A slightly different episode this week, featuring not a finance chief, but a CEO talking about the power and impact of FP&A on business strategy. Jeanette Dorazio, CEO of Leadpages, joins Paul to discuss the daily impact FP&A is having for her company, a leading SaaS no-code website and landing page builder.
In this episode Jeanette Dorazio discusses with Paul:
- How FP&A teams can actually get that coveted seat at the table by “seeing the patterns” in a business
- How FP&A works with her in monitoring key metrics for growth
- The CEOs playbook for FP&A during a downturn
- The best and worst FP&A work she has seen in her career
- Why FP&A should be a “very close first” for hiring into the finance team after the CFO
- Why the visibility of FP&A needs to improve
- The power of Excel in shaping her journey through product management to CEO
Watch the full show on YouTube
Read the full transcript and blog
Follow Jeanette Dorazio on LinkedIn
Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn
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Paul Barnhurst:
Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Today, I am your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka The FP&A Guy. And you are listening to FP&A Today. FP&A Today is brought to you by 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 today we’re going to do something a little different. We have a leader who’s the CEO of Leadpages with us, and we’re going to have her talk about her experience with finance, what she looks for in finance leaders, how she’s worked for, worked with FP&A. So a little bit of a different perspective today, as I’ve mentioned. We encourage you if you haven’t had the chance to provide a rating on the platform you listen to, and also we give you a reminder that you can earn CPE credit for this course. You’ll just need to go to Earmark and you can go in there and they’ll ask you some questions and you can get that credit. So with that being said, I’m thrilled to welcome today’s guest on the show I have with me today, Jeanette Dorazio, coming to us from Minnesota. Jeanette, welcome to the show.
Jeanette Dorazio:
Hi Paul. Thanks for having me.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, no, I’m really excited to have you. So let me just tell you a little bit about Jeanette. We actually worked together at Solar, so fun fact there. She comes to us from Minnesota. She’s currently the CEO of Leadpages. She went to school at the University of Minnesota. She’s a member of the Forbes Technology Council. And over her career she’s worked with several different companies in multiple product and client success roles. So I’m going to go ahead and give her a chance to just tell us a little bit about herself and her background.
Jeanette Dorazio:
I can do that. Thanks Paul. So as you pointed out, I’ve had very many very various different roles within technology. Currently I am with Leadpages. We are a drag and drop, no code. You can build websites and landing pages in the marketing technology space. So fast growth SaaS company, which is what I enjoy, being with those type of companies. I’m really good with creating growth and transformation strategies. I love building high performing teams too in the technology space. That’s what I’m passionate about. Innovation. It’s all about innovation in this space. So I’ve been in technology for 20 plus years, various different industries, retail, automotive, marketing, now e-commerce payment providers as well. I spend some time with Oracle, Verifone, et cetera. So yeah lot’s going on in my career. Technology is a great time, great space to be in right now and can’t wait to see how it evolves going forward.
Paul Barnhurst:
And definitely I agree with you, technology, it’s a great time. It’s amazing to see how things continue to change and evolve, particularly around SaaS and subscription businesses. 10 years ago they were just starting. Today most companies have, the majority of their IT spend is some kind of SaaS or subscription service business.
Jeanette Dorazio:
No, and that’s spot on too. And it’s also spawning some others platforms as a service. And you look at some of those cloud technologies and Google, Amazon platform is a service. I love it that I don’t have servers in a physical location anymore. Risk reward type of thing, but brings that cost down and it’s way more efficient.
Paul Barnhurst:
Exactly. Yeah. Platform is a service. Business processing is a service. You said so many things today that as a service just slap as a service, a service at the end of it. So I’m curious, I know you’re the CEO lead pages. Was it always your goal to be a CEO or what ultimately led to you becoming a CEO?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Sure. So yes. I think my goal is always, I don’t know if it was CEO necessarily, but my goal has always been to run a company for many years coming up through a product management path through technology. I was really good with marketing and operations side of businesses. So I did have and I was leading on the operations path. But lo and behold, this opportunity at Leadpages came up to a little over two and a half years ago. It was right there in a pandemic, of course. So that was an interesting challenge to my leadership methodologies that I’ve used in the past. So yeah, I’ve always liked leading teams, building businesses, building companies and yeah, that’s what led me here. So I’ve been I guess training for this for a long time and here I am.
