Antonio Reza is the Head of Finance for Google Cloud Consulting in Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). In this episode he reveals the FP&A life and lessons he has learned over the past 14 years working in finance and strategy at Google, Microsoft, and GE. He brings experiences across 10 different countries leading teams across the globe spanning different industries (he also speaks four languages). In this episode he reveals:
- How Getting into GE’s finance and FP&A training was life-changing
- Why so many tech people like himself are inspired to get into finance
- Country specific differences in finance that he has learnt over his career
- Google in the midst of AI revolution and how we used AI at Microsoft for our commercial forecasting
- How AI in finance is still about automation – with insights the next frontier for FP&A
- How FP&A at Google and Microsoft FP&A teams are set up
- Why “Walking the Shop” remains core to his career in finance
- How the biggest companies in the world manage real-time data
- Despite the technological avalanche storytelling and persuasion is fundamental at the top tech companies
- Why FP&A needs to focus on snapshots vs “real-time” dashboards
- FP&A Need to Ask Why x5 Times: The Secret of great storytelling
- Why I am focused on grasping and applying the economic picture in my work
- My biggest challenges in moving from individual contributor to manager early in my career
- How a “failure” led to my team and I staying in the office for 56 hours trying to close an audit – and the people skills I learnt along the way
- Why Despite working at Google, Excel still bosses Google Sheets for finance teams
Follow Antonio at X (Formerly Twitter) 48k Followers https://twitter.com/theantonioreza
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/theantonioreza/
Subscribe to Antoniio’s Newsletter Money & Robots https://www.theantonioreza.com/
Further Reading
WSJ: Google Finance Head: Anything That Can Be Automated, We Strive to Automate
The Pyramid Principle:Logic in Writing and Thinking by Barbara Minto
Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It; Chris Voss
Full transcript
Glenn Hopper:
Welcome to FP&AToday, I’m your host, Glenn Hopper. Our guest today is the head of finance for Google Cloud Consulting in Europe, middle East, and Africa. He previously served in finance leadership roles at Microsoft and GE. Antonio Reza is a seasoned finance and technology professional with a remarkably diverse background, spending multiple industries and countries with more than a decade of experience leading projects in areas such as financial audits, supply chain excellence, mergers and acquisitions, integration and commercial effectiveness. He has honed his expertise across sectors, including oil and gas, healthcare, financial services, and software. Antonio has a true global perspective on business and finance, having worked in eight different countries and becoming fluent in an impressive four languages. Join me in welcoming Antonio Reza to the program. Antonio, it’s great to have you,
Antonio Reza:
Nate. Thanks for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Glenn Hopper:
I love your background, very diverse, and some, some big logos in there too. So maybe tell me a little bit about your background. Take me through your career and how you got to some of your recent roles including Google and Microsoft.
Antonio Reza:
Sure. I studied finance and accounting in university. And then I graduated in 2008 when all the financial crisis hit. And we couldn’t find any jobs. And what I ended up doing was starting a company with my, with my mother who, you know, is an entrepreneur at heart. And we started a small card manufacturing company, and we operated it for about 18 months, and we sold it after 18 months for a small profit to a, a bigger manufacturer. So I dabbled my feet a little bit on, on the entrepreneurial world. After that, I always wanted to work in a multi multinational company. And at the moment, GE was the poster child of excellence in terms of finance training. And I moved to Mexico City. I’m actually Mexican out of origin, born and raised. And I got a job at this rotational program called the F&P Financial Management Program.
And I did two years there where you rotate every six months in a different business unit. And my fourth rotation, I got to go to Brazil, and I worked in the oil and gas industry, and that was a lot of fun. And then I moved into the internal audit group, which was, in reality was an internal audit group and a consulting group. So it was a bit of a mix between what you would do typically on a -K-P-M-G and a McKinsey, for example, because we actually had to find the issues and then help the business solve it. So that was very interesting from a finance skillset perspective. I stayed three years there, and that’s where I got to go to about 10 countries around the world, different business units. I met my wife there, who’s French, and I ended up transferring to Paris and got more roles in the commercial space, commercial finance, and then eventually a little bit of well actually quite a lot of integration M&Aintegration because GE bought a company called Alstom, which was the French jewel.
And that was a lot of work on synergies and how do you materialize those synergies. And then I ended up moving to another business, which was renewables, and that was my last role at ge. I am a, a pretty geek at heart. I build my computers. I’ve always liked technology. So then I, my prior boss at GE became the CFO of Microsoft for the French subsidiary, and she invited me over to take a role with, with her team. And I worked on the Azure space to try and grow market in the French, in the, you know, gain market in French, in the French market from AWS, who, who’s the main competitor. And then after that, Google came calling up to two years of that. And then I’ve been there for about almost three years now at Google Cloud.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah, that’s great. And that’s, that’s really you know, new host here. So that’s one of my favorite things about hosting this podcast is I’m talking to so many, like-minded people, and I love hearing geek at heart, building your own computers. I mean, I, I did the same. And back in the day, thinking about programming and BASIC, I’m dating myself here. This would’ve been in the eighties, sitting in front of my Commodore Vic 20. And it’s funny though, all these tech people who end up going in finance, there’s like a, some kind of correlation there. I’m not sure what it is, but <laugh>,
Antonio Reza:
I think it’s the numbers, because I think you like detail in a computer. Think about it. You have to understand when you put together, even if it’s for, for gaming, not to geek here a little bit, but you have to think about the CPU and what’s the clock rate and how much ram and how much the GPU do you choose Nvidia, like, you like details, which I think translate very well into spreadsheets and cost levers and profit levers and things like that. So I think there’s a natural, some sort of a synergy there if you don’t go to engineering. Right?
