Jeff Epstein is an operating partner at Bessemer Venture Parts leading its CFO Council where he helps CEOs and CFOs at their 200- portfolio company share best practices. Epstein, one of the most famous names in finance, is former executive vice president and chief financial officer of Oracle, with a market value of over $200 billion. Prior to joining Oracle, Jeff served as CFO at public and private companies, including DoubleClick (acquired by Google), King World Productions (acquired by CBS), and Nielsen’s Media Measurement and Information Group. Earlier in his career, he was an investment banker at The First Boston Corporation.
In this episode:
- From Wall Street to first-time CFO
- Running finance at Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and Oprah-TV hitmaker King World
- The skills needed to be a top CFO
- The 3 routes to CFO: Auditors, Wall Street or FP&A
What Andy Gove OKR setting can teach us about budget setting - What is the right percentage of time to hit budget goals?
- Balancing between Elon Musk (Papa Bear) and Charlie Munger (Mama Bear) in setting targets
- Giving people the opportunity to overachieve
- Best case/worst case/base case at Oracle strategy
- The delicate balancing act of Wall Street guidance
- Using a stagger chart
- Why FP&A is so critical; how the biggest strategic decisions involve FP&A advice
Revisiting the processes as Oracle bought Sun Microsystems - Merger integration strategy worked on our sales compensation
- Truck drivers and sales commission – a must-listen to story
- How in 1983 at the Washington Post I learned from Warren Buffet and ended up scrambling to buy 4 shares of Berkshire Hathaway. Guess much it’s worth now?
Show notes
Forecasting 101 and how to build a Stagger chart
Jeff Epstein: How CFOs build a Goldilocks “just-right” budget
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
Winston Churchill: My Early Life
Andy Grove: High Output Management
Full transcript
Paul Barnhurst:
Hello everyone. Welcome to FP&A Today, I am your host, Paul Barnhurst, aka the FP&A Guy. FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails, the financial planning and analysis platform for Excel users. Every week we welcome a leader from the world of financial planning and analysis. Today we are delighted to be joined by Jeff Epstein. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Jeff Epstein:
Hey, Paul, thanks very much for having me.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, really excited to have you. So a little bit about Jeff. Jeff comes to us from the Bay Area. He earned his BA from Yale and his MBA from Stanford. He currently is the operating partner at Bessemer Venture Partners , and he served as the CFO at several companies, including Oracle Nielsen, DoubleClick, and King World Productions. So we’re really lucky to have him here with us today. And we’d just like to start by asking you to tell us a little bit about your background and yourself for our audience.
Jeff Epstein:
Well, I started in on Wall Street as an investment banker, and when I was 32 years old, one of my clients was King World. They were a small company, publicly held, but they had three giant television shows, Wheel of Fortune, jeopardy, and the Oprah Winfrey Show. Okay. So the three, three of the highest rated shows in Daily Television, and they had an accounting CFO and they wanted a Wall Street, CFO, and they asked me to come in. So I, I had never been a CFO. I had never worked for a CFO. I had never worked in a finance department. And here I, I found myself as the CFO of a New York Stock Exchange company trying to learn, learn from my subordinates instead of learning from my, my boss. So it was quite an experience and I loved it. And then I spent the next 25 years being CFOs of other companies.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. Yeah, no, that would sounds like a little bit of a baptism by fire, that first role.
Jeff Epstein:
Well, it was, but it was the best possible way to start because it was, the company was very profitable and we had didn’t really have any problems. It was when you have the three highest rated shows in television, life’s pretty good.
Paul Barnhurst:
Did you say Wheel of Fortune, Fortune, jeopardy and Oprah,
Jeff Epstein:
Was that at Oprah? Oprah Winfrey, yeah.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. It doesn’t get much better than that
Jeff Epstein:
Right. So I, I and I, they were my clients and I knew how great the company was and the value of the company tripled while I was there over the next six years. And it, it just, just worked out great. Ultimately, it was sold to CBS and it’s still now an important, of course, Oprah’s retired, but Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy are still highly rated shows 40 years later.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, I know. It’s amazing. I know people that, right. Every night, 6:00 PM or whatever time it comes on locally, you sit down and you watch Jeopardy and Will Fortune. I remember my mom watching it many times as a kid, more Wheel of Fortune than Jeopardy. She was more of a Will of Fortune person. But I can remember both of them being on in our house quite a bit growing up.
Jeff Epstein:
Little known fact, Merv Griffin, who was a talk show host and a singer created both shows personally and wrote the music to Jeopardy the Jeopardy theme song. Incredible.
Paul Barnhurst:
Had no idea. Yeah. That’s that’s quite a list to have on your resume, right? <Laugh>? Yeah.
Jeff Epstein:
Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
Paul Barnhurst:
So, no, that’s great. So now you’re running a Venture Partners company. So tell us a little bit about that and what type of companies you’re investing in. So just a little bit of what you do there.
Jeff Epstein:
Well, Bessemer Venture Partners is one of the largest and oldest venture firms in the world. We have 20 investing partners. We have about 200 portfolio companies. We invest at every stage from a hundred thousand dollars seed check to a hundred million dollars late stage check. And we invest in every sector mostly software, but also healthcare and retail and high tech and satellites and things like that as well. So it’s a very exciting firm. I’m not an investing partner, I’m an operating partner. So I spent my career as a Chief financial officer, and when I retired 10 years ago, I joined Bessemer where I created, and I lead the peer group of the CFOs of all of our portfolio companies. So we have about 200 members. Ev every one of our company has a VP Finance or a CFO. And if you are the CFO of a $5 million revenue company and you’re doubling or tripling in revenue this year you really wanna talk to someone who just did the same thing last year. And so my main role is making it easy for the finance leaders to meet each other and learn from each other and share best practices.
Paul Barnhurst:
So you’re really there to help support the CFOs and the operating people for the 200 portfolio companies for besm. Is that the way to think about that?
Jeff Epstein:
Exactly.
Paul Barnhurst:
That makes sense. And what, what got you to do that after retired. What do you enjoy about, you know, kind of being in that role where I guess you’re a little bit more of a mentor and helping others manage their companies? What attracted you to doing that?