Paul Barnhurst:
Got it. No, that makes sense. And that’s great that you’ve achieved that goal of yours. It’s always rewarding to get where we wanna be. Absolutely. Not always as easy as we might think, but definitely rewarding. So maybe can you talk to us a little bit about Lead Pages, what you guys do, what the company is?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Sure. So Leadpages, actually we’re going to celebrate our 10 year anniversary in January. So the company’s been around obviously 10 plus years here. It was founded to solve a problem that marketers had with getting leads on how do I do this, especially in a digital space with e-commerce. And back in the day you had to find a front end developer and probably use a WordPress platform. So Leadpages came onto the scene and the problem they were trying to solve is providing customers with an easy way to build those landing pages. And that’s how the company was born. So yes, our core competency where we are bringing our values with helping people, small businesses, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs who have no idea how to do marketing. We provide them tools and services to build landing pages websites. We’re all about getting them leads and getting them revenue. And that’s what Leadpages does. We exist to help those entrepreneurs and small business owners kind of realize their dreams and their passions and see it them bring it to life.
Paul Barnhurst:
Got it. And I can relate to trying to figure out marketing as a solopreneur. lead pages and all those different things as I launch different ideas and ways to generate revenue. So I definitely know it’s something a lot of solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, early stage need help with. It’s not always the easiest thing to figure out.
Jeanette Dorazio:
No, sure. Not at all. Yeah.
Paul Barnhurst:
So that’s great that you have that. So obviously our show here, we’re dedicated to finance in particular FP&A. So we’re going to get into a couple questions around that. Can you maybe talk about how your experience has been over your career working with finance and FP&A?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Absolutely. So my experience and how I explain this to people that ask me about my relationship with finance teams I’ve worked with is first and foremost, they’re my partner. They have a seat with me at the table. Whether I was creating a new product at Oracle as a product manager and trying to understand how do I model the demand on this thing that I’m building all the way up to my current role. They’re an integral part. They’re very important to not only myself, but others understanding the business and the opportunities. And they just bring another mindset to the team and to the table that I’ve really enjoyed and respected. There’s been some times where they’ve been, they’re also in the trenches with you and they’re going to experience well, your experience they experience. So I have a mantra of one team, one mission, and they’re part of my team and sitting right there at the table with me.
Paul Barnhurst:
That is good to hear. I like to hear when people are at the table with you. I know finance in particular, FP&A, the way it’s viewed, the need for it has changed a lot over the last few years, especially the pandemic and other things. But maybe let’s start on, I don’t wanna call it a negative note, but what’s maybe a bad experience you’ve had with working with FP&A something that didn’t go right or where you’ve been frustrated and what do you wish they had done differently to better support you?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Well, that’s a good question. Wow. I dunno if that, I would call them negative experiences necessarily. I think there’s been a couple times too with my FP&A colleagues where there’s been assumptions made, right? You’re working on a project you think we’re going one way, they think they’re going another way whether it’s an analysis or. I’ll give you a recent example. We’re trying to model out some retention forecast and what we think churn rate’s going to be. And everybody has their interpretation of the data differently and where it needs to go. And I had some numbers come up and they got communicated to the parent company, to my boss. And lo and behold, after we challenged those numbers, turned out not to be right. There was an assumption that the finance person had made about the business that they weren’t entirely up to speed about.