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. Yeah. And actually I started in mechanical engineering, and I, the calculus was too much for me. I prefer business calculus to engineering calculus. Yeah. I, I’m, I’m seeing a common theme here. And I think it’s that there’s like this there’s no gray area, you know, it’s with numbers, you just, it’s black and white. It’s binary. It’s just <laugh>. And it, it’s kind of nice to have that sort of resolution, whether it’s a, you know, a program works or it doesn’t hardware build works or it doesn’t. And the financials, you know, the trial balance balances or it doesn’t, you’ve moved so much in your career and you’ve done finance and accounting work in so many different countries. I mean, does it, I’m assuming, you know, you’re just, I’m assuming your IFRS and gap kind of going back and forth a little bit, does it, how did, how did all the moving and the different exposures working in different, we’ll get to the industries later, but thinking about just country specific differences, how has that shaped your sort of approach to finance and accounting, if at all?
Antonio Reza:
So we always operated in US GAAP, but you always have this statutory requirement. And sometimes you had like, I wouldn’t say like two ledgers, but you would’ve, you know, you have different set of accounts when you deal with US capital, different set of accounts for statutory, right? So I never dabbled in that. I think more on the perspective from working in different countries, it’s the culture of how people treat certain things, sense of urgency, attention to detail. A lot of the advanced or more advanced finance, let’s say work environments, like if you work in the US or you work in, in, in the UK or or Europe, it’s more discipline. There’s more substantiation for completeness, accuracy of accounts, things like that. When you went, when I got to go to Angola or Brazil or anyone in Latin America, that was different. It was more of a, you know, the bare minimum to substantiate the accounts.
It was, it was difficult to get a, a sense of how, how, how do you use this? What do you use this account for? How do you even do business in this type of thing? How do we concessions? Like, all that type of stuff just changes from country to country. And you have to understand those cultural, you know, exceptions that happen. ’cause Not, even though it’s an American company, we don’t operate, you know, the American way in a Brazilian market or in a OLA market, right? There’s different things there. I got to see a JV in Angola, which also you see the pressure from the partner. So that was, that was interesting. I think gives you more perspective on how business should be and a global view of what are some of the opportunities or what, what are some of the disadvantages and what can each market learn from each other through you. Right. That’s
Glenn Hopper:
Cool. You’ve worked for such big international companies at GE Microsoft, and now Google. And I’m I’m an AI geek, so I’m immediately gonna go straight into Google and where you are right now. And I’d love to hear about just sort of the mood and the focus and the environment at Google, just in the midst of all the whirlwind around AI right now. I mean, what’s for you guys? I mean, I know you’re not you know, writing machine learning algorithms, but just across the company, what do you feel is the, what’s the sense of the mood and the, and the focus of everyone there right now? You
Antonio Reza:
Feel a little bit of prioritization on using these tools, at least getting your feet wet on, on understanding how to prompt how to ask a question to Gemini, for example, because there is a learning curve on, you know, you can ask a question to Gemini or ChatGPT or perplexity, whatever tool you use in there, but it might actually not be insightful. It might be a repository of knowledge, but it’s not insightful. It doesn’t generate insights yet. Right. I think in terms of machine learning, I got to see that more closely when I was at Microsoft, when the hype wasn’t that big yet. We actually used it for our commercial forecasting process where revenue, we used to do it, you know, in an Excel sheet based out of the inputs from the, the commercial team, things like that. And Microsoft actually figured out how to use statistical analysis through machine learning and things like that in the context of a SaaS business, right?
Where you have new deals, renewals and then this comes of recurring revenue, right? So it’s very statistical. So they used all of that data across the world, across all the products to forecast what the revenue was gonna be. And to me, that was fantastic because it just added another layer of evidence of what the forecast should be, rather than relying on the commercial person to tell you, Hey, this is, this is what’s gonna land. And you said, Y because historically your close rates have been x and the re the renewal rates that were coming and the amount of deals that were coming, it’s x discounting historically has been X. They just gave you so much more data to challenge assumptions. And I really liked that. And that was used by the whole finance team back in the day in Microsoft, which wasn’t that long ago.
