This episode is all about financial modeling from one of the world’s experts. Ian Schnoor is Executive Director at the Financial Modeling Institute (FMI) & President and Founder at The Marquee Group. In this episode he provides frank assessment of why most financial models fail and how you can take instant actions to instantly transform your financial modeling.
This is absolutely essential listening for anyone considering taking the Financial Modeling Institute’s world-respected accreditation program. The program is recognized by companies like Goldman Sachs, Moody’s KPM and Morgan Stanley as the most rigorous validation of financial modeling skills and ranges from foundational, to advanced, to Chartered Financial Modeler and Master Financial Modeler.
In this episode:
- From investment banking to creating the world’s only accredited financial modeling training
- The skills you will need to pass the robust accreditation by the Financial Modeling Institute
- Why employees are increasingly requiring proof of financial modeling skills
- The multi-disciplinary skills required to excel in modeling including design, data flow, communication and storytelling
- How the integrated 3 statement model is the table stakes for being considered a good financial modeler
- How you can get your financial model humming smoothly – you should not have to pop your car hood to show the engine
- The power of a committee approach to modeling and design in a company
- Nixing our favorite function question: There should be no favorites in Excel, but pick the tools that will help you to get the job done you have in front of you
Watch the full show on YouTube
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’ll welcome a leader from the world of financial planning and analysis and discuss some of the biggest stories and challenges in the world of FP&A. We’ll provide you with actionable advice about financial planning and analysis. This is going to be your go-to resource for everything FP&A I am thrilled to welcome to today’s guest on the show Ian Schnoor in welcome to the show.
Ian Schnoor:
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
Paul Barnhurst:
Really excited to have you. So a little bit about Ian. He comes to us from Toronto, Canada. He graduated from the University of Manitoba. He’s currently the president and founder of the Marquee Group, and he’s the executive director at the Financial Modeling Institute. He’s also an all-around modeling expert and we’re really excited to have him on today’s show. Just a quick reminder for our audience after you listen to this episode, if you wanna get CPE credit, you can go over to earmark app and you can earn CPE credit for this episode by answering a few brief questions. And you’re also, we’d love your reviews to be left on whatever podcast platform you’re listening to us on. So with that being said, I’m going to get started here with our first question in, can you maybe just tell us a little bit more about yourself and your background?
Ian Schnoor:
Yeah, sure. Thanks Paul. I grew up not so far from you, as you said. I’m in Toronto, Canada now. I grew up in Central Canada and came to Toronto after university. I did an undergraduate degree in finance and I got my CFA. I’m a CFA charter holder as well. I started my career as an investment banker in Toronto. I worked at a couple banks, well, a Canadian bank called Bemo, and then I worked at Citi for a couple years as well. And then over about 20 years ago, or just over 20 years ago well when I was in banking, I loved building models. It was a bit of the wild West back then. This was late nineties. Excel as we know, it was relatively new and modeling was a relatively new discipline in spreadsheets. So I really got into it, loved it in some of the work that I did as an investment banker.
And about 20 years ago, I started a company called the Marquee Group that trains people. There was no real, there weren’t many options for companies to offer training. So I started providing training in how to build best in class world-class financial models. And that has gone very, very well. Our business now has around 20 people and a bunch of instructors and we train banks, pension funds, students all over the world, which is always a lot of fun. And around five years ago I was involved with some other people from all over the world in trying to solve a need and creating what’s called the Financial Modeling Institute. I’m currently the executive director, which is, think of it like an accreditation body, like AICPA or CFA institute. I mean, that’s what we aspired to be in the field of financial modeling. We discovered that there was no way for people to prove that they had strong modeling skills. Just taking a course doesn’t prove it. And we wanted to have a whole new way of allowing people to validate and demonstrate their modeling skills. So that’s what we do at the Financial Modeling Institute and we’re seeing lots of interest for people wanting to prove to the world that they actually have these great skills.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great. Now I appreciate that intro and telling a little bit about your business and a little bit about FMI. So just kind of a follow up, how did you get started with your business? What helped you realize there was a need for it? What made you so passionate about teaching and educating to go from spending all day in investment banking, building those models, as you mentioned, the Wild West, those early Excel days to saying, Hey, I’d like to teach and focus on helping people become better in their modeling.
Ian Schnoor:
Yeah, so it’s funny, I, I’d love to say that I had the vision to see that 20 years ago. The reality is I didn’t quite have that vision. What I can tell you is I did work as I worked in banking, but in university I was, I was a terrible student, at least stereotypically. I mean I did very well academically, but I wasn’t a student the way they wanted me to be. I didn’t learn very well in classes. I fell asleep in classes. I didn’t have a phone back then to keep me occupied. We didn’t have laptops. If I was in class and no matter how much sleep I got, if the professor lost me, if I was bored, I would fall, my brain would turn off. So the way I studied and got the university was teaching myself and then tutoring other people.
They always said, and you’ve probably heard the best way to learn is to teach. And when you can teach someone, you really, really demonstrate that you know the content yourself. So I got through university by tutoring and teaching friends, colleagues and anyone that wanted to learn together. And that went very, very well. So I always had a bit of a teaching bug in me. When I was in banking, I was one of the guys that they always every year said, Hey Ian, the new guys are coming in this next week and we need you to train them. So I would be involved in training the new class when they would come in banks. So that was sort of always planting a seed. When I left banking, I didn’t think there would be much demand to be honest, because there was really nobody doing teaching. So what I told clients was I said, Hey, I can build models, I can do some consulting work and build models, but by the way, if you ever need a course I can teach you how to build models. I didn’t think there’d be much demand because as I said, no one was doing it. But as they say things kind of take on a life of their own. And before I knew it, people’s banks said, this is silly that we’re using our own people. Let’s find someone else outside to teach in a professional way. And it kind of caught on like wildfire. And the rest, as they say is history. That’s on the marquee side.