So we had just a small miss that made it into a budget into the forecast. So we had to back that off. But here’s the deal. Everybody makes a mistake. We know that. Especially within Leadpages, we have a culture of if we’re going to fail, let’s fail fast, let’s figure it out. So we were able to quickly change that. The benefits of working for a smaller company is a little bit more squishy, not squishy, but a little bit more leeway on some of those forecasting that we could reforecast and stuff. But what I’ve learned from that tool is communication is key and just making sure that both of us are understanding each other and what our needs are. And I’ve had a couple times where we’ll go over something and my question has been, are you sure? Do you get it? But then vice versa too. They’ve asked me the same thing, Hey Jeanette, do you understand the numbers? I’m going, what I’m thinking? So kind of a long answer, but I don’t call it a bad experience other than an opportunity where we kind of two ships crossed in the night and we had to come back on course.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thanks for sharing that. It sounds like me, the key takeaway from that is really just that importance of making sure you’re communicating correct and that you’re aligned on all the assumptions. None of us wanna have to explain to senior management or to anyone at a higher investors, whoever it may be. There was an error or there was a bad assumption or there was a miscommunication. Whatever it might be. And we need to bring the number down. Never a fun situation.
Jeanette Dorazio:
Absolutely not. No,
Paul Barnhurst:
I remember my first year SaaS business was Solar where we worked in auto Auto point and worked with my manager and we put together a forecast. I think we missed, I think churn the first month was three times higher than what we had forecasted. The year was done. That was a fun one to explain and it didn’t get better. Exactly. That’s another story. So I can definitely relate to that. Making a forecast it error with the churn. That was a learning experience, as you said.
Jeanette Dorazio:
Completely. Completely. And I think what just to expand on that, what’s been really challenging the past two years is trying to forecast off a pandemic field business. Leadpages was one of those. We were very fortunate to be part of that digital explosion, I’m going to call it. And just understanding and I think any talked to any CEO these days big company, small company, mid-size company, only anywhere in between. Everything just got thrown outta whack. And how it’s been hard to predict some demand and some of what the market’s going to do. Because we’ve got some big pendulums swinging back and forth and we’re not sure where it’s going to land. I’m hoping we’re through it relatively soon. We’ve got some economic headwinds where everybody’s dealing with. But that’s been really challenging just to come back and say pandemic. I think there’s some grace you get with being able to use that reasoning, but we’ll see where the world ends up.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yes. As I saw, I think it was on a mug or a shirt somewhere, they called it ebitda, sea earnings for interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and coronavirus.
. And sometimes in your case, that might be a positive if you wanna take it out for the future and be like, okay, now we’ve level set it without covid of what we think we can grow. Because once you hit a number, everybody wants to continue to see that growth and you’re like, oh, there’s things that have changed.
No, that makes sense. And that’s great that you’re benefited, but then it also creates a challenge of how do you keep that momentum going in a different environment
Jeanette Dorazio:
Completely. Yeah, no, absolutely.
Paul Barnhurst:
So maybe on the flip side, you shared that experience where there was a learning experience? What’s been maybe some of something really positive you’ve seen from FP&A maybe where they’ve made a real difference in the business, something went right, maybe just share an example there.
Jeanette Dorazio:
Oh boy had a lot of those actually.
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s good. That’s what I’d like to hear.
Jeanette Dorazio:
That’s why this role is so important. There’s been a couple projects and I’ve had over the past few years where having my FP&A there at the table and understand the business. One item in particular is we were trying to forecast staying on the pandemic theme where we were trying to forecast out what our revenue was going to be for fiscal year 22, I believe it was. And the company was just acquired. So there was all kinds of new things people weren’t sure. And what the person I was working with found that we weren’t accounting for a big source of our revenue. It was another sales channel we had. It was kind of missed in the previous forecasting. Again, you’re acquired, there’s a lot going on, you’re trying to figure through that. But they spotted a mess that me and my leadership team didn’t see that and brought that to the table.