Jeff Epstein:
Well, the way I think about it is if you’re playing in the NBA and then you can’t play anymore, what do you do? <Laugh> and you coach or you go on TV or whatever. So this is my version of that. I love, I’ve always loved business. I love reading about business and learning about it, and working with entrepreneurs. And so this is a, a chance for me to to be involved and, and be helpful. Take, try to take advantage of all the things I learned. Now, there’s a famous saying that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. So I don’t go in and say, this is what you should do because every company is different. What I do is I’ll say, well, tell me about what’s going on. What are the challenges you’re facing? Well, this reminds me of a time where this happened or that happened, or Here’s someone you should talk to, or here’s something you should read. Have you thought about that? And so mostly what I do is I ask questions. And I do that either in my role at Bessemer or as a board member. I also serve on the boards of a number of companies, including Twilio and Okta, which are two leading software enterprise software companies and Kaiser Permanente, the very large nonprofit healthcare company.
Paul Barnhurst:
Sure. I’m familiar with all three of those. I recognize all those names, Beth, definitely big companies. And Sure. That will keep you d keep you busy between the board and, you know, the operating companies. And so I’m curious, you know, before that, I know you’re a CFO four different times. I would love to know what you think the, you know, the skills are that someone needs to be a successful CFO. And I know that may change on company size, so I’ll leave that up to you to kind of define that, how you wanna, what you think is needed in general for a successful CFO.
Jeff Epstein:
Well, the CFOs that I’ve met typically start their career in one of three ways. They start, often, they start as an accountant, often at one of the big four firms where they’re an auditor. Sometimes they start on Wall Street the way I started. And the third path is typically through FP&A or analysis where they’re, they’re trying to understand how to allocate resources. And to be a great CFO, you need all three sets of skills. Plus we need to know a little bit about tax and things like that, treasury. But typically the, the main, I would say 90% of CFOs come from one of those three backgrounds.
And I think about it, I used to play tennis and, you know, some people have a strong forehand and the weak backhand. And then mm-Hmm. We wanted, you wanna work on your backhand, you see, have a complete game.
And so I knew a lot about Wall Street because I had been an investment banker. It’s when I joined king World in my first CFO role. And I had taken an accounting class, but I was not a CPA and had never closed the books. So it was very important for me to learn as much as I could about the accounting function. And the FP&A function came naturally to me because I also had, had been a consultant earlier and, and lived in Excel. And at the time, actually it was initially VisiCalc and then Lotus123 before Excel. But you know, understood modeling and how to understand the key levers in, you know, business.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. I I when you said VisiCalc and Lotus 1, 2, 3, I remember, you know, in high school we got our first computer and Lotus 1, 2, 3 and Quatro Pro, and then Microsoft Excel came out. So, can relate to that a little bit. I didn’t get the, didn’t really get to use VisiCalc, but I remember some of those early days and now it feels like, you know, almost everybody talks about Excel. I occasionally hear Google Sheets, but
Jeff Epstein:
It amazing. Well, actually when I was in business school, visicalc hadn’t been invented. So when we did spreadsheets, we did them literally on paper spreadsheets.
Paul Barnhurst:
I couldn’t believe it. I so I had on my show called Financial Modeler’s Corner, a guy who tells a story, 1978, he built a financial model. It was in South Africa. He was trying to get, you know, a bank, I think some capital from a bank. And they built it using a mainframe that they’d rent out from the bank from midnight to six in the morning. ’cause It was cheaper on punch cards using Prosper as the code. And they built a three statement model, shared it to the investment committee, and they didn’t believe it could be done. So yeah, that was early days. I think this one was 1978 that he tells this story. And it was great to hear. ’cause You just think how far we’ve come. Like you mentioned, you know, the example of doing it on actual paper or using a punch card. I mean, now what spreadsheets can do is really amazing compared to even, you know, 20, 30, 40 years ago.
Jeff Epstein:
I’m waiting for the AI to, to be to the point where I can just say, you know model you know, forecast my revenue for the next two years. See what, see what it says.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. I think it’s gonna be interesting how we how AI changes it all and just being able to prompt the system to give you what you want versus having to build it. Exciting times for sure.
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So earlier this year, you wrote a really good article titled How CFOs Build a Goldilocks “Just Right” Budget. What prompted you to write that article? Kind of what was the impetus behind that?
Jeff Epstein:
Well, I was sitting in a board meeting and the company had missed its forecast. And one of the board members said, you know, this is terrible. You should always under promise and over deliver. How could you miss the forecast? And another board member said, no, actually, I want you to be ambitious and I want you to have an aggressive goal. And if you miss the forecast every once in a while, that’s fine, and as long as over time you do well, that’s, that’s what counts. And it, it just hit me that this has probably happened at every board that the board members and the CEO and the CFO have different points of view about how aggressive the budgeted forecast should be. And as I thought more about it and talked more about it, I actually asked all the partners at Bessemer, what percentage of the time time did they think their companies at Bessemer achieved its budget?
It’s just revenue budget. And the answer was they thought they achieved it 70% of the time, and then we have 200 portfolio companies. So I looked it up and it turns out we only achieved it a third of the time.
First of all, there was a discrepancy between what people wanted and what was happening. And secondly, they didn’t even know, which was really just surprising to me. So what you, this is what I, it, what I figured out was you could actually measure this if you have a large portfolio. Of course, any one company is hard to measure probabilities because if you’re talking about per quarter or per year, you have to wait for 10 quarters or 10 years to figure out what your probabilities are. But it is measurable over a portfolio. And I think it’s a very useful way of thinking about how aggressive or conservative is the optimal plan for you at, at your particular company in this particular time.
Paul Barnhurst:
So I’m curious, you mentioned the people said they thought it was about 70% of the time the data showed 30%. Were you surprised that there was that big a discrepancy between, you know, what people thought and what the data actually said? I mean, what was your kind of initial response when you saw that difference?
Jeff Epstein:
I wasn’t surprised that the, the actual was less than half the time. What I was surprised was that the board members on average didn’t know what their portfolio was doing which surprised me a little bit. I think, you know, maybe over several years it was more than 50%. But it’s, it’s very helpful to go back and look at the data and learn from what were you thinking when you put together the budget or the forecast and what, what are the lessons learned? I think budgeting and forecasting is a muscle, and you need to exercise the muscle and go back and learn from experience.