Paul Barnhurst:
That makes a lot of sense how you laid that out and always enjoying teaching. I had a laugh a little bit when you mentioned falling a asleep in class. Cause I think I slept through undergrad. I was very much, if I wasn’t really involved in what was being taught or if I wasn’t taking super detailed notes to keep me awake, I was asleep. I got good grades, which annoyed some of the people I knew. But I always read the book. I often read the book twice because I just didn’t do well in class. Unless it was activity or there, there’s something to really engage me. I shut off. So I can completely relate to what you were talking
Ian Schnoor:
About. Well it’s funny you say that mean. So obviously we had a very similar university experience. The same was with me. Very, very, I’m very curious as I suspect you are as well, love to learn. But I think traditional university settings are designed for audio learners, people who can learn by just sitting and listening. That’s not me. I need to talk. I need to be engaged, I need to be involved. I need to get my hands going. I need to really get into the sitting there and just having someone talk at me. I mean at best I’ll leave with 5% of what they said. So I had to find another way. Sounds like very much we were probably both frowned upon by our profs who didn’t like us sitting in the back and then doing well somehow. But yes, it’s an issue. So by the way, when I started teaching, the number one thing I said to myself is when I said I’m going to start teaching, but, but my goal is to keep people engaged and if anyone ever falls asleep in my class, that’s my fault. So since day one, I’ve probably taught close to 2000 days now, over the last 20 years. And I’ve always said, if anyone’s sleeping, it’s my problem. It’s my fault. I need to, that’s my job is to keep people with me and engaged and active and having fun so that they wanna learn.
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s a great way to look at and I like that perspective is just focusing on what can I do better to make sure they’re really learning and engaging. So feels like we’ve definitely have had a similar experience there on the education side.
Ian Schnoor:
Undergrad experience. Yes.
Paul Barnhurst:
That’s kinda fun. So next question here, you talked a little bit about at the FMI and I’m familiar with that. I know I heard about that a few years ago when it first came about from Lance Rubin and I actually had signed up funny story to take the first test and COVID hit and it got delayed. And at the time I was originally, when I had signed up, I had been displaced at a job, but they decided to keep me and actually ended up promoting me. So things were super busy. When the next time came around, I kept kind of putting it off and I’ve never actually completed it because then I started my own business and I’m like, okay, I could study for this or I can try to grow my new business. But I’ve always thought it’s a great test and I really like the idea of it. So maybe can you talk a little bit about how it came about? Sure. What was the impetus and just a little more on that process?
Ian Schnoor:
Yeah, absolutely. There were some real significant changes that happened around seven, eight years ago in the world of accounting and finance. In our experience, and maybe you can relate to this. So I told you I started the training business around 20 years ago and then we discovered that when we would teach junior professionals or university students, they would all put on their resume that they attended one of our courses, as they should. I mean, anybody who takes a course puts it on their resume , which makes sense. But inevitably what would happen is we would get senior people calling us from banks and saying, Hey, we see you taught this guy Paul, we’re interviewing this guy Paul. He wrote on his resume, he took one of your courses. Is he any good? I’d be, I don’t know, probably not. I have no idea. I, I don’t know.
He took a course. He took a course. I have no idea if he’s any good. But what’s what professionals and students were looking to do is they were looking to use our course to validate their skills, right? A course is a part when you teach, it’s a partnership, right? I am helping to deliver. You need to be open to receiving and teaching is a spark you then need to learn. I always tell people that modeling is like a skill, like learning an instrument, learning to play piano, learning to play golf. I can teach you the ideas of any sport in a bunch of hours. But you’re not going to get good at that sport until you spend days, weeks, months, practicing, practicing, practicing over and over. Modeling is exactly the same. So I would get called and I’d say, I don’t know if they’re any good, they’re probably not good.
I don’t know, what do you want me to say? So we realized what the world needed both on the recruiter side and on the candidate side was validation. True external, third party validation. Now there are plenty of training firms. Marquee is now one of them where you do a course and you get a badge and you can get a participation badge and it means nothing. It means you took a course. It means that you showed some initiative and you took a course. Any badge that anyone sees out there from an attendance course is just that. It’s an attendance badge. So we said no, the world wants more than that. So we went out to create, as I said, the equivalent of a CPA or a CFA level rigorous test. So what we do at the FMI is we have learning materials.
When people sign up, they get really detailed learning materials and they sit an exam. And the exam is tough. It’s hard. Our level one, our level one advanced financial modeler, AFM exam is a four hour exam. In a nutshell, we give you a case study and a spreadsheet. You get a couple years of historical financial statements of a company. That’s it. And in four hours you’ve gotta build a beautiful world class best in class three statement model that’s dynamic from scratch. And if you can do that, that achieves some really best in class approach and it’s works well then you’ll be designated as an AFM. And that is our level one. So it’s doable but it’s tough. And so when people get that, I can look at them and say, yeah, Paul is an excellent model. I’ve never met Paul, I’ve never met him, but I promise you he’s an excellent modeler because he got through the AFM exam.
Paul Barnhurst:
And I can attest to that, having received the practice material and having spent time studying for it, that it is a rigorous test. It’s not something you just show up and slap together a model and expect to pass. You gotta be thinking about inputs and assumptions and scenarios and how you lay out a model and some of those best practice design principles. I mean you don’t have to follow one rigorous standard. But you have to understand what makes a good model like you mentioned. So I really like that because it’s so true. You can get an attendance badge, but that doesn’t mean you absorbed it. Maybe you attended the course for a week and never touch the stuff again in your life. Does that mean you’re qualified? Like you said, you have no idea when somebody calls says, is this person qualified? They kept my course right. I mean beyond that I have no idea.
Ian Schnoor:
Exactly. And what we discovered is in the world of, and maybe your listeners can relate to this as well, one thing that frustrates me is that in the world of business, think of what all the business disciplines. Imagine a classic, imagine a classic merge, a big m and a deal, a big merger that happens. Well there’s a lot of professionals that have to work on the transaction. You’re going to have lawyers involved, you have accountants involved, you might have actuaries involved to validate the pension plans. You’re going to have engineer if it’s a physical asset, you’re going to have engineers looking at every single one of the professionals hired to work on the transaction is university educated and professionally designated. You don’t bring in an engineer that does not have their accreditation, a testing that they know what they’re doing. Same thing with the lawyer and accountant, yet the person building the forecast, the FP&A a person, the modeler could be anyone. I mean especially if you’re working at a bank and you’re building the model for the project, you could have anyone. It might be a recent history grad who was put on a team and was said, Hey, you’re going to build a model and that’s it.
And there’s no way to know. So we want our profession of forecasting, planning, modeling to be elevated to the same playing, same plane, same level of playing field and rigor as all these other professions that I mentioned a moment ago.