And lo and behold, that helped some of our operating profit that we’re trying to figure out where we’re going to get it from. So what I really appreciated is that they saw it we talked about it they provided their reasoning, here’s where I found out what’s going on. So it’s a positive experience and it just fueled a great amount of just optimism in the team, especially during the pandemic where you’re trying to slog along. We’re getting to get through an acquisition, hey, it’s all positive. See the potential that we have and that’s what they brought to the table. I mean that’s just one example of many that I’ve had with them.On the other side too looking at a churn retention in a SaaS business and trying to figure out what that’s going to be and what the patterns have been. And it’s about a year and a half ago where the person I was working with actually noticed some interesting patterns that we were having in the churn cycle and brought a couple suggestions to the table on the business side that wasn’t anticipating that they would bring to the table. And great idea. And we implemented it, we looked at some cohorts a little bit differently, customer cohorts than we have in the past. And we implemented it and we’re in a much better spot than we were a year and a half ago on it. So couple just examples of real, just positive interactions I’ve had with FP&A.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, thank you for sharing that. And it’s good to hear where they’re adding those value finding things, finding those insights that we may not notice or providing suggestions that can help drive the business forward. Because I like to think of it asFP&A really is there to help create value to be a true strategic consultant from a number perspective. And so sound like you agree. So how do you think, obviously the economy, we’re a little bit of a downturn. Some people say we’re in a recession. It all depends on who you ask. What we do know is inflation’s up, interest rates are up, we’re seeing a few more layoffs. A lot of people, it’s a challenging environment, right? And so how do you see the role of the finance function in this type of an environment? Does it change for you? Does the value that you wanna see from your finance function change or how do you think about it in this kind of environment we’re in right now?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Greek question. I mean I always have finance as part of my team. They’re a key component, a key team player. I don’t see that changing necessarily other than what’s coming at us as different business strategies and different ways of looking at things. So business for centuries goes up, business goes down. And what I appreciate about my finance partnerships that I have right now is we just changed business strategies. How do we need to react to a labor market? Nine months ago, the labor market was so hot I couldn’t keep software engineers. We had to figure out how to do that. And conversely we have churn a little bit higher. So for me, they play a really important part of they also keep it level headed and keep others level headed in the business and not they help us see the patterns. A lot of times they’ve got their ear to other parts of the financial world that we don’t have. So I really rely on them as a partner and another set of eyes and ears and how we need to adjust as a business to be able to adapt.
Paul Barnhurst:
That makes sense and I’m glad to hear that they’re really that key member of the team. A lot of things that you said there made sense to me and it just made me think of a question a little bit. Something we talked about before we started on the podcast is, I know you guys are product led growth. Very, very little sales, I think you said maybe one person or whatever. It’s almost all through affiliate and product. So are there key metrics you look at kind of things in the reporting way that you expect from your CFO and your finance team and maybe what are those kind of key metrics that you really look at them to provide for you?
Jeanette Dorazio:
There’s so many metrics. I mean, where do I start?
Paul Barnhurst:
Why I said key. I didn’t say metrics,
Jeanette Dorazio:
But for me there’s about a half a dozen or so that I look at on a daily basis that come from my finance team that helped me keep a pulse on the business. You know, have your standard SaaS metrics. How am I doing with our MRR monthly recurring revenue? What’s the cash flow looking like bookings for us? We are a trial based business. So our customers come into us and their journey starts typically with a trial. So I’ve got metrics around how they’re perform in the trial usage as well. We’ve built recently built a group of success coaches, we call them onboarding specialists that as we mentioned earlier, our customer base typically aren’t marketing experts, so they need some help and some guidance. So I look at some metrics around how many people we’re putting through that pipeline. Obviously churn and retention and how that’s tracking for the month.
And because we are PLG (product-led growth) I, there’s some key marketing metrics that I look at too. So our trial conversion rate, our trial to paid rate as well as our return on ad spend because we are putting some considerable investment against those paid media opportunities and channels that we have to go through. So really as if I boil that up to on a daily basis and a snapshot of quickly what I look at. It’s revenue, how are we turning with revenue for the month top line? How are we looking as far as those billings and bookings that we’re getting? I also pay close attention to our LTV to CAC ratio. I’m not the only business that experienced this, but last year at this time the cost to acquire a customer was astronomical. Some people attribute that to the changes Apple made in their advertising and how they served data up to people, but it got really expensive to buy that. So we know that the health of the business, we want that ratio to be very good ratio for SaaS business. So I keep a keen eye on how we’re doing there and then just around our operating profit, how it’s looking for the month and that cashflow and seeing how we’re going. So those are my key ones I look at. Obviously we could go in depth there’s, I don’t know, 30 some key metrics for SaaS business.