Paul Barnhurst:
I think it’s a great point of learning from experience. And you know, one of the things I really liked in the articles I was reading for through it is you shared a, what I’ll call an all too familiar scenario. One, you talked a little bit earlier about that was kind of the impetus for writing this, right? The board chair, CCEO and CFO are all looking at the same data and coming away with different perspectives, and they’re not on the same page. One’s like, oh yeah, it’s fine. We, we missed their numbers now, but they were aggressive and the other one’s, no, you should hit ’em. Right. Kind of like what you talked about. Why do you think that happens as often as it does, that they’re not on the same page of what the budget means and what it means to achieve the budget?
Jeff Epstein:
I think it happens because companies come up with one budget and talk about one budget at the or forecast at the board meeting. And they don’t talk about probabilities, but the world lives in probabilities. And so anyone who’s played poker or, or does scenario analysis, if you’re an FP&A expert, just understands that it’s hard to predict the future. And what you’re trying to do is think about a range of possible outcomes and what, what would you do in diff different circumstances. But board meetings, they have limited amount of time and they wanna limit complexity. So most of the time when I’m in a board meeting, we, we have not talked about probabilities. And my advice to CEOs and CFOs is, you should make it explicit.
Paul Barnhurst:
And when you say make it explicit, can you elaborate? Like say what the probability of achieving that budget is, what the range is like, maybe just elaborate a little bit on that.
Jeff Epstein:
Yes. Well, let’s take two extremes. So let’s say your CEO is Elon Musk <laugh>, and he says, we’re gonna create, you know, we’re gonna produce a hundred million cars tomorrow. And you, you, you understand after working with him for a while, that that is not a real forecast, that that’s just an aspirational forecast. Yeah. And you’re, you’re probably not gonna make it, but, but his philosophy of life is if you aim high, you achieve more. And then if you think about Warren Buffet, he’s very much in the camp of under promise and over deliver stick to your commitments. And he’s probably gonna make his budget, you know, 90 plus percent of the time. Yep. And so you have to understand is, is is the culture of your CEO and your company, which, which way is that? And what’s the optimal way of making it?
And I I, there’s a terrific book by Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel where it’s called High Output Management. And in it, he says, in his view, most of the time, the optimal way of setting a goal is to make it 50 50. And he uses professional sports as the example. And he says, think about the NBA. These are the best athletes in the world. They’re incredibly talented, very highly paid, extremely motivated. On average, they lose half their games. And yet that seems to be pretty motivational for them. And so he, his view was, you should act, if you’re setting goals, whether it’s revenue goals or any other set of goals for your team and let’s say you had, this is related to OKRs or objectives and key results. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, which came outta the Andy Grove Management.
By objectives, let’s say you have a company with a thousand employees and everyone has three to five goals every quarter. So that means you have 4,000 goals, a quarter, 16,000 goals a year, because everyone has those goals at the end of the year, you can look up and see, well, how many of those 16,000 goals were met? Did we meet 90% of the goals? Did you make 80%, 50%? And if you’re making 90% of the goals, you’re not being ambitious enough. If you’re making 50%, you’re just about right. Now, Google looked at that and said, you know, people do not like to fail 50% of the time. So Google’s OKR process is set to achieve about two third goals about two thirds of the time. So back to budgeting, the question is, when you put together a, a revenue budget for your company and for your board, what percentage of the time should you achieve it?
And there’s no right answer. It depends on the culture of the company and the culture of the board and the CEO. The one thing I do recommend is that you talk about the probability. So if you, if you set it so that we think we wanna make our budget, 90% of the time you explicitly say we’re expecting to make our budget 90% of the time, and then presumably nine outta 10 years, you make it in one year you miss it. If you set it a 50%, make it that explicit too and have a, have a conversation about it. My personal view is I think the 50 I, I believe the Andy Grove philosophy. So I think many companies would be, would benefit if they had a 50% probability on the revenue side. ’cause That that’s the balance between the Elon Musk and Warren Buffett approach.
Now, if I can make one further observation, of course you don’t wanna miss your cashflow forecast because you don’t wanna run on money. So what I do then is I put in, in the budget, when I, when I was C ffo, I’d put in a contingency, which meant that half the time I make my revenue budget and my costs are probably pretty much in line, so I’m gonna make my profit cash flow budget. But if I miss my revenue budget now I might miss my cash flow budget. But if I have that contingency, I, I can make my cash flow budget. So the question is, what percentage of the time do you wanna make your cashflow budget? And I think that should be much higher. And you can talk about what it should be. But, you know, typically 70, 80% of the time,
Paul Barnhurst:
I, I think that makes a lot of sense at the end of the day. ’cause Right, yes, you wanna hit your revenue numbers, but cash is really that most important metric that if you don’t have it, nothing else matters. If you’re substantially missing that all the time, it doesn’t matter. Even if you’re hitting revenue, right. You got some major problems. And I still remember when you talked about when you gave the Andy Grove and the El Musk and the Warren, the different examples. I remember I was working for a company and we had a CFO that would always give unrealistic targets to all the businesses. You know, everybody had to grow by 10%, didn’t matter where you were or what was going on. That was just the bare minimum. And we were, we were missing badly for a couple years in a row and got a new regional CFO and a global CFO.
And he is like, all I want to make sure that happens this year is we hit our numbers. And I remember, you know, we went in with very conservative numbers in the middle of the year, they gave us all new budgets. We were so far over at that point, but he is like, I just can’t go with another year of telling the board we missed by 10, 15, 20 just killing us. And so, yeah, trying to find that balance. It was interesting to watch in that company as it shifted in new leadership and how they try to manage those expectations to a more realistic, you know, probability in what they gave the board. So I’ve kind of seen both sides of that, where you have the elion musk of, okay, that’s never happening, that’s a nice dream, but no, I’m not delivering, as you said, well, you know, a million cars tomorrow. Right. That type of thing to the, well, if we don’t hit our numbers, something went really wrong. I’ve seen both sides of that. So, you know, kind of back to the article a little bit and just kind of the budget setting process. In the article you gave three examples of budget setting, I think you called it Papa Bear, mama Bear and Baby Bear, right? The Goldilocks. So could you talk a little bit about those different types, kind of what you meant by that analogy?