It was like, you know, four years ago, four or five years ago. I think now we’re entering more in the era of how do you use generative AI to create insights? And I think that’s still in finance a little bit on the long way, I think, I feel it’s more about automation still more than anything that generating insights. I think the only function that I think can use that more intense is, for example, investor relations to think of very difficult questions that analysts can get, because you can ingest all those questions into a model and then ask, ask me a question similar to this. Whereas in an FP&A role, it’s a little harder because then you would have to ingest data on, you know, commercial deals on discounts and all that stuff, that, that’s still not there because there’s not an enterprise solution yet. Right? I think ChatGPT announced one, but it’s still very early days.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. And that’s you know, I think about sort of the black box nature in generative AI right now. There are so many issues you know, know that you have to address for you know, hallucinations results that are not repeatable and, you know, getting different. I mean, you can’t, like we said earlier, numbers are binary. They’re either right or wrong. There’s not, not a gray area in there. And I think about, you know, if I’m a public company, CFO or, or head of finance, I’m not gonna sign off on something that I just threw into a black box and got the results out, right? I mean, we’re at, I say we’re at trust, but verify, but that trust is still kind of low. I mean, I, it’s, it’s funny for me to say that because I’m like, you know, I’m, I’m a huge evangelist for AI and for the potential of it, but we just have to know where we are in the stage of it right now.
And I guess, you know, to that end, and I know you can’t, you know, speak on, on behalf of, of Google, and there’s probably a lot that you can’t talk about it there. So I’m gonna throw this question out. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> in two ways. I guess you know, we could look at it as how AI is being approached and, and I think you’ve maybe kind of already addressed this, but how it’s being approached by the finance department at Google and generative and machine learning, or in general, like what are some potential applications you could see where we could use generative ai, you know, if not immediately today, in the near future,
Antonio Reza:
Like I said, automation is a big one. How can you reduce a lot of the, and I go back to this Microsoft example, right? Which is also something that, you know, I think there was a Wall Street Journal article, one of the VPs of finance at Google explained that. But the whole automation process of how can you take the work that is very manual and done by a lot of people and takes a lot of time, like close or even a forecast and make it so much shorter and with less resource, right? And that’s probably the best application because it just frees up a lot of time to focus on more value added things, right? To be in those meetings with the commercial people or, or, or the suppliers, the purchasing department, just to understand more things of how the business actually operates instead of you spending so much time on the closing process.
So I think that’s one. I think another one that I really liked, and that was from my time at GE, is RPA sort of robotic process automation. So back then we used to work with UiPath, this company that, you know, worked, there was a lot of GE alumni that went to that company from the IT side and the finance side. So a lot of work was on automating the closing process, the cash reconciliations, things like that. I think those are great use cases. I think on machine learning is going to facilitate more things like how do you forecast more accurately, again, using statistics, things like that.
I do see a world where some of the finance people are walking that, you know, line or certain with that line of, do you learn SQL at Google? Do you do learn SQL at Amazon? You do learn sql, and then you go a little bit to the right and then do you learn a little bit of Python, right?
Because if you learn Python, sql and then, you know, which is a little bit of the, of the main core languages for ML and ai, you got a very powerful finance person.
The other thing I’ve seen is, you know, this there’s some noise around copilot already with some of the CFOs on the Microsoft side. Something as simple as generating a pivot, a chart that goes into representation that also just like saves a ton of time, right? Especially finance people at, at a certain senior level. They just spend so much time on slides on the commentary and things like that. So the commentary, for example, if you are looking, especially historically, if the narrative is good and the, and you have this personality of the AI, well, because you can prompt that personality to be a sound like an inverse relation pitch, blah, blah, blah. That’s also super useful, I think. So those are some of the use cases that I’ve seen, or I think they’re gonna be good.
Glenn Hopper:
It’s funny because even, even even a year ago, if somebody were coming into FP&A and they said, okay, I’ve, I’ve got my
Master’s in finance, this is my background. What do I need to do to supercharge my career? I immediately would’ve said SQL and Python and data science. And now though I still think data science is, is very important. Because it’s, you know, just the extension of of, of bi. What I’ve been amazed with generative AI is we’ve been talking about democratization and of data for a while, but with generative AI, you could, it’s almost democratization of data science, because now the barrier to entry where if you can write SQL prompts in natural language, and you don’t have to know Python because your generative AI tool is writing it under the hood, you can play with the same tools, but it’s, it’s dangerous. Just like if somebody were coming into FP&A and didn’t know, you know, the difference between cost of goods sold and expenses or whatever, you have to have that domain expertise.
So I think about how you’re gonna add more value is just like, not every data scientist is a coder, but you have to understand the models and the algorithms and you know, what you’re looking for that this is classification, this is prediction, whatever the the case is. But it, it feels like now you get the domain expertise in finance and accounting. You understand the principles of data science, so you know what questions to ask, but you don’t have to be a great coder anymore. It’s gonna be, I mean, maybe we’re not a hundred percent there, but you and I could go on Gemini right now and, you know, have it write code to build a really cool little Python app that you know, reviewed financial statements or something.
