Brad Eisenhuth is the founder and CEO of The Outperformer, a consultancy that designs integrate and facilitate performance and change focused solutions for businesses on their teams.
Many of our audience will know Brad's a thought leader in the finance space around culture change and adoption of technology, all of which his team works on in partnership with finance teams around the world.
Check out the work The Outperformer here -
https://www.theoutperformer.co/
To contact Richard Holmes please call 0403 513 720 or reach out on richardh@hprconsulting.com. https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardholmesfinancerecruiter/
Brad Eisenhuth is the founder and CEO of The Outperformer, a consultancy that designs integrate and facilitate performance and change focused solutions for businesses on their teams.
Many of our audience will know Brad's a thought leader in the finance space around culture change and adoption of technology, all of which his team works on in partnership with finance teams around the world.
Check out the work The Outperformer here -
https://www.theoutperformer.co/
To contact Richard Holmes please call 0403 513 720 or reach out on richardh@hprconsulting.com. https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardholmesfinancerecruiter/
Please note that this has been transcribed by AI/Bots so there may be typos and the occasional strange things happening.
Richard Holmes
0:01
Welcome to the numbers people Podcast, where each week we're going to be speaking with some highly regarded senior finance professionals and create experts looking into the ins and outs of what makes finance people and their teams great. The podcast is proudly sponsored by HPR Consulting a leading executive finance recruitment firm. I'm your host Richard Holmes. In today's episode, we welcome Brad Eisennhuth. Brad is the founder and the CEO with the outperformer that consultancy that designs integrate and facilitate performance and change-focused solutions for businesses on their teams. Many of our audience will know Brad's a thought leader in the finance space around culture change and adoption of technology, all of which his team works on in partnership with finance teams around the world. Broad Hawaii, good to catch up. awesome to see you, Richard, my old friend how you Bay? Yeah, very well, very well. I can't complain at all. I'd like to complain about the lockdown. But I'm not going to complain
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Brad Eisenhuth
1:02
with attitude to have, I think in these times better gratitude, the appreciation and the perspective on the fact that you and I are in a fairly good place. Not a bad place to be right.
Richard Holmes
1:12
It's all good. And I've known Brad for what coming up 15 years now. We're getting old hay or taken off the years. But it's it's good to see you again. And I actually used to live abroad A number of years ago and since then Brian has set up his own business, the outperformer as I mentioned in the introduction, he has seen a lot over the last few years in terms of how teams are progressing. Now, the thing with this podcast and the reason I wanted to get Brad on the show is to really get his thoughts on culture on hygiene and leadership. And there's definitely an evolvement. With finance going on. There's a pace of change going on within finance, overall and within different teams. So I thought it'd be really good to pick his brains and see what he's seeing out there and what's working, what isn't. And hopefully we'll cover a few topics. Thanks. Great. Yeah,
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Brad Eisenhuth
1:58
look, I'm very happy to go down there, then I agree with you made, I think you're totally right, with respect to that idea of the pace of change increasing dramatically. And perhaps to provide some context for anyone who doesn't know me, or the APA format. We are essentially a management consultancy that historically started all of our work around the notion of performance of finance teams, and the finance function in an organization. And we've evolved, and we do a heap of consulting in all areas of culture, strategy and performance more broadly across organizations. But I have a real sweet spot. And I guess, a love for finance, because that's where I started my career and partly why no, you made when you think about that point around pace of changes, a few dynamics that are playing out at the moment is momentum to develop. And I think it's good for us to sort of start the conversation there, right? Because all the other points around Well, how do you manage them? Why do you manage that? What do you do about it? Well, we can talk about that today as much as we need to. But you know, there's a few things at play, right? The first of all, what we're seeing is this expectation from the organization. So from the business, asking the question, how do we get more out of finance, you know, in every organization that I'm often brought into, not only is there a movement of finance, evolving for its own needs, but there's this sort of pressure point coming to the business angle, we're moving, we're innovating, we're trying to do things differently, we want more out of our organization, we've gone through in recent times, COVID, and a lot of change ourselves. So that's coming back through the organization into finance. And there's big bigger questions being asked whether it's coming from Asia director, CEO, level, executive team, or just as the business is pressing back on the finance team on different aspects of what they do, it's coming from an outside in perspective, but