Count Me In®

IMA’s Neha Lagoo Ratnakar speaks with Oded Zehavi, CEO of Mesh Payments, about digital transformation of the finance team. They discuss how powerful new software tools and automation opportunities empower CFOs and their teams to streamline business partnering, sharpen internal controls, and simplify business operations.  The good news is it’s much less complicated than you think.Connect with OdedFull Episode Transcript:Neha:Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast by and for management accountants. I'm Neha Lagoo Ratnakar from IMA, and today I'm speaking with Oded Zehavi about how the enormous potential of digital transformation is finally coming to fruition for CFOs and finance teams everywhere. As the CEO and founder of Mesh Payments, Oded has a bird's eye view into how accounting and finance professionals are utilizing and customizing powerful new software tools to streamline business partnering, sharpen internal controls and simplify business operations. And what struck me during the conversation was that how appropriate the word transformation is in this moment. It's like the buzzword I've heard a million times crystallized into something real for me. During the course of this interview, you'll hear how technology has clearly elevated the value the finance function is able to provide to the business in real time. Let's get started with Oded to see how businesses are leaning into this exciting new era of innovation.Neha:So let's start with the obvious question today. We are all witnessing a transformation in the way we work and finance and accounting is one of the functions that lends itself very well to remote working. How do you think the CFO's office has changed since the pandemic?Oded:So people usually speak a lot about the fact that everything is remote now, which is key, by the way, by the way that finance people operates. I will even go back in time and speak about something that less people are talking about, which is why the category, which I mean, which is spend management, have been really driving from the beginning of the pandemic. And in my mind it's always start by the fact that before the pandemic, the finance teams were really focusing about T&E. So everybody were a lot of fun. Various sales guys were traveling and it's all about how we collect received, how do we close the books? There was so much noise so many people involved. What does does it mean? And so many employees have been brought, and it's really beyond the fact that he's taken a lot of the time from the finance teams activities.Oded:It also created a lot of noise and camouflage some other problems that might have been bigger or different. And when the pandemic started, that was shut eliminated overnight. So now nobody travels anymore. No receipts have been chased. That noise have been gone quiet. Totally. And on top of it, there were two other trends which in my mind have really impact the way finance team operates. One, as you mentioned, is the fact that now companies are fully remote and distributed. So a lot of the processes that historically the finance team could have solved by telling the employees, you know, what? Come to my desk, yes, tomorrow and we'll make this happen have not been relevant anymore. And last, but not least, the fact that many of these companies move a lot of the infrastructure to the cloud. So now a lot of these old on premise licensing models have been shut down.Oded:And now everything move to more recurring models where you need to pay every month a much smaller amount with much more softwares. So the combination of all of that really made a huge difference when it comes to how finance teams need to treat spend or treat corporate spend. And what I'm seeing is that over the last two years, the space itself have been exploding. So many great companies have come into this space, which are now giving very new technology, amazing user experience will talk about it in the second, and last but not least, a new business model, which in our category, historically, companies have been used to pay for software that helps them control spend. I'm amazed there are still companies that are even considering paying for some of the very, very old legacy platforms on things they are not really using, where there are so many options like mesh in the space that enables them to pay only for what they use and sometimes not even pay anything because a lot of us have been using the model where we, the merchant that we are paying for are, are really paying for the service. So a lot of transformation and changes in the way finance team have looked at spend management and on top of it and you started by the remote and the fact that companies are now distributed. So it's not only that are distributed, they're also global. If we were talking, having this conversation few years ago, most of the US companies were usually around this very one site usually in one city in the US it could be San Francisco or New York or one of these leading countries.Oded:The pandemic really shifted a lot of the employees all across the US and now there are new places where employees from different reasons want to spend time in like Austin, like Miami, like all these places which are totally outside of the where traditional headquarters have been based and last than not least, why stay in Austin when you can spend the same time and work from a much more exotic place. And I've seen companies that have become fully distributed and fully remote. And for the finance teams, all of these challenges are really something that is transformational. And they have really invested a lot of time and effort in the last two years to be ready to give solutions or be, give service in such a changing world.Neha:Wow. I love that, Oded, there's so much that has been happening, and thank you for summarizing so well how work, softwares, platforms, our activities have changed in the last couple of years. Now let's talk about the mindset changes. What have you seen change in the last couple of years and is there anything that the CFOs or the finance departments can do to help with this mindset change?Oded:So it's interesting that we are talking today, which is more or less in the middle or the beginning or some people out the hand of additional neutrons to change in the mindset of finance team or finance people, if we can go back when the pandemic came, everybody stopped and tried to reduce cost and see what happens that very quickly after a month or two, the world, especially the high tech scene, have really shifted into growth. Just growth and growth and growth. And companies have been growing and bringing more to employees. They're more talents and spending more on media. And it was really about growth. Not all, but most of the companies didn't invest enough time about unique economics and controls and things that are fundamental when it comes to business. And we are in the beginning of a new transformation or new mindset change where everybody said saying to the same fine sense things that they will say to them a year ago, Grow, grow, grow, stop, stop, stop.Oded:And let's focus on the fundamental economics control and visibility. And it all comes back to the fact that now changes are happening much quicker, but then nobody knows if we'll talk again in two months, what will be the mindset then, that it will be just control, and it might happen the same way it was in the pandemic. The only thing that we know that is that we don't really know. From what the impact for finance teams is that they now need to have an infrastructure, which is ...

