there’s a lot of manual stuff that we are doing. So in the meantime, there is very little or less time to actually do the deep dive and the critical thinking in organizations where automation is a much developed stage it’s very easier for finance professionals to just pull a report and kinda work through it, do the deep dive analysis and present it going forward. So I think automation is the biggest challenge and once organizations are adopted and able to automate a lot of more things, there would be this gap between doing the last mile of analytics would be bridged.
Paul Barnhurst:
Got it. No, I think there’s definitely a point there around we spend so much time dealing with the data that makes a hard to have time for the presentation. So there definitely is often a time crunch. I would agree with that. Ron, how would you answer this question?
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, no, so I definitely agree with Pooja, but what I would say is it’s a bit of a comfort zone thing. So again, I think Soufyan made the point where we’re all very comfortable in Excel in working on our analysis, but it’s about practice. And Paul, you’ve mentioned this many times, I really believe it’s spending the time and practicing. And so one specific example in a company is we used to have a meeting with the executive team, th eCEO and the leadership team. What we did was we set up a meeting the day before with the finance team and we all presented our respective parts of the presentation. And so it got us a chance to practice in a safe environment and helped us avoid those landmines where you go into meeting with the CEO and somebody says the wrong thing and then the whole meeting blows up and you go that way.
So for me it’s a practicing and it’s a comfort zone thing. And I’ve said this many times to you Paul, in all our training sessions, stepping out of that comfort zone is going to result in real positive things. But it’s about doing it in a supportive way, right? Finding an accountability partner and saying, Hey, can I practice my presentation on you? And then you get that feedback and you say, how do I get better and better every day? And then it’s astounding how much fun you can have as a finance professional when you go in confident and you can lead the conversation, be at the table. Like Pooja said, it becomes a game-changing skill for financing. And as mentioned that it’s a huge need and I really believe if our profession takes that, it’s going to just dominate, right? We’re going to be the ones driving the business.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great, thank you Ron. And I’ll tell just one other, you reminded me of when we talk about the practice and things. I for the longest time struggled with being too detailed in meetings and presenting stuff. And I remember at one point another director at one of the directors when I was a manager, he would, IM me every time I was getting too detailed in meeting, he’s like, pull it up, Paul, bring it back at a higher level. And I worked on it really hard for a long time. I even had another senior leader that’s like, look, just give me, he called it the BLUF principle. And this isn’t so much of a presentation, but just is just a really good advice for focusing on what’s important. He’s like, just give me the bottom line up front. He’s like, want every email to start with that? Then you can give me the details and I’ll ignore it. He didn’t quite say it in way, but that’s how he would’ve done it. So it was a good learning experience for me. What would you say on this question?
Soufyan Hamid:
Well, why for me might come from two things. The first one is that originally the finance department was always called the support department. So we were there to support the business and as Ron said, it’s a comfort zone because you do not put your shirt wet at that moment. It’s an expression in French. I don’t know if you translate it directly into English, but that means that you do not take the risk. You just give what you have to give and that’s it. You do not go further because you do not take any decision. You do not decide anything. You do not even try to find a solution. Other people will. You just gave your support. And that’s one of the reasons. The second one I see is because of the compliance mission of finance, because finance was originally accounting, so the statutory account, internal controls and so on.
And all of these made the finance department take a position of independence. So you had to be far away from the decision so that you could control it. And that sort of gave a wrong sense of the mission of finance because that means that if you are there to control, you do not have to do anything else. But we have to separate this internal control with the rest of the missions of finance. And this is something that’s not always done. In my last post, I had some discussions with my colleagues because I was busy with the business trying to work on the volumes from the next year or for the budget or the three year plan. And I was working with them modelliing, taking assumptions and so on, and they were completely out of their mind because they did not see finance doing it because they thought it was almost crazy to do this. And so this is why I think that it’s more a question of mentality than a question of tools or even of comfort. It’s the philosophy we put on the finance department that led us to that situation today.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you for sharing that. And I definitely think there’s things to be said that plays a part in all this for sure. And Grace here said totally agree with your point. So score one for Soufyan on that one or two. Thank you. Want two points? All right, we’ll give you two. All right, so we’re going to go to a couple questions here for a moment and we’re going to give this one to Soufyan. It says, what is your best advice for doing presentations about financial results? This comes with monthly, quarterly basis. So what would be your advice of how to think about presenting month end financials? Yeah, everybody’s favorite thing to do, right?