Paul Barnhurst:
Is definitely a lot you can look at. I really like when you said LT V to CAC. I think that’s a huge one for SaaS businesses, obviously. Cash burn understanding. Yes, cash is always important. Runway bookings is huge. ARR whether you’re looking, also looking at committed to understand, okay, how much do I have coming in this month, add to it and all those different things that help you understand that. And I really liked how, you mentioned obviously being PLG led is how efficient CAC helps tell part of that. But how efficient are we being in our marketing spend? Absolutely. What’s the conversion rate? Absolutely. Cause little percentages can make a huge difference there. A couple basis points here or there can really make the difference between hitting a plan or not.
Jeanette Dorazio:
Absolutely. So yes, I hate to call ’em funnel metrics cause yeah sure you’ve got the funnel metrics in our marketing machine, but I’m really looking at the health of the business on a month to month. And as a SaaS it can get pretty what’s the word I’m looking for? Fluid sometimes. And trying to forecast what the business is going to do in a certain area with a certain customer base. But we’ve got some good tools around that. And we use, if we wanna get into tools a little bit, I don’t know if you have that a question later, but we one challenge I had is we had some disparate sources of where we’re storing information. So we’ve got some great platforms we use now, but I’ve got a fantastic data analyst and we’ve actually consolidated a lot of that into one place. So he calls it Jeanette’s dashboard. So Jeanette has her own dashboard and has several of those items I just mentioned.
Paul Barnhurst:
That is always good to have is a great data analyst or somebody who can put your data together, build those dashboards, work with all those disparate systems that we so often have and try to consolidate that tech stack. Whether it’s a finance, the business, the operational, there’s just a lot of data, a lot of systems. And if you don’t get control of it, as I’m sure as you know, right? Yeah. It becomes a real challenge. So that’s great that you’ve, you’ve got a good handle on that.
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As a CEO how do you set about starting to build that finance function? So a couple things with that. When do you think of adding maybe FP&A, CFO and growing that team? How do you think about that?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Great question. So as I’ve talked about finance being a key partner somebody off the table I think it’s important to build finance disciplines. Finance functions as early as possible in the life cycle of any business. As your business scales, I don’t know if there’s the exact sweet spot in number, but for me, anything that’s going between 2 and 5 million in revenue, you’re trying to get up there a little bit. A bit larger of a footprint with a finance team. So what does that mean? Maybe you have a finance leader, whether it’s a CFO, VP of finance you know, have somebody that does the accounting right? And understanding how we need to code those bills and accounts payable and then having an FP&A person there. I think at least my experience has been, that’s the last discipline that’s added. And I would argue that should be a very close first.
First you got your CFO, but the discipline needs to be earlier rather than later. Sure you can whatever goods of services you’re selling, a software you’re selling, you get your money in, money out, just key disciplines but not understanding what you could do with that or potential market opportunity or maybe there’s a different investment strategy we should be looking at. That role I’ve found has been so important and to bring in as early as possible. Obviously you look at some bigger companies, they’ve got so many multi-level of discipline within finance is kind of crazy. But minimum somebody to run the book, somebody run the accounting, make sure we’re paying expense, paying expenses, paying bills, et cetera. But then somebody on that balances that can really talk to you about business strategy and where you need to go and what’s happening in this world that you’re in I think is key.
Paul Barnhurst:
Something I’ve heard you mention a lot is looking at FP&A to also help with business strategy. It feels like you view FP&A, obviously there’s the number perspective they bring, but you’re really looking for them to be part of that discussion and be able to understand the strategy and understand the business.
Jeanette Dorazio:
Absolutely. Yep. A hundred percent found that when they’re not, they tend to be defaulted into more of what I would call traditional finance. Maybe they get stuck on taxes or compliance or something. Yes, it’s very important but it’s really not their passion. Most FP&A folks that I have worked at really wanna understand the business, get involved help plan different strategies. As I was early in my career with product management, building technology solutions having that person that was able to, hey, help me with a revenue model, this exact thing for a revenue model. I’m pretty sure that if I say we’re going to sell a lot, that’s not really going to resonate with them. So help me put that together and quantify that, what that means. So yeah, no, they’ve very important part of my world.