Connect with MatRead more about Online to OfflineFull Episode Transcript:Adam:Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that brings you impactful people and stories from across the world of management accounting. I'm your host, Adam Larson, and joining me today is Mat Boyle, CEO of Online to Offline, to discuss how businesses and management accountants can make a big difference in the world by shifting their focus from profits first to mission first. While this is much easier said than done, as you'll hear, Mat's inspirational story is an important reminder that it's possible to do well in business and even better than ever when you measure your success by something greater than the bottom line.Adam:Well, Mat, I just really wanna thank you for coming on the podcast today. Thanks so much for sharing your time with us. And to start off, I wanted you to kind of walk through a little bit of your story with us as we were kind of talking, coming up to this call, you mentioned something that you learned to focus, no longer focusing on profit, but on the impact your business was making, and that's not something you hear every day. So maybe you could talk a little bit about that with our audience.Mat:Yeah, sure. Adam, thanks for having us. So the sort of condensed version of the backstory, I'd built quite a large sales training business. So I had four offices around Australia. We had a stack of businesses that will help in their sales teams, really navigate through the changes caused by the internet. And from a profitability point of view, it was amazing, but there was this kind of hole inside me that it was really unfulfilling and my days was spent training sales people that didn't want help. They needed it, but they didn't want it. So it was just this horribly unfulfilling sort of thing. And I met this guy back in 2015 who was an Australian guy that worked with the Thai immigration police. And he started talking to me about the work he was doing over in Thailand and how he was involved in rescuing kids out of exploitive situations and women outta sexual slavery and human trafficking.Mat:And the more we got talking, the more things just sort of opened up for me and the, you know, my heart sort of went, I've gotta see this. So about six months into the conversation, and I eventually convinced him to take me over to Thailand, and I spent three weeks working with him and his team in Thailand doing the front lines rescuing kids outta brothels and women outta brothels and just seeing this depravity, which is human trafficking, and you know, that some of the sites and the sounds were just horrendous. But the thing when I was talking to all these women and that, that the stories were identical, that they all needed money and got caught up in this life because someone gave them a job that they shouldn't have lent to money from someone they shouldn't have.Mat:Or they were promised a job that didn't exist and they were all taken advantage of by their desperation towards money. So when I was sitting back in Australia and I'm sitting back in a boardroom a few days later, I sort of had this idea of, well, instead of businesses paying me to train their sales teams not to do the work that I've paid them to do, I've been paid to do. What about if I just could automate and outsource all of these elements of the sales process, businesses could pay me to build the systems and manage the systems and they're gonna make more money, but then I can go and create jobs in these developing countries where all these women are getting exploited and train them how to operate my system and actually be able to use my business as a way of making good.Mat:So that's what we started to do and started to develop all these systems that can automate and outsource big chunks of the sales process, but do it in a way that no one actually ever realizes it's not been done by you. And in 2018, we ended up opening our first outsource center in the Philippines, which has gone gone amazing. And then Covid has gone slowed down our growth and we are on track to open our second center in Thailand sometime sort of before sort of March next year.Adam:That's quite a story. I mean, to have something like that caused such an impact on you that you want to completely turn your business around, that can't be an easy decision to make. And it's a very risky one.Mat:It was a very easy decision to make because I made it with my heart, not with my head. It was an incredibly risky situation. And the journey between sort of 2016, 2017 when the idea came and where we are now, we certainly have faced the consequences of that, you know, of that decision. Because going through this said, I made it purely with my heart of going, I have to make an impact from there. And I kind of threw out all conventional business acumen around, well, what happens to your existing customers? What are you gonna do with everything you built up? And so over a period of a few months, we ended all of our contracts. I just stopped prospecting for new business and didn't replace them. And just focused our whole energy on trying to fix, solve this problem and, and tried to create these systems and open the center.Mat:And, you know, as is often the case, it always takes twice as long as you think it's gonna take and takes three times the amount of money that you think it's gonna take. And, you know, through all of that journey, the consequence is we actually went through complete financial meltdown and we lost our house, lost our cars, and basically went down to having $50 to our name at our kind of lowest point. And you know, that's kind of where we were able to kind of keep persevering and keep getting through. So like fortunately now we're in a much stronger financial position than we ever have, and the business is going great, but there certainly was a big journey from start to where we are now, which has been challenging.Adam:So maybe we can talk a little bit about that journey, about becoming to the success you are now. I know a lot of that contributed to getting the right people in place in your organization to make sure that you were doing the business in the right way. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that to how that became successful.Mat:Yeah, so there was a few kind of phases where I was first in that survival phase where it was just me. I was just hustling. I was just, you know, I was robbing Peter to pay Paul and I didn't really have a financial strategy in place other than how can I pay this week's bills type of strategy. And that, you know, although that was getting us forward, that was creating other holes with taxation and a heap of other kind of just areas that, because I was so single minded focused on the goal at hand and trying to do everything myself or being left behind. So I started to look for support teams and one of the sort of first pieces I put into place is actually bringing on a fractional CFO. I've been working with a lot of the accountants and, you know, all the accountants, all they kept doing was just filing my tax returns and telling me, because you've done A, B, and C this way, this is what we've had to do.Mat:So they're just telling me about their problems and how they've stuck a bandaid over it rather than actually working with me to try to solve the problems. And that just kept making, compounding the problems, you know, and just putting us deeper and deeper and deeper in a hole. So I'm, you know, one side, I'm, you know, busting, busting everything. I've got to ...

Connect with ToriConnect with DennyLearn more about the CMA CertificationFull Episode Transcript:Adam:Join us in this bonus episode of Count Me In, where IMA brand storyteller, Margaret Michaels sits down with two noteworthy CMAs to discuss the 50th anniversary of IMA's globally respected certification for accounting and finance professionalsMargaret:In this special Count Me In podcast, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Certified Management Accountant or CMA program, I will be speaking with two CMA exam takers, Denny Beresford, who earned his CMA in 1972 and made IMA history by becoming one of IMA's first CMAs, and Tori Heavey, a recent graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who won the CMA student award for the highest score on the exam in the June/July, 2020 testing window. Tori also recently won the Elijah Sales Award for her CPA score. Denny has spent a lifetime working in accounting and finance. He currently serves as a member of IMA's Financial Reporting Committee and as the executive in residence at the JM Toll School of Accounting, Terry College of Business at University of Georgia. Tori is a recent graduate of the Master's in Accountancy program at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, and is currently working as a tax associate for KPMG.Margaret:Thank you Denny and Tori for joining me today. As we talk about your experience taking the CMA exam. Denny, you have the distinction of being among the first people to sit for the CMA exam in 1972. At that time, the CMA exam was administered with paper and pencil and the field of management accounting was not widely known. What do you remember about taking the CMA exam? How did you learn about management accounting? Was it through school or work experience and what are some of your study methods and tips?Denny:I had been a member of IMA, it was actually the National Association of Accountants or in earlier years since 1962, shortly after I graduated from college. And in fact, I'd been active in my local chapter back in Los Angeles, rising from a helper on some of the committees to become president of the chapter shortly before I transferred from Ernst & Ernst's office in Los Angeles to the national office in Cleveland in 1971. So I was very familiar with what was going on at, at the organization and the fact that the CMA exam was being developed over a couple of years before that. And I guess I was generally familiar with the management accounting profession, having again been participating in IMA for a number of years being involved particularly at the local chapter level and then also at the national level.Denny:And also having been an auditor and interacting, of course with many of my clients for that period of time. And when the exam was was first offered, I decided that it would be a good thing, first of all, to support the organization for by taking it. And I thought it would be something that would help build my self confidence, you might say, in dealing with, with clients. Since I was a public accountant, I knew that I had to be able to speak intelligently to controllers and chief financial officers and others who were involved in the management accounting profession. And so I thought that being able to pass an exacting exam like the CMA would again, give me both self confidence and also a positive credential that would show that I was on similar footing to them.Denny:What I remember about taking the first exam, I was in Cleveland in the National Office of Ernst & Ernst, and at that point, and I don't remember how many different settings there were, but the closest location that I could, where I could take the exam was