Antonio Reza:
That one is one that I’ve been struggling and debating a lot with friends, because even the Nvidia CEO came out saying that people should not learn to code. I dunno if you see if you saw that, but he was like, Hey, people should not learn to code anymore. Even though, you know, it seems like the, the push from schools and parents and everybody’s like, learn to code. And he was actually saying, you shouldn’t, I still think you should, because a lot of the things, and again, if you like that type of thing, right? If you don’t like it, then don’t. But for example, I do SQL scripts on my job right now, right? And it’s something that you cannot ask a model to write for you because you need to understand how a dataset works, how does it look in a table even, you know, something so deep in knowledge as which table do you need to use to retrieve the data, right?
And then I think that coding helps you, at least it has helped me understand how to think, right? Because you’re thinking in this sort of algorithmic way or decision tree, and, and you don’t need to know SQL to do that. You can even do it in Excel. A lot of people do it in Excel or sheets from an EF statement, that’s already an algorithm. So I think it’s important to understand that. And then, yeah, no data science principles, but I don’t think that the finance teams, or at least all the, all the members of the finance team should do that, right? Because I think it’s more important to understand, like you said, what, how, what does an income statement do? What are the accounts in there? What are the costs about the profit levels? And then you’re talking at the analyst level, right? This, the data scientists.
Another thing I remember when I was working with data scientists at GE, 50% if not more of their time is actually spent on cleaning the data. So you don’t, you know, depends on the people, but like, do you wanna really spend, if you work five days a week, two and a half days, just cleaning data to then figure out the model, and then you’re gonna get more feedback, you’re gonna have to ingest more data, clean it up. So I think the conversation is a little bit obsessed right now with, ah, you know, you learn, learn how to code and finance professionals. And I’m like, yeah, at a analyst level, I see that to get a job and become more competitive. But then once you hit manager, let alone the director, that stuff doesn’t matter anymore, right? Because you’re no longer producing that. You’re more taking care of what is the team saying?
What is the, the right message that I need to tell my, you know, manager, director, investors, things like that. And then a lot of influencing, right? The role of the finance person is a little bit like the referee of a match. You know, sales wants this, but then, you know, purchasing wants that, and then you, it’s an economy. You have a trade off. So then that skill of negotiating and influencing people and being a referee, I think it’s a more of a important skillset there than, you know, going in the rabbit hole and learning Python and SQL and all that stuff. Again, that’s my, my opinion.
Glenn Hopper:
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It’s interesting because I talk to so many different companies of all sizes. I’m always interested in hearing what the makeup of kind of the FP&A team is at various companies. Because when you talk about a manager and a director and what you’re doing, you know, at a much smaller company, you may have someone may have a CFO title, but they’re really, maybe they’re still doing bank recs. I don’t, you know, probably not. Hopefully not. Yeah, yeah. Got that title. But it’s just, so the, the the different size and scope. And so thinking about a company as big as Google, can you tell me how your FP&A team is set up?
Antonio Reza:
Probably most of the tech companies at that level, but I think you would have, if you think about the CFO office, you’ll have like the investor relations department, the treasury department, right? So that’s very niche you could say. Then the FP&A team, typically what I’ve seen is you always have a product team, somebody who’s really planning, forecasting, and analyzing the product. And whether you’re thinking about someone like Amazon or Google or Microsoft that have different products from cloud to workspace or M365 or retail, in the case of Amazon, right? Somebody’s always analyzing, forecasting and planning for the products. How much money are we gonna get from this product, and how much cost allocation are we gonna do for this product? Those, I think personally, those are one of the sexiest jobs, even though sometimes they tend to be more of a cost analysis rather than a revenue type commercial finance role.
Those roles typically sit at the HQ level, typically in the states, but they have a lot of power and a lot of weight because they dictate a lot of the yeah, where, where the trajectory of the company’s gonna go. Then you would have like a go to market team, which typically me sitting in France, that’s what I saw when I was sitting in, in, in Azure for Microsoft, France. And now at Google Cloud you have this business partner, right? That’s the new term that goes with the sales person or the sales director works a lot with marketing where they are just trying to get as much volume as possible. And those jobs are fun because you get to see a lot of the commercial process, you get commercial acumen, and if you really, really, really like it, you start understanding things like, you know, deal economics and, you know, should we give out these concessions, payment plans, investment programs.
There’s a lot of stuff that of, for example, because we want them to, and technology typically want them to adopt a product, but the customer might be reticent to do that. You have this investment program where you give them money or credits in exchange to signing a bigger deal, right? So you would, you would typically have that go to market team and, and then there’s other more like shared services, right? That help you out with the closing and things. And then you have the controllership team that’s more on the close and the statutory reporting, things like that. I would say those are the, the two main verticals, product and go to market. And then you have what we, you would call the central finance team that is more of, you know, dealing with analytics and the portfolio value, more like creating the whole package at the whole company level, and then you would slice and dice. But I would say those are the main things that I’ve seen from Microsoft, Google, and then from some friends that I have at Amazon, that’s more or less how the big three work and probably Meta at works the same way.