Jeff Epstein:
Well, of course, the old story about Goldilocks with where the one bed is too soft and one bed is too hard and one bed is just right. Using probabilities for your particular company in your particular year, you can think about should I be more aggressive, less aggressive, or or somewhere in the middle. If you are, if you just raised a lot of capital and business is booming and you’re trying to maximize growth and not as concerned about profitability, you probably set very ambitious targets. If it’s the period from, like a year ago in technology where the stock market had crashed, it’s hard to raise capital and you have to preserve cash. You probably wanna be more conservative. If you just, the point you just made, if you missed your budget the last three years in a row, everyone’s depressed.
People are quitting you, you probably, morale is probably pretty important. You, you wanna be more conservative, give people a chance to make their numbers. So it’s, it’s very facts and circumstances specific. But I think it’s, it’s very helpful for the CEO and the CFO and the board to have this conversation about is it too high, too low, or what is just right for our company? And we talked about revenue, we talked about cash. There are two other factors as well. One is if you’re a public company, it’s different than if you’re a private company. And it’s pretty important as, especially as a newly public company to establish credibility. So you wanna be extra conservative there. And the data shows that companies in their first year as a public company achieve their revenue target 90% of the time. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. So there, they’re being much more conservative now over time, after the second or third year they’re public, they, that, that goes down a little bit.
But at least the first year you wanna build that credibility. And then the last question is what about your sales team? So let’s say you, you set your revenue target to be a 50% probability. If your sales team is a 50% probability as well, then you have no cushion on your revenue. Because what if, if they, if the, if the sales team misses their numbers, then the company misses their numbers. So typically what I’ve seen is if it’s, if you’re in an enterprise sales company type of company, you set your quotas, each individual quota adds up to more than the company’s quota. So if you’re mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, if your revenue budget is a hundred million dollars, each individual sales quota might add up to 110 million. Which means that if the a hundred million is a 50% probability, the 110 million is less, actually less than a 50% probability, it might be a 30% probability.
Now, of course, you pay your salespeople very well when they hit their numbers, and some salespeople will hit their numbers. But the questionnaire is, should you, should you make your, should you create a cushion between your sales quotas and your revenue? And generally you do. If you’re a marketing driven company instead of a sales driven company, it’s the same type of thing. You create a marketing plan where if the results of all your marketing programs, whether it’s search engine marketing or brand advertising, whatever it is, if, if they work out you, that you wanna give a little cushion so that you still make your revenue plan, if, if one or two of them don’t work out.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. Tot totally understand that philosophy. I know when I helped do sales commissions and build some of the plans, I did that one of my fp and a roles. You always, we always try to put at least a 20% factor between those individual quotas and how that all rolled up to what the company needed. Right. So if we needed a hundred million, if everybody hit their quota, maybe it was 120 or 125, knowing that some percentage is not gonna hit it no matter what you do. So you wanna give yourself some kind of cushion in there’s makes that makes a lot of sense to me. We definitely always did that. And yeah, I’m not surprised on Wall Street that Right. In those early, early years of company, you’re hitting that a lot more than you are later on. Not that you’re not still hitting it, but nobody wants to be three months in and have the stock price tank. Right. Nobody wants to be the CFO or the CEO on watch when that happens.
Jeff Epstein:
Exactly.
Paul Barnhurst:
So definitely gonna be conservative. And I know you talked about kind of those probabilities and those components, and we’ve talked a little bit about it revenue, it sounds like you kinda like that 50 50 mentality, but you know, you got the key is that everybody knows how they’re thinking about it, whether it’s 50 50 or 70 30 or 80 20, whatever the number may be, the people understand that so that they’re on the same page.
Jeff Epstein:
That’s right. I’m in a minority. I think most people would probably set it more like two thirds probability on revenue. I, I’m, I think back to the, the college professors I had and the high school teachers I had, and the best teachers I had were the toughest graders. Mm-They made me work hardest. And I, I, I think Andy Grove is that kind of tough grader where he just thinks it’s, if you’re trying to take the talent of the people you have and get them to perform at the highest level, his view, and I agree with it, is set challenging goals and then hire great people and expect them to rise to the occasion.
Paul Barnhurst:
And I tend to follow that philosophy is you wanna challenge people, you want, you want people that want to be challenged. Right? Right. That look at it and say, okay, how can we achieve it? Because you accomplish more when you have those kind of people. Right. At least that’s what I’ve always seen right. Now, obviously you don’t wanna demoralize them and set impossible goals, hence why you don’t want it to be, you know, 10% of the time you’re achieving it. Because we all have a point where it’s like, okay, what’s, what’s the point if I can almost never hit the, the goal, at least most of us.
Jeff Epstein:
Exactly. And you know, it’s a balance. And, you know, you told the story of the manager you had who, who always said, you’re gonna have to grow 10% a year, and it’s three years in a row, and people didn’t do it, and they just gave up. It’s, you know, that’s counterproductive. So you have to have a realistic sense of, and and, and then tell people, look, we’re setting these goals and we know you’re not gonna hit the goals all the time, but it’s your job to try to figure out how to do it and let’s, you know, let’s, let’s see if you can come up with it. We wanna give you the, the opportunity to, to, to overachieve.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. So I’m, I’m curious, I know having been CFO of multiple companies, you know, Oracle and and others, how did that process go for you of setting, you know, how you should think about achieving the goals with the different CEOs you had and the board? How did you manage that and come up with what you thought was, you know, a good balance between those different components in the budget? How did you work through that?
Jeff Epstein:
Well, interesting, I, I, I just came to this observation after I retired <laugh>. So this has been, so, I, I didn’t have this tool in my toolkit when I was A CFO.
And I think it would’ve been helpful I think what we typically did if we did scenario analysis, so we would have a budget or a forecast, and then we’d have a high case and a low case. And, but we didn’t think about was the, the set was the middle case, a 50% probability or an 80% probability. And I think it would’ve been helpful to do that.
Paul Barnhurst:
That Got it. So you used, it sounds like scenarios, but kind of a best case, worst case base case. Right. And then let, let’s say you finished those scenarios. So did you think about, you know, wall Street is somewhere between that kind of base case and worst case to make sure you hit your numbers? Or how did you kind of think about those different parts of it in relation to those scenarios?