Pittsburgh. So I had to I go there, drive over to Pittsburgh, which isn't too far from Cleveland. I had to stay overnight. And the morning of the exam, there was an ice storm in Pittsburgh. And another fellow and I were both gonna take the exam together and we had to drive from the hotel to the, I don't remember exactly the place it was being held, but it was a half hour or so away, and we could barely make it there because of the streets were all icy and it was just a terrible weather situation.Denny:But and it was in a cavernous location, some sort of a very large convention location, something like that. And it was large and very cold. And again I had no idea how to prepare for the exam because back then there hadn't been any previous exams, had nothing to to go on in terms of looking at what questions had been asked in the past. And for the first exam, what the organization had done was give a list of books that you could consider studying to prepare you for the exam. I thought that was kind of a good idea, but not a very good use of my time. I knew that a couple of the parts of the exam, particularly Generally Accepted Accounting Principles and some other parts were pretty much in my wheelhouse and I could do well on those.Denny:The other parts I wasn't so sure about, but I felt that trying to study them by going back and reading textbooks or the like, would not be a very good use of my time. So my strategy, if you will, was to try to do well on one or two of the parts, and then of the other parts that if I didn't do so well the next time when I had to take them over, I'd at least know what to study for. And as it turned out, I passed the whole exam the first time and had one of the 10 highest scores. So that strategy worked out pretty well and it didn't have to go back and study, but that's as much as I remember about preparing for the exam, why I took it and exactly what happened when I was there.Margaret:That's great. That's a great story about the ice storm. You really persevered taking the CMA exam a very rigorous enterprise indeed. Tori, now that you've heard Denny's experience, how do you think the way you've taken the exam is different from Denny and what did you do to prepare for the exam?Tori:Yeah, my experience was a little different. I did not have an ice storm to deal with, but I've kind of grown up through the shift to digital. I rarely ever used computers for school until I came to college, really. Freshman year, most of my exams were still on paper and pencil. And gradually more and more classes switched to exams on the computer. And this transition really helped me prepare to take the CMA exam electronically, specifically for the essay portion. It helped that I'd improved my typing skills tremendously over the time or the few years I'd started using computers more and got more used to typing papers online or even just using different software. I used the Wiley CMA exam question bank to prepare and study for both parts of the CMA exam. And it was totally computer based. All of my prep except for my own notes that I still write on paper and pencil.Tori:But seeing the exam simulated during my studying in this way definitely helped a lot. It familiarized me with the test software and it made actual exam day a lot less daunting just to have kind of more familiarity in being used to the situation that I would be in. Cause sometimes it can be so nerve wracking on the exam day to go into a testing center. Right now we use Prometric centers, which I'm not sure if y'all are familiar with those, but you have to schedule an exam slot online, a few, usually a few weeks or months in advance. And then the day of you show up and you are assigned a computer that has like the blockers all around so that everyone is, it's almost like small cubicles a...

Connect with Dr. Marsha HuberRead the report Thriving Amidst Challenges: A Guide to Small Business Resilience Full Episode Transcript:Neha:Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast where management accounted stays center stage. I'm your host, Neha Lagoo Ratnakar. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Marsha Huber, who is IMA's director of research to discuss a recently published report, Thriving Amidst Challenges: A Guide to Small Business Resilience. I have to say, this report is such a great example of the timely and rigorous research IMA specializes in with the goal of providing practical insights and actions that truly help businesses learn and grow. We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, but make sure to download the full report using the link in the shownotes, because it's literally brimming with insights that can be put to use immediately. Now let's get started with Marsha.Neha:Hi Marsha, welcome to Count Me In. It's such a pleasure to have you on the show.Marsha:Oh, thank you so much Neha. I feel privileged to have been invited to talk about this IMA publication.Neha:Oh, it's all my pleasure, Marsha. And first of all, congratulations on your new report. Thriving Amidst Challenges: A Guide to Small Business Resilience and that's quite mouthful, but a very much needed topic. Can you tell us, our listeners, what this report is all about?Marsha:Yes. It's a report that was developed from interviews with business people, the small business development center, and various members of the small business committee at the IMA. And I spoke with people, read interviews and developed models with people and experts, and here's the report of our findings.Neha:Cool. And I'm glad you were able to do all that. And how did you come up with this topic? What's the story behind this report?Marsha:Yeah, it's really interesting. I was not the originator of this report. During the pandemic, the small business committee at the IMA had a heart for small business and they actually had another publication. And then this was the second of the two about resilience, small business resilience. And I was invited as a new researcher at the IMA to help the small business committee write this report. And that's what I did. And it was a excellent experience.Neha:Thank you for sharing that journey with us Marsha. So, let's talk about the resilience model. I found it very interesting. Where does that come from and how can it help businesses bounce back?Marsha:Yeah. This came from actually a lot of interviews with the small business development center, Youngstown State University, because they worked with small businesses and they worked with small business during COVID. And at that time, when this was happening, I was also a faculty member at Youngstown State. So I worked with them as well to work small businesses. And so we decided to think about companies that thrived, you know, this is a report about thriving during hardship and resilience, the very definition of it is bouncing back. So how can you bounce back when certain challenges come your way? And what happened was we found three elements among the businesses that thrive as well as the experiences of our small business committee members. These different three, there were three concepts that stood out. And would you like me to describe those concepts?Neha:Sure. Go ahead, that would really help our understanding of the model.Marsha:Okay. So just imagine three circles, and you can also look at the report as I talk about these things, because these are illustrated, but you know, I'm just gonna lay it out three circles and one circle is business focus. And of course, during COVID, and now, we still have a continuing pandemic. You know, business focus is important for everyone, but it's not everything. Okay. So what else we saw as a visionary leadership and the companies to thrive, they could see beyond they didn't lose sight of their goals. They kept their eyes on the goals, but they also had to be flexible and agile and they had to change for the circumstances and they could see things that they never saw before. So, and I might give some examples if you want some in a moment. And then the other element that was so important was a people-centric culture. That the companies that thrived thought about their people, they thought about them as family, you know, not worrying about, you know, we have to lay people off or we have to do this and that they're thinking about how can we keep our people here?Marsha:They're our family. And I think you see now even a heightened awareness of wellbeing, but before the pandemic, yeah, wellbeing is around. But right now it's very important. And I think it actually began at that time where everybody was in the same boat, we were all working from home, having kids at home, you know, things happening, dogs coming in our Zoom meetings, our animals and everything else going on, that we had to change. And some of those things brought humor into what we did. And when you bring these things together, the business focus with the visionary leadership and the people-centric culture, those items mixed together, came to what I called a zone of thriving.Neha:Wow. That was very insightful. And thank you for bringing the human bit in it. It is true that the pandemic did bring out that human side of us. We were more real on those Zoom calls than we are in the actual office setup.Marsha:Yes. Like I'll just give you example of one company, they were in the concession food truck business. Now during COVID, there was no food truck business to go to, people were not going out to eat. All their orders were canceled. And they were the top food truck company basically in United States and everything came to standstill. So they thought, how can we keep our people working when we don't have a business anymore for a while? And so they developed and they saw, looked at everything they had, they basically reenvisioned what they could do. And they started a hand washing station business. And they cuz they had the products, they had the manufacturing process, they had the people and that's what they launched. And then they started selling these hand washing stations. And the University I worked at, they put them in, people put 'em in venues and they're really cool. You don't need to touch anything. There's three stations, you're six feet from each other. And then you wash your hands and your, the soap is there. You wash your hands, you dry your hands. It takes like 20 seconds. And then the next person could go. So that's the very ingenious idea that came just because they cared about their people.Neha:Wow. That was pure genius, I agree, Marsha and thank you for also volunteering a bit ago to talk about some examples. And let's talk about the six Rs of resilience. That's something that also stayed with me. Can you give us some examples of what that means for a management accountant?Marsha:Yeah. And when we talk about the six Rs, let me mention them, under visionary leadership, there's reflect and reimagine. Under business focus, there's reevaluate and reinvent. Under people-centric culture is reconnect and recharge. And again, you know, it's the six RS, resilience, you know, was a way to model these things, these different ideas. So the first example already talked about was visionary leadership, you know, reflecting and reimagining, you know, w...

