Foundational Truths with Cliff Merchant, Finance Manager at ForeScout Technologies

What are those foundational truths of Finance Business Partnership that persist across roles, companies and industries?  Cliff Merchant, Finance Manager at ForeScout Technologies, shares his insights on what makes a strong relationship with your partner, and how to grow our arsenal of skills for the road ahead.  Welcome!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Hi, this is Matt Cooley, Cliff Merchant, Finance Manager at Forescout Technologies. Hey, Cliff. Hey, Matt. Thank you for having me. I'm really happy to be here. Oh, thanks. It was wonderful having you. Please tell us about your business, Cliff, and how you came to the role that you have today.

SPEAKER_00: 0:45

Yes, so my company is focused on cybersecurity. And my current role is I'm the sole business partner for our chief customer officer. And he has responsibility for both customer support and professional services businesses, which are full P&L responsibility. How did I end up in this role? The short version, I was fortunate enough to work at a variety of companies, from medium-sized companies all the way up to multibillion-dollar corporations. And I've also worked at a cross-section. I've worked at a public utility, a few computer hardware networking companies, software companies. And for good measure, I've even worked at a law firm, a well-known law firm out in the Bay Area Thank you. And within those companies, I've also had a variety of business partners. There's been sales, marketing, R&D, G&A functions. And an interesting point, my first job or my first analyst role was supporting a hardware services division. And now I've gone somewhat full circle and I'm currently supporting a hardware or a services division once again. Why not? You must have enjoyed it. Hopefully, I've picked up a few things in that time.

SPEAKER_01: 2:10

Wow. That's what I love about your background, actually, is the variety of roles and different environments and people that you've had to interact with. I mean, it's a good story for a finance business partner podcast. So, during your career thus far, there must be some, I'll call them foundational truths of finance business partnering that you've noticed seem to consistently apply regardless of where you're working. Is that the case? And is there been any one particular sort of truth that you've noticed or a North Star during your career as a partner?

SPEAKER_00: 2:52

Oh, I would say absolutely yes. And I really like that question. There's actually, I think, two points that stand out to me from my different experiences that I've had. The first one is from a a finance geek perspective, if you would. Nothing wrong with being a finance geek, right? No, come on, get in line. We're all geeks. You know, I'm so thankful that my very first role was very focused on accounting. So I was really deeply involved with the month-end, quarter-end, close process. And this included the, you know, preparing journal entries, obtaining the status of vendors for accruals during recons, et cetera. And that experience, being able to be confident in accounting, I think has really helped me and served me well going forward. I think about doing expense forecasts, for example, and I think that if I had not had that accounting experience, they likely would not have been as accurate as I'm able to get them. I think with just being able to explain variances, being able to go back and dig into the accounting just makes those explanations, I think, much more meaningful to the business partner. And so it's not necessary to have a CPA, but I think it's important to have a good understanding of accounting for any finance business partner. Nice, OK. The second point is I think that open communication is absolutely critical. And we hear communication so much, it sounds like a cliche. But if I could just take a moment to maybe add a little bit more color to what I mean. When I think about open communication, I think it encompasses much more than just having the quick kind of budget versus actual review or maybe sending off a report to address some fire drill. It's more than just that. At times, it may mean having a dialogue with your business partner. And other times, it may mean actually having a debate with your business partner. And if either of those can take place without ruining the working relationship, then I think it means that you've become well-positioned to be a trusted advisor to your business partner. I found that having regular one-on-one sessions with the business partner does an incredible amount with helping you to understand the strategy of the organization. And it also will help the business partner buy in if it comes time to planning, budgeting, and so forth. And so these types of regular really getting into the nuts and bolts, if you would, of the business, I think also help to break down the stereotype that the finance person is just Right. And I think those

SPEAKER_01: 5:59

stereotypes used to be our roles, you know, quite a few years ago, right? Not us personally, but the finance function in general. Wow. All right. That's awesome insight. So we worked together in Silicon Valley and both later moved to other places far away from Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley. From my perspective, it was such a unique place. After moving away, I realized how much it affected how I viewed things. I'm curious if your perspective on being a finance business partner changed after you left Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_00: 6:42

Yes. My intro to Silicon Valley, way back in high school, a friend of mine showed me this article in Businessweek about this place called Silicon Valley. I just remember being so fascinated that You know, there are all these companies that seem to be concentrated in this one location. And I just kind of put it in the back of my head, not realizing that I eventually end up working there. There's certainly no place like the Bay Area and working in Silicon Valley. So many companies that are very good at what they do. It can be extremely fast paced because of the competitive nature of the business out there. And And also, I mean, just living in the Bay Area from a cultural perspective, from a good restaurant perspective, there's few places like that. So there is quite a bit that has kind of shaped my approach, if you would, to business support. And one of the things that stands out to me is that because of the nature of the business in Silicon Valley, it's virtually impossible possible to not be able to thrive without having a good team effort. And usually, it's a cross-functional effort. Something I wish that I would have learned earlier in my career is the importance of being joined at the hip with the business partner's operations person. This role might be solely operations, or it may be a part of their overall function. But it doesn't matter. I think having finance and operations worked hand-in-hand together is so critical. With the benefit of hindsight, if I look at some of the roles where things didn't go so well with my business partnering support, I think it was the equivalent of essentially trying to balance a two-legged stool, if you would. The operations person may have been going off doing their thing. I may have been going off doing my finance thing, and we're trying to balance the two two-legged stool, which sometimes you might be able to get it to stand up, but inevitably it's going to fall over. And then that's when you end up in this downward spiral, maybe finger pointing at who did what wrong. And in essence, the business doesn't move forward. I think until you can establish a relationship where that third leg of the stool is established, or even better, the fourth leg of the stool, where the third leg means a strong working relationship with the operations person. And then the fourth leg means you bring in the rest of the management team as well. So everyone kind of understands the challenges and maybe the constraints that you have with achieving the strategy. And then everyone's moving in the same direction from the different perspectives, but you have a common goal. And I think once that happens, the role of the finance business partner opens up to so many more possibilities.