Jeff Epstein:
Well, typically we would say we, we’ve almost never wanna miss our Wall Street guidance if, if we can. Now, the challenge is, let’s say that you’re running into trouble. Let’s say you have a company that used to be growing 30% a year, and now you’re growing 10% a year. And if you te and if you, if you really wanna be conservative, you might have to tell people you’re not gonna grow at all to give yourself a 10% cushion, or even we’re gonna shrink 5%. Now when you announce that your stock’s gonna go down when you announce it <laugh>. So you might say, well, look, let’s just hold, let’s keep our fingers crossed and we think it’s gonna be 10%. Let’s tell people 10%, we won’t have any cushion, and maybe we’ll get lucky. So that’s, that’s the, the, the challenge and the pressure when, when you when when the the car, the underlying performance of the business starts to deteriorate.
Paul Barnhurst:
Sure. Sounds like you’ve probably dealt with that a little bit in your career of seeing that slowing growth
Jeff Epstein:
And everybody has been around a while, has, has dealt with it, and there’s no easy answer there.
Paul Barnhurst:
No, no, for sure. I totally agree. I’ve definitely seen that where the underlying performance is not what it used to be. And how do you manage that and manage those expectations? And they can be difficult conversations for sure. And sometimes, like you said, there’s a little bit of hoping to get lucky and finding that, that right balance. On the, on the article, I think there’s a lot of great advice. We’ve talked about probabilities, the four areas, you know, the different type of personalities.
Any kind of final thoughts or advice you’d give to CFOs, you know, CFOs and FP&A professionals when it just comes to managing the budgeting process? Any, any thoughts there?
Jeff Epstein:
Yes, I would. I talked about how budgeting and forecasting is, it’s like a muscle. And I would recommend that everyone do what’s called a stagger chart, which is let’s say you have a budget of your revenue for the full year by month, January, February, March, April, may and at the end of January, say, what did I think January revenue was gonna be in the initial budget? And then what is January revenue and now what’s my new forecast for February, March, April, may, et cetera. And then at the end of the next month, compare the actual to not only the original budget, but last month’s forecast. And so by the time you get to December, you actually have 12 comparisons, because you can say December actuals came in at, let’s say $10 million, but my budget was 12 million. And then my January forecast was 11 eight, and my February forecast was 11 five, and my March forecast was 11, and my June forecast was ten five.
And so what happened was over the, every, every month for the 12 months, you kept on lowering your forecast. So to me, that says you didn’t do a very good job because every month you things were worse than you thought. Why couldn’t, even if the budget was wrong, why couldn’t you have figured out in March that the December revenue was gonna be 10 million? In that case, your stagger chart, if you put this literally all on a chart, it would’ve gone $12 million was the initial budget, then 11 eight, then 11 five, then 10, and then 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10. And then for nine months, I accurately forecasted the 10. Does that make sense?
Paul Barnhurst:
It, it totally does. And we’ll put that in the show notes. I know you’d sent that to me of that idea of, you have the chart, you got your January through December, and you’re seeing each month how it changed. And your point is, why is it coming down every single month throughout the year, if it’s coming down that way, that that leads to a forecast issue? And I’ve seen kind of two things drive that. Sometimes it’s a forecast issue, sometimes it’s the I’ve seen the philosophy of slowly leak bad news by some leadership, like just gradually bring it down. So, and hopefully we’ll find that hope and a prayer somewhere between now and December. How do you balance those two? Because I’m sure you’ve seen that, right? The, Hey, we know this is gonna be lower, but we don’t wanna, I guess cir, you know, mention that yet, or circulate it, so to speak, and so you try to hold off.
Jeff Epstein:
Well, that’s a, a very important point, and I, I think it’s a dangerous thing for a, a finance leader or FP&A leader or a CFO to do. I think if I, when I talk to CEOs, they want their finance leaders to tell them the truth. They don’t want them to hide the numbers or shade the numbers or hope, that things are gonna get better. The CEO may not wanna communicate to the public or to all employees how bad things really are if things are bad. But they want the CCFO to tell ’em how bad things really are.
And of course, one of the most important rules for a finance leader is no surprises if, if you are missing, let’s say you have a budget and at the end of the year you’ve missed your budget, you’ve made two mistakes. One is you’ve underperformed, and the other is you forecast it inaccurately. So there’s a limited amount you can do as a CFO. Let’s say you miss your revenue forecast, you’re not in charge of sales. The CFO may not be able to help revenue, but they can certainly forecast accurately. And so what my job and my team’s job is always, how can we learn how to forecast better and understand what are the key drivers of why we’re missing our revenue or missing our cost? We’re missing our profits and learn earlier in the cycle what the leading indicators are as opposed to the lagging indicators.
Paul Barnhurst:
And, and I love your response there, and I, frankly, I totally agree with you. I’ve just seen in my career too many times where leaders want to slowly put out bad news. I’m like, just be upfront. Let’s talk about where we’re at and figure out the solutions. Because it just, one it perpetuates a bad problem, it leads people to think you don’t know how to forecast and transparent. You can never go wrong with being transparent with your management. Now, what’s communicated company-wide, like you said, or publicly, that’s different based on what you know, what the right timing is. You know what I mean? There’s still a level of transparency you always need to have, but I, I’m, I’m with you on that. I agree with you. I’ve just seen it too often where people would be like, no, let’s hold on. Maybe we can hit that number. And I’m like, I, I don’t see it happening.
Jeff Epstein:
But, you know, I think human psychology is very interesting. And I think the question of morale of, of the team what affects morale more, the things are bad, or the things are, is it, is it how bad things are or is it the direction things are going? Which are two different things. And I’ll, I’ll give you an example. Let’s say company’s in trouble. They have to cut costs. They’ve got a hundred people, and you’re thinking about, should I lay off 20 people? Because we just don’t, we, we have to get to break even and otherwise we’re gonna run outta money. Yep. So there’s a couple of ways of doing it. You could say, well, let’s cut 10% of the people and hope, hope things get better. They don’t get better. We’ll cut another 10% of the people. So now we cut 20%.
That’s scenario A. Scenario B is things look bad. I think we have to cut 20% of the people, let’s actually cut 30% of the people, and then things are getting a little better. Let’s hire 10 people, and maybe some of those people we just laid off six months ago, we can actually hire them back or hire new people. And now we’re still back at 80 people. So in both cases, you went from a hundred to 80, in which company are people happier? I contend that in company B, people are happier. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, because the pain is in the past, and now you’re growing, you went from 70 to 80, and the future looks bright. In the first case, you went from a hundred to 90 to 80. Hey, maybe next week I’m gonna get laid off and it’s gonna get worse. And it’s, you’re in the wrong direction. So ironically, both from a business point of view and a cost point of view, and from a human point of view, it’s better to take your pain early and then get the company healthy and grow again, rather than the continuing cuts, you know, one cut after another.