Connect with AnthonyFull Episode Transcript:Adam:I'm Adam Larson and welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast by and for management accountants. Today's guest comes to us from the forefront of the data automation revolution. Anthony Nitsos, a proud CMA, a consulting CFO, and the founder of SAS gurus shares the unique story of how he transitioned from pursuing a career in medicine to how he discovered the power and beauty of accounting. From explaining how accounting forms the spinal column of any manufacturing business to practical advice for writing the coming tidal wave of financial automation, Anthony's insight and expertise is important listening for management accountants everywhere. Enjoy the show.Adam:Anthony, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We're really excited to have you on and today we're gonna be focusing in on automation and what that means for the management accountant. But to start off, I wanted you to kind of tell us a little bit about your story.Anthony:So thank you, Adam for that. And I really appreciate being on your program today. You know, I've had an association with the IMA for a long time, which we uncovered in our kind of a preliminary, so that'll be part of the story. But I actually started off in medicine of all things. I was accepted into an accelerated program at the university of Michigan at the age of 18, but several years into it, I realized I really did not want to be a doctor. So it was one of those kind of all right, well you're most of the way to a doctor and you've kind of got a bachelor's degree to show up for, but what are you gonna do with your life now if you've decided not to go in medicine. So I think by, you know, stint to the fact that they both started with am, I went into manufacturing right after medicine.Anthony:I don't know if it was anything more than that, just like, okay, I need a job. I need to, you know, make money. But the strange thing is, is what they had me do was really, you know, kind of the beginnings of process reengineering analysis and trying to figure out why in this particular case, you know, logistics were breaking down material, wasn't ending up where it went. So I got kind of a baptism in fire. What it showed me was that corporations are very similar to bodies. You know, they even, you know, means the same thing. So this training that I got in medicine actually translated pretty well into manufacturing. And so there, I, you know, from there I took off. After that, I did a stint where I was doing a lot of ERP implementations. If folks recall back around the year, 1997, everybody started panicking that their code would blow up when the year 2000 showed up.Anthony:So there was this huge, you know, Y2K, doomsday disasters, et cetera, et cetera. And at that time I was picking up accounting skills. It was one of those things where it was pretty clear that the impact of manufacturing was absolutely a financial one in that, you know, when you got right down to it, you're making decisions on the shop floor that impact profitability. So it was kind of a natural progression for me to just kind of move over into more of an accounting type of world. And ERP really brought that together, cuz that's where you really unify back then still in today, you know, the operations of the company with finance. And so that's where the accounting management accounting piece came into it. And it was right around 1996 where I actually got my first certification in accounting and it was the CMA.Anthony:And I remember that being really useful to me and still to this day, I'm not gonna say it really stopped being useful because whereas the CPA exam and I've taken that, and you know, I've also passed that and I'm also a CPA, but I became a CPA later. I was a CMA first because CMA was very broad based. And from my training, you can't look at one part of a body anymore than you can look at one part of a corporation it's an integrated systemic whole. And so how those pieces work together and how they work most efficiently together, the principles are very similar between medicine and, you know, process reengineering. They really are, you know, you go after the root cause the idea of medicine is not to treat symptoms. I know there's a big debate about that, but really what we are trained to do is find the root cause and fix it.Anthony:And manufacturing is no different and neither is IT. So moving from the physical body to the physical manufacturing now to a more, you know, electronic realm, bringing ERP and all the systems and how they touch everybody together and unifying that ultimately in a framework, which was based in accounting in my mind, because in my mind, the accounting pieces, like the spinal column of the body, you really build everything off of that. All of your reporting, all of your metrics comes off of that. And so focusing the attention to get to the numbers most accurately, most efficiently really became kind of the focus of my next position, which was a controller for a Japanese company. It was a company that was a manufacturing company that had been purchased by, was an English company that had been purchased by the Japanese, excuse me and the president at the time really wanted to have his own money guy rather than have somebody from Japan come in and do the numbers.Anthony:And so he quickly moved to hire a new controller and that was me. And so at that point we knew we were going to scale the company 10 times within the next three years. And so my experience in accounting, the fact that I also spoke Japanese, cuz I had actually studied there, helped out, I understood the cultural kind of the, you know, became kind of like the cultural liaison with the Japanese people when they showed up and then going over there. But that was kind of a side issue. The big issue was they gave me opportunity in a Greenfield implementation to design the entire data collection, information, reporting, financial reporting and whatnot for what was going to be a $50 million company that I had inherited at 5 million using Peachtree. So here I am, freshly minted CMA got his first controller job, applying all these skills and saying, okay, we now get to design a data collection piece for all the production data, all the manufacturing data, all the material data, all the labor, blah, blah, blah, in a way where we really kept the cost down.Anthony:So this was my first and in some ways, best experience scaling a company because I was actually given that power. I was given the authority to basically design the system. And so we had at the time when we started that 5 million, there was myself, a full-time accountant and kind of a half-time payroll person running, you know, the entire back office. When we reached 50 million, I had the same three people, only the payroll person was now full-time. And so we were able to, by applying Japanese manufacturing principles and techniques of totally total quality management, plus Six Sigma black belt process, reengineering analysis, plus my training in ERP systems and what could be done. And at that point, the state of automation was you drove everything off of barcode scanners. And so once everything was set up easily, so each person had their own badge, their own employee badge.Anthony:That was what they used to swipe in and out of the clocks and also what they were used to swipe in and out of jobs. And we made it easy for them to do that. We had readers everywhere and the jobs themselves had their own codes. And so all you had to do is just match the two up in a system and boom outfalls the data. So it was the principle of a sin...