Glenn Hopper:
Yeah. And that’s, I so love business partnering now because I think I’m old. So <laugh>, when I started in in finance, it was, it was almost, you know, finance and accounting were in this ivory tower where it was just, we don’t care what the widgets are, we’re just counting them and given our reports and we defined our KPIs two years ago or whatever the case is, and we’re just running with these and kind of operating outside of the business. But as, I think probably as data’s gotten more available, the sort of expectations of real-time information, the, the whole emergence of business partnering first off, it’s huge for the business because you can get so many more insights and you may find data that will inform whether it’s your forecasts or your analysis or whatever, but by being embedded with those teams so it’s great for the business, but I also think it’s huge for development when you can actually get out of that ivory tower of finance and accounting and see how the actual processes work. I mean, do you, has that been a part of your career? Have you been you know, more like broadly involved in understanding, or I guess the easiest way to say that was, has the bulk of your career been in this kind of business partnering business partnering mode? Or have you been in places also where it’s just, we’re just in finance and accounting, we’re doing our, our thing?
Antonio Reza:
No, to be honest, I haven’t had a, like an HQ role that you just sit there. Even so at GE they really pushed you and even forced you to quote unquote walk the shop because it was a huge industrial business, right? Except for financial services, when they have GE capital. And even then, we always, always, always had to sit as close as possible to the operations, to the factory. So for you to plan something, right, you have to understand what the shop was doing and the flow of product, right? So the, and, and back then when I started, GA was more on the, on the cost side, right? Cost accounting, things like that. And I think cost accounting is like huge deal, but not a sex, not the sexiest job to have. But then you go through that and it’s great because you see raw materials, you have to understand purchasing, you need to understand logistics, you know, you need to understand reception and, and warehousing.
Then from, and that’s walking the shop, then whip working process. You have to understand how are they booking hours on costs how are the materials being booked? How are you scrapping, how is quality? All that stuff. You need to understand the, I remember all the whiteboards in the, in the factory, understand lead time, all, all those things. So you could plan, you know, when am I gonna have a shortage of material so that I can, I can forecast that. And then finally, you know, finished goods. I remember like, how do we forecast finished goods? How much is gonna get out the door? You had to learn about ankle turns. So understand the, you know, the, the transfer of risk so that you could recognize revenue. So all my roles at GE were like that, like very close to the shops and in factories. So we didn’t used to call it business partner back then, but yeah.
And then the later stages of my career, that was been more on the commercial side because that’s, I think that’s where the action is, or, or you feel more of an understanding what the market is saying or what you can pulse the market better, right? Because you, you hear the, through the voice of the sales guy who is always optimistic, right? They always just wanna sell.
But then again, one of the big learnings from GE was that you have to have this external focus gene where, you know, I hear something from the sales guy, but if, if you put your ear a little bit to the ground and you start hearing what are the investor calls saying for each of the customers that you have in the company, and then you can triangulate that to see, hey, I don’t think it makes sense signing this deal because these guys are probably gonna go bankrupt based on what the analyst question were.
Right? And sometimes that’s context that the seller doesn’t have. So I think that type of role I also enjoyed, I’ve never been, to be honest with you on a maybe one, but on a role that has been purely, you know, planning and analysis far away from operations. I typically don’t like those roles because I think, like you said, it’s very siloed. However, the irony of those roles is that you’re closer to the chain of command, so you’re more visible, therefore, promotions tend to happen in that space. So it’s a bit of a trade off of what do you wanna do with your career?
Glenn Hopper:
Great points on that. And I’m thinking about, you know, we’ve gotten so much broader and but also the expectation. So, you know, you can have the corporate reporting up there and, and doing, you know, sort of aggregating the data from all these other groups, and then you get a lot more visibility because the people downstream are, are not the ones that are communicating it. I think about how much FP&A has changed just over the last, I don’t know, say 10 to 15 years, just because there’s so much more data right now, but there’s also more and more of an expectation of realtime information for everything. And, you know, shifting from sort of that rear view mirror look, which I know we’ve been there, especially at the biggest companies in the world where, you know, there is a lot more real time data, but it’s also like the expectations are higher as well. So what do you see as kind of maybe the challenges and opportunities for FP& right now? Either, either at an individual employee level as far as their training and development and, and where they should be focused right now, or even as, as a field in general or at at companies?
Antonio Reza:
I think that’s never going to change, but storytelling is something that they, they don’t harp on when you start your career at this. They did with me, but I think it’s because again, GE’s a very unique school, or was very unique school. They used to tell us everything’s a story and you had to do all these, like, you know, produce a massive amount of amount of slides similar to like McKinsey, right? And I, even though I hate slides, I think it’s a great way to understand how, how do you tell a story, right? And then when you couple that with an understanding of what the, the, the audience wants, right? And, and that by, by, by that I mean you’re talking to an executive, like he’s not gonna go through the whole spiel of I did X and Y and Z, therefore this, they just wanna know this is a result.