then there's this other momentum, which is starting to build and that is this awareness that the finance function can digitize far more efficiently than ever have been able to before. And the reason for that is the power of digitalization can now go into the hands of the finance function, we often call this enablement. So the processes the tasks, the hygiene, I'll talk about later, that the components of finance that can also be done in a very logical sequential manner, by a system, automated process. Down the past, you know, if you think about the typical systems that we've had, we've used in finance, you require a very heavy degree of it, intervention. That's it requires. If you thought about back when the AI tools started to be introduced, they will all be managed by very, very administration heavy, IT teams that needed to code the five bill cubes build resources to support the outputs of those tools. Now, what's happening is there's this whole shift towards Well, we've got all this data. And we've got these plugin type tools or systems you know, there lots of Power BI and others that many of you will be thinking about. So this can not only wrangle the data, with the finance person using like a low code, no code And approach, we can get very creative about how we present that data. But how we shape that data. And I'm not, we don't require this whole development of IT technology knowledge, we actually can leverage off some fundamental skills that have come out of knowing how to use Excel, and all sorts of capabilities that already exists in the finance function and just build on it. Of course, there are some new skills that come with it. But as we're building on foundations, as opposed to requiring and relying on other support to enhance the capability of Finance. So you, as smarter finance leaders have tapped into this awareness. They're asking better questions that I can actually walk, if we want this outcome, we want better support to the organization, we want more accuracy, we want stronger control and governance model these things done, let's work on ourselves more proactively automate, improve accuracy, improve auditability, improve the output, prove the efficiency of the output and have fun, it's really driving that it's been really interesting to watch that in from an internal capability development point of view. And then from an external point of view, the business saying, well, we really want you as a partner, we really want you to support our decisions. We don't want to be just receiving information from you. We're looking for much more now that that's always been a question, but it's just happening much faster than I've
Richard Holmes
6:18
ever seen before. And it's good to see in sales or touching before the evolvement of finance just in the last few years been incredible. And have you seen a lot of companies been restricted to do it.
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Brad Eisenhuth
6:29
You know, where the restriction comes from is this inertia that comes from the way we used to do things and the way we currently are set up. So there's different reasons that things might slow down the adoption of this change a few things I see. So one is, if you think about some of these larger global multinationals, you know might have a centralized IT strategy that has been built on all the thinking built on, we rolled out being solutions that everyone across the globe uses. And we expect you to work this way. The smaller organizations say, well, that's great from a kind of Central efficiency of getting leverage across an organization getting scale across an organization, let's use these big chunky tools that we work on. But let's be smarter about what we bolt into it. Let's personalize at a local level. So that's, that's getting in the way a little bit. The other piece of scaling the wave data, my data sits in all sorts of places where an organization typically and you know, many, many financing to say, Oh, we need to take more control dials, bring in a data scientist, let's do this. Let's do that. What's hampering, that is how you need to actually organize your data first. So it's all well and good to get all this exciting stuff at the front end. But if it takes for evidence extracted, pull it out, we're asking the wrong question that actually gets more hygiene and focus around how we manage data, what data does for us, and how do we make that change from these centralized systems to a single source of truth. Now, that idea of a single source of truth has existed for a while, just a lot of companies have been very slow to adapt to that. And then I think the final piece that's getting in the way is, if I'm really honest with the leadership thing, it's the finance leadership group, being slow to deploy the skills and the behaviors and the culture that allows the adoption of all this stuff, to occur a path. And so if you have three different teams with three different leaders, they've all got the same tools in the market, they've all got data, they've all got financial kind of processes and systems that ultimately are reasonably similar across different organizations. There's other nuances depending on the industry, but you know, the performance of those teams is always reflective of the leadership. Always, in every case I look at, there's no lack of capacity to access technology, there's no lack of access to data. It's all about how it's managed and how we take advantage of it. And to me, the focus of leadership on building agility building the culture that supports the use of that, is the difference between working or not.