Connect with LeahWorkman ForensicsFull Episode TranscriptAdam:Welcome to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from a management accountants perspective. My cohost Rouba Zeidan spoke with our special guest Leah Wietholter. Leah is a certified fraud examiner and the author of the new book Data Sleuth: Using Data in Forensic Accounting Engagements and Fraud Investigations. Leah began her career supporting forensic accountants at the FBI and has since branched out to lead her own forensic accounting and private investigation firm. Forensic investigations are the center of so many great crime shows these days, and it was exciting to hear how accountants expose fraud and other problems lurking in bank accounts, credit card statements, and payroll reports. I hope you enjoy the conversation.Rouba:Good morning, Leah. And thank you so much for joining us.Leah:Thank you so much for having me.Rouba:I'm really looking forward to learning more about your very kind of interesting arena and industry, which is and you have a wonderful background in the FBI. So maybe you can drop in some examples on that part of it. So can you tell us a little bit about forensic accounting and forensic accounting engagement? What does it entail?Leah:Yeah, so I work forensic accounting engagements as a private consultant. So I'm not affiliated with law enforcement or anything like that. I own a forensic accounting practice in Oklahoma, and the majority of our engagements are solving some sort of financial problem that's either in litigation or could end up in litigation. So we work a lot of embezzlement investigations or fraud investigations. Then we also work to help sort through partnership dispute or a shareholder dispute, so if someone believes the general partner or whoever's managing the money, usually, has been taking more than their fair share, we get involved there and kind of our third other largest category of a forensic accounting engagement is in divorce matters when the two parties are looking to get divorced and they need to split their assets. Then usually one party is not familiar with how the marital funds were handled.Leah:And so they wanna make sure that when they go to divide those assets, that they're getting their fair share. So we help them either get comfortable with the known assets or try to find any other hidden assets within that situation. And we usually only work divorce cases. If there's a business involved, there's a lot of opportunities when people have closely held businesses where they can hide assets or just, they own things that maybe their spouse doesn't know about. So those are kind of the three types of engagements that fall under the three types of cases that are typically involved in a forensic accounting engagement for us.Rouba:Interesting. I mean, that, that kind of implies that there are numerous kind of legal consequences and circumstances you know, that might come into the equation and most well known would be maybe investigating alleged fraudulent activities like you, you know, in your experience, how prepared is the average finance and accounting professional to handle such circumstances?Leah:I would say that the accounting and financial professionals that I run into, they're familiar with what fraud looks like. They're familiar with, you know, the concept of, we talk about this a lot, cuz we use data analytics, but a lot in our investigations, but we talk about what should have happened, the framework what should have happened versus what happened. And so finance and accounting professionals know what should have happened. And then they also know what happened, but taking that information and then putting it in a format that could be explained to a judge or a jury or even to the client themselves is where our specialty usually shows up. As opposed to, you know, maybe someone working in corporate or even in audit connecting those dots. One of the things that I've been focusing on lately with my team is, okay, I understand that these journal entries, for example, these journal entries look strange and we can tell the client, Hey, these journal entries look strange, but we need to tell them why that matters.Leah:Why should they care about it? And what is the risk to them? What is the financial loss to them? And being able to connect what we know about accounting to losses, to the story of what happened, because that's what helps in, if it does result in litigation, that's what helps communicate the findings. So we've gotta be able to connect what we know as financial professionals with a group of individuals that this is not their specialty. And so connecting those dots, understanding a lot of times finance and accounting professionals are very good at understanding what all the financial statements say and what that means, but then to translate that into, okay, why should my client care, which is usually connected to what actual dollars are missing which would be found on bank statements and credit card statements and payroll reports. So just knowing where to go for that information to best communicate what happened. And the corresponding loss is kind of where this forensic accounting niche comes into play.Rouba:Did you find that the need for forensic accounting has grown over the past few years and more specifically, you know, post the COVID era? And if so, how and why?Leah:So when I first started in forensic, so my background, I worked for two years with the FBI under the direction of a forensic accountant. And that's how I got into this niche so early in life. But then when I joined I started doing this from the private sector. It wasn't as popular and that would've been like 2009. It, it was becoming more popular. The more that technology has advanced and the access that we have that keeps growing to different kinds of data and understanding what that data can tell us. And you know, how we can use that to understand what's happening and just to understand and put our arms around those facts. Then I think forensic accounting is becoming more popular in the private sector. And I haven't really noticed a huge increase in the need of forensic accounting.Leah:I think a lot of people after COVID, I tell my team, I think people are just mad at each other. So we have a whole lot more like the volume of partnership disputes is so much greater than it was before. We're starting to see an uptick in divorces as well. So I don't really know that COVID affected how much forensic accounting or, you know, increased that need. But I have seen an increase in over the course of the last 12 years or 15 years of my career in that, because there's so much more information readily available, that it is possible to find out what happened without relying on law enforcement to get involved and law enforcement, especially in the US, they already have too much work as it is. So if people want answers to their questions and they want it timely, then I think the best resource for them is a forensic accountant in financial investigations.Leah:So that's what I have kind of noticed in, you know, this basically has consumed my entire career, this field. And so just noticing the trends that way, you know, and like I said, COVID, I don't know that it increased the need for forensic accounting. It's just that there seem to be even more disputes since COVID. And so then that means that there's a lot more volume for not just forensic accountants, but I like to ...