Paul Barnhurst:
And I love that example and how you explain that. Look, if you’re an engineer, you gotta be qualified. If you’re a lawyer, you gotta be qualified If you’re an accountant. But an FP&A in financial modeling, you, some people get zero training and it’s like, here, just build this model because you have a finance degree. It’s like, well I know finance concepts. That’s totally different than building a model. I mean, Can it help me? Sure is there’s some relation, but it goes so much deeper to that. And that’s why as I teach Excel courses, one of the things I always teach is design principles.
Ian Schnoor:
Oh love it
Paul Barnhurst:
I start by thinking about how should you design a model? How do tables and data work? I mean, sometimes I’ll spend the first hour, hour and a half of these courses and not even talk about a formula. Okay, that’s great. I could teach a formulas. But if you don’t, don’t learn how to design, you’re always going to struggle. And so that’s why I came up with some design principles and it really started to preach that a lot more because it’s what I felt like I was always missing. I could build some complex models but they were hard to follow. I didn’t know what I was doing because I didn’t realize the value of stepping back and designing that process.
Ian Schnoor:
I will tell you the I’ve, I’ve probably built over a hundred models in my career. I’ve seen thousands. The number one reason why models, why spreadsheet models fail. The number one reason and there’s not even a close second. The number one reason is poor design. Full stop it is poor design. It always comes down to poor design. People will call me all the time and say, listen, I’m struggling with this thing and this complication and this calculation and then pulling the data and I’m using this tool and it’s crazy long and it’s wrapping around five times. And I’m like, stop. That’s not your problem. The problem is you designed it terribly. If you had redesigned it in a much more elegant and organized way, you wouldn’t need any of that. And so it always comes down to effective flow, data flow and data design.
Paul Barnhurst:
I appreciate you sharing that. And so that kind of leads to my next question. I was going to ask, what do you see as the most important principles for learning modeling? And it sounds like it starts with design and data flow.
Ian Schnoor:
Well, yeah. It starts with a lot of things. One of the reasons I love modeling and a lot of people do, is modeling is it requires a multidisciplinary skillset. So modeling is kind of the hub. It’s right in the center of a lot of different disciplines. If you wanna be a good modeler, and again, let’s just get this right on the table, a model is just a forecast. All we’re trying to do is build, for the most part a forecasting tool. Either of a company or a business line or a division or a product. We’re just building some sort of a forecasting tool so that we can make a critical decision off that tool. It sounds really simple, but to be a good model builder, you need a lot of different skills. You need to have good design skills and understand data flow, data design, data communication.
I always tell people a good model has to tell a story. And I think you wanna talk about that later. It’s critical that a model tell a strong story. But you need to have good excel skills or I mean most finance and accounting professionals are still using Excel, but some are some using sheets or other spreadsheets. You need to have strong spreadsheet skills. You need to have good accounting skills. You don’t need to be an accountant. I teach accounting, I think about accounting every day, but I am not a professional, professionally certified accountant. You need to have good finance skills because you’re going to be using your model to make decisions. You need to have good business skills good judgment skills. You need to understand how companies work and how they operate. So there’s a lot of different disciplines you gotta bring to bear to package up into this one cohesive discipline, if you will. And that’s what I like about it is there’s always something to do. But yes, design is right at the front
Paul Barnhurst:
And that makes a lot of sense that there’s a lot of different areas, like you said, right? I mean design’s important, but as you mentioned, you gotta know how to work a spreadsheet. Most of the time that’s Excel. But sure, it could be sheets or whatever other spreadsheets are out there. You have to understand accounting, you have to be an accountant? No, but you gotta understand the basics of accounting. You gotta understand the three statements and finances and how the financial ratios and different things within of course, financial knowledge. And then you also have to know how to work with people to be able to validate assumptions and think through the logic of a model because you know can build the most beautiful model in the world, but if the assumptions right don’t make sense, it’s not going to be any good for making a decision or it’s going to lead to the wrong decision.
Ian Schnoor:
And by the way, people sometimes have this huge, they’re misguided and happen to think that a good modeler is someone who sits in a corner in a dark room all day long for 12 hours banging out on a spreadsheet ungroomed and unkempt. However they wanna think about that.
Paul Barnhurst:
You probably have a beard like this and they’re not just kidding.
Ian Schnoor:
No. And nothing could be further from the truth. The reality is a good modeler is spending, I would say maybe half their time at most in front of their spreadsheet. The rest of it requires people skills. You’re asking questions, you’re collecting data, you’re pushing back, you’re challenging people, you’re presenting feedback, you’re listening. It is really multidisciplinary in terms of not only the skills you need but how you engage with people. So that’s why, again, I love it and many people do. What I’ll also say is I think it’s important to clarify for your listeners, because a lot of them of course are working in FP&A and and planning. There’s really only two ways that I’ve ever seen all, I mean, I’m going to say most medium and large companies are involved in planning and forecasting. Maybe I won’t say all, but I’m sure your listeners are all working at companies where they do forecasting and planning.
Really super small businesses sometimes don’t, but they should. But there’s two major approaches. There’s what people, companies either use spreadsheet based tools, Excel or some other spreadsheet. Or, they’ll use what I refer to is and I don’t mean this pejoratively, but it sometimes comes across that way. It’s sort of black box software. Companies will use black box FP&A forecasting tools. So some of your listeners might be thinking, well I don’t actually do this because our forecasting at our company is done entirely on a piece of software. And some of them are great, don’t get me wrong. Some of them are fantastic, but I really truly believe in my heart that anybody working in FP&A needs to know how to build best in class beautiful spreadsheet based models. Because there will always come a time when you have to do a one-off when your boss says, you know what, yes, I know we’re using software X to forecast our business, but we’re interested in looking at an acquisition or we wanna look at some investing $20 million in some organic change and can you model up what it would look like if we invest and change this structure and play with that and try to make a decision to make this more efficient?
Whatever the case is, there’s always scenarios where you need to do one-offs, analyses, evaluate things that are not part of your software realm and they shouldn’t be because they’re just evaluating potential alternatives. And it’s really critical for people to have the comfort in their comfort zone to say, yeah, great. Let me build something. Let’s get it going and I’ll show it to you.