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Richard Holmes
9:00
So why do you think that is? Why do you think the scared of it? Or is it just more of a knowledge thing?
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Brad Eisenhuth
9:05
is a few things going on? I mean, sometimes it's knowledge, sometimes it's the witness, we do some work with clients that we dangle the carrot. What did you know, you could do this in the wall? Actually, no, I didn't realize that this is we're just in a new world where some of the pathways that people can take just that really visible, we don't all know about it. And technology is moving faster than our understanding in some respects. So yeah, I certainly can acknowledge that there are some gaps there. And often, you know, when we've seen teams look at technology change, that the reason they go back to the old ways of thinking because they're not aware of what's possible out there. And so if you start with a problem statement, you say, Well, if you could do this, would you do it? And most of them nod their heads that yes. So great. Well, there's there's a possibility to do that. So let's not think about the old path. Let's just think about the problem. So that's one aspect. You completely robbed the other pieces. Yeah, it's always different for each each person but there's a few things that I see out there when I talked to finance leaders and the scared nervous that you always use your words. Good, they can be a few things at play. So one is how do you build a business case for change with others that are investing or supporting investment in that chain? To some degree, you're going to get there, whenever you're looking at any sort of change or development of your team, you've got invest in it. So whether it's around technology, data, people in development, and the question you could ask yourself is, why should the business care to invest in that if things are kind of working? Okay, you know, often where we have to start with a really intelligent way of looking at that problem and knowing it's worth changing. So you need a burning platform to support the strategy of the organization. And fundamentally, people around you need to be able to go Yeah, that's a no brainer, I'm going to back your support that now, that is a skill. And that is obviously confronting for some because you need to go and push into the idea of challenging others to support you to change, even very, very experienced finance leaders are not leading into that as much as I wish they could. So what's driving that? There's all sorts of things, sometimes as impassivity, things are working, okay, now, Bob chug away. And the team's doing pretty well, I'll make some incremental kind of process improvements or small changes, I'll get everyone excited about different things. But I'm not really looking for that step change. That's a confronting kind of concept, we're particularly two things going, okay. So there's no burning platform, there's this concept of the secondary gain that I see a lot. And what a secondary gain is, where we know it could be done better. But it's actually much easier to do the thing we don't lock now, as a way of explain that, you know, one of the members of my team explains really nicely so that, you know, you'll be ever seen someone who's a housewife who works at home, and does all the chores, does a lot of work, and then feels a little bit debilitated by that as well. I don't really like it, I don't feel like I'm living my life. And I don't like running around doing the chores after the family, but they never change. And often what's going on is while they know they would like to do something else, they also have this secret story in their head that is, well I like it when my family feel like I'm important and tell me that it's important that I get these things done, right. So when you think about the finance functions, the same thing, well, I'm getting a pat on the back for delivery of x, y and Zed, it's time consuming, I feel a bit special by getting stuff done. When I get stuff done, I get a little bit of a high, that makes me feel important. So emotionally, to let go of that and go, I'm gonna go into this unknown area is a big change, right? And it takes a lot of self awareness for a finance leader, anyone listening to this, to be able to go Actually, that's what I'm doing. I'm playing the safe game, because it's easier for me to do that. I know it's better to go somewhere else. But I'm staying here and underlying it. And it's interesting, I had this particular kind of client of mine for years in a row has spoken to me about culture. He said, okay, I'd like the finance team to change. This is the problem we keep getting is the problem. Again, we can explore that. Let's look at how we deal with the root causes of that. And let's look at the culture and see how if we define what great looks like, how can we start to get your team collectively moving in that direction four years later, same conversations going. Four years later, people are partnering, as well as I'd like. We're getting killed up with poor processes and systems, which are still talking about the same problem four years later. And I don't think that person lacks any intelligence. I think they're very capable. I think they've got a very good handle on what's actually going on. Question is what's stopping the change? It's certainly not logic. And it's certainly not the rationale, right? That's all there in front of them. So something else is going on? If I knew the answer, i'd i'd influence a little bit more than you know, the reality