Connect with RachelFull Episode Transcript:Adam:Welcome back to another edition of Count Me In. The podcast that explores the world of business from the management accountants perspective. My guest today is Rachel Baesler, VP of financial reporting and technical accounting at FLEETCOR Technologies, a leading global business payments company. We talk a lot on this show about the need for accountants inside the organizations to partner cross-functionally with leaders and groups, driving business performance and growth as an accounting leader at a company that has completed over 90 acquisitions, Rachel is the perfect guest to help us better understand how accountants can overcome common stereotypes and thrive as strategic business partners. So let's get started.Adam:So, Rachel, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today, and we're just gonna jump right in cuz we're talking about strategic partnerships today and when you're building those strategic partnerships, a common term or role today for accounting and finance professionals is business partnering. That's the term we've been hearing a lot. And so how do you ensure success when building these relationships across departments?Rachel:So to ensure business success, collaboration and partnership across departments is critical to the success of the organization, I was reading this Deloitte report that said that 83% of organizations want to increase the time spent on finance business partnering over the next three years. So it can be difficult to foster open communication with accounting. We're often seen as an impediment rather than a strategic business partner. So they understand that we handle the numbers and that we handle compliance, but it's up to us to, you know, articulate our value and demonstrate how we can be a strategic partner. A major component of FLEETCOR's success is our M&A strategy we've had over 90 acquisitions to date. Each of these require extensive involvement from accounting. So last year we purchased AFEX for over 400 million. They are part of our cross-border payment solutions similar to Cambridge global payments, which are all newly aligned under our court pay business unit.Rachel:We have noticed over time that we are getting similar accounting issues come up in these deals. So for our deal team, we created this quick reference guide and we shared it with them. So these matters that come up over and over again, they have them at the front of their mind versus the back. This helps, you know, demonstrate our value as a partner cuz they know every decision they're making and an acquisition, there is an accounting impact. It also helps just foster a relationship with them. Now they know, you know, they know my name, they know to come to me, when things come up, I can help them work through issues and they understand their accounting implications.Adam:So is that why it's so important for accounting and finance professionals? Because you have to be a seat at the table, no matter what's happening, whether it's an M&A, or the strategy that's being run or FP&A like all those different things are happening. Why is it so important for accounting and finance professionals to be a part of that?Rachel:Well, there's, you know, the compliance matters, obviously it's our job to ensure that the books and records are accurate, but also, you know, in the business environment today, all departments are being asked to demonstrate their value and partnering with other departments is how we demonstrate our value in an organization. And this also helps us, you know, foster culture of governance and compliance because you know, we have a seat at the table and we know what's going on in the business. It also helps us, you know, understand what's going on in the business. So we can better communicate with our stakeholders. You know, I'm the one preparing a lot of investor documents, right? So knowing what's going on across the organization helps me communicate more effectively with our investors.Adam:So what skills have you had to develop to be a successful relationship builder in this process?Rachel:Okay. So I read another Deloitte study and it was talking about the main competencies you need to be a successful finance business partner. And it talked about you know, being able to challenge negotiate, have, you know, commercial acumen, strategic thinking. And then one, I think for me has been critical, which is relationship management, such a simple thing, but building interpersonal relationships with people in other departments helps foster open communication and builds trust. You know, we live in an environment where we receive lots of emails. Whenever possible, I try to meet with people in person or have a face to face video call even pick up the phone, you know, you're not, you don't really have the opportunity to build a relationship when you're communicating over email, this, you know, just helps facilitate an open dialogue and create a trusted relationship. I'll give you an example.Rachel:I was working on this project with, you know, it was KPIs and I was having to talk to different leaders of the businesses. I'm sure it felt like an incremental ask. One of our lines of business leaders I was working with on this project. We just started chit chatting about Disney world. He has kids, I have kids, he was giving me some tips. I haven't taken my children yet. They're a little too young, but we built this, you know, great rapport fast forward a few months. And we acquired a business and he didn't understand, you know, how the revenue recognition pattern was working with one of the new products. Fast forward a few months later, we acquired a new business and we have a new product and there's trouble with the business leaders, understanding how the revenue recognition pattern works for that new product. You know, now they know my name, they know my face. They know to reach out to me, I can help them, you know, translate the, you know, the product to the accounting impact. So it helps me, you know, I'm getting to know the business that we've acquired from the business leaders and from the target itself. And you know, I'm at the front end of the issue they know to get me involved and it's just a really productive relationship and it, you know, helped us get involved early. So.Adam:Yeah, it's almost like you've you learned how to connect on a human side with your other collaborators and then because you connected, you developed the relationship and that allowed you to, when that you needed their help or they needed your help, you were able to connect in a better way.Rachel:Absolutely. I mean, you know, if I'm just shooting an email, so I'd be like, give me this, you know, or even asking politely. You know, I'm not gonna be the front of their mind when a problem comes up. So, you know, just spending a little bit extra time with folks, you know, building that connection, it really helps create a good relationship. And you know, it enables you to have a strategic partnership. I think that's really hard to just like force that on someone.Adam:Yeah. I was thinking, you know how it's always easy for us to talk about for as accountants to say, how do we partner with everybody else? What advice would you give to somebody who is not an accountant? How do you best partner with the accounting team? We've already talked about the human side and building that relationship, but are there other elements that we can say, Hey, this would, this would be best way to communicate. This is the best way to kind of ...