Paul Barnhurst:
I agree a hundred percent with you that you have to be able to do that. Even if it’s like you mentioned a one-off and ad hoc, doesn’t matter what tech stack you have, being able to use a spreadsheet and being able to build a model is just table stakes for finance people. Now does everybody have to be able to build an LBO model or this type of model or that? No, there’s different types. I will admit until two years ago, I had never built an integrated three statement model. One of the reasons I wanted do the FMI is I’d worked for big companies where focus was P&L, right? Some KPIs. Yes. And CapEx and we weren’t building a balance sheet. Amex wasn’t asking me to figure out the cash flow, right? American Express or some other companies I worked for. And so the first time I did it, I remember spending three, four hours trying to get the balance sheet to balance because I hadn’t pulled something through, right? But I still had knew, I had known about modeling and knew how to model. And I think that’s the key is you have to have some basic skills and I think three statement is where most people should start. I think it’s a great skill to have and I would’ve liked to have it a lot earlier in my career.
Ian Schnoor:
That’s why our level one AFM exam is exactly that. Because as you said, in the world of modeling, step one is your ability to build. If anyone ever says, by the way, if anyone ever says, do you have good modeling skills? What they really mean is can you build an integrated three statement model that is the table stakes. That’s step one. Everything beyond that is next level. Everything else grows and builds off that. And I don’t remember if I mentioned this, I might have, I was planning to, I don’t know if I said this earlier. The big shift that we saw in the industry that I mentioned this was that recruiters and companies started asking for this on job postings. So I was starting, and I think I got off on a tangent, whereas when I started in my career, they just said, sure, we’ll hire you.
But now, and maybe you can relate to this in some of your listeners can so many roles and employers and companies will say when they, they’ll say, well, we were looking for a CPA or a CFA or an MBA or some other accountant. But we also want people who have proven modeling skills. Right on job postings is they’ll say, university students tell me all the time. They say, oh yeah, every day we see job postings and says we’re looking for this and this and we want people who have strong financial modeling skills and that’s new. You and I did not see that when we graduated. Nobody put that on job postings. But some of your listeners can probably relate. If your listeners are looking for different types of jobs or to elevate their career, they might be seeing job postings that say, no, you need strong modeling skills before we will hire you.
And so what a lot of companies will do in an interview is they’ll try to ask, they don’t really know how to evaluate it. They’ll try and ask questions to see how much you’ve done or they might give you a test. Those tests are always flawed. They might give you a two hour test in the office and they’re usually kind of not very detailed or they might give you a 24 hour take home test. I hear this all the time. Build a model for over the weekend, which is great, but you don’t actually know that the person did it. I mean, they say they did it, but they might have had their sister or their brother help them or their father, you don’t know. So having this rigorous industry accreditation we think is going to help to solve some of that.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, I was really excited when I first learned about it. I learned about it from Lance Rubin originally. He was one, I had brought it up and I know one of the models he had mentioned in one of the examples came from him that sometimes shared, and I think I know which one it is. I remember him mentioning it. I’m like, yeah, I think I’ve reviewed and tried to build that same model as I was studying. That’s, we had him on the show probably about 10 episodes ago now. So a few months ago, and he talked a little bit about the FMI. So that’s great. I mean, I’m a big proponent of having those type of certifications and FMI is really the only one I know of that’s truly a financial modeling certification. I mean, like you said, you have CFA, you have cpa, you have cma, you have Corporate Finance Institute does a good job of courses, but there’s not like a certification test at the end where you go through a rigorous process. And so I think it’s great that we finally have something out there to help validate the people have a base level for modeling.
Ian Schnoor
Well, I’ll be honest, this is what I do all day every day. I am not aware of anything in the world. I don’t think there’s anything. And I would tell you if there was, there’s nothing in the world. There’s no organization in the world offering rigorous independent accreditation exams. As I said, the only thing that you’ll find out there is companies that are training firms and they’ll say, we’re a training firm by our courses, and when you finish, we’ll do a multiple choice test. We’ll do something gentle and we’ll give you our badge. That’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with that. But it is not a true validation of the person’s skills. Our exams.Covid was actually very good for us because you’re right. Sorry by the way, apologies that we canceled the one exam sitting that you were scheduled for. Our exams used to be in person.
We had 30 testing centers all over the world, and people would travel to go to a testing center just like all the accounting andCFA institutes would do. We made the decision quickly during COVID and said, no, we we’re not going to wait for COVID to end. We are going to make the massive shift and try to go virtual. And it took us admittedly a couple sittings to get it right, but now people sit the exam from home. We have a amazing AI-based proctoring tool that you have to use. So we get a full four hour recording of you and a full four hour recording of your screen so our graders can watch it. And if there’s anything that you’re doing that’s against the rules it gets flagged and we can see it and we can say, wait a second, we can see Paul’s looking at another model, he’s using another model to help him that that’s not going to work. And you know what? People don’t do that. They don’t. They don’t because they don’t, it’s so rare to see people even trying to cheat. They just don’t know that there’s no way to, there’s really no way to do it. So yeah, it’s legit when someone passes, they’ve passed
And yeah, no, I believe that. I know you had gone virtual and that’s a great story. But yeah, I happened to be the one, the May one and I totally got it. I was supposed to travel somewhere else and it was all good. It is what it is.
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So one more thing before we jump into a little bit about modeling, telling a story. So just in general for FP&A, and I think you’ve kind of answered this, but I’ll ask it specifically. If there was one piece of advice you would offer to FP&A community, so people doing budgeting and forecasting ad hoc analysis that would improve the overall level of financial modeling and that corporate finance FP&A realm, what would it be?
Yeah, I think I looked at this ties into where you said you want to go next, which is around storytelling. And what I would encourage people to think about is I know a lot of FP&A professionals, we’ve got some on our team. I know that there at times is a tendency to really dive into the weeds and to get very granular and very detailed and there’s nothing wrong with that by the way. It is very important to be able to dive into the weeds and understand detail. However, it’s really important that, I’m not sure if this is encouraged enough in the discipline in the field of FP&A, is to step back at times and to think about it holistically as a communication tool. Often it’s funny, I will often ask people in a class, what do you think the most, if you had to say, if you had to guess what I would say is maybe the most important skill in as a good model or what do you think?