Paul Barnhurst:
I, I would agree with you. I think that is definitely easier psychologically for people to handle the, the way people perceive it. I’ve been in a company where, you know, we continue to do cuts every six months, and it was just, okay, who’s next? What person’s not gonna be here tomorrow? When, when does the next round come? And it just felt like it was a never ending where’s the bottom? Right? And yeah, it’s never a fun situation to be in. I’ve been in that twice. One where I was the last person in the, that location of the office, and I’m like, all right. I, I called it staying alive, you know, everybody else was in other locations. And I’m like, yeah, I probably should be looking for a new job. This is not the situation I wanna be in.
Jeff Epstein:
Right.
Paul Barnhurst:
You know, there’s something to be said for being last man standing, but usually it’s not a good thing. Next question I have for you is, during your time as a CFO, you know, a company such as Oracle and others, how important was the role of FP&A for you to be successful as a CFO? Kind of how did you think about and look at FP&A?
Jeff Epstein:
Well, of course, FP&A is critical. The way I think about the CFO team is you have an accounting team which talks about the past. What happened? Mm-Hmm. trying to understand where all the revenue was, where all the costs were, where all, where all the profits coming from. And then you got the FP&A team, which is talking about the future. And of course, you need to have both, but, and you need to have the understanding of the past accurately in order to have a platform to understand the future. But it’s really the, the, the key decisions you’re going to make as a CFO or as A CEO have to do with the future. And they have to do with resource allocation. Should we hire more people in this area or that area? If you have a one product company in the us, should you launch that one product in Europe, or should you launch a second product in the us Or should you do both? Should you grow faster and use up more cash as should you grow more slowly and generate more profit? Where, what if you have multi, multiple products, where is your profit coming from? What should your prices be? What should your distribution strategy be? How much should you pay your sales team? What should your marketing ROI be? These are all critical fp and a questions, and I’ve always relied on my FP&A team to, to answer them.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. That, that makes sense to me. And that’s often I explain it, right? Accounting is all about getting the historical right. FP&A as I often say, is, how do you best spend the next dollar? How do you maximize your resource allocation to accomplish your strategic goals? And, you know, if you don’t have that foundation, the accounting’s not right. It makes it really hard to forecast. I had a business I supported once where we had a lot of system issues. And I think in a one year period we had, we had millions of dollars of corrections, and it was only, you know, $40 million business got to the point where the general manager every month would just put his head down and, okay, what accounting change have you made that I can’t control this month? And it was painful as the finance person to have to share that news every month of, well, we had this issue and we had that issue. And they learned, they didn’t reconcile this correctly because the system wasn’t set up to manage it. And you can’t, you can’t operate in that environment. At least I, it was very difficult for me for sure. And that’s when I gained a real appreciation for good accounting and having proper systems and those controls to allow you to focus on the future instead of dealing with things that are really outta your control.
Jeff Epstein:
Exactly.
Paul Barnhurst:
So, I, I’m curious, you know, over your career, from your experiences, how would you define good FP&A, like what does good FP&A look like to you?
Jeff Epstein:
I think first of all a great FP&A leader or manager or or individual contributor understands the business at a granular level so they understand unit economics. If you’re a retail store, it’s what’s the same store sales, what’s the revenue and margin by department? If you are if you have a manufacturing company, what’s your, what’s the, what are your costs and profits contribution by product? So the, and, and if you’re a company, for instance, that sells subscriptions, there’s something called cohort analysis because you could say, well, there’s a cohort of customers I got in January and here’s how they behave over time. And then there’s a different cohort of people I got in Feb started February, and here’s how they behave over time. And if you just look at the aggregate numbers things might be looking great.
Whereas within a cohort, things might be much worse. And so we’re, we’re a bit different. And so fundamentally, the, the FP&A takes the top level numbers and breaks them down to the most relevant unit level which is, and that’s is an art in that. Is it a cohort? Is it a store? Is it a product? And understands what’s going on there and then understands how to build it back up and then, and thinks about in terms of segments, some customers are different, other other customers or how, how do we think about our current costs and our, and what, what we need to spend to support different groups of customers and different groups of products. And then once they have that fundamental understanding, it’s back to your question of how do you, where do you spend the next dollar? Should you reallocate resources?
You basically have two, two resources, people and money. And so should you reallocate those people and money from this project to that or from this product to that or this region to, to that? Or should you just put more money in at the expense off your balance sheet or, or raising more capital? And how does that compare to your cost of capital or other uses? So there’s a whole series of trade-off decisions that you’re constantly making. And you’re never, information’s always imperfect. You’re never gonna be right up a hundred percent of the time. You just have to make educated guesses and, and try to do it with as much data as you can. And then keep track of your guesses to see how good you’ve write you, you actually write down, here is the decision I’m making, here’s why I’m making it. I’m gonna evaluate where this decision worked in three months or six months or a year. And then go back and look at what you wrote and see how good you, how right you were. And if you’re good over time, you’ll get better at it’s just you. This is something that you, you can learn.
Paul Barnhurst:
I, I love what you said there. You know, a couple things that really stuck out to me is first learn the business. That’s kind of what I’ve always tried to preach to fp a people is spend time understanding the business, the economics, the more you know the business and you know, those drivers and those levers, the better you can help make smart decisions with the business, the better you’re gonna understand that data that you talked about. Right. Using that data to drive decisions. And then the last part I really liked is make sure you keep track of how you’re doing. You know, you made this decision for this reason. How did that work out? You made this decision for that reason. And over time, are you improving? Is it getting better? Are you making smarter decisions? And if not, you know, what are you doing wrong?
So having that feedback in the process, I really like that. So thank you. That was a really good explanation there. I appreciate that. One other question I’d like to ask you, this is one we like to ask people that kind of just gets back to strategy, which I think is at the heart of a lot of what we do in finance and obviously business. So can you tell me about a time in your career when you experienced what I’ll call a strategic moment, like a strategic insight that later empowered you to drive change within the organization?