Connect with Amanda:https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-cohen-0b4b81a6/https://www.linkedin.com/company/resolver-inc/ https://twitter.com/Resolver https://www.facebook.com/ResolverInc https://www.instagram.com/resolverinc/ https://www.youtube.com/user/ResolverGRC Full Episode Transcript:Adam:I'm Adam Larson and welcome to Count Me In, the podcast focused on all the ways management accountants can help businesses thrive through smart financial management and data driven decision making. My guest today is Amanda Cohen, the vice president of product at Resolver, a software company helping businesses manage complex interconnected risks. We talk about the image problem that governance, risk, and compliance functions or GRC have at many businesses; namely, that they're tedious, repetitive and restrictive. Amanda explains how this negative perception of GRC actually hampers innovation and growth. The good news is Amanda has tips to transform this frog into a prince at your company, making GRC a more dynamic and valued partner to business operations and performance. I hope you enjoy this modern day fairytale featuring our favorite stars: management accountants.Adam:Amanda, thank you so much for coming on our podcast today. We're really excited to have you on and today we're gonna be focusing a lot on risk or governance, risk and, compliance, kind of the big three words governing organization. And one of the biggest things that we kind of wanted to focus on is, you know, there's an image problem that you've said a number of times that there's an image problem with with GRC. Can you kind of talk a little bit about that as we get started today?Amanda:Yeah, certainly. So I think a lot of it, well, I think there's a couple different angles that the governance risk and compliance space has a bit of an image problem. First and foremost, I don't think a lot of the organization understands exactly what they do and how they provide value to the organization. And so often they're seen as a barrier that maybe comes in a little late during the project or, or something that's preventing you from getting to your objectives. And really, I think that's all just in terms of the order of operations. If we can flip that around a little bit and bring these teams in earlier, it's not that person who's getting in your way of completing your project or helping you complete or achieve your objective. Really what you're starting to do is you are bringing them along for the ride and helping or using those teams to help guide your project and make sure that it's operating with the realm of what's appropriate for the organization.Amanda:And then they're gonna help you find really creative, suggestive alternatives to help move things. So that's kind of one area of the image problem is, you know, there's a barrier specifically that they seem to be imposing. And then the other one that we hear a lot from our customers is really that it seems like these teams are constantly asking me for the same information. And so, you know, you might get a request from someone in audit and they're looking for a bunch of documentation on how you run a particular process. And then two weeks later, two months later, someone from compliance is coming in and they're you the exact same question, you know, your internal controls team, same thing. And so it's like, why can these teams not just get together come up with some kind of strategy on how to collect that information and then reduce the onus on me because the business is really just trying to accomplish their job. It's not their job to provide you with the documentation. And so when there's more synergy between those teams it also reduces a little bit of that friction that you often get from the business.Adam:It almost seems like when you're looking at risk management from an organizational perspective, the organization's mission kind of needs to be the foundation of that. And the focus of that risk management, because otherwise everybody won't be on the same page if it's not there, how do you get there?Amanda:So, I mean, there's a couple ways to help be a part of those strategic decisions, be a part of what the organization is trying to accomplish. It really helps when you have buy in from the top. If your executive endorses and believes that risk and compliance has a place at the table during those discussions, it's gonna be a lot easier, but in order to, it's a bit of a chicken and egg, because it's also in order to be included in those conversations, you need to be providing insights. And so something that, you know, if all the risk function or the compliance function, whatever it may be is there. And they're just, you know, showing up at that board meeting, showing up at that executive meeting to present their five minutes on their findings and, you know, maybe their last regulatory audit, like, okay. But what have you uncovered what's in your data to help us understand, you know, how the organization is gonna achieve their objectives? Are there potentially a couple alternatives that we could consider or that we should be thinking about as we're making these strategic decisions? And so when risk can bring more valuable data that also helps propel them forward and allows them to be a part of that conversation and that'll help get that executive endorsement and then allow them to be, you know, help the organization achieve that mission that they're trying to accomplish.Adam:So I know that you know, it's probably rare that, you know, your CMA, your certified management accountant, your management accounting will lie awake at night thinking, oh no. What about that regulatory compliance document? It is something that's important. And a lot of times culture pl...

Resources:1.  Quora link to building a great Linkedin Profile2. Articles about job search/networking or how to reach out to that mutual connection like we discussed in the middle of the episode3. Daniel's book: https://www.amazon.com/Build-LinkedIn-Profile-Business-Success-ebook/dp/B00N18B2RSFull Episode Transcript:Neha:Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from the management accountant's perspective. I'm Neha Lagoo Ratnakar from IMA. And today I'm speaking with Daniel Alfon. Daniel is the author of the book, How to Build a LinkedIn Profile for Business Success. He helps businesses and individuals succeed by maximizing their reach on one of the world's largest business networking communities. Today he'll be sharing pro tips for using LinkedIn for career networking, business development, content marketing, and more. If you use LinkedIn for any reason, this is a conversation you don't wanna miss. Let's get started.Neha:So hi Daniel. Thank you so much for joining us today.Daniel:Thank you very much, Neha, I'm glad to be part of Count Me In.Neha:Excellent. So let's start with the why. Social media is not something that is top of mind for many professionals, especially accounting and finance professionals. So help us understand: why is social media and more specifically LinkedIn so valuable for our accounting and finance listeners?Daniel:Oh, that's a great question. I think the easy answer is that whenever an employer or any client will Google your name, then your LinkedIn profile is going to top the list on Google. That's the simple reason. And if you care about the image and your professional image, then you should leverage LinkedIn and make it shine.Neha:All right. And as a tag along question to that, how can accounting and finance professionals leverage LinkedIn better?Daniel:Great. It starts with understanding our career objective, whether some of the listeners here could be managers who want to get promoted in the organization or moms who had their maternity leave and want to get back to the workforce or young people trying to start out in business or get the the CMA certification then having target list of companies or career objectives for you is the prerequisite for anything you'd like to to do. And then because your LinkedIn profile, the most frequent action LinkedIn users perform on the platform is visiting other people's profiles.Neha:Mm-hmm, that's true.Daniel:And it needs to speak for itself. In other words, if I go to your profile, you will not be there to add information. And, when I see the book that you've released and I see your headline, and I see the photo and the VO photo is visible, and I see that you've added feature content. I'm likelier to stay here and try to discover what is it you do? And for the accountant or the management accountant would be seeing what they have achieved in their current position. And why is it a good idea for me to reach out to them?Neha:Wow. I love that. Keeping the person who's visiting your profile engaged throughout. Awesome. And thank you for bringing up career objectives. And we are in the era of the great resignation right now. So let's pivot to that part of LinkedIn job search. And if, if somebody's looking for a better job, how can LinkedIn be helpful for you?Daniel:Okay. The keyword is networking. When we think about the four step that that you that you roll about, and network is probably the single most important element we need to take into account. We may move from one part of the world to another. Our network is the key asset that is likely to make our career grow. And whenever we run an advanced search on LinkedIn, LinkedIn advanced searches or excellence, and that's probably one of the misused and underutilized assets, you can run advanced searches for a company you're interested in, and you would be able in many cases to identify the person you are likely to report to. And in some cases, you'll see that you and them, you share mutual connections,Neha:Right.Daniel:You connect with people, you know, well, you could leverage that meaningful connection, leave LinkedIn, and ask that person to introduce you to your ideal hiring manager or to your ideal customer and the power is to leave LinkedIn. As much as the LinkedIn is a powerful platform, close to billion users. Two people sign up every second. Still hear me out. The big secret is to know when to leave LinkedIn. LinkedIn has shown us the name of the person. And it showed us the name of the mutual connection. Now is the time to leave LinkedIn because in real life, what we are interested in is an interview. The interview is not going to happen on LinkedIn. LinkedIn just provided us with the names, and then we need to forget about the platform and get back to real life. So we, we land that position or start that discussion.Neha:Wow, that's quite insightful. So looking up people on LinkedIn, but moving on from there to actually network with them directly. And how can that be done in a remote-first world?Daniel:It could be, when you say you run a search and you find someone you'd like to reach out to, and you see that you do share a mutual connection with them, or several mutual connections with them. Then we, if you two are connected by visiting their profile and clicking on contact info, you would get their email. Simply leave LinkedIn. You send 'em a message. You ask how they've been. And at one point you page the link to the hiring manager or to the ideal prospect you'd like, and you ask them, do you know that person well enough?Neha:Okay.Daniel:And Neha, in some cases you could, you could guess because if your mutual connection has 300 connections, and the hiring manager has 400 connections, then chances are they know each other.Neha:Okay.Daniel:And if you spend 30 more seconds in, you see that they went to the same school, or they worked in the same location for the same company, it gives you also a probability of them knowing each other. And if you manage to have a meaningful introduction that can get you foot in the door, and that can start a meaningful process, hopefully leading to a contract.Neha:Wow. That's some great detective work there, Daniel. All right. So from career tips to, let's pivot to another key aspect of LinkedIn. Now, many of our listeners are consultants, or they work in small businesses, and I know you're an expert at getting clients from LinkedIn. So what are your top tips from, for business development on LinkedIn?Daniel:Okay, great. So I'll, I'll say this, there, there are two pillars. I think we need to consider. One is a converting profile. And the second is our connection strategy. So very quickly a converting profile will make your ideal reader understand what you bring to the table. And that your connection strategy should enable you to use or to leverage, or to ask people to introduce you to the hiring manager or to the ide...