Soufyan Hamid:
Well, in a month end presentation there is not a lot of originality you can put. People expect you to give the results, say what you did versus the budget and so on. But here it’s important to still keep in mind that there’s a message to give. And this is why I like to use a storytelling template which is a running master I use often. That what? So What? Now What? If you can’t really fill in those three points with the issue you found, why it matters to them and what we do about it, that means that the message you have to give just doesn’t fit into that presentation. So of course you can give all the results, the revenue, the EBIDTA, the direct margin, but don’t forget the deep dive in which you have to tell the business the insight that was important during that month. And that insight has to answers those three question, what was the issue? So what does that mean for them? What’s in it for them? Why would they have to matter to care about this? And now what can we do about it? It’s not that you have to absolutely give your answer, but you have to at least give some leads and some information so that the people in front of you will start a discussion. If they have a discussion in front of you, it’s already a win.
Paul Barnhurst:
I love the principle. I mean three things. I think everybody should write that down if they haven’t really the what? The so what and then now what. So often month end presentations, just focus on the what it’s like, all right revenue was off by a hundred thousand, subscription revenue, T&E was 50,000 high. And they just list all the variances. And the commentary is basically just stating what’s there. And it’s like, okay, if I’m a business leader, what does that mean? Help me do something with this data. Otherwise, can we just skip this meeting and send me an email, right? Because without that, so now what you’re not going to get the trust you need. So we’ll go to the next question we had here from the audience, and this is from Ankit. And I’ll leave this to any of the panelists, whoever wants to take it so you guys can fight over it, you can raise your hands, whatever you want. What are the top three things you would keep in a finance presentation?
Yeah, I am struggling a bit with that one too.
Ron Monteiro:
We’re we’re all fighting here. Yeah, so Paul, maybe I’ll start and look. I think SU’s points brilliant around the what, so what now? I think for me the three things, and I think you mentioned, hey, the middle of the presentation’s typically pretty good, what I call the content, Hey, here’s what happened down the P&L, the two other things. So that’s really great. Visuals is telling your story. The first thing, the last thing I always did was write an executive summary. And that to me is kind of your BLUF, your bottom line up front. And it’s a way to get discipline into your own process. So example, so I’d have a month end presentation on Friday. By the Wednesday or Thursday, me as a lead would start seeing all the data and I’d start writing that executive summary. I used to just take the headline from all the other pages, put item on the front and tell the story.
And I would get to the what, the so what and the now what just on that one page, the bottom line up front. And then the last thing, the third thing is end with a bang. And what I mean by that is what is the call to action? So as you said, it’s not just a meeting for the sake of having a meeting, we’re. We are either behind on our budget have a good discussion on it, or hey, we’re ahead of the budget, where can we invest? It’s really having that context and saying, what do you wanna do? So for me, the number one thing is really good visualization, executive summary and then really ending on a note where, hey, what’s the business action coming out of it?
Paul Barnhurst:
Great, thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that answer. Anyone else wanna add anything to that one?
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
Yeah, so just to add to Ron, he captured it very well how he would want to break the presentations. And that’s something I align with. But there’s one more thing that I would do in a presentation is start with the most clear headline which is very important because sometimes our headline is not able to capture what we really wanna achieve. And I would put it hard. Sometimes we are trying to be too subtle and trying to change the direction, but still bring out the most difficult thing that we really want to speak. So I would just hit it hard on the first time and put a clear, concise headline that would highlight the most important point of the discussion.
Ron Monteiro:
And there’s so many finance presentations which actually don’t have headlines, right? A simple thing, but it takes effort to say, Hey, what’s my key message on this slide?
Paul Barnhurst:
Great advice on that one, Pooja, is make sure you just give it to ’em upfront. Don’t make them guess what you’re trying to tell them. That’s when you see the charts with 50 data points and it’s like, okay, what am I supposed? Why are these important? Get to the point, put that headline out there and don’t make them guess what you’re trying to tell.
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah. And Paul, just one more point on that. So look, we’re in finance, so sometimes you do need to have that Excel chart on the page which has versus budget versus prior, versus pre covid, all these things. And let’s say you have to do that because you’re CFO or somebody wants it, then it’s about, hey, can I use some circles on the pages? Can I use color? Can I use contrast to say where do I wanna take the reader? So even on a data intensive chart, there’s some real simple skills to say, here’s where I can direct the audience, right? Because we all know you sometimes you need those data charts.