SPEAKER_01: 9:59

That makes so much sense. I think in our partnering role, the focus a lot of times is on making the best decision, given the information we have available, advising our partner so that they can make the best decision. But once you make decisions, you have to enact them, right? And you have to make them happen. And so having that strong link to operations and also for a feedback loop is so critical. It definitely takes a team. I think that's well put.

SPEAKER_00: 10:29

It's just one other quick point regarding Silicon Valley. I also went through the whole.com calm bubble, a subsequent burst of the bubble. And I think about maybe some of the either new graduates or recent grads who are going into business now. And unfortunately, we kind of seem to be headed in a downturn. So I would just say, business is made up of cycles. There's going to be expansions and contractions. And if things look a little bit bleak, I would just encourage the new grads to stay positive. Keep going forward with what your career goal is, and eventually we'll have an upturn, and things will hopefully get a lot better than what we're dealing with right now.

SPEAKER_01: 11:15

Yeah, that's good advice. And for our listeners that are earlier in their career, it's important to remember that this is definitely not forever. How has remote working in a pandemic changed how you do your job this year?

UNKNOWN: 11:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 11:34

Yes. You know, a friend of mine, we were talking and she mentioned that I was a trailblazer with remote working. Okay. Now everyone has followed. Because of how my business partners, most of them work remotely. And so it was fairly easy for me to transition into working remotely as well. So before this awful pandemic happened, hit us, I had been working remotely for about a year and a half or so. So I was... Plenty of practice. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, I had my home office set up. I'd gone through some of the challenges. I think one of the biggest hurdles was feeling disconnected from the rest of the team. And it's interesting, I wasn't disconnected from my business partners because, you know, we'd already been working remotely even when I sat in the office, but it was more from the finance staff. my boss and I basically sat next to each other in the office. And I guess I underestimated how important it was that we'd had these quick chats on different issues or just casual conversations. And all of a sudden, you know, that was gone. So I tried to reach out to some people who had actually had more experience working remotely. And one bit of advice that I got that I really strive to implement is that I was told to... I should really work to over-communicate. And that really resonated with me. Instead of deferring to email, I would purposefully do a phone call. And if there were meetings, I'd make sure that my camera was on with the Zoom meetings. Anything I could do to make sure that I wasn't out of sight, out of mind with my own team. So I think those water cooler type conversations that we all have in the office, that's probably what's the biggest challenge to the transition to working remotely. And I think something that you actively have to work to address. I guess if there's anything positive from this whole issue that we're going through is that now that everyone's remote, I think everyone is now conscious of making sure that everyone's included in a conversation. We probably took for granted some of our people that work overseas and what have you and didn't really actively include them in meetings. And so I think this is just making everyone much more aware. And also, in some ways, it's a lot easier to have meetings remotely than working in the office. So it's been a combination of good and bad and definitely a learning experience.

SPEAKER_01: 14:31

Yeah, that's interesting. I've noticed that I can reach out to my direct colleagues a little bit more easily in this remote situation. So I'll ping somebody frequently either on Teams or Skype. Those are the tools we use. And most of the time they'll pick up. So there is a silver lining to this temporary nightmare. So Cliff, I like to ask all my guests, where is the finance business partner role? heading from your perspective? And what should people be doing now to prepare for that future, regardless of where you are in your career journey, early, mid-stage, or even later stage?

SPEAKER_00: 15:17

Yes, yes. You know, I've attended a, it was probably a couple of years ago now, I attended a workshop and the person presenting had a lot of experience with how finance has transitioned over the years and was also able to give their perspective on how things would be changing in the future with transition to cloud computing and with AI and so forth. So I know that there's a lot out there and I'll probably leave the prognosticating to the experts in terms of where the trends will go. But I do want to give an example of how I think things might change and how it might be beneficial to anyone wherever they are in their career. I think about, there's a lot of scenario analysis that I do in my current role. And some of the analysis are pretty pretty detailed and pretty involved, but yet I can get those done in about an hour or two. And I think back to my first analyst role and literally that same type of analysis would have taken probably a couple of analysts, maybe a couple of days to get it completed. And so here I'm able to do, you know, the work of a couple of people myself in a much shorter timeframe. And so I see that type of trend, you know, over the next maybe three to five years, just accelerating. So if we just reflect back on the couple of points I brought up earlier about working tightly with an operations person, and if you're positioning yourself to be a trusted advisor, then even if you get more efficient tools and better tools, where you're able to react much more quickly to the competition, where your business partner may decide demand a wider cross-section of data in a much shorter time period, your role is not going to go away. But your arsenal of tools is just going to increase and just make you much more effective as a business partner. And so I see that accelerating in the short term. But as long as a person is staying up to date on the most popular cloud applications for finance and maybe some of the other reporting-type tools, I don't think that the role itself will go away. I just think business partnering will just become much more deeply involved in the business.

SPEAKER_01: 17:58

Oh, that's excellent. Wow. Cliff, you've given us a lot to think about, and I think some great sage advice on the partnering role that we play. And I want to say thank you so much again for being with us today. Thank you so much, Matt. And thank you to our subscribers for listening to this episode of Upside Downside. We will see you next time. Have a good day. Okay. Recording.