From a deep struggle with personal skills to Storytelling Leader
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Welcome to FP&A Today. I'm your host, Glenn Hopper. It's my pleasure today to be speaking with Ron Montero. Ron is a CPA and CMA, as well as a dynamic speaker, trainer, and author with a mission to transform workplaces and inspire people to love what they do. Born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya, Ron moved to Toronto, Canada, where he now calls home. Overcoming challenges with social skills and a severe fear of public speaking, Ron carved out an exceptional career in finance, rising through the ranks at Kraft.

His time there not only honed his technical expertise, but also gave him the confidence to thrive as a leader. In 2021, Ron founded his own company dedicated to helping individuals and teams embrace every day with enthusiasm. Through his engaging keynote speeches and practical training sessions, he's made an impact at major organizations, including Walmart, Kraft Heinz, Blue Rock Therapeutics, and the Four Seasons Hotels.

We're excited to dive into Ron's journey, his insights into FP&A, and how he's helping professionals find purpose and joy in their work. Ron, welcome to the show. Thank you, Glenn. Very excited to be here.

Yeah, I love your story. And I'm really excited to dive in because it's... I think about all the FP&A guests we have. And we have people that pivot from doing corporate FP&A to doing maybe training on FP&A or to something in that realm. And it's interesting how you've taken it and expanded out. And we're going to get into your book, which I didn't even mention in the opening here. So we'll get into all this. So I guess...

Maybe in your own words, kind of walk us through your career journey from starting out in accounting and then going into FP&A and now your current role where you're a speaker and a trainer.

Yeah, thank you for that. So you mentioned I grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, and I moved to Canada, Toronto, when I was a teenager. And the difference, you know, I faced was I in Kenya was very academic. And look, I had great academic skills, but I had very poor social skills. And so I moved into an environment where I frankly, really struggled. I was

very nervous to talk. I had a bit of an accent and it was a struggle. And I carried that struggle out. I mean, it was fine, but like right through high school, university, and I still had built up this fear of public speaking, of communicating. And interestingly enough, I was pretty good at math. So I did my commerce degree. I ended up in an accounting role at Hitachi and it was actually the only job I could get. I really struggled at first.

And I did three years of fundamental accounting, really good job to learn fundamental accounting, but it was still very backroom and I didn't have a chance to

you know, explore public speaking or even just participate much. It was just get the job done and move on. And, you know, great experience. But then I fortunately landed at Kraft Foods and I got this interview and I remembered the director saying, "Hey, Rana, I don't think you're qualified for the role, but I'll take a leap of faith in you." And that was a big turning point in my career because I went into this organization and had a phenomenal development program for finance and all the other functions. Leaders there

as part of their evaluation, were evaluated on how they developed their team. So I walked into this environment accidentally. And they had a great technical skills training program, but they also had a good soft skills program. And so I ended up staying there for 15 years. I probably had seven jobs. I got promoted about five times. And my first role was a corporate finance overheads role. Again, numbers, Excel, just pounded out. And then I got

I got promoted and I got put into an FP&A role. And all of a sudden, I find myself around the table with marketing, sales, supply chain. My very first month, I'm in the president's office presenting a pricing recommendation. And we literally got kicked out of the room. It was a very smart president. He kicked us out. He's like, "You haven't thought of all these things." And it was like a red pen all over the pre-issue. And at the same time, in hindsight, great experience. Obviously, very, very

very much a baptism by fire. What I loved is I could now see my products on shelf. I was starting to build confidence because people appreciated the technical skills I brought to the table. And at the same time, it gave me so many opportunities to start communicating. So I ended up staying there for 15 years. I did FP&A as an analyst, a manager, and a director.

And I did several other roles, supply chain, sales finance. And consumer packaged goods is a brilliant training ground for FP&A because it's so fast moving, the best of acquisitions, all these things. And we get to about 2015 and the company got bought out. And so 3G Capital bought them out.

big transition. I was at a direct level. I actually put up my hand and said, "Look, I'm ready to move on." It was a phenomenal chapter, but it was time to move on. And then I ended up going to a company as the VP of finance for a private company. And so I'll give you an example. With Kraft, it would take you one year to launch a flavor of cream cheese. Regulatory, all these things that... But it was a slow-moving organization. And it was a great organization. So I'm not saying that's bad. But then you move into an entrepreneurial experience where people are

like the owner wants to launch something in three weeks and you're like what is going on or i'd bring him an idea to say hey we should put some tvs in the plant to monitor a result he's like go do it

He's like, take my nephew and go to the Costco and do it. And I was just like, so I was like a kid in a candy store for that experience in the beginning. And then at the same time, I did miss some of the pieces of craft, like some of the processes, the talent, the procedures we had. And so great, great chapter. And then I ended up doing another FP&A role at Campbell's Soup where we closed a plant that was an 87-year-old plant. So seeing a very different side of business. And my last corporate role was Kruger Products where the president of craft

was now the CEO of Kruger and he was just trying to bring a little bit more of that business partnership mindset to finance. So in that role, I actually had a dual responsibility of corporate finance and training for finance. And I ended up loving that training side probably more than my day job. And that's what catapulted me a little bit into this world where I live. And your listeners will know Paul Barnhurst, me and him do a lot of training all over the world. And it brings me a lot of joy to share

the skills I've learned in this FP&A world, as well as in leadership and Excel and all these other things that we play in.