Paul Barnhurst:
This is true. So I’m going to throw a little bit of a curve ball here and then we’re going to move toward wrapping up to have a little bit of fun. So this is a question that the panel didn’t see in advance and I want the audience to get to answer to this one as well. It’s a question we ask on this FP&A Today all the time. So if anyone has listened to fp and a today, they’ve heard the myriad answers we get from this question. So first we’re going to ask the audience and then I’ll go to the panel here. Favorite Excel function or feature? So it could be something, it could be pivot tables, it would be something like Power Query, it could be SUMIF, but what’s your favorite thing about using Excel? And as we see the answers roll in, we’ll start with Ron here. What’s your favorite thing about Excel, Ron?
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, so interestingly enough, I used to be a VLookup guy, right? V lookup for 20 years and I’ve always done it. And then Paul, you convinced me, hey, X lookup is the way to go. So for me X lookup, you introduced me probably about a year ago to it and hey, I love it. So I think for me it’s about constantly learning and Paul always texts me and says, Hey, did you see Excel launched 14 new formulas? So it’s again, how do we make ourselves more efficient? So XLookup is my quick answer.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you. And I see Scott Myers came in with Power Query, he’s a kindred spirit of mine. I love Power Query. So that’s a great answer. Pooja, what’s your answer on this one?
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
Yeah, so I like something as simple as conditional formatting. I think when there’s large amount of data, when you put in the right amount of functions and conditional formatting, the color coding and all does the work. So I guess it’s something simple that I really like about Excel.
Paul Barnhurst:
That is a great one, especially since we’re talking about data visualization here. Cause it’s a simple way. I mean you can build a whole heat map just using conditional formatting. You can do all kinds of things. Great one there. And we’re going to go through a couple more answers here. So we got another XLookUp, Sharon, Power Query all the way. I love it. And Kit, Power Query, and Dynamic Arrays, love that combo. Rodney is an index match person. We get lots of those. Pivot and V lookup pivot tables. Great one. Let’s see, we got another mostly used VLookup, but recently Power Query. Power Query is my new go-to. So it looks like we got a theme here. Lots of people love in Power Query, so that makes me happy. I like seeing that. But now we’re going to go to Soufyan on what’s your favorite thing for Excel?
Soufyan Hamid:
Well, my favorite thing, it’s comes from Power Query and Power Pivot, but those are the formulas, cube value and cube member. The formulas you use to get the information from the database you just created, it’s simply ecstatic.
Paul Barnhurst:
Wrote a blog post all about that on my website. I love my cube formulas.
Soufyan Hamid:
I mean it gives you the the impression that you are a programmer that you can get the information from anywhere. Just click on another cell where you put the cube member and it appears. And I even like the moment where it calculates, you know, have a hash and then calculate, it gives a sort of excitation. I dunno
Paul Barnhurst:
<laugh> makes you feel like you’re a wizard. I get it. Yeah, I love me some of those cute forms. So you get another point Soufyan for bringing up that one. That’s a great one. So we’re going to go ahead and we’re moving toward the end here. If anyone has any more questions, please put ‘themin the chat. But what I’d like at each, sorry, ask each of our panelists is if you were to give some advice about becoming better at presenting for our audience, particularly financial present presentations, what would be the top one or two pieces of advice you would give? And maybe for this one, we’ll go to Soufyan on first.
Soufyan Hamid:
Well, my advice when it comes to finance presentation is just to forget about finance. The first thing you have to do is first to think about the context. Because what I like to say about finance and accounting more precisely is that it’s just the language to speak about something that happened. So learn about what happened and why it happened and what will happen. And you will already be better than 50% of the presentations you’ve made in your life. So this is the thing, you just have to forget about the jargon. You have to forget about the complexity of the world of accounting and put yourself into the shoes of the people that are in front of you. And those one will know about their products, will know about their clients, will know about the decisions in the operation that changed from one month to the other. And so if you do that, you are already a good presenter. If you want to be a great presenter, that’s another story. But let’s start with that.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great advice there. If forget the finance part and focus on the audience, that’s a great area to start on Pooja, what would be the advice you would offer?