I ask people if they know what I would say because I’ve shared with you a good model that needs to have good accounting skills, good excel skills, good finance skills, and it’s all true. But maybe the most important of them all, I think certainly if you wanna elevate your career and get to the next level is communication skills. The ability to communicate clearly. And what I would always say is there’s no point building an FP&A tool. There’s no point building a model. If someone can’t review it, if they can’t review it, read it, understand it and make a decision off it, don’t bother. Why bother if no one can actually use it to make critical business decisions? Which means there’s gotta be an intermediary step getting from the model to this communication gap where we share our ideas, tell the story and make the audience go, wow, that’s incredible. That’s exactly right. Let’s move in this direction because I get it. And that’s I think incumbent on the modeler to be able to do that. That’s your job as the modeler.
Paul Barnhurst
So that great. I agree. Being able to tell the story and communicating. I’ve been on both ends of that times where I have done a poor job of communicating and I’ve seen the impact of that and times when I feel like it’s done well. And again, seeing the benefit of that and how it drives things forward. So practically, how do you go about doing that? How do you go from building a model and maybe have a great model to making sure you’re telling the story that you’re really providing that communication that the business needs so that they don’t feel like they’re looking at just a big black box.
Ian Schnoor:
It has to do being reflective and thinking about, first of all, who’s your audience? Who needs to see it? And is there perhaps a disconnect between the level of detail you have, which is okay versus whose needs certain levels of detail. We’ll talk about model flow. I want to be able to communicate and present my tool, my model to people. And there are lots of things you can do to become a stronger communicator, but maybe the best way is let the model tell your story for you. If the model is laid out clearly, you can let the model do the work for you to communicate. And that’s the one that set it up and designed it. So as an example, I always ask people, have you ever built a PowerPoint deck? Have you ever had to build a presentation?
Surely many of your listeners will have built PowerPoint decks, built presentation slides. Well of course when you do that, your brain automatically flicks into Mode. I’m in presentation mode. And you think about, well, okay, I need a copper page, I need to have my agenda slide. Nobody ever builds a PowerPoint slide and the very first slide you see is a page with 12 bullets. Nobody would do that. Nobody would do that. Everybody thinks, well I need a cover page and I need to have an agenda or a table of contents and then I probably should have an executive summary. People who build presentations, what they do is they storyboard, they think about what will the table of contents look like because I’m thinking about flow, how do I wanna tell my story? And it’s natural. You make your table of contents and then you have 20 blank slides and you start to slowly populate them and you build them and you start to say, does it weave together?
That’s how we think when we know we have to tell a story. But when people are told now you’re going to build the model, they think, oh, I’m just going to figure out how this number works in row 8,000. No, it’s same thing someone’s going to wanna communicate. So what that means is optimal model flow should feel like a presentation. Let’s have an executive summary, let’s have a nice cover on it. All of our models would have a cover. It makes it feel like a financial presentation, an executive summary, because I promise you the very first thing your boss or your client wants to know is what’s the answer? What’s the answer to the problem? Now the answer that your direct supervisor might want might be very different than what the VP wants, which also might be very different than what the CEO wants.
Make sure you know what people need. If you’re going to go to meetings with them, what do they want to see? Get them excited, create confidence. And then of course this is just the way humans brains think. And I’m not making up modeling here, we’re just trying to map modeling to the way people think. So people wanna know what’s the answer. Okay? And your job is to figure out what does each recipient want for them is the answer. But I promise you, as soon as you show anybody an answer with a model, I promise you I will bet a million dollars. The next thing that they always wanna know is, how’d you get there? How did you get those answers? What key decisions did you make to get those answers? And so you need to lay out all your thoughts and it’s really nice. Imagine if you can flip the page and say, that’s beautiful, thanks for that question.
Let’s flip the page because the next page walks you through all the key assumptions. High level. Now if it’s the CEO maybe it’s one page of high assumptions. If it’s a cost person that you’re a vp, maybe they want see all the very detailed costs around a certain area or a certain function. Mm-hmm. know what you’re doing. The CEO doesn’t wanna see 25 pages of detailed assumptions around costs. They wanna see the average labor cost and the average energy cost, whatever. So think about that and then think about through the way that you map out and communicate your story page by page so that they say, wow, I’m so comfortable with this tool, I’m ready to make a decision.
Paul Barnhurst:
I love the way you laid that out there. And what I really appreciate is just thinking about your audience as well. Always having a cover page, having an executive summary, thinking about who’s going to see the assumptions? Is this someone at a strategic level or what they care about is those three or four key drivers and that’s it. Or is this somebody that wants to get into the details and make sure your capital assumptions are right or your pricing assumptions or whatever those may be. And so laying out a model that allows you to easily meet the needs of your audience is so important. And that that’s part I’ve struggled with a lot in my career and it’s taken a long time to get better and realize the value of having an assumption sheet. So having it laid out in a good format that you can easily be like, hey, I can change this and we can see what happens and there’s a place to look instead of, oh well let me go to page 12. Oh wait, no, no, no, I put that one here. Oh I hard coded that one. And before you know it,
Ian Schnoor:
What people don’t realize is that even if just going down that path of what you said, showing your boss, oh no, let’s go to Row 800. Nope, sorry, sorry. Let’s flip the tab and let’s go down to Row. No that’s not where it is. Let’s flip the tab. No, that’s in row 750. Even if you are perfectly accurate and all those numbers are correct, you are losing confidence by the second without knowing it because it does not convey confidence when you’re hopping and jumping and skipping and flying all over. So I tell people, even if it’s with your direct supervisor, even if it’s the next person up, have for them one output page that they like to see the key things and make it look beautiful and invest some time. So when you meet with them every time you can say, these are the things we’re going to talk about today. These are the key numbers that we’re dealing with. Let’s go through it. I always tell people when you think about a model, the most time consuming, rigorous, detailed part of any model is what we call the engine. And I like to make an analogy that a good financial forecasting tool is like a car. I’m going to guess you have a car, Paul, is that a fair assumption? You probably drive
Paul Barnhurst:
I do
Ian Schnoor:
I’m going to. Yes you do. And I’m going to guess that most of your listeners drive a car or have a car or have been in a car. And my always like to ask, if you owned a car how often do you pop the hood and look at the engine and play with it? I’m going to guess not very often. You certainly don’t pop the hood every day in your car. I’m going to guess.