Yeah, that's great. And your background and learning... Whenever I talk to guests like you who've been in the business for so long, I start to draw corollaries to my own experience. And I think about... And I was not... It was about half this amount of time. My first FP&A role, and like you, kind of moved up through the ranks, but was at a telecom company. And we had so much data and I learned so much. Same kind of thing when I came into it. Back then, they weren't...

FP&A wasn't something we said. I was just the finance guy. And it seemed like nothing was defined. Nobody was thinking about soft skills in 2000 or nobody at my company when I was going through that. But seeing when you have that much data and you're at a larger company and you get to work with all that,

So I did that for about seven years. And then I went to startups, very, very early stage startup. My first CFO, I guess that, well, that one wasn't a startup. It was a small business that we were leveraging and getting ready to grow. And that's when they brought me in. But being used to the way things work at that large company, and then at this small company, you're wearing all these hats. But it was, both of them had incredible learnings.

learning associated with them. So, you know, the sort of the mix of background that you bring to it is, you know, I think that's great. And it's certainly in a company as big as Kraft Heinz, I'm sure you could have stayed there another 15 years and learned as much more, but taking that and then applying it to other businesses. And I think having those disparate experiences probably helps you as a trainer to be kind of, you know, not just, we're only talking about the Fortune 100 level companies here, but you've also seen the other side of it as well.

Yeah, like I always tell people like that year and a half that I spent at the private company was probably my most challenging experience, but was probably my best experience. And as you said, it's a compliment, right? I do some university talks and they say, hey, would you do a big company first or a small company? And I say, look, I think both experiences are great. Everybody's different.

So for me, it was a real benefit to start a large, great company like that and then go to the smaller company. Other people might be the reverse, but I totally agree with you. The complement to the two is powerful.

I want to think back to craft because this is the kind of, I feel like the time you were there and the amount of experience you had could probably really informed your training even more because the role that you had at craft, you transformed FP&A into a function that added strategic value. And we think about, and it's really as your career has progressed, I really think that between the, and the kind of stuff you're training on, you know, the soft skills, the business partnering, the storytelling and everything, FP&A has really evolved in,

And I go back to early career and think about where, you know, finance and accounting were just considered this cost center and backward looking and all that. So maybe if you could walk through transforming the FP&A function at Kraft to where it was, you know, where the group is actually adding real strategic value. And if you've got any specific examples or kind of your methodology about that, I'd love to hear about that.

Yeah, I know. So it's interesting. So when I joined back that example, where I was in FP&A and we got kicked out of the presence office, I talked before. So I used to sit on these brand teams, right? So Kraft Singles, for example, a brand that most people recognize. And we used to have our GOST meetings.

So it's get our stuff together, but you can substitute something else for the F in there. And I used to go to there and I was a little confused because I had a very accounting-based background before. And we talked about innovations and flavors and pricing and all these things. And the marketing manager at the time, she would look at me and say, "Ron, what do you think?" And I was a little bit like, "What?" And it was just in the DNA of craft to say FP&A is at the table.

Yes, we'll take the lead on the finance, but it's a well-rounded business. And I'll tell you, my first three days at Kraft was a brilliant orientation where they had an annual orientation for all new members. We went to plants, we went out to sales, we went out to... I went out to a commercial shoot for Philadelphia Cream Cheese. And so you're starting to see a 360 view of the business, not just the spreadsheet. And there was an expectation for finance. Yes, you're getting the privilege of doing that, but we want your opinion. I got to go... One of

One of my very first jobs, my third job at Kraft, I got to go present pricing to a coffee company. And it was a formula-based pricing. It was not subjective. It was objective. And the guy receiving it was still yelling at me. What is going on here? And so then you start understanding, here's what a salesperson goes through, even in a very objective situation. Here's what marketing is doing. They're up all night helping customers.

do the creative. And so for me, I got a brilliant combination of yes, I own the numbers and there's all kinds of numbers and ways to do it. But we were at the table, making decisions, providing input. And look, I slowly got there. At first, I didn't know what to say, but you start saying, "How do I do it?" And then another great example is we had a strap plan for our Chiefs division. So our marketing director set it up full day off site,

finance, you're going to be there and here's your time slot to present your ideas. And at first we're like, whoa, what's going on? What do we do? And we started just doing simple things like let's do a SKU ranking and say, what percent of SKUs, 80, 20, things like that. And what was pretty amazing is the marketing team would look at us and say, wow, we didn't know that. And so you're expected to be at the table, not just tactically, but strategically. And look, throughout my career, lots of examples like that. I went out across Canada presenting the importance of

profit to a sales team that was completely revenue-based. But they didn't care all about the bottom line and they weren't incented on it. So now I've got to go across the country and try to convince them. And so that is one of the things that really built my softball.