And then if they have time, they go, oh, I know that that’s the result because of x, I did X in the Y and Z, right? So it’s super counterintuitive to the scientific method that they teach you at school. So you come out of school and then, you know, the formulas, everything, and how to do a financial analysis and black schools model, whatever, when you don’t use that in real life, rarely. And you’re used to telling stories like that, I did this because that’s, that’s how you’re programed to do it. And I remember one of my executive managers showed me this book, and it’s like the bible for the consultant world, which is called the Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto. And it just, it just made it so much easier. And you understand, oh, so this is how you need to communicate in the corporate world, fast structured, but you know, foundations at, at every layer.
I think that’s one that’s never gonna change. And I think it’s something that the earlier you can do it in your career, the better off you are. I think the other one is how to influence people. It’s, it’s, it’s crazy. How do you convince them to do something? I wish I could have read more books. Like Never Split the Difference that they teach you how you know that this guy who’s a, I think FBI or CIA guy that dealing with really high stakes situations and how do you control the emotions and then how do you convince people, right? Because for example, there’s a lot of tensions in budgets and planning and things like that. People, it’s their money, how can I spend my money? And sometimes you need to negotiate guys, like we, we only have this amount of capital, this is how it’s allocated, and yes, there’s a stretch here and there’s a stretch there, and you cannot travel, whatever.
That’s always gonna happen. So how do you deal with those types of situations? I think that is way more important than understanding, you know, super deep expertise in, in an, in accounting or IRS or US capital, things like that.
I think that’s always, that’s never gonna change those two for in, in my opinion. And I think it’s going to require more like just being in general more understanding of, you could say, yeah, a little bit of, of data and things like that. But then I, I’m still not quite sure because there’s a lot of data. The question is do people really use it? I have no idea how many times it’s all this’s a new dashboard. And like you said, it’s live data, whatever. I don’t know if I believe in the live data thing to be honest, because do you think an executive is gonna be the whole day looking at the dashboard, refreshing things?
No, they should be spending time with customers, spending time with their teams, spending time drafting a proposal. So in reality, snapshots work better, right? And then, you know, that rule that you say when you talk to someone and you leave with the last impression of the last, you know, there, there’s only like so much thing that you can fit in your head, so you fit either the, the six minute worth of content of an hour call. So that executive is gonna be overwhelmed with the amount of details, especially this dashboard has like, you know, charts and graphs and whatever. So I think very snapshot relevant content of like, these are the three metrics that you need to know of, this is what we’re doing to move the needle and that’s it. And then the ex executives, and then he can do his thing and then do actions that will drive those three metrics, right? So I I, I’m not entirely sure if a new dashboard all the time is the best answer. And I think that if PA has become obsessed with dashboards and data and all that stuff, and I think it’s, it’s good to some extent, but we could be doing something else.
The problem with corporations when they do that is that sometimes that’s a mandate that comes from very high above. So the people that are analysts or managers don’t have a say on whether the, the dashboard doesn’t get built or not. So, you
Glenn Hopper:
Know, it’s interesting as, as you were walking through that it, it really reminded me of, so, so earlier we’re talking about how, you know, finance and technology that, that it’s sort of the same mindset is drawn to both of them. But now, so we’re, we’re in kind of a right brain, left brain situation where you have to be, you know, have the very logical mind that can construct all these numbers and put everything together and, and make sure everything’s correct. But then the ask is also to be able to communicate it and to, to be able to tell that story and everything. So I think, and I think data science and FP&A are very similar in this way is, like you said, you’ve got all this data. It’s, it’s it, you know, to keep it from becoming like billboards, you drive by on the interstate, it’s refining that data into something that’s meaningful.
And then, but then you’re also kind of an editor in that, you know, you know the story you want to tell, and you can kind of get into that what lies, damn lies in statistics mode where you can make the numbers. It’s sort of the Malcolm Gladwell thing. You can make the numbers say whatever you want ’em to. So having that sort of editorial mind to know your audience, but also to be reporting the truth, whatever it is, but to be able to convey it in a way that’s, you know, different ways to deliver good news and bad news or whatever, but that you’re not trying to cover anything up, but that you’ve gotta, depending on, you know, whether it’s investor relations or management or whichever group you’re talking to, that they understand it and that you’re accurately representing it. So it’s really kind of a cool marriage of both sides of the brain, I guess in, in what we do.
Antonio Reza:
Yeah, we used to have this hack that was given by his name was Jeff Bornstein. He was the CFO at GE at some point. And he would say always it ask why five times. That’s the way to tell a story. Okay? Like, we grew 10%, why? Okay we got more volume in customers. Okay, why? Becuase it was a one off event with one customer, and they paid a bunch money, okay? And why did we have a one-off event? Because we gave them a discount. Why did we give them a discount? Because there’s no controls in place to control it. So then you do realize that the problem was not the growth, it was that you lack a control and having salespeople, you know, reigned in and giving discounts. So all, and you know, I think that’s a, a lost art and people need to do that more often, whether you’re in finance or not.