Jeff Epstein:
I, I think a good example is when I was the chief financial officer of Oracle, and we acquired Sun Microsystems. Oracle was the largest enterprise software company, and Sun was both software and hardware and made servers and storage. And we, we looked at many of the business practices of Sun and we said, why are they doing things certain way? And are, are those the optimum way to do it? Or can we change it? And so, for instance, the Sun sales team their sales compensation was based on revenue, not based on margin. And we had some Sun products that were had a 50% margin at gross margin, and others had a 20% gross margin. . And yet the salesperson would get paid the same no matter what they sold. And some sales were direct to customers, and some were to partners who then added a markup and sold to customers.
And the salesperson got paid the same, whether it went direct or through partners. And so the company’s profitability was quite different based on the gross margin of the product and based on whether it was direct or through, through partners. And yet the salespeople didn’t have the same incentives that the company had. My favorite example was there was a project where they sold a million dollars worth of hardware with a $10 million consulting project to install the hardware. And it turns out the, the consulting project went over budget. And so the sales team made half a million dollars in commissions, and the company lost $2 million because the project went over budget. So, you know, that’s not a very good alignment. Yeah.
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s, that’s not a margin you want
Jeff Epstein:
<Laugh>, right? So so as we worked on our merger integration strategy, we, we changed sales compensation. We also did things like they had tens of thousands of SKU stock keeping units. For instance, they had, some of their products came in three different colors. So, you know, you couldn’t put a blue cable on a black server, obviously it had to be the same color. And so we just said, well, you know, why do we have three colors? Why do we have so many SKUs? And we dramatically reduced the number of SKUs. And there were some SKUs that sold very little that weren’t strategic, we just didn’t produce them anymore. And then we had, they, they had, they had a strategy of, for the, in the manufacturing of having multiple suppliers because they were concerned about risk. What happens if there’s a fire in one of the supplier’s plants? We were a much larger company so we could take those risks. So we dramatically reduced the number of suppliers. And what that did was that increased the volume for every supplier with higher volume. We got lower costs. So there was a whole series of business decisions that we made, which were driven by understanding of FP&A and planning and trade-offs and resource allocation, which dramatically improved the profitability of, of Sun worked very well.
Paul Barnhurst:
Thank you for sharing. That’s a great example. And I could see how each of those would, you know, materially move the bottom line and allow you to gain synergies that are needed from an acquisition. Right. Because there’s always a lot of assumptions that go into those of how we make improvements. So I appreciate you kinda sharing how you did that.
Jeff Epstein:
I’ll tell you my favorite story related to that, which I didn’t, wasn’t the company I worked at, but a friend of mine bought a series of water bottling companies where they delivered water, bottled water to offices, and they paid their truck drivers a sales commission on everything they sold, because a truck driver would go into an office building, deliver the water, and then they would go upstairs to the next office and say, Hey, I’m, I’m coming here every week. I’m delivering the water, you know, downstairs, why don’t I deliver it to you too? And things were great, the company was doing fine. They ended up selling that company to Pepsi. And Pepsi said, you know, we’re not gonna pay our truck drivers $200,000 a year. That’s ridiculous. We’re just gonna pay them like a truck driver. And they completely changed that. They stopped paying commissions to the truck drivers, and two years later, their revenue had fallen in half. The truck drivers all left. And my friend ended up buying the company back. Same company for maybe a third of the price that he sold to Pepsi. He put in the new sales commission structure to pay the truck drivers commissions again, the company thrived again. So these kinds of incentives and strategic kinds of decisions are pretty important.
Paul Barnhurst:
Couldn’t agree more. I mean, I think that’s probably the biggest lesson I learned when I was in an FP&A role where they actually asked me to write some of the commission plans. Like, I was not just working with the sales on them, but I was writing them up and coming up with them. And there were definitely some areas where I feel like I missed a little bit, and I learned a lot about that human behavior and how hard it can be to get it right. It was, it really taught me a lot that, you know, I, you don’t always see when you’re just on the finance side of things, of how important incentives are. As I’ve heard someone say when you talk about commissions, it’s their, it’s their playbook. It’s their rule book. You think of football, right? They have that playbook. They go by and they’re gonna, they’re gonna learn it, they’re gonna memorize it and they’re gonna find ways to exploit it, as long as that benefits you as the company go at it, so to speak. But
Jeff Epstein:
Exactly right.
Paul Barnhurst:
So, all right. Well, I know we’re coming up near the end of our time. So we have this section we like to call the get to know You section so you get more, no more than 30 seconds to answer these questions. We’ll have four questions here, and they’ll just help us get to know you a little bit better. So the first is, what is something interesting about you? Something that not many people know.
Jeff Epstein:
In 1983 I worked for the Washington Post Company and Warren Buffett was on the board of the Washington Post Company, and I had a chance to meet him, read about him, and it was so impressed by everything he had done. He was not, not nearly as famous then as he is now. And I managed to buy, I took, looked in my savings account and I ended up buying four shares of Berkshire Hathaway at a thousand dollars a share. And those shares are worth $500,000 each now. And so as I think back on that I have three observations. One was I was very lucky to meet him and learn about it and, and buy, buy these shares that have gone up so much in value. The second thing I did is I didn’t sell them. I could have, you know, when they went from a thousand dollars to 10,000 or to 20,000 or 50,000 or a hundred thousand, I could could’ve sold them any, any, it would’ve been human nature to sell ‘them at some point. Sure. It’s been four, literally 40 years ago. So I’ve never sold them and hopefully I’ll just give ’em to my kids. But then the other is why did I only buy four shares? I had more money. I could’ve bought, bought 10 shares, you know, what was I thinking?
Paul Barnhurst:
Oh, yo kinda, I, I I think we’ve all been there on the, what was I thinking? But when you mentioned Warren Buffet, it reminded me a story. So I worked for American Express, right? One of his biggest holdings at times has been his biggest, I think it still is. And an activist investor came in and bought like $2 billion of Amex shares and they wanted to split up the company and they had the hubris to think they could win a proxy fight with Warren Buffett, who was 100% in support of the CFO at the time. Kenneth Chenault, he once, or the CEO, he once said his two favorite leaders he’s ever met were Nelson Mandela and Ken Chenault. And I just remember thinking, wow, what is this private equity group thinking? And six months later they took, I think it was like a seven or $800 million loss.