So how do you engage an audience that maybe is at a resort and they've got a golf game right after this? And the finance guy gets the last time slot. So it was just a brilliant example. And it was in the DNA of craft, which was so cool. It was, again, a fortunate circumstance that I landed there that completely changed me.

That's incredible. And you think, you know, for a company as big and as old as Kraft is to be that focused on employees and so the training and the exposure and kind of the just the culture around there. I wonder how much of that survived the buyout when at the time that you left if that, you know, if they were able to keep that.

Yeah, no, it's interesting that we were still very busy even before the buyout. And we had a brilliant VP of finance named Brendan Flynn. And many, many leaders have developed because of his vision and the other leaders. But he would always double down on things like training, even in busy times.

And it was a little counterintuitive to say, "Hey, when you're busy, should we cancel all that?" And our engagement scores were off the charts because we continued to do that. So the 3G comes in, they basically cut all of that. And it was, "Hey, how do we get to a prostate number that's way higher?" And short term, it did deliver that, but then it didn't last. And so now what I'm hearing, again, this is my opinion, and what I'm hearing is now they're starting to rebuild a bit of that culture. 3G is out of that world for now.

And so it's now very quick to, I shouldn't say destroy, but to change your culture. And now it's like it takes time to rebuild that muscle, right? Which was pretty amazing. There are a bunch of case studies, Harvard case studies on it. I don't know if you've seen any, and I've got a couple of them actually. That's the level of geek I am that I love reading. It's a brilliant case study. I mean, Warren Buffett was all in on that deal too, right? So that was one where he technically had smeg on his face, and I think he said it, but

But it's a good reminder to us in finance to say, it's not just about cutting the cost. It's about the top line as well, right? Because the downhill slide started with a goodwill write-down, right? And that's what started it all. And then you think about what transpired. So it's such a brilliant case study. I would love to read it.

Yeah, I'll send that over to you. So, you know, I mean, to me, it was a perfect example of, you know, we hear about M&A and, you know, especially in Buffett and sort of a conglomerate kind of business, but 75% of mergers actually destroy value. The spinoffs are better at creating value than mergers are, which if you think about it, I guess it lets each

group get more efficient. But yeah, craft was a lot of problems from the goodwill right down to the culture and everything that happened since. It's a lot of learnings to come from that. One of the things when I talk to people about metrics is, you know, you ask people in corporate finance about whether it's the board deck or the management reporting or what they're putting together. And you'll frequently hear, yeah, every month we put together an 80-page deck with, I don't

charts and graphs and all that. And at that level, it becomes like driving by billboards on the interstate. You just filter it out. It's just information overload. And I think with KPIs, it's important to focus on what are the ones that actually... That are the levers that actually drive business value. And I wonder, with all your time in CPG, whether it's at Kraft or at Campbell, what the key KPIs for CPG are. And then maybe if there are just some

key KPIs that you talk about in your training, just in business in general or things you look at? Yeah, no. And look, I've seen the gamut of like really small scorecards and scorecards where you can barely read. And so I think for me, a couple of examples that worked really well was we had this one document and it was our marketing VP named Dan D'Alessandro, brilliant man. And he used to love what he called the quad chart.

Okay, so it was a picture of one pager. Top left was your volume. How many pounds do you sell each of your brands? And we'd have this for each brand. On the right, your revenue. So in that time, both were important. Bottom left is your investment. So advertising, consumer and trade. And bottom right is your variable margin and your overall profit. And we track them. We'd actually have another report that was linked to that, which was what's your last six years on each brand

in those categories. So what he was looking at, okay, how's my top line doing? How's my bottom line doing? How's my variable margin doing? Which was very important. And how much am I investing in the business? The combination of trade spend, which is what you pay the retailers, and advertising, which is long-term brand building. And so that was a brilliant report. And he actually made t-shirts out of it, right? Because it was a way for him to really gauge the different aspects of the business.

And then the other thing that was quite prevalent in most of my career is it was very P&L focused in CPG. And so we had this one time where we started saying cash is king, the whole mantra. And we actually started changing to show DIOH, days inventory on hand, and DSO, days sales outstanding. And the old term, what gets measured gets managed or gets measured gets done. I saw it in action. I saw salespeople who initially didn't care about DSO

because they didn't know what it meant and they weren't incensed on it, to now they know what it means because we did the education and they're actively going after it instead of some finance person in AR making a call that no one picks up. So again, I think it's incumbent on what you're trying to do as an organization. And I like that quad chart example, but I also like the tactical approach to say you're trying to achieve something.