is with the work I do, and the work my team Does, does principle always take is that someone wants to change, they don't want to do and a team or leader wants to be in a better place. And I think once you can have agreement that you're going to commit to that, you're going to build a plan to get from A to B, whatever B looks like you can make that happen. But when you look at it, and you're seeing it a and you will not prepare to define what b is. And then I'm not prepared to change the plan or let go of what I've already got in front of me and say, well, it's going to be really different because b looks really different. I'm going to get there. This sounds so simple, right? I know. It's like I'm speaking. Yeah, really simple terms today. It's so common. It's so common, like the number of times that I've spoken to teams or finance leaders or groups, and they all they all know there's a better way to do things. They all know that they could be automation, or they could be this or we could actually spend more time partnering and less time it's like it gets sick every day, some dirt and some dark. The difference is those that take action and are prepared to lean into the discomfort of knowing that they're taking a bit of a risk because the benefits don't get realized. Straight away. Right? far easier to go into a meeting with a half page report that's based on the current situation and deal with that meeting than it is to visioni for three years and say well, I'm going to drive it see And if we can shift in the way this finance function operates, takes courage, it takes all sorts of things. And I'm not suggesting those people don't have courage, it just just takes a takes a very different approach.
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Richard Holmes
15:11
And as you touched on there, but it's about taking action, isn't it? If you've got any examples of where you went to a client for us, or years ago, and where they were broken to, if that's a way to explain it, where you've gone in, you've seen a huge kind of transformation to the present
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Brad Eisenhuth
15:24
day happens all the time. And, you know, the pace of change depends on a few things. But I'm working with the team right now. Explain it very, very rapid change. I probably underestimated how fast these guys could get things going. What had happened was, and I won't name the company, but they're in the pharmaceutical sector, this person that I work with the leader, a heads up both finance and a bunch of other operational areas and supply chain, it essentially asked the question, will I want my team deliberately partnering with the organization to help them make better decisions? Now, that was like the problems? We said, Okay, well, that's great. Lots of people say that. First thing we do is let's diagnose why they're not at this, let's find out why they're not doing this organically. Because I can tell you now, partnering is not exactly a new concept. So let's work out why it's not there. And then once we work out why it's not there, let's build things into the culture that normalize that way of thinking that way of behaving. Do you want partnership to be a priority? Let's make it a priority. And then let's normalize that as the expectation we have in our organization. And so of course, we looked at a few things. Why didn't partner exist? Well, the first thing was, no one had a clear definition of what partner was, we went out and interviewed all of the team, and everyone had some random description with all all sorts of things like, Oh, it's helping them with reporting and analytics. Okay, cool. person. Number two, it's being strategic, and it's being ahead of the game on on ideas.
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Brad Eisenhuth
17:00
And all sorts of definition. So you have all these different gifts, then you have this challenge of saying, okay, even if we defined it, what's the way of working consistently, that ensures that partnering activities can happen? There's all different ways that the teams were engaging with the business. So some of them that was, you know, ad hoc, others it was here, we have a meeting every month, and that kind of give them information. Everyone was dealing with it differently. And then the actual act of partnering right, the idea of partnering was clearly based on the definition is clearly inconsistent. You know, when we started to look at, well, if you kind of partially understand at least you might have an approach that you can, that you can get things to work some of the time, and how far we have getting that consistent, you're really what it comes down to. And this is probably one of the biggest things that I see broken out there is the bias of how you design the way you part, right. So it all comes down to Well, here's a strategy. Here's the Northstar, what we're working with both collectively working towards that. And we just use the tools that we've got around us to make sense of that. And then we overlay all of the hygiene and the reporting. We put all that up. And instead, most of them were, well, I've got to get this thing down, I've got to get this thing done. These guys need to take this off on these guys. So we just completely kids, I don't think so but I will biases to business strategy. We'll talk about that first. And then we clean the hygiene up. And hygiene is like brushing your teeth. In the morning, you brush your teeth. Just happens every day. No one cares if you don't brush your teeth, but you do it because it's important. Actually, the