But the other day, my, my wife just started a new job and she’s in finance too, and she was telling me, ah, the culture is very different to from GE. She actually stayed longer than me than at G. And she was saying, yeah, people sometimes write, you know, oh, there was a 600 K variance in controllership and the commentary was buried up because of x movement in, in the entity. But when you need to pitch that to someone, an EVP or SVP level context and, and storytelling, like human being type of thing, is that’s what matters. And that’s what you remember, right? Not the movement in the account.
Glenn Hopper:
I’m really loving talking to you because I can, you know, you can just sense your sort of your, your passion and interest in not just doing the basics of FP&A, but your, your deeper focus on it, realizing the storytelling and how to get down to the answers. And clearly, you, you read a lot on it. What’s kind of top of mind for you right now? What are you trying, are, are you trying to learn it or master anything new or where’s your focus right now for development, to
Antonio Reza:
Be honest with you, just more economics, more than something finance or niche or anything like that. I think that back to that storytelling point there’s a lot of context that needs to be given because of what happened with COVID, because of what’s happening with AI, right? How are we losing jobs? And when you look at it from a, an enterprise level, a single enterprise level, it’s very hard to miss what’s going on in the outside. And typically, one thing I’ve seen is that finance people are very inward looking, right? The data that you use is probably 80% or 90% of the time is internal. Your customer data, your cost data, your revenue data. But what’s happening on the outside is something that either you don’t have access to because it’s expensive. You need to buy, you know, analysis report from Goldman Sachs, whatever, but you can have these signals from, from the news or, or, or from, you know, studies or something like that.
And in the case of big companies typically have like an, an, an economist team, and you can get the resources from that. But really understanding economics in a deeper level, I think it’s a good toolkit to have, right? Like, do you understand what drives prices? If, if we think about a, I feel like a company’s an economy in itself, right? It’s a bunch of capital that needs to be allocated, but that capital has an opportunity cost, right? It can be used in different ways. So how do you make sure that you allocate in the right way? I think that’s a good skill to have and to master, and we don’t pay enough attention to it. So why, you know, how is inflation going to impact the product, right? Like the manufacturing cost. And you can know that like very high level well, price of rising, like deeply, what does it mean, right?
In terms of the, the whole economic context, the the job losses upskilling, right? The one, I remember that I heard this crazy statistic, one that software engineers, because I work in tech, their skillset lifespan is 18 months. So they need to constantly upskill themselves because in 18 months there’s something new, and if they don’t know how to use it, they’re already obsolete. So that to me was like, wow, and why? And then you see that, you know how so many tools or if you think about how many programming languages there used to be, and now you have plenty, right? You have Python, sql, C plus, plus, Ruby REOs, JavaScript, it’s insane. And then now they have to learn whatever to do AI and ml. So the upskilling thing is, is crazy. How is the economy being affected because of Covid? Like I said, that that was a huge thing, right?
And, and how is capital flowing through that? I think that’s a great skill to have, to have that context for storytelling, especially when you work in a global business. And you have to explain why did France do better than Germany or the, than the us or why are things, again, back to the US centric culture for corporations? Why is the strategy that’s working in the US not working in France? And I can tell you in many places, GE markets and Google, sometimes people didn’t understand that, hey, France has very strict labor law, so you cannot fire people here. You have to give a three month notice for you to quit your job. So even if you do a restructuring plan, you cannot fire people in two weeks. You have to wait. So there’s all these nuances, cultural nuances and economic nuances that you need to understand, I think, for, for, so that that’s a priority for me.
And the other one, yeah, they say AI think, right? How do you understand the impact that it’s going to have? The, I bought recently this book from, I can’t remember his last name. I, I just remember his first name is Mustafa, but he’s the new AI leader for Microsoft. He came up with a book called the the Coming Wave, and he explains how this is like the fourth big wave of technology, right? How, and he tells the story of how the industrial revolution was won the printing press, like all those things. And then now how is AI going to, is the new wave and how dangerous it is to become a phenomenal because of what it means. Does it need to be regulated or actually the word he used is contain it. So that is critical for anybody who’s in tech and even anybody who is interested in AI, I think that’s gonna be something that’s gonna impact all of us. It’s a good idea to, to learn about it, of what does it mean really for everything, right? Even for your kids. Like what, what should they study in the future, right? I think those are the two things that I would say my, my attention is gonna, so leading
Glenn Hopper:
The economics part is I, I feel like, you know, in FP&A, you’re always looking for what levers to pull and what things are, you know, trying to find these correlations. And I know during COVID was addicted to the federal Reserve, the Fred site where you can get all the economic data and they’ve even, they’ve got the Excel plugin, and I was just trying to find <laugh> correlations, you know, to, to the historical to try to figure out what’s going, because it was very hard to forecast through COVID. It was, I, I don’t know what anybody’s doing anywhere and trying to find something that you could grab onto. I wasn’t super successful in that <laugh>.
Antonio Reza:
I don’t think anybody was
Glenn Hopper:
<Laugh>. Yeah, yeah. <Laugh>. What’s kind of the worst or most challenging FP&A experience in your career, or maybe a, a, a big mistake you’ve made and, and, and what you learned from it?