Paul Barnhurst:
I really appreciate that you recognize the importance of strategy. Because I feel like that’s where FP&A can really add value. The spreadsheet, the numberings, the modeling. Yeah. Okay, that’s great. But without understanding the business, there’s just a piece that’s missing. That’s always been something I’ve really, in my career I’ve tried to pride myself on and enjoyed is understanding the business and trying to think of ways of how do we bring value? Not, hey, you need to cut your expenses because you’re a hundred thousand off on ebitda. No, I won’t take this cross charge or whatever. Right? Those type of things. There was an inside joke there between Jeanette on the cross charge comment. I, I’ll tell the story here to give people a laugh. We had a leader that was asking me to cross charge everything. And I was like, well if we’re going to cross charge this, we also have to cross charge these expenses over here. And I’m pretty sure they’ll wash out and he finally just like, all right, I give up. We’re not cross charging it.
Jeanette Dorazio:
Yeah, we got ’em, we got.
Paul Barnhurst:
So it was a fun little back and forth I had with one of the leaders and Jeanette got to hear some of those conversations, so that’s why I threw in the cross charge. So we’ll give a little backstory for those. It was a
Jeanette Dorazio:
You have fun. Yeah, you gotta have fun in finance.
Paul Barnhurst:
You do. So next question here, what advice would you offer for the fp and a function to make themselves more prominent as a profession? And what do you think? This kinda held him back. Cause for the longest time they reviewed as back office and I think that’s starting to change. So what’s kind of your take there?
Jeanette Dorazio:
It’s some visibility, right? We’re in such a great time right now. Like it or love it, social media content and just understanding what does this discipline do? What is it about? So visibility is just important. Corporations are businesses. They’ve always had these roles. They’ve got big finance team, hundreds and hundreds of people. But I think especially where we cater to, which is those small businesses and you know, have access to some of these platforms and people like yourself that are out there. Whether it’s podcasts, whether it’s content on YouTube.LinkedIn is a great place I love your posts that you have Paul. You know, take a small little discipline, something that, and like you said, modeling or pivot tables. Let’s talk about a pivot table. But you bring it to a place to where it’s easily understandable and business owners can digest that and understand that.
And I think doing more of that is key. In fact, I’ve got some people in finance that I’m mentoring with. I actually reverse mentor with them. They actually teach me a lot about the trials and tribulations and the fun things. And that’s some fun things about FP&A but really having that conversation. I think too with the explosion of, we were talking about as a service solutions earlier I think in the FinTech world, they’ve really come to a great place with different solutions and platforms that help you with that discipline. And you didn’t have access before. In the past it was usually somebody or some group of team and oh my gosh, good luck if I could get access to that. But now that there is so much information and somebody like yourself bringing it together and having it easily digestible has been great. And I’ve often sent a link to your postings that you put in LinkedIn to other folks that I’m mentoring and just to, as they’re trying to get in the FP&A role which has been really, really helpful for them too. So wrapping that all up, visibility, keep talking about it keep asking the question. There’s been times where maybe I’ve been in a business discussion and I’ve said, stop. Where’s the finance person? Where are they? Right? Let’s make sure they’re here. And how important it is to strategically where we’re trying to get.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you for sharing that. And I couldn’t agree more is trying to be more visible, continuing to share what the function’s about, being outspoken, making sure you’re involved in the business where needed. And I think those are all great ways to continue to increase the visibility of FP&A and to help it move forward. You’ve talked a lot about the importance of strategy and seat at the table and looking to finance to really be that voice. Maybe the top one or two things you look for from your CFO?. We’ve talked about a number of different things. What do you really want from a CFO?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Well, communication is key. I, and I mentioned in my example before, everybody has a different viewpoint of the world and I appreciate the diverse perspectives and opinions that my CFO brings to the table. I think secondly too is just that honesty and transparency. I know sometimes people feel like they’ve gotta not bring bad news to the table necessarily. And I welcome that. And not that anybody wants to hear bad news, but let’s have that conversation. We’re all part of the same team. Let’s figure out how we solve that problem together. And I appreciate having the opportunity to do that earlier versus later when something maybe is a little bit harder to try and fix. But for me, communication and like I said, honesty and transparency are the two key things I look for. And third, somebody that just is really passionate about what they do and has an openness to teach me. I don’t propose to know everything there is to know about finance, otherwise you, I’d be probably in a CFO role. But I appreciate them willing to teach me or to educate me on something that I may not be completely up to speed about. So I added a third one in there for you.