Paul Barnhurst:
No,
Ian Schnoor:
You would not be very happy with your car if you had to pop the hood and readjust some cables and move around some wires and then get underneath it and do something else before you can start the car. That’s how most models feel. People have to play around and mess around with them before they can use them. The engine is the most detailed, important part of the car. But you never go there. You never look at it. Same thing with a model. There needs to be someone who knows how to play with the engine and get the engine working. That doesn’t mean your boss should ever need to go there or see it or look at it. They just want the answers. They wanna prove that it’s working. How do you know your car engine’s working well? Because when you put your foot on the accelerator, it’s going to tell you you’re going 40 miles an hour or 50 or 60 miles an hour. And if you get stopped by the police and they say you were going 90 miles an hour. Your going to, oh wow, I guess my speedometer wasn’t working. I guess the car wasn’t doing what it was supposed to be doing, but you trust that it was working. And you can do similar things with a model. You know that if you make certain changes you expect to see certain results. And that doesn’t mean you have to crawl through every formula if you’re the boss to prove that.
Paul Barnhurst:
I like the car analogy I hadn’t heard that one that I’d often use is I compare it to a house. How many of you ever built a house without using an architect and designing blueprints and having a contractor in? Yet we hand the model to somebody that has no blueprints, has never built one before, and expect them to just throw it together and wonder why, you know, have problems like with the car, maybe it doesn’t work. So I like that analogy. I hadn’t heard that one. That’s a really good one. Especially the part about we don’t need a look at aan engine model to know it’s working. I mean, look at an engine to know it’s working right?
Ian Schnoor:
You do not need to look at the engine of a car to know it’s working. You’ll know it’s working because you’re not going to hear it because it’s going to be humming smoothly. You’re going to know because it’s going to tell you if something’s wrong. There are flags, there are check lights. You are going to know when it’s low on gas, when it’s low on oil and it will be correct about that. You’re going to know because you’re going to roughly monitor your speed. If you’re going at 60 miles an hour and you’re kind of moving with the rest of the traffic, chances are you’re actually moving at 60. So there’s ways to know if the engine’s working other than looking at the engine and same thing. Yeah, I use the house analogy when I talk about design, when I talk about model design and planning, that’s when it’s important to, because you’re right, a good financial model is just a virtual representation of any physical structure.
And you know, put a group of people together and say, good, here’s a piece of land. Go put up a building or a go put up a shed. Even for a shed or a garage. Go to say a group people here, let’s make a contest. You have a weekend to build a shed. I can guarantee you most people that were half intelligent would take out a piece of paper and they would jot out, they would take a measuring tape and they would measure and they would make a plan and they would say, I need a concrete pad. And they would measure some and what do we need in terms of, they would do that even for half an hour. And yet people do that when it comes to physical models and yet when it comes to virtual models, they don’t, they just start building. And I tell people, if you do that, it’s going to look exactly like the house would look if you had no architectural plan, if you just showed up and started building it, you’re going to get the same thing.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, I a agree with you and I appreciate, like I said, both those examples. So question for you. obviously you’ve seen thousands of models, you’ve built hundreds yourself. You have been in many organizations, done many training. How many companies, organizations out there, especially in corporate kind of fp and a corporate finance, do you think have good processes in place and are doing modeling? Right? You have a feel for that?
Ian Schnoor:
I, it’s tough because I certainly don’t wanna be disparaging. Let’s just say that I’ve never encountered a company where I left thinking, wow, you guys are nailing it. This is perfect. You do not need any support like you guys, this is perfect. I’ve never felt that way. Even companies that get fed up and frustrated with forecast spreadsheet based forecasting often have made a decision at some point of the years and they throw up their hands, they forget it. We’re no longer doing spreadsheets, we’re moving to black box And what that does is it allows them to maybe more smoothly do just their annual budgeting and their forecasting. And I get that that’s okay, but what we talked about, that’s only half the battle. That doesn’t solve the need of all the other things we talk.
You can’t get rid of spreadsheets, not possible. Because a spreadsheet is just a piece of paper. Getting rid of a spreadsheet is like saying get rid of thinking because you need your spreadsheet to do back of the envelope analysis, one-off analysis. And I can tell you even if the actual budgeting process is perfect, that’s fine, that’s great. But there are lots of other things FP&A professionals have to do to evaluate other possibilities, other options or bolt on or strategic changes. We’re going to invest 20 million to improve our facilities. We’re going to do one of three different ways. Let’s explore those options and evaluate them before we make the changes. Well, you’re not going to do that in your black box FP&A tool if probably doesn’t have the flexibility and you don’t wanna build that in before you’ve made a decision. So most organizations that I’ve ever worked with, all the ones I’ve ever worked with, have a lot of room to improve their processes, their design, their structure around forecast. And again, many of the largest ones still do use Excel or spreadsheets for their annual planning as well. But there is lots that they can put in place to improve decision making, flow clarity minimizing errors, minimizing. We see lots that can be done. I’ve never, again, never encountered any company where I was like, wow, you guys are perfect. You don’t need any help. Never.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yep. So safe to say, nobody’s nailed it from day one. We all have opportunity to improve and there’s a wide range in there of that opportunity.
Ian Schnoor:
I believe so.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, that makes sense. And that would fit with what I’ve seen in companies. There’s always room to improve. So if a company’s struggling, they’re really having a hard time getting consistency in their modeling and the process throughout their financial org, what would be the advice you would offer them? Where should they start?
Ian Schnoor:
One thing that I have found works really well is to actually have a bit of an internal committee structure. The problem is what happens in medium and large companies is everyone goes off in a different direction. It’s like an octopus with eight legs and then never come back and talk to each other and everyone runs off. I was working with a multi-billion dollar fertilizer company, a chemicals company with multiple divisions, and I was close with the head of FP&A and she had eight people running models for the company. A bunch of them were running long-term, the long range, long-term planning models and some of them were doing the short term models. And what happened is that, and you’ve seen this over time, they all kind of got together on day one and discussed what they wanted and that was fine.