Antonio Reza:
I mean, I wouldn’t say it was related, but I think it was my, my, the, the transition from individual contributor to manager is always hard. And that happened to me in my first promotion, and I couldn’t delegate, number one. And then even the stuff I delegated was wrong to delegate. I think you mentioned this before, right? But trust and verify, that was another thing that you just, either you just, you just trust it. And also, like that’s when you get into these, I had a very bad experience on not being able to manage my team, and things got out of hand. And long story short, we, we ended up, it was an audit. We were late with closing the audit, and we were actually auditing a, a site in Venezuela, and we were late. The internet in Venezuela is not great.
So we actually had to fly back to Houston and we stayed at this office and we didn’t sleep. It was five of us. We didn’t sleep for 56 hours. We actually didn’t go home. We just stayed in the office for 56 hours trying to close the the test work files, the audit, the pages, everything. It was exhausting. And I don’t recommend that, but it was a painful experience that taught me so much about reading people who has good skills, who, I don’t like to say bad skills, but like, who has opportunity to grow needs a little bit more babysitting, right? That doesn’t mean that they’re bad. And how, how do you delegate more effectively to, to get stuff done? I think that’s, those are the big lessons. The other ones just how it impacts your health, right? Like back then I was 25, no, 27.
So yeah, not sleeping, didn’t do any damage whatsoever. If I try to do that now, it, it would destroy me, right? So it’s, it’s also, it teaches you a little bit about, I think most, there’s a trend lately I’ve seen on LinkedIn that I agree with it that you use your twenties to hustle as much as you can to climb up and have a successful career. So in your thirties, you don’t have to be spending nights working, et cetera. So that’s probably one of the, if not the most painful, one of the most painful experiences I had.
Glenn Hopper:
And I’ve got a a million other questions. I feel like we could go all day, but we do try to keep to a timeline here. So maybe we enter a lightning round for the last few, I don’t want to influence your answer here. One thing we always like to ask is, what’s something that not many people know about you? And I did see that you and I both share an interest in filmmaking and triathlon. So not saying that’s what you have to talk about, butwhat’s something that people might not know about you that they couldn’t find online?
Antonio Reza:
So I used to do CrossFit pretty intensely for a good 5, 5, 6 years. I loved it. I, I was literally the guy who woke up at 5:00 AM and went to training sessions, lift it heavy, did a snatch of 120 kilos at some point that probably most people would know at this point. I stopped because I had two kids. And then, you know, it’s just now it’s harder for me to snatch that volume. That’s probably one. And they, I, I did the occasional triathlon sometimes. I’m trying to get back on it, but it’s hard. That sport just requires so much time. So you need to be hyper organized to, to get the swimming in, the biking and the, and the running in.
Glenn Hopper:
Agreed. It’s, yeah. And we’re with, with young kids too, man. <Laugh>. Yeah, <laugh>, just no life outside of work, kids and triathlon training. That’s it. That’s right.
Antonio Reza:
<Laugh>
Glenn Hopper:
Maybe not prioritized in that order, you know, <laugh>. Yeah. okay. So here’s, here’s kind of a bonus question too. So, well, you’ve worked at Microsoft, now you’re at Google. Where do you go? Excel or Google Sheets?
Antonio Reza:
Oh, Excel. 100%. I kid you not, I think Google Sheets makes you lose 50% productivity if you’re like an Excel power user and you’re used to spreadsheets and formulas and you know. Just to give you a perfect example, there’s a keyword shortcut for you to paste the formula from one cell into multiple cells in Excel. And most people will notice you cannot do that on Google Sheets. You actually have to right select the, the cells right click, go to options, paste special, and then pay formula. You cannot do that through a shortcut. That right there is just a waste. Yeah. Yeah. So, but again, you know, to be fair, sheets was not designed for the finance power user, right? It was more designed for, you know, regular users. It’s just simple spreadsheet budgeting, things like that, right? You can’t beat Excel.
Glenn Hopper:
And that leads us right to our favorite question, what is your favorite Excel function and why?
Antonio Reza:
I mean, people are gonna criticize this one, but I think what the moment that I figured out Index Match, I felt like a champion that I didn’t have to use V Lookup. And now probably people are gonna say, ah, you need X lookup is better, whatever, <laugh>. Yeah, sure. But it looks cooler if you have an index match. I think so, yeah. Yeah.
Glenn Hopper:
Like I said, we really could go all day, but we will, we will try to give our, give our listeners some time back in their day and I’d, I’d love to have you on again in the, in the future. And for our listeners, how can people get in touch with you?
Antonio Reza:
You can follow me on TwitterAntonio Reza LinkedIn as well. Same thing at the Antonio Reza. That’s where I typically write. I also have a newsletter called Money and Robots, which is, I talk about AI and finance and things like that. Try to send that, you know, every, every now and then. Those are probably the three, three main places you can find.
Glenn Hopper:
Alright, Antonio, well I really appreciate you coming on the show, all your insights and look forward to talking to you again soon.
Antonio Reza:
Likewise. Thanks for having me. It was great.