Paul Barnhurst:
So I got it. So three things we talked about. You talked about obviously communication key, I mean so important in any role, but especially a senior leader, you need them to communicate. I love the point about honesty and transparency. It benefits nobody to hide something, to try to think, oh, we can fix it or we’ll tell ’em about it later. It is just never a good idea. It never ends. Well I, I’ve seen it. I can remember sitting in a meeting where somebody wasn’t wanting to bring something up, they were trying to hide it and it took me a while to figure out what they were doing and I’m like, just tell them already. Let’s just move on and get it over with. This is silly.
Jeanette Dorazio:
Absolutely. Yeah, agree. Couldn’t agree more.
Paul Barnhurst:
And then I think the third one you mentioned there is just being willing to help educate and mentor and help teach, right? Because we all need to learn and we all have our different functions we focus on for a reason. We all have our strengths. So that makes a lot of sense to me.
Jeanette Dorazio:
And they’re part of I like my C F O to be I said it this whole interview, right part of that team. And we fight together, we win together. And it’s important that we’re all invested in the one thing, the main thing as they say.
Paul Barnhurst:
Makes sense to me. So we’re coming up toward the end of our time here. We got a few more minutes and just a couple more questions. We’re going to kinda shift gears a little bit and these are pretty much standard questions we ask everybody. So you’ll get a couple ones here. The first one that we like to ask everybody is, describe a time you had an experience or maybe there was, and I use this word loosely, a failure at work. Something didn’t go as planned, maybe an implementation went wrong, some kind of analysis, whatever it might have been. And what was the learning from that? What was the takeaway from that experience?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Well, I think the pandemic has, there’s no shortage of learnings from the pandemic and having to pivot not only your leadership but businesses as well. I think there was one example where we had some folks that wanted to go try something new, a different position different places, which I always encourage. As a leader my job is to make sure that you not only successful where you are, but where you wanna go. And these folks have been with the company for a little while. What I underestimated was the impact that they would have when they exited and went on to their next journey. I think it was exacerbated with the pandemic because usually they all work together very closely in person. And you take that element of not being in person and being back in the two dimensional world. And I underestimated the reaction and how long it would take for people to say goodbye to that person.
Grieve try to figure out, oh my goodness, what are we going to do without them? So it just took a little longer than usual. And part of that is I’m a leader that likes to be present and the pandemic didn’t allow us to do that. So learnings from that are when we do have people that move on to something different, or even if they’re getting promoted internally, it’s a different role somebody’s taking. So what I do is I allow for that grace period, that time for people to absorb the change and to understand that change as they pivot to something else. So yeah, it’s pandemic.
Paul Barnhurst:
It sounds like it was harder, the transitions of those people was a lot harder than you anticipated and had to learn and adjust
Jeanette Dorazio:
Completely. Yeah.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. Makes sense. And the pandemic exacerbated all of it.
Jeanette Dorazio:
Oh, absolutely. Right.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. Not surprising. It exacerbated a lot of things for all of us. I think definitely not just that one. So next question, this is a fun one we ask everybody. What is something unique about you that you can share with our audience? Something they wouldn’t find out online?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Okay, well I actually probably wouldn’t find, you’d have to do some digging online, but I actually had the opportunity to work in Paris for quite a few months when I was with Oracle. We had a couple of large customers in France, in Paris, and having taken high school and college French and having several folks that people I knew that were from France, I got the opportunity to spend I think it was two, three months there. Just working very closely with colleagues, got to meet some great people and I got to practice my French a little bit more which was really good for me to do and see a different culture. But yeah, I don’t think you’d find that online about me. I’ll be surprised if somebody does, but
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, sounds rough. But somebody has to go to France. It
Jeanette Dorazio:
Was horrible, right? Yeah.