But over time there was degradation and over time there were deviations. And a year down the road you’d have no idea that they were all part of the same organization. They were. And some of them were great and some of the models were awful and required that one person to update it, otherwise it was impossible to update it. And so what I’ve often found is having a committee structure is really helpful. Again, I am not a fan of templates. I do not, I would never like to impose that someone must use a template. They sometimes have their place for certain things, but when it comes to forecasting, I do believe if I’m modeling one division, there might be different dynamics than the division you\re responsible for modeling, so I need to have some flexibility. However, the design discipline, the structure can be the same. So having checks and balances, having an overall approved corporate wide approach, overall design tabs, even things like tab structure to know that what we’re going to do at our organization is we’re going to have a cover, we’re going to have our executive summary, we’re going to have our assumptions, we’re going to put all of our financial statements in one spot, and then we’re going to build our supporting calculations and we’re always going to do it in this order and we’re going to try and capture these big ideas for each one so that if the CEO or the CFO was looking at two of them, they could say, yeah, yeah, I get it.
They clearly, they come from the same company. We often encourage little simple things like really only one person should own any model. And I actually am a big fan of models being locked and protected and only the person who actually owns it should be able to make the real change. Just the number of people who’ve told me that they have a model because in a company, everything lives on a shared drive. And so someone goes in the VP, goes in late one night, makes some changes, saves three other versions of it, hard codes, a bunch of numbers. It’s hard for the model owner to feel a sense of responsibility. I don’t know, Paul’s just going to come in and screw it up tomorrow anyway, so when the model is accessible to a lot of people, that’s a disaster. So I think having ownership, pride of ownership, a sense of what the design and flow structure should look like. Even simple things like fonts and coloring because that makes a sense of consistency. Maybe everyone agrees that when we present the senior leadership team, our executive summary pages look like this for our own internal teams. There are more and there’s more . And then there should be meetings every couple months, every quarter. Are the models still adhering to those standards? Are they to not the standards I don’t need, but to that, to the general approach, the discipline,
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah. If I’m hearing you there, it sounds like you’re recommending in general have a committee have a general approach and some high level guidelines that people should follow. You don’t need an exact template. You don’t need to specify, okay, row seven should always be this, right? But you do need to have the checks and balances. You need to have a committee, you need to have a general flow that allows people to understand what’s going on. And you need ownership in the process.
Ian Schnoor
Ownership, yes. And a committee can come together and collectively design what So point is if I’m going into that company and I open up all six models, I should say, yeah, they all come from the same company. And I might even guess they were all built by the same person, even though they weren’t. . There can be the same way that most companies now have a PowerPoint template. That, but again, the word template does doesn’t mean unchangeable. It just means if I’m going to start building a PowerPoint deck and I work at a certain company, I don’t start from a white piece of paper and I slap the logo on wherever I want. I don’t pick whatever font I want. I download the template and I know that if there’s a page with tables, it’ll look like this and that the executive summary looks like this and there’s a general order. And I believe that that same adherence to discipline should come in the form of our forecasting tools.
Paul Barnhurst:
Agree. That makes sense to me. Appreciate that answer. So I know we’re getting close to end of our time here, so we just have a few more questions for you. Really enjoyed the conversation and I love hearing how you think about modeling and just all the experience you have there. I think there’s a lot of great advice for our audience, but now we’re going to kind of switch to a question. This is a question we ask everybody a little more of a personal question. What is something unique about you that you can share with our audience, something they wouldn’t find online?
Ian Schnoor:
All right, well something unique, some personal stuff. I like, especially during Covid and we’re all wrapped up and cooped up. I mean I really value clearing my head and getting some head space and not working all the time. I work a lot. I’m sure you and most of your listeners. But definitely to clear my head. So that fitness is really important to me. I try to do, I used to not work out a lot, but for me, I’ve discovered that fitness, the most important reason I do fitness is because it impacts my state of mind. My mental sense. I don’t get edgy, I don’t get worked up If I’ve had a chance to get in, whether it’s some weight training or a run or some activity, some rigorous activity will absolutely go such a long way to improving my mental state. So I really like to be active and fit even though I sit on my butt for hours and hours and hours at a time. So fitness is one. Another thing that’s a bit odd doesn’t quite fit with my personality of those who know me. But I decided years ago that I wanted to try taking up kite surfing so I can now I dunno if you’ve ever done that or seen that yourself. I don’t know if they do that.
Paul Barnhurst:
I’ve seen it. I haven’t done it, but I’ve seen it.
Ian Schnoor:
It’s fun. It’s one of the most incredible things that I’ve done is one of the few activities. It’s very difficult. It was very difficult for me to learn. It probably wouldn’t be for most people, but I found it very difficult to learn. And what it did is when I’m doing it, it it’s like almost nothing else. I truly can understand and appreciate. When people talk about a sense of flow, a flow state, when I’m kite surfing my brain cannot think of anything else. A lot of people, my brain wanders, your mind wanders. We’re all looking at our phone and our screen and we’re on the call and we’re doing at the same time. It’s an activity for me that requires such enormous concentration and focus that it really puts me in to state where it’s just my brain is locked in and it’s amazing. Time flies and it’s great. So I like to do that. I like to play piano. So those are some things that I do to when I’m not modeling or thinking about modeling .
Paul Barnhurst:
Cool. I appreciate that. I can understand the fitness and the difference it makes for the body. And I know you’re talking about a flow. I’ve experienced that not many times, but I have experienced that with activity and it’s amazing when you just have that flow and time just seems like it’s almost stopped not from modeling a sense.
Yeah, right. Not from modeling. I assume you got it from something.
No, it was actually, it was one of the times I, I’ve run a couple marathons. It was one of the marathons I ran for about, about two-thirds of the race. I was in a flow where just running beautifully and then I hit the famous wall at mile 20 and it was a struggle for those last six miles.
For a good part of it, I was running probably the best I’d ever ran in my life. It was pretty amazing.
Ian Schnoor:
Nice.
Paul Barnhurst:
Yeah, it was fun. So as you know this podcast, so it’s sponsored by Data Rails, which is an FP&A tool that is built around Excel. So they’re kind of model is embrace Excel. Let us bring something to that. So one of the questions we like to ask everybody is what their favorite Excel formula is.
Ian Schnoor:
Huh?
Paul Barnhurst:
So we’ll ask you that one.