What are those metrics that are going to help you get there? That are going to get not just finance on board, but the whole organization going towards it.

So you're bringing up something that regular listeners may be annoyed with me talking about this. So I was CFO at several small companies. And it's a lot different at small companies than it is at Kraft. And you can't really get away with this. But I always pushed for... So first off, because I came up through FP&A, I was always hungry for data. I was always trying to find different pieces of information that

could help that I could find correlations that would help me with my forecasting or, you know, and you're doing your analysis, you're trying to explain variants or why, you know, why are cogs creeping up and you're just always in data and you're always trying to look further, you know, up the stream to figure out, you know, what's going on in different parts of the business. And I think this is from starting out in telecom where there was just data on everything from network traffic to customer calls to, you know, all the churn issues and just very data rich environment.

certainly when I was in telecom, we didn't have that. But when I was in small companies, I would push for finance is if you're trusting us to be an impartial reporter on the business's financials, then you should trust us to be the impartial reporter on the rest of the KPIs because if

you know, if you're a department head and you're bonused on customer retention or install timeline or whatever it is, there's a chance you might find a better way to measure whatever metric you're tracking. But have you seen in companies of any size or what do you think about the argument that finance should be the keeper of all, keeper and reporter? You know, they agree upon what they are with the other departments, but the keeper and the reporter of all company KPIs. Yeah.

Yeah, no, it's a very interesting question because when I was at Kraft, we were actually also incented on profit on the same metrics as our cross-functional team, which led to a lot of buy-in and skin in the game and passion and things like that. And I remember this one VP of supply chain coming in and I started providing my perspective on inventory and cost and all these things. And he's like, "Dude, you're in finance. Stay out of this."

And it was a philosophical difference that he had had at other companies where finance was, call it the scorekeeper. And that's an important role. But they weren't really too concerned about the score itself. Like they were just like, you know, reporters, as you said. So I'd like to find that healthy balance where there's still skin in the game.

but you're still able to be impartial. There's a certain ethical component of it and doing the right thing. Do you write off inventory or is there a gray zone there? That's where I saw that in action and it's fascinating to see different

and how they employ that approach. Yeah. So the other thing that's interesting when you are, and I guess kind of going along with that, is you can report the data and you build the reports that you do every month in your management reporting and your KPIs and all that and you just...

fill in the blank and you do that. But there's times where adding that strategic value, you have to be able to communicate your findings. And maybe it's a little bit different than just your regular monthly reports or ad hoc or whatever. This is something where you're doing a deeper dive analysis. And you could build the best analysis, the best spreadsheet in the world. But if you don't have the storytelling skills...

to convey that message, you're going to get kicked out of the room. And it's going to be go back and think about this and get it together. And it's been a while since I've been in school, but I don't remember really a lot of courses on the business side that talk to you about storytelling. And maybe there are now, maybe it's evolved, but it's become...

so important to our job. And I know you guys teach this. So can you walk me through the importance of storytelling and how finance professionals can develop this skill and maybe a couple of tips around that? Yeah, and I'll give you a very specific example. So I was hired as the Senior Director of Corporate Finance in one of my roles. And the CEO knew me pretty well. So he told me, look, my finance team is not delivering what they need to be delivering.

And his impression was it was just in shambles in that department. And so I ended up getting hired and I went in there expecting it to be a bit of a challenging situation. What I found was there was amazing competence on a technical side. There was great information. I'll give you an example. A 60-minute month-end meeting had 60 slides and it became a race to the end. And so

All I did was based on my previous learnings and experience. Okay, we're going to trim this down to 10-15 slides, the same information per business unit, and we're going to tell a story. So I'm going to start with an executive summary. I'm going to leave that. I'm going to start with that. I'm going to hit the important points upfront.

And then when it tie all those in. And again, when I talked about that GOST meeting, the Get Our Stuff Together meeting, what was interesting is when you attend non-finance meetings, you start seeing the connections to the other parts of the business. So when I'm presenting the business results, I can present it not just from what I see in the numbers, but from what I'm hearing on all the conversations. This happened at Walmart or Loblaws or whatever it is. And this happened in the plant. And if you're attuned to what's going on, you're part of the understanding

Unofficial communication is what I'm saying. And people buy into you much more because they see you care about the business. So I'd say the previous finance approach would just present a whole bunch of data