Jeff Epstein:
No kidding.
Paul Barnhurst:
You know, and I just, I just don’t know what someone’s thinking that they’re gonna win a proxy fight with Warren Buffet.
Jeff Epstein:
Yeah.
Paul Barnhurst:
You know, and this was only 10 years ago, so it wasn’t, you know, 1983. It was 2015, I think. So anyway, next question. If you could meet one person in the world, dead or alive, who would you meet and why?
Jeff Epstein:
Well, it would be Warren Buffett, who I’ve just admired so much. But I’ll give you another name, which is Winston Churchill. I’ve, I’ve read most of what Churchill wrote. If he, he wrote an autobiography about his life up to age 25, called My Early Life. And if anyone’s interested in Churchill, I highly recommend that it’s a short book. It’s his early life was amazing. He went to Sandhurst, which is the British version of West Point. And then he served in the military in Cuba. In, in, as an observer, he served in what’s now the, the, the Pakistan Afghanistan border fighting in personally in, in combat. And then in the Boer war. And in the Boer War, he was captured and he escaped from a prisoner of war camp and managed to get back to England. So all before the age of 25. Just amazing, amazing story. And this is of course, you know, we think of Winston Churchill in his sixties as the Prime Minister in World War ii, and yet he had this incredible life much earlier than that.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. Well, we’ll mention that in the show notes. And I’m gonna have to check that one out. I like reading biographies and it definitely sounds like a good one. So thank you for sharing that one. So this is kind of a fun one we like to ask people is, what is the last thing you Googled looked up on YouTube, or we added this asked chat, GPT generative AI about that was related to finance, FP&A and a Excel, something kind of in that realm.
Jeff Epstein:
Well you gave me a hint that you were gonna ask this question. So actually I put into chat GPT, the prompt, how can I improve the accuracy of my financial forecast for my company? And it was pretty good. So here’s the answer. It is, one, use high quality data. Two, understand your business drivers. Three, use multiple forecasting methods. Four, get input from key stakeholders. Five, review and update your forecast regularly. So it’s try, try putting that into chat. GPT. It’s probably can help you out.
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s a pretty good list. I’ll definitely have to give that one a try. And so the next one here, this is one we like to ask everybody. Our sponsors is an Excel-based planning tool. So we’re big fans of Excel. Your favorite thing about Excel function feature, what is it that you like most about Microsoft Excel?
Jeff Epstein:
Well, I am not a nearly a power Excel user. I just use it for sort of basic math. And to me, it’s you, you’d rather be approximately correct than precisely wrong is an important concept. And I think sometimes people spend too much time doing detailed analysis to five decimal places and out 10 years and incredible detail, but they don’t think about the key drivers. And so what I like to do is actually on a single sheet of paper, if I’m thinking about the economics of a company, say, what are the five or 10 key metrics? What’s my unit economics? What’s my, if I’m a software company, how many customers do I have? What’s my revenue per customer? What’s my sales cycle? What’s my CAC payback period so I can understand the return on my sales investment? And if you get that right, it, it doesn’t really matter whether you have 1,232 customers or 1,348 customers, you know, you have about, you know, more than a thousand customers, less than 1500 customers.
That’s all you can expect in, in most, most businesses. And so it’s very important if you’re, if you’re an aerospace engineer, that you’re precise. So the plane doesn’t crash. But if you’re doing for financial modeling out several years for businesses, you’re just not gonna know the answer and you just wanna get the big ideas correctly. There’s a terrific book called Working Backwards about Amazon, and it talks about the difference between input metrics and output metrics. And so I think it’s very helpful for for FP&A professionals to understand the difference between those two and to understand what are your input metrics.
Paul Barnhurst:
I like that. And I liked how you boiled it down to really just focusing on what’s important and understanding those unit economics. And you know, one thing I, I love the quote by George Box. He once said all models are wrong. Some are useful, you know, and it’s really, do we have something that’s useful? And it doesn’t need to be super precise or complex to be useful. Sometimes the back of the, the napkin math can be better than the complex model. It’s, you know, doing what works. So as we wrap up here, just have two more questions for you. The first is, what advice would you offer to someone starting their career in fp and a today?
Jeff Epstein:
Wh when you’re young you can try to learn on your own and just to trial and error, make mistakes and figure things out. Or you can learn from other people who are older and more experienced than you <laugh>. And what I found is that most people who’ve spent their lives learning fp and a or being a CFO are love the opportunity of sharing what they’ve learned. And of course, listening to this podcast is a great example of of that because people are sharing their ideas. But if I were young today, I would try to find people who are like me, who are maybe three or five years older than me at my company or at other companies, and take them out to lunch and go out for a cup of coffee and just say, you know, tell me about, you know, what you’ve been doing and, and what, what’s, what are your lessons learned? What’s something, what’s a mistake that you’ve made? What’s something, what’s the your greatest accomplishment as an fp a leader? What’s the biggest surprise? And so ask open-ended questions like that. And if you do that with three or four or five people, you’ll learn not only what from your own experience, but you’ll learn from everyone else’s experience. And it just, that experience compounds
Paul Barnhurst:
Great, great advice there. I know I learned a ton from talking to others, just the podcast for example. I’ve, you know, talked to over a hundred people now and I’ve learned so much from their different experiences and take things away. And I know it’s helped me be a better, you know, better leader, better businessman to learn from others. So thank you for that. And so last question. If someone wants to learn more about you, what’s the best way for them to do that?
Jeff Epstein:
Come to the Bessemer Venture Partners website and we have a lot of published material. For instance, the Goldilocks budget article is there and there’s actually a finance course that we’ve published of lessons on finance. And it’s at bvp.com. So go, go there and then look in our content section. We, we have a lot of great content there.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, I definitely noticed that when you sent me the link for the article, all the other content, and actually signed up for the finance course and read the first section of that. So we’ll definitely share some of those resources in the show notes. And thank you so much for making the time to chat with me today, Jeff. I’ve really enjoyed it. I know our audience will enjoy listening to the episode. So thank you for sharing an hour with us today.
Jeff Epstein:
Paul, it’s been a real pleasure. You asked fantastic questions and it’s been a, a great, I’ve had a great time. Thank you.