Ian Schnoor:
So what’s funny is I’ve, I’ve been teaching Excel for 20 years and I love teaching Excel and thinking about Excel and I, and I’ve used and love using most, there’s a lot of new functions in the last year or so, a whole ton of new functions are come out and keep coming out with the way 365 works. So I haven’t used all of them as rigorously, but really it’s funny, I’m going to have to be careful here because I have taught thousands of students not to have a a personal favorite. What I encourage, because so often when I go teach a class, someone will say, oh yeah, I always tell people never use these features, always use this. This one’s better than that one. And I’ll say no, it’s a palette of nonsense. They’re all good. You need to pick the best tool for your situation.
The hardest thing to do in Excel is identify a problem and figure out what’s their best tool to solve it as simply as possible. It’s like walking into a garage. Imagine you share a garage with someone who was an expert woodworker and they had hundreds and hundreds of beautiful tools all over the walls and they knew how to use themall. That that means when they see a woodworking problem, they pick the perfect tool to solve that issue. Whereas me, I know how to use a screwdriver. So every time I encounter a problem all I can do is pick up my screwdriver because that’s all I have. I like simple tools though. So if I can solve a problem with something like in the LookUp family, if I can use a choose function, I will because it’s simple and everyone understands it and it’s clean instead of a nested index. Those are great index offset indirect functions are fantastic, but I try to pick the tools that will keep simple so that I can explain it to anyone and they’ll get it.
Paul Barnhurst:
That is a really good answer. I like that point of just use whatever is the most simple means, the easiest for people to understand because yes, you get almost like it’s a religion V look up, index match and I like to joke, no X look up and power query. But you know, just get that kind of back and forth. No look up, no use, choose. And it’s like use what makes sense for the job, understands the pro and cons of the different formulas and the audience you’re working with. Because there’s times you may use a V lookup, right when, yeah, you could used an index max or XLookup, maybe it was better. But your audience, there’s different reasons you use different formulas and I think of course understanding is really important.
Ian Schnoor:
Like to joke with people when people say that answer index match, I say, oh, are index and match married? Do they have to go together? Why? Everyone says to me, oh I could use V lookup, H lookup choose or index match. I’m like, no, you don’t need to combine index match. You can do a VLookup Match, you can do an Offset match. People say that it tells me they don’t really understand what the functions are doing and how they relate to each other. Pick the best tool that’s simplest for your particular problem.
Paul Barnhurst:
I agree with that. So last question here and we ask everyone this, what advice would you offer for someone starting their career today? And in this case case we’re going to ask you, usually we ask ’em a little bit about FP&A , but for you, I wanna ask you a advice. Would you give them so they could be good at financial modeling if they’re starting their career today and they wanted to be a good financial modeler, the one piece of advice you’d give them
Ian Schnoor:
To, you’re talking to people that a lot of your listeners are going to have an accounting background, they’re going to be skilled in accounting, they’re going to have come through that, which is great. It’s a great foundation to become skilled in financial modeling. I would say you need to get a little bit out of your comfort zone. I have met lots of accountants over the years who’ve said, no, no, I’m going to be a good I, I’m going to be a good modeler because I’m an accountant so it means I have to be a good modeler and that that’s actually not true. To be a good modeler what I would say is you need to be very open to ideas, open to change. It is a discipline that will evolve with you your entire career. There’s always something new to learn and you need to be open to the idea of taking your great accounting foundation and converting it into tools that will allow you to tell stories and make optimal why we’re not, by the way, we’re not telling stories because we wanna tell stories.
These are not children’s bedtime stories. We’re trying to tell stories so people can make decisions. So you can elevate your career so that you can be, because people will say, wow, you’re fantastic at distilling down all this incredible detail, ignoring what we don’t need, showing me what I do need, laying it out in a way that’s clear, telling me a clean story and I am ready to make a decision. We need you, we can’t go anywhere. That is an incredible skill. So it’s a great slingshot to elevate your career if you think of it as much more than a technical skill. So get really good at Excel, get good at thinking about modeling design, data flow, model flow and push the boundaries and you will make great decisions and be in high demand.
Paul Barnhurst:
Great advice there. And I agree if you learn to be able to summarize it down, distill it, be open, tell that story, you’ll be in high demand because there’s nothing more valuable than a finance person that can really relay those numbers in simple terms and relate to the business and help inform and drive better decision making, which is ultimately the goal of all this.
Ian Schnoor:
You’ve seen it is so often they can’t do it so often someone’s crunching numbers but there’s no way to distill it or clarify it or communicate it to the decision makers. And that’s where there’s a gap and massive frustration. So someone who can bridge that gap is so far ahead of most other finance, accounting and FP&A professionals.
Paul Barnhurst:
Agreed. Well I’ve thoroughly enjoyed having you on the show. I’m sure I could keep talking for a while about this, but I know we’re at that point here. So last question for you. If somebody wants to follow you, learn more about you, where should they go? Where would be the best place to learn?
Ian Schnoor:
Yeah, great. Actually I’ve been posting a fair bit on LinkedIn. I just posted, I’ve been, I’m in the middle of a series I’m doing on LinkedIn, a video series on the top 10 reasons a balance sheet doesn’t balance. So I don’t know if you saw any of those but got.
Paul Barnhurst:
I have seen a little bit of it.
Ian Schnoor:
Okay, well there’s really only in all my years of teaching, there’s really only 10 reasons why a balance sheet doesn’t balance. I’m by the way, a huge fan of people building balance sheets. Even if you never show them to anyone because it’s a great check. It shows you understand the flow of all the accounting data and it’s a great check that your model’s working if you get it working well. But people don’t like them cuz they sometimes don’t balance and they get frustrated. So I’m doing a 10 part video series. Today was video five, follow me on LinkedIn and you can find my email addresses at the Financial Modeling Institute. I am not hard to find again, Ian Schoor. Not difficult to find LinkedIn works.
Paul Barnhurst:
Well, thank you so much for being on the show, Ian. I’ve really enjoyed having you and we’ll excited to share this with the audience. Just a couple reminders for our audience real quick, if you want CPE credit for this, you can go to earmark, download their app and there’ll be a couple questions you can answer and you can get credit for this episode. And also, if you enjoy fp and a today, please leave us a review on whatever platform you listen to. Spotify, apple, Google, wherever you go to listen to this. And thanks again, Ian, for being on the show.
Ian Schnoor:
Paul, it’s been a thrill to be here. Thank you so much. I really enjoyed that and look forward to catching up with you again.