And people would come out of that room being totally confused. Now it's like, here's what we have. And then what we do in our training sessions, we try to have what's the framework to use. I'll give you a couple. One is ACE, so Audience Content Execution. So how do you ACE your presentation? Number one, understand your audience. So Glenn, if you were in sales or if you were in marketing, I would start by, okay, how do I focus on what matters to you? If you are a corporate finance person,

person, I would say, okay, let me go a little bit more detailed. Here's what I do. Content, insightful, interesting, impactful. Think about that in a finance context. And then the execution piece, which I agree with you, it's not taught, is my voice, my body language. How do I show up in that meeting? And I'm naturally introverted. I've learned all this to say, how do I command a room with a CEO and an executive? And then the other one we love sharing, and I do this a lot, is

There's the what, the now what, the so what, the now what. Most times in finance, we concentrate on the what. What's really important is, of course, the so what, the implication. But what are we going to do about it? What's the action coming out of this? And it's funny, just that little change in lens, like how can we impact future results, is where that ability to communicate comes back.

So I think it's such an important skill to complement the great technical skills we have and impact the business, which is ultimately what we want to do. Yeah, that's great. And it's something to think about. And I'm thinking back to my first CFO job where we had a very involved board. One of the board members, finance guy, and much older, ended up becoming kind of a mentor to me. But we would go in and I would present the financials.

And the first couple of times, I would basically... I was trying to throw everything at him just to show, I've got to handle this. We're going to go three levels deep on everything. But what I learned was he was paying attention and he would be looking at the financials as I was talking about them. But if I gave everything all at once, he was always going to have questions. And if I showed all my cards...

I had nothing, you know, nothing left to say. So what I learned is focus on what, you know, what I'm telling him, what he wants to know, but also know that I've got to hold some back because he's going to ask questions no matter what. So I had to have some level of knowledge beyond what I was sharing there. And a lot of it really becomes trial by fire. But it's if you can go through an organized, coordinated training program and have the practice and work up to it, it's

much better results, I think, than that trial by fire where you're kicked out of the... But maybe everybody has to have that moment. Yeah. No, and look, at that stage, I think our brand team was somewhat immature. We didn't understand the dynamics and there's lots of things we could have learned. Of course, we were upset at the time. We did our best, but we learned a lot, right? So totally agree with you. Sometimes those tough experiences...

teach you a lot if you're willing to listen. And then, as you were talking, what I always encourage part of storytelling, actually, one of the most important part is listening and not just listening to what people say, like watching their body language. And I just had a vision. I was sitting in this room one time, my finance director was presenting something very technical on finance, and there was a sales director in there. And he was just, he was like sucking on a straw. He's just like, he couldn't understand one word that

And so I've got all these moments where it's like, hey, is the audience actually paying attention? Are they engaged? Are they interested in what you're saying? And sometimes by default, I like exactly what you're saying. We're trying to get through so much financial information and the consumer is not looking for that. They want, hey, what's going on and what can we do about it?

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So this interesting part to me is if you early in my career, because I was a journalist before I went to business school. And so it seemed like two completely different tracks. But even after I went to business school and even after I switched to finance, I

If you had asked me, I would have said finance, you know, numbers and math and the models and all that we do over here is a completely different, you know, right brain, left brain. It's a completely different skill set than the storytelling, the creative part. But realizing as the career went on, how entwined they are and how important that ability to communicate is to finance. Because if you're, if all you're doing is just reporting the numbers and not adding any value and creating a narrative around it and helping, then you're not adding value to the business. And

And what I think is interesting to me is the number of finance people who have written books, you among them. And I wonder if writing a book is something that you had thought about before because your latest book, Love Mondays, which we're going to talk about. But how did that come about? And did you find that your communication and storytelling that you did in finance actually helped you when it came time to write the book?

Yeah, I know. And honestly, I think it's back to like the whole track of, hey, I went into craft and I had to learn much more than technical skills. I had to learn how to engage people. And then, you know, it was a growth mindset type culture where it's like, look, I was not good at presenting and probably struggled through my first 10 years of presenting. And so I learned. And so what I also started doing over time is I started reading a lot, right? And probably in the last 10 years, I would say. And I just got fascinated by, look, you can take a book

And that could be like Warren Buffett's biography. Here's his thoughts on investing in 300 pages. Think about the value that has. And so over the last 10 years, I've just committed to doing that. And then I think as I did that, I started getting fascinated with the concept of what is an author? And I didn't believe I could be one. But then what happened over the last three to four years is that I've actually unintentionally surrounded myself with people who have written books. And there's another FP&A influencer, Asif Masani, you probably know.

He and I connected on a Zoom call and it's like, "Hey, what are you doing?" He's like, "I just written my second FP&A book." And we just got to talking. He's like, "Here's my publisher. If you want me to contact them, let me know." And one thing led to another. And it's funny, I was looking at one of my old vision boards. I do this thing, vision boarding, not consistently. I had a book which had a heart and Mondays on it.

three years ago, which I didn't even remember. So it's like, you know, it's one of those things that sometimes these things are buried deep in us and somehow it came to the surface and I surrounded myself with people who have done it. So, you know, it's not like it's a very clear plan I had. It just kind of evolved.