Connect with Rocky: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rocky-buckley/http://powerpersonaproject.com/ Full Episode Transcript:Adam: (00:05) Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from a management accountant's perspective. Today, I'm speaking with Rocky Buckley, a personal branding consultant who helps experts maximize the value of their unique knowledge and skills. Rocky does a great job of demystifying the concept of a personal brand and explains how understanding and embracing your specialization helps management accountants and others thrive in a chaotic world.  Adam: (00:36) Rocky, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Really appreciate you coming on to share your expertise with us today. And so today we're gonna be kind of talking about personal branding and there's so many things happening in the world like pandemics, wars and in a lot of ways you have to kind of find a way to make yourself stand out in order to show the world, Hey, this is who I am, and this is how I want to go. And so kind of, maybe we can start off. Maybe you can define what does it mean? What does personal branding mean and why is it important for us?  Rocky: (01:06) Yeah, well, personal branding is really an offshoot of branding itself, which, in a nutshell basically is a way to take a shortcut into people's minds, right? We're in a crowded marketplace. There's a lot of noise. We're bombarded with marketing messages all day long, all sorts of different inputs and the ability to stand out, as you said, to be able to sort of penetrate through all of that noise and cut through in a way that resonates with the type of person that we're we're targeting. It becomes very important to figure out a way to do that. So on a corporate level, you know, of course, branding is sort of that company's vision mission, what they're all about. And then all of that gets crystallized into, you know, visual form. It can be a logo, it can be a style, it can be a way that they communicate their message to the world.  Rocky: (01:58) So when you take that to a personal level, the same sort of principles apply, what we're looking to do is take all of those aspects of ourselves that make us unique, different, you know, and really connect with that kind of person that we are for that we're really targeting at. And being able to kind of create a shortcut version of that, a crystallized version that somebody can very quickly get what you're all about and get whether or not they connect with you or not. And again, we're not looking to please everybody, but we are looking for those people that we are trying to connect with to resonate with us. And so, you know, when we talk about personal branding, you know, some people just naturally come across in a way that cuts through, right. They just have a big enough personality where they resonate with people, but for most of us, you know, it requires some conscious thought and design.  Rocky: (02:48) It's sort of like thinking through, you know, what are those elements about me that are different? What are those aspects about what I do that I really want to convey very strongly? What's that sense of purpose maybe that I have, right. That makes me excited about what I do. So it's being strategic and kind of being able to figure all of that stuff out and then being able to distill it in a way that's constructed for public consumption, right, for other people to be able to get and get it really quickly. So that turns into, you know, your messaging and your visual branding and all of that kind of stuff. But ultimately we want a snapshot of ourselves that people will be able to kind of understand really quickly that simple, fast, you know, and easy and cuts through the noise.  Adam: (03:29) It almost makes me think of that old fashioned elevator pitch that you would say, you know, if you're in an elevator, what would, you know, what could you say to somebody in that ride on the elevator in a sense, right?  Rocky: (03:38) Yeah. Yeah. It is that really that fast because, you know, especially now as people are moving more online and the online market, as you just mentioned, pandemics and wars and stuff, it's really made people rethink their business. A lot of people have now decided to come online much more than they ever were before by necessity or by choice, right. When you step into the online marketplace, you know, you find it's even more crowded and you're connecting people through a scroll on a phone typically, or some kind of a timeline where, you know, if you're scrolling, let's say through Facebook, I mean, Facebook can only put so many people on your timeline, and it's basically a way to compress the world into this one narrow thing that people can scroll through. And so for you to be able to actually have somebody stop the scroll and actually pay attention to you for more than a few seconds, like that's a big deal and we've gotta master kind of the art and science of being able to know how to do that. Right. And so, yeah, the online marketplace is really, really crowded and yeah, more important than ever before. And it's just going to become more so, you know, there's billions of people in the world that haven't even come online yet, you know, so like it's, and the population of course is growing and so on. So being able to construct an effective personal brand that cuts through this is sort of a master skill that I think is only gonna become more important as time goes on.  Adam: (05:07) So what I'm almost hearing you say, it's almost like we need to make ourselves like a specialist in a way to make sure that we stand out in that way. Does that make sense to make ourselves a specialist?  Rocky: (05:16) Well, I think being a specialist is one aspect of a way to stand out. I think that specialization is more of a conversation about business model. I think there's a reason why we would wanna specialize beyond just the branding elements of it. Specialization allows us to do things like raise our prices a lot, charge a lot more. And it really affects then everything downstream in a business model. From a branding standpoint, yeah, specialization is one of those ways that allows you to filter all of the people potentially in the market and start to narrow those down into a slice that you can target very specifically. So for example, you know, a good, good example of that might be as if you were a doctor and you were a general practitioner, you know, versus specializing in one part of the body.  Rocky: (06:09) Right. And so therefore, you know, you're gonna basically be for those people that are looking for that one thing, you know, I have a problem with my nose or something like that. And I'm looking for a nose doctor as opposed to a general practitioner. So when it comes to something like accounting, yeah. If you can specialize and be great in that one area, you're gonna cut down the potential number of people that you're trying to reach. And the potential people that are looking for you are gonna be able to find you much more easily because you're focused on that one thing. Yeah.  Adam: (06:42) Hmm. That makes sense. Yeah. Cuz when I think about it, a lot of times accountants have to wear so many hats, especially if you're in a small to medium size business and you're a CFO or controller, you kind of have to be a jack of all trades. You have to do a lot of different things. And so there have to be ways to differentiate yourself in a way. So a lot of times people start with certifications, you know, IMA offers a certification, certifications are one way to kind of make yourself a speci...