Paul Barnhurst:
What I figured. I could tell you’re just like, oh man, I gotta take one for the team. So, alright, so next question here for you. We’ll see what we get on this one. Okay, finance people love this question, but I know you’re not our typical guest in the sense that no went up through the finance ranks. So finance people love Excel. Our sponsor is an Excel-based FP&A platform, datarails. And we like to ask everybody, what is your favorite Excel? It could be formula, function, feature. What’s your favorite thing about Excel?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Oh boy. My favorite thing about Excel, oh boy. I don’t know if I have a function necessarily because I don’t get into that. I usually have a team of folks that or Paul, when you and I used to work together, you did my functions for me. I do like and they added it many, many years ago. But when they brought up pivot, tables and I was able to do a very quick pivot table as a product manager, there was a lot of times where I had to be I was asked for the different slices of data, tell me different customer base or what do you think the market’s going to be in a certain spreadsheet, all this data. So I love that pivot table function and being able to go in there and pull some data out very quickly and succinctly and get that to the person asking for it, it made me look like a genius. So I love that. Almost like people couldn’t know if, hey, is Jenna part of finance? Is she not? Boy, wow. She really knows her stuff. So that’s my fav, one of my favorite features in Excel.
Paul Barnhurst:
You’re not alone. I’ve had a more than one guests, say pivot tables is their favorite. <laugh> a great thing. It’s easy to consolidate things, so I totally understand that one. I’ve spent probably way more hours than I’d ever like to admit working with pivot tables,
Jeanette Dorazio:
So yes, yes, yes, absolutely.
Paul Barnhurst:
I understand that one. So last question we have for you is, what advice would you offer to someone starting their career today in FP&A?
Jeanette Dorazio:
Mentors. Sponsors. Mentors are key. I talk about this a lot. I’m very passionate about leadership and growing helping people grow in their careers. And whether it’s finance, technology maybe some other discipline, customer success, etc. Finding a mentor, finding somebody or many people, a lot of people think what, I just need one mentor. You need many mentors. I, I’ve got many and they’ve evolved over the years, depending on your work, where your career is and what you need. But it’s just getting involved. Any local industry groups are really good with doing that as well. As you mentioned, I’m part of the Forbes Technology Council and I’m constantly searching for whether it’s a mentor for myself, maybe it’s on a topic I don’t know about or maybe it’s for somebody else, right? It’s really making those connections and talking about it. And I don’t think at least in my experience lately, finance is kind of that cool.
That really cool subject, cool discipline that’s going on. It’s not like you said, hidden in the back office. Oh, go talk to my back office person. It’s not that anymore. It’s really become front and center. Data is wonderful, but somebody that’s starting out, get those mentors, talk to people. I know it can be hard for some finance people because they tend to be a little bit more introverted and that sounds so overwhelming but just ask, raise your hand. You’d be surprised at the number of people who will be more than happy to have a conversation or coffee or take you out to lunch or whatever, to just have that conversation and meet other people. It helps a lot.
Paul Barnhurst:
Have to sum it up, find a mentor,
Jeanette Dorazio:
Find there. We find a mentor.
Paul Barnhurst:
Have a mentor. I think that’s a great answer and I know they’ve helped me in my career. So last thing, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you or learn more about leadpages or just see things you do, what’s the best way to do that?
Speaker 3:
The best way to do that? So I’m on LinkedIn, Jeanette Dorazio. You can find me there. That’s usually where I hang out the most. But otherwise leadpages.com, all one word, leadpages.com. You can also get in touch with me as in touch with me through that channel as well.
Paul Barnhurst:
Well perfect. Well thank you for being a guest today. Appreciate you providing a different perspective for us coming from the CEO seat versus the finance seat. So again, it was a pleasure having you on the show, Janette.
Jeanette Dorazio:
Oh, thank you for having me. It was great to discuss have the opportunity to talk more about my relationship and partnerships with finance. I loved it. Thank you. Thanks.