Yeah. So, well, tell me about Love Mondays. So you were inspired to write the book, had it on your vision board, you decided to go through and do it. What's the focus of the book? What's the points you're getting across? And bonus question, anything from the book that we could apply specifically to FP&A teams? Yeah, no, it's interesting. So, and I'm sure you've seen this. One of my observations through my 20 plus year career is

is people are really down on Mondays. Oh, it's Monday. And then you get to Wednesday and it's like, oh, it's hump day. There's a little bit of optimism. And then Thursday is now happy junior. Friday is what I'm hearing. And then Friday, everybody's excited. And I'm just like, I'm a math guy. The math doesn't work. I don't want to be excited for two or three days out of the week and plow through the rest of the week. I want to love what I do.

And so I started getting fascinated with this concept. One of my friends at Kraft actually used to say, "Make Mondays as exciting as Fridays." So think about it, Glenn. If you, I, and all your listeners were truly excited on a Monday, how much more powerful the world would be. And so what's interesting is through my podcasting, through my training, I've started to meet a lot of authors, CEOs, teachers, Buddhist monks who love what... Truly, you look at them on a Monday and they're like, "Let's go." 4:30 AM, they're jumping out of bed.

And so the whole concept is, how can we all find that? And look, I've just gone through a massive career transformation.

And I love my Mondays a lot more than the end of my finance career. So I believe it's all possible. So it's really a guide to say the first part for individuals, how do you find more joyful fulfillment in your life, Mondays and every other day? The middle section is a guide for leaders to say, how do you build a team where people are excited on a Monday and every other day? And the last section is just 20 people who I consider Monday mavericks, people who love what they do.

And so your bonus question, so here's my answer to your bonus question, is I've probably got at least five FP&A leaders who are now probably in a CEO or CFO job in the book. And I'll give you a couple of examples. There's one gentleman, Brian Kirk. He's the CEO of a famous Canadian ice cream company, Kawartha Dairy. And he was, as a 15-year-old, he was working in the plant and he just loved it. Fast forward 20 years later, he did a

Lots of FP&A that needed sales, they needed the CMO, Chief Marketing Adopter. He's now the CEO. I've got like at least two, three other CEOs or CFOs who started an FP&A. And so back to your point about FP&A, I think it's probably one of the best roles within a company because you get that 360 view of the whole company, right? So then, you know, back to your earlier question around soft skills, if you can harness that and you have the 360 degree of the view of the business, FP&A is unstoppable, right?

So that's the whole concept. And I think FP&A is where I did love my Mondays. So when I looked at my finance career, my first three years at Hitachi, I was clock watching on non-month-end pieces. In my 15 years of craft, I never watched the clock. In fact, I probably was like, how can I stop working at a certain time?

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. So this is... Okay. If you're listening to this podcast right now, you're an FP&A geek. You love this stuff. You probably love your Mondays. So I'm going to ask this question anyway, though, just to get a little bit more insight to the book. And then we'll come back to some traditional FP&A. But I love...

I love the topic of your book and the approach to it and just kind of leaning into that side of it because there's work-life balance and all that, but there's what happens when you actually are passionate about the work that you do and then you also have the work-life balance and all that. And so I think for a lot of us,

You try to keep the balance, you try to keep the interest and keep things interesting. But for any of our listeners that are, you know, maybe they've been stuck in the same role for a long time or their company's stagnant or whatever it is, if they're looking to find more fulfillment in their work, you know, kind of with the advice from the book, what advice would you give them to help kind of align their career with their purpose and passions? And I know for you, you got to a point where it's, I'm going to shift.

completely and go focus on training and all that. But with your FP&A background, that's a very dramatic shift. There's probably some smaller steps people can take along the way. Yeah, no, I love that question. So I'll give you an example. When I was in FP&A, I would often, and this was a first almost voluntold to me, I would try to pick up a project outside of my regular scope. Example, hey, let's do a competitive assessment on

a competitor X in cheese. And what it would do is just say, "How can I start building some skill sets outside of my day-to-day, month-end budget, all these other things?" And you can start crafting, "Is that something that's interesting to me? Or is it maybe an AI project or something else?" So I always tell people, if you do an inventory of your week and say, "Where do I feel the most alive, the most joy?" It could be budgeting, it could be month-end, it could be a project, like I said,

start leaning into that a little bit more and try to impact your business a little bit more. And one of the things I do up front is talk a lot about purpose. You just talked about purpose and there's a cool Japanese concept. You may have heard of it, ikigai. Basically, people who have found their ikigai never retire because they found this thing that they just want to do. So four questions you ask, what do you love to do? What does the world need? What do you get paid for? And what are you good at?