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
So one thing that I would advise is to keep things really, really simple. Sometimes there’s this quote that Mark Twain. has, he says, don’t use a $5 word when a 50 cent word would do So what I really like about that quote is just try to keep things really simple in your presentation. Because it’s easier to present simple things and they’re easier to understand as well. They do the work like two ways just for the presenter and the audience as well, and avoid jargon in your presentations. So sometimes as finance professionals, we use lot of acronyms lot of difficult metaphors that the audience might not quickly relate to. So try to make things very simple and easier for the audience to understand. I think that that works really well in our favor if we do that.
Paul Barnhurst:
I love the Mark Twain quote. I’ll remember that. So I’ll focus on using the 50 cent instead of the $5 word, even though I like to sound sophisticated. Ron, how about you?
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, no, I think those were wonderful points that both Soufyan and Pooja made . So for me, I’ll just share another statistic that I use frequently in my sessions is that 85% of your success as a professional and a human is driven by your soft skills or communication skills. So that came from Dale Carnegie, Warren Buffett famously said that course that he took on public speaking was a game changer for him. So for me, the advice I’d give is to step into it and just start. The last thing is just get yourself an accountability partner. I remember that was a bit of game changer for me saying, look, I’m going to commit to this many presentations and just start and you’ll get progressively better to the point where you can be a great presenter if you put the focus and practice into it.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you, Ron. Appreciate that. So we had one other come in on the Excel question. Annette came in and said, remove duplicates and XLookup previously an index match lover. So I like it. I’m a huge fan of Unique, so another way to remove duplicates as using that unique formula. We’re going to go one last question here for everybody in the audience, and then we’re outta time. So real quick, I’ll just thank everybody for joining us today. We really appreciate the time. Please feel free to reach out to me or any of our panelists and this will show up as an FP&A Today podcast. We’re looking to get it released either next week or the following week as soon as we can get it out for everybody. But last question is another question we ask everybody who’s on the show. So we’ll ask each of you, we wanna know something unique about you, something people wouldn’t find online. So this is something a little more personal so our audience can get to know you not unique professionally. And let’s see, who should I pick on? I mean, start with, why don’t we start with Pooja here.
Pooja (Laddha) Jaju:
Okay, so something unique about me. I love hiking. I’m able to do very shorter hikes with my daughter, but I guess that’s the best experience we both have had since last couple of months, especially in California, there are beautiful state and national parks. So that’s something I’m really, really enjoying and it’s the best part of my weekend when I go on a short hike with my daughter. So I think that’s something very personal about me.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you. Which you appreciate that. Ron, what’s something unique about you?
Ron Monteiro:
Yeah, so unfortunately I mentioned up front, but I grew up in Kenya and Africa and I’m a massive soccer fan, so I wouldn’t say that’s unique, but I still play soccer. At my age. I coach soccer all about soccer and competitiveness. So for me I’ll have to find something else, Paul, for the next LinkedIn live. But for me, I’m sticking to soccer or football as it’s called in most the world.
Paul Barnhurst:
I see Soufyan nodding his head like, yes, it’s called football stop
Soufyan Hamid:
At the stop. That’s what I was going say. You cannot say you were a fan. If you say soccer,
Speaker 2:
Well then I’ll
Paul Barnhurst:
Say soccer debate for another day.
Speaker 2:
All right, what’s your answer?
Soufyan Hamid:
Well I can say something about that because by that time internet was not that present. But I was a karate teacher and I reached quite high levels. I was black belt and I even reached the third position in Belgium in a competition when I was 17. So yeah my pretty much of my life as a youngster was around karate. So I’m quite happy to see that it takes a bit more space today with the Cobra Kai Netflix series and that people are back in karate. And this is why I used the karate picture in one of my guides.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you. Love it. So a couple questions came in and I’ll first just, there’s a big thanks from Kit for this event, and then Chandra asked about a recorded version of the webinar. It’ll be released tas a podcast, so you’ll be able to get it there. You also can see it on you rewatch it on LinkedIn as well. So those are some options there. But thank you everybody for joining us. We’ve loved having you today. I know we’re just about a minute over here, so we’re going to go ahead and close this, but if anyone has questions, please feel free to reach out to us. You can find any of us on LinkedIn. And everybody, have a great day and thanks for joining FP&A Today.