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The Art of Finance: Joe Knight on Demystifying Numbers to Empower Businesses
The Art of Finance: Joe Knight on Demystifying Numbers to Empower Businesses
When any finance business partner–a CFO or an FP&A professional–wants their counterpart across the table in marketing, sales or HR, to understand the essentials of numbers, they hand them the business classic, Financial Intelligence, A Manager's Guide to Knowing what the Numbers Really Mean.
First published in 2006, the book has been named in the Top 100 Business Books of all time and remains a word of mouth sensation and continues to sell rapidly nearly two decades on. The classic was authored by former CFO, Joe Knight and Karen Berman. Until her untimely death 10 years ago, Karen, was also a force in engaging all employees in improving a company’s finances
Based on the principles of the book, Joe Knight, Partner and Senior Consultant with the Business Literacy Institute, trains execs at some of the biggest companies in the world including NBCUniversal, Electronic Arts, and McKesson on business partnering and the importance of getting a business to understand and embrace their numbers and works. He has also been a guest on Bob Brinker’s Money Talk show on KABC ratio and CNBC’s Morning Call program.
In addition his engaging keynote addresses, include "The Love affair with EBITDA" and "The Secrets of Finance Revealed". As CFO of Setpoint Companies, he spearheaded the financial education of engineers in this automation and roller coaster company and tells us some of his adventures from this journey and secrets to finance business partnering at the highest level.
In this episode
- The origins of the writing one of the most famous business books
- Why I hated my time in finance at Ford Motor Company and how it shaped my thinking and journey
- Busting the fallacy you shouldn’t share your numbers with your business
- Why actuals are not actual but just a guess (accountants close your ears).
- How business partnering has changed
- The metric of Financial literacy has stayed at 38% in companies for large companies nearly 20 years on
- Why it hurts operators if they don’t understand the numbers
- Focusing on three to five numbers
- My experience with GE and NBC
- The art of using limited data in finance
- Harry Potter roller coasters and what it taught me about the ridiculous focus on EBITDA
- Having seven Kids
- Not being a “numbers” person but a accretive person with numbers
Business Literacy institute: https://www.business-literacy.com/
Contact: mail@business-literacy.com
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When AI Outperformed Financial Analysts – Alex Kim
When AI Outperformed Financial Analysts – Alex Kim
In this episode Glenn Hopper talks to the researcher responsible for the groundbreaking study which found that AI is better at conducting financial analysis than humans. Alex Kim, University of Chicago Booth School of Business, provides a full overview of his findings, methodology and the impact on FP&A, CFOs and finance from the attention-grabbing study “Financial Statement Analysis with Large Language Models”. The analysis, which made headlines across the world, found AI produces a 60% rate of accuracy in predictive financial performance. Human experts’ accuracy tends to fall between 53% and 57%.
In this episode Alex Kim reveals the implications for finance professionals:
- Alex’s finance background – from a Master’s degree in Business Administration to a Accounting and a dual Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Business Administration- to his doctoral and PHD career
- How he self taught himself coding and AI
- Practically how do finance pros take the insights from this paper and use them in their day to day?
- Why the model didn’t do so well with loss-making or startup companies
- Improving on the performance models using a startup company data
- How can you combine AI and Human Intelligence
- What humans can do better than AI in financial forecasting
- Future research projects into information processing for investors
- How to keep up to date on the latest ground breaking research in AI and Finance
- My military experience stationed with US soldiers in South Korea
- My favorite Excel feature ( and why one thing about Excel still cannot be rivaled).
Read the full paper here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4835311
Check out the analyzer for yourself here: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-9P3sIn487-financial-statement-analyzer
Follow Alex Kim on Linkedin Ph.D. Student at the University of Chicago: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgunwookim
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How to get on CFO headhunters’ radars and win your next role
How to get on CFO headhunters’ radars and win your next role
We received a flood of FP&A and CFO questions from our audience (and FP&A Reddit). These and more are put to this this week’s finance headhunter special guests: Nick Gribbon,Senior Partner, Financial Officers Practice at Essenta, and Laura Streather, Consultant, Private Equity at Essenta, who run the finance headhunting section at the global executive search firm. Hear all the behind the scenes anecdotes and secrets to getting your next big FP&A or CFO job.
Connect with Nick Gribbon, Senior Partner, Financial Officers Practice at Essenta
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nick-gribbon-37349b1/
Connect with Laura Streather, Consultant, Private Equity at Essenta
https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-streather-451966137/
- Shortage of Exit Private Equity CFOs and what you will need to fill the role
- How to go from Director FP&A of a large public company to CFO of a PE-backed company
- The importance of demonstrating “behavioral competencies of leadership” to pass the first screening
- Getting exposure to the right industry – how important is it?
- Getting to understand where you are going to have most impact in your next role
- How important is the CPA?
- What is the best way to get on headhunters’ radars?
- What the headhunter interview looks like and is designed to accomplish for you and the recruitment firm?
- The importance of referrals and how to play them to your advantage
- How slow is the CFO job market?
- Is being the CFO at a private equity-backed company right for you?
What can candidates add to CVs to stand out? - Salary bands and how to negotiate the most money
- Salary inflation and how that impacts senior role
- Will moving as CFO from a $100m to $1bn company automatically get you a higher salary?
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Fortune 500 to Startups: Multi-industry FP&A Leader Geetha Ramachandran
Fortune 500 to Startups: Multi-industry FP&A Leader Geetha Ramachandran
Geetha Ramachandran is an FP&A change agent. She helped transform FP&A operations at GE Healthcare and Cummins (“When I walked into the FP&A at GE Healthcare, and I saw the close was eight days, my approach to things is usually I don’t take things just on face value or just because someone has been doing something a particular way).”
Geetha has since swapped supersized companies for startups, most recently leading FP&A at fast-growing businesses including SimpleTire. In her current role as Head of FP&A at New Jersey decor company, Triangle Home Fashions, she continues to propel FP&A as a “co-captain” in the business.
In this episode Geetha reveals:
- Her career journey from PwC auditor to equity research to GE Healthcare
- The CPA in India and why the pass rate is only 10%
- Key FP&A achievements including shrinking number of days of closing from 8 days and spending more time on value added activities
- How to better establish KPIs for departments aligned with business goals
- Presenting KPIs for improving warehouse efficiency at Triangle Home Fashions (pick and pack time, average utilization, inventory turnover, SKUS meeting minimal sales threshold)
- The challenges at multinational manufacturer, Cummins, integrating four companies and restructuring the finance team at a time of low morale
- Doing FP&A at company as fast as Simple Tire vs more mature business
- Her approach at Triangle Home with inventory levels purchased during COVID
- Lessons from two decades in business partnering
Follow Geetha Ramachandran https://www.linkedin.com/in/geetharamachandran201/