And so imagine an FP&A person who's like, "Okay, that's my icky guy." Think of Paul Barnhurst. That's probably his icky guy. So I think it starts with introspection to say, "Look, our career is taken off by the tide sometimes." Sometimes you stop and you're like, "How did I get here?" It's stopping to say, "What do I love about my job? And what do I not love about my job? And how do I start trying to edge a little bit more while knowing there's still parts of every job that you don't love?"

and start doing more of that. So for me, it might be like, how do I start working on a different category or a different part of the business? How do I work with somebody else who I haven't worked with before? I was listening to a podcast, a friend of mine, brilliant analogy she used to talk about, are you in tall grass or are you on a pavement? And for me, the analogy that works is like the tall grass, it's rough out there, but you're carving out a new path. And so it's a very clean paved road and you know exactly what's going to happen Monday to Friday to

to me, that's a pretty good sign to say, is there something that I can learn? And it becomes a way of life. Like even for me, and I'm sure in your life now with the podcasting and all the other things you're doing, you become much more open and excited about change, right? And taking a much more intentional approach. Instead of saying, oh, I can't do this because of my boss, all these things that we often do complain, I do too, saying, what can I do? And how am I going to

put myself in the best position to do that. Yeah, yeah. And I like the idea. It's similar to an approach I take on a lot of things and have for years, mostly thinking about getting older and people, there's a natural tendency when you hit a certain age to get kind of mentally lazy. Like you've worn these grooves, your neural pathways are set and you're like, this is the way I do it. But then you start to get more rigid.

And you start to think, nope, I'm not going to hear any new information. I've been around the block. I know this is the way we do it and all that. And it's so by trying something new and expanding and getting out of your comfort zone there, it's invigorating on one level, can be very frustrating, but also you're forming new neural pathways there. And I think by doing that, you're more engaged and you become, you just keep that intellectual curiosity going. And there are studies that say, you know, by keeping that brain plasticity, it's, you know, your longevity and mental health going into older age, which

I don't know, I'm showing my age a little bit, but that's the kind of stuff I'm starting to think about these days. No, I totally agree with that. And even for me, my energy is way higher than it was when I plateaued my engagement. I'm actually excited to do stuff. And the other point about that is it's not from zero to 100 right away. It's like...

What's the baby step? What's the smallest step you can take to do that? If you're going to do a LinkedIn post, what's the one paragraph you're going to write? What's the first sentence? And I love that concept, like James Clear, atomic habits type approach to say, it's about consistency.

What's that small thing I'm going to do every day to start moving towards my goal? You know, on that note, and I'm going to bring this back to FP&A and into a lot of the training you're doing as well, I think. But with all that is set up, what are some critical skills beyond the table stakes that you need to come in to FP&A, but some critical skills that maybe you would recommend our listeners start working on or expanding or getting better at to...

become better at FP&A, but to expand how they're thinking? And, you know, what would be some approaches to developing these skills and like driving them forward to become more of leaders in the area? I think for me, it's like, you know, sometimes we just get dropped into a role and we just start doing the role without doing what I call listening to her, right? To say, go

Speak to all the other functions. Go build relationships outside of FP&A, like into marketing, sales, supply chain, whatever your industry is, and start learning about that. Find a mentor. And then for me, it comes down to look, we've got core skills, financial modeling, forecasting, budgeting, Excel, all the technical skills. And of course, keep sharpening that at AI and all these things that are going on. That's necessary. We've talked a lot about the soft skills.

But then it's like the business partnership. It's like, what can you do to be that business partner? And then little things like, I shouldn't say little, but...

you know, taking initiative, like signing up for a Toastmasters club or doing these little things to say, how can I sharpen up my skill? And, you know, you could even say, I'm going to go learn piano. Like I'm taking away from FP&A too to say, what are the skills I'm going to learn to build that neuroplasticity to say, what can I do to grow? And I think it's, it's the classic case of how can I grow and what can I do? And I, you know, it was cool. Like I got chucked into this environment where they're like, go watch a marketing shoot. I'm like, what? But, you

But you reflect on that and you say, "Okay, now you're building a much better business knowledge." I went in as an accountant at Kraft. I came out as a business leader, not just a finance leader, a business leader. And any opportunity, I say, to lead or co-lead a project... I'll give you an example. One of my last companies, our CEO asked for a competitor analysis. I asked the 25 people on the team, "Who wants to do this?" Two people put up their hand. I'm not blaming them. Everyone else was busy.

Those two people were in front of the CEO two weeks later. And they had an opportunity to really say, "Okay, how can I connect with somebody who I ordinarily wouldn't do?" I think it's that initiative that people can have that's not always present.