build on that is like a nice little story to give you an idea of the way to think about like finance performance and this sort of story. And I'll do a bit more of that in the end. But it's a nice, nice little add. For me What this means is, if you think about an athlete, right, let's compare the finance function to an athlete. What's the athletes job to do? Well, it's the goal of the definition is pretty clear as to when their event, then you start going back and go, well, what's the thing you've got to focus on? I'll tell you what, I can't remember, I played a bit of 40 years ago, so I can't be here. But anyone ever saying to me, or did you brush the teeth in the morning? My coach certainly didn't talk to me about brushing my teeth. Now, yes, if I don't brush my teeth, and I get an infection, I'm probably not going to be able to train for a while I'm gonna have to get a doctor, it's gonna be disruptive, right? But there's an expectation that you just brush your teeth. Then on top of that, what are we talking about? We talk about skills we talk about, you know, how do we beat the opposition, we talk about what sort of strength and conditioning Do I need to be successful we work on the stuff that matters, is really obvious when we talk about that in sport. But then when you go into business, it's kind of the other way around, right? It's like, let's talk about brushing our teeth and 90% of the time, and we might add on a little bit of a discussion about going to the gym. So in this team, they just did the complete opposite, be the complete opposite and say, Okay, let's work on three things. Let's define what it is let's invent a new engagement model. And let's continuously continuously focus on what this is the muscle building that might During the comms what it looks like to partner motivated. And they literally talk about it week in week out every week. And it's been going on for months now. And you should see the change in performance, right? In a few months, they picked up a global award for the best performing team. Within a few months, right? The business has seen an engagement model that has not only helped the finance function and the operations team work more efficiently, and they're making better decisions in their time. On the other side, the business is going Geez, you're organizing us to be more efficient. Gck, like, oh, we're making, we're actually asking better questions about where we put our focus. As to so everyone's getting these wins out of the organization of what's important, not what we just have to do. And so, you know, when you change the narrative, and you change the focus, and you change the priority to the thing that matters, it's amazing advice, hands down, the leader in this team, go back to my phone for this leader has been relentless about that focus, right. So I talked about the weekly times that they spend literally an hour debriefing on wins, losses, and ways to improve on it and come in and work on different sort of questions that come up with each week on that sort of stuff. Every few weeks is a phase of development on shaking, how effectively is that engagement model working? And what do we need to do to build on it? So instead of just talking about wins and losses, it's how do you enhance your function? How do you continue to enhance your function based on the starting point of this engagement model that's been set up to set you up for success? Every quarter, roughly, what's the focus is let's get clearer about our vision for the 18 months, right? Because before we had this notional definition, now that we're understanding, let's not just pretend we put this little strategy workshop day, you know, six months ago out, and we talked about where we want to be, let's keep talking about where we want to be. And the shift there relative to any environment I've seen has just been significant fast, because of the attention on that. That's not to suggest that other teams I've worked with have been any less effective. But all I'm saying is, this is a great story to share, to move the dial and get results, the larger the team, and the more complex the organization, or the principles apply, sometimes there's a little bit more inertia and bit more to move through. And it takes a little bit longer. But of course, you know, if you get those principles that I've just shared, they're in place, you get movement,
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Richard Holmes
22:23
just listening to that. I mean, it sounds so simple, I guess it's short term pain, long term gain.
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Brad Eisenhuth
22:28
Look at anything in life, here, we've all been through it. And you know, it's different things you decide to do in your life, and you decide something's important you're leaning to and that's pretty easy to say. But often, the message I think about is this concept of choose your heart, it's hard to stand still, there's always problems as things change, the business changes world changing, it's always a problem. But there's a choice to be potentially more impactful, leave a legacy or do something innovative or whatever justification you've come up with, right? So if you want to do that, it's also hard. They're both hard, I find one more enjoyable than the other. That's also my choice as well, right? So you know, I think from a leadership point of view, choosing that part and leaning into it, realizing that you could actually make a real difference and not get stuck up in that kind of humdrum of the noise of regular business is a useful thing to reflect on.