Yeah, that's great. And that's like, as you were talking about that, I was thinking another thing from early in my career that we didn't talk about was business partnering. That is now every good FP&A team is doing that business partnering. And you are like you go into a marketing or an advertising shoot or working with operations or whatever it is you're doing that's outside of finance. Back in the early days of my career, you could be in this ivory tower of finance business.

where you're like, I don't know, I'm just counting the widgets and I'm just in my spreadsheets. I don't, you guys do what you're doing and all that. But now you are getting that other value. And I think, you know, I can't remember the exact stats on this, but you're seeing more CFOs become CEOs than ever have been before. But I think it's because the way a CFO is now, you know, you used to be able to be, you know, I guess as a,

opposite of the way they normally said, but you'd be a mile deep in sort of your control, your financial controls and accounting and all that knowledge. But, you know, an inch wide because you didn't really understand the rest of the business. But now you have to be able to speak to the rest of the business and report on it and all that. So I think it's that business partnering is what's setting up, like you said, not just a finance leader, but you become a business leader with... If Warren Buffett said, you know, Warren Buffett said, accounting is the language of business.

you're fluent in the language of business and now you've been exposed to the rest of it. So it does work very well together. So I always ask this because, you know, it's a passion of mine, but we've talked about all these soft skills and human skills and everybody's talking about AI right now and how it's going to change things.

And I think we've highlighted some of the human skills that are going to stay important and are really as more and more of our job is automated by tech. Those human skills are going to be important longer than a lot of those other are. But as you're going around and doing the training, I know you talk to a lot of companies. Are you seeing anything now in AI and machine learning that you see is already impactful in FP&A or what's your read on the environment right now?

I think there's a lot brewing, and I think there's still a lot of confusion to say what can an organization use and what can we not do? What information can I put into chat GPT or is my company developing our own AI? So there's a lot going on. And I think it's incumbent on FPA individuals to really understand the landscape and say, how can I use this to my advantage? And simple examples like me and Paul were doing a case with a group of people and

Paul used Cloud and ChatGPT to analyze a publicly available quarterly report for a competitor of some of the folks in that room in seconds. And we would also run a simulation of we give people a case, we let them work on it for an hour, then we'd run it through ChatGPT and Cloud and it would be very similar in seconds. So the implication again ties to, "Okay, yes, there's going to be some real progress there. How do we

continue to add value with our business partnering, soft skills, all the things we talked about. So it points me out like, and look, I'm a soft skills kind of guy at this point, but it points me back to, yes, let's be really fluent there, but our soft skills are going to be even more important in my opinion.

Yeah, well, appreciate the insights on that. So, all right, well, we are, we're getting close to time here and I feel like we could, we could keep going, but I have, there's two questions we got to ask all the guests and I'm always excited to see what kind of answers we get. But the first one is, what is something that most people don't know about you? So I think I might have mentioned it a little earlier. I am naturally introverted. So for example, when I do a training session or speech, I want to just go and crawl into bed and sleep.

And so what I always tell people is like, some people assume that people who are public speakers are natural at it. You know, they have the gift of the gap. I don't. I learned it. And you know, another thing is I've ran a three or four half marathon. So that might be something people don't know. Not a full yet. Yeah.

Oh, that's great. That's great. As a runner, I appreciate that. As a runner and an introvert, I appreciate both of those. So I've got a couple of events on my calendar for this year, but not as many as I used to. But it's a great way to get out and talk about that work-life balance. You stare at spreadsheets all day or training all day and all that and be able to just get out on the road and get some miles. It's great. Okay. Well, now everybody's favorite question. What is your favorite Excel function and why?

- Yeah, no, so it's interesting. So I grew up in this culture in finance where we had a huge team. So our leaders would actually tell me when I was a manager, senior manager, get out of the system and let your team do that. So I had a team of analysts doing things. The landscape has changed a lot now, right? So I kind of finished my career in that type of mentality.

And then lately, the last few years, I've been watching Paul and other people train Excel, and I've learned how to do X lookup. That's probably not as sophisticated as other guests. But just being aware of all the cool things that have come up like text before, text after, all these little formulas that can save hours, right? Format pasting one graph onto another.

It's possible. I'd spend hours doing that. You know what I mean? So I know I've given you a few more, but I just think it's just being that open to learning because the progress is so fast. Yeah. And it's funny that you mentioned XLOOKUP because I was talking to another CFO a few weeks ago and he said, if you answer that question, VLOOKUP, you immediately are telling people how old you are. Because back in the day, that's all we had. I was a VLOOKUP guy.

All right. So the book is Love Mondays. We'll put a link to it in the show notes. It's available on Amazon and wherever you get your favorite books. How, if our listeners want to get in touch with you, learn more, learn about the training and all that, how can our listeners get in touch with you? Yeah, I think the best approach at this point is just LinkedIn. Just connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm quite active on LinkedIn. So I always love to engage with listeners and understand what's going on with them as well. Well, Ron, we really appreciate you coming on the show. Glenn, thank you. It's a fantastic conversation. Thank you for having me on.

so