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Richard Holmes
23:20
And just listening to Brad, the example he gave. I mean, that's, that's a great example of a leader in a company executing it when you're interviewing those people within that team, though, giving you different examples of what's important. What's partnering things like do you then say, right, this is what we're going to do? Do you have that kind of step blueprint? Or is it a case by case?
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Brad Eisenhuth
23:38
Oh, it's case by case, right? Because as soon as you define what's going on, if something different is getting in the way, one organization to another, then you focus on the thing that gives you the best return? Yeah, of course, there are principles and structures that are usually quite useful that you can lean all the time and get the way you need to be. But you know, let's say, for example, and we've seen this recently, you know, one organization is completely has a team that is completely embedded in manual process, dysfunctional system, people are running around trying to get data from here, there and everywhere. That scenario versus another scenario where systems have reasonably strong, right, and it's easy enough to get data. And while there can be some improvement, the real gain is actually around. Some other aspects of that finance strategy might be the, you know, the way we make decisions or innovation or other areas where they're just two different problem statements and two different pathways. Lots of the frameworks that work in terms of weight and you know, selecting ways of working in terms of behavior in terms of culture design, the frameworks are pretty similar. The things that that can set you up for success are pretty similar. The way you execute it is dependent on the context you're in. Right. So there's a lot to do with the broader business culture that you need to align with. There's a lot to do with it. Word a piece of strategy and the maturity of systems, the maturity of the people. One thing we always look at is what we call readiness or tolerance to change. Some things have been built around, and they change fatigue, because they've gone through an organization where COVID has had a dramatic impact on them. Others are less impacted around that type of change, and more, you know, more than that, buisiness, right, they're not change much. They're just always busy. There's a motivation that comes with setting a new form of what the future might look like, versus the other thing, which is fatigued by leaders saying, Oh, we got to go here. Now we got hit on our we're gonna get here. So again, it's all context, right? How do you realign towards the vision and the ways that you'd like your team to be working and the outputs you'd like to see, go back to my question before a debate, right? What's age? Where are we now? And what's the if we're going to find the to the smartest path usually falls out of that,
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Richard Holmes
25:53
but I think it is, it's simplifying it as well. A lot of the finance things we speak with and work with it, they do kind of get stuck in there in the detail in the day to day, and really from, again, listening to you today. Kind of pulling it all apart? What can we do differently? What's the simple way of getting ahead? I actually read probably a good book recommendation for people. I've heard of the one thing by a guy called Gary Keller, I heard it on an audio book. And it's quite amazing. It's such a simple theory, just focus on the one thing, don't get just there. And it's smart to do less don't have like 10 things, just what is the one thing that's going to make a big difference today? And sometimes it is, it's like keep it simple theory, isn't it?
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Brad Eisenhuth
26:29
Well, it permeates into that culture change. If you consider people and their ability to digest and take action on new ideas. If I give you one idea, you'll do really, really well. If I give you two might do one, okay, and one. Not. So okay, if I give you seven, who knows which one you'll do? Well, when you select the one thing, that's the key, right? It's the We are often asked the question, what's the one thing that changes everything? So if we would have focused on this priority, it has the greatest impact across all aspects of the cultural shift we're trying to achieve? And everyone can find their value in that or find their their reason to buy into it. You know, that's, that's a good question to ask. And if you're picking up a good book, focus gives you better return, then the key is pick the right thing to focus on. What is that and get people behind. And obviously, the reason I've used the term hygiene is you can start to reduce the noise that comes around hygiene and set just basic standards, right standards that are of an excellent level, that tell us, you know, the day to day stuffs done, empower people to go off and do it, we don't want people over indexing their attention on the stuff that just gets you by the vru. You measuring the wrong thing. But you're not measuring impact or outcome or result you're measuring stuff, like brushing your teeth, right? If I got measured for brushing my teeth, I'd be pretty demoralized person. It's not something I've actually, you know, it was apparently supposed to do. Now it's important. But it's kind of basic. Yeah. And so I know that, you know, for some finance teams, it's a wonder we've got a really important role to protect value, don't disagree, that we're going to put your focus that the different questions, not saying it's not important, it's just saying, how are you going to drive the change you want to drive we can focus on,
Richard Holmes
28:18
it's understanding what's important from the stakeholders point of view, not from your point of view?
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Brad Eisenhuth
28:22
Yeah, well, you know, I think the stakeholder piece is a challenging one. So when you talk about stakeholders, right? But let's say for example, if if things weren't itself, we got to the sales guys and go, what's the most important thing we can do? How can we help you? And they say, well, rich, best thing you can do is get me reports done on time, was all your reporting inaccurate? Give me some reports. Now, that seems helpful. And that's what they want, but doesn't really doesn't really orientate us to the success that we seek for the business and strategy. Doesn't, right, it's just a thing we're doing to be helpful people that actually need is whatever it is, that enhances the performance of that sales function that we can, we can support that. And so then it becomes not a question of what the stakeholder wants. It's what the stakeholder needs to achieve their outcome. And so the North Star is we can always talk about these independent thing, which is where you're trying to get to outcome a, what is the thing getting in the way of that? Rather than what do you want Richard Mr. salesperson. And that's that's the real difference. Often when we talk about partnering, or when we talk about like being strategic in finance, if we rely on the idea that we're helping stakeholders in isolation, you know, my job is to help you, we might actually be doing a disservice to the business or even a disservice to that person. So I'm not saying it's right or wrong, alien people out there might be doing it really well. But all I'm saying is challenge yourself on what does that help to the stakeholder on the client?
Richard Holmes
29:52
I think to a certain extent, it's chipping away. I know this commercial manager in it amazing achievement a couple of years ago where he was looking at the numbers In the How to fractious relationship with a sales team, and he realized with a one product was a consumer products business. And he said this one product, the profit margin was really healthy. He was selling long story short, he convinced them they had a product line of eight different products. And this one product, if the focus on it would smash all the other seven products life. So anyway, he presented to the sales director at the time of sales go now now we've got these products that good like that. Anyway, he went a different route with the head of marketing, said we've got to spend the budget on this product in any way took about six months to convince the sales guy. And he basically completely turned around the performance of this company with just one product. And its products, something we buy all the time. But we just one guy, this commercial guy in finance, he said he had a fractious relationship with the sales director. But at the end, within six months, the sales director was his best mate. because he'd just gone through the numbers. And he said he was just amazing, where I had to just keep on coming in from a different angle. And he said, I was just treating me like it was an accountant. And he took a while to beat down the door. But what a great sample, it didn't turn around the company because the company was performing well. But think some of the products they used to sell, they don't sell them anymore. It's such a
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Brad Eisenhuth
31:02
good story. And I think you know, the theme and that story, which I really love, perseverance, right? It's acknowledging that I don't want to have this brand of just being annoying kind of person in the relationship to the salesperson, I know, I can add value that I've somehow got on there. And that, yeah, like I somehow got to show that my ability to see things that they cannot see can be used well, and that's the skill right? Now that person went through all these different angles and just didn't give up. What I as I said, I admire that perseverance. But often what that is a symptom of is a broader organization strategy, allowing it to be okay for finance to challenge that performance. from a place of, could we be doing better towards our long term vision? Could we be doing better? And if the numbers say, Well, here's highperformance is the rest of the portfolio that has low margin? Are we putting our attention in the right areas that gives us the best return, there's just a bet that comes with that, if we only focused on that high margin product. And we realized that that customers also want to build low margin products. And it was stopping them buying a high margin product, and we'd have to make a different decision. Yeah. So you know, those sorts of bets, are much better made collaboratively. When everyone's aware of the risk, everyone's aware of the ultimate objective. And we're prepared to focus on it not just as a sales team, as a marketing team, as a leader of the business as a as a group, right? Then we have had this conversation with the CEO of a company, private equity owned, bought out failure, old organization, and have a similar situation lots and lots of different products is to basically went down that simple path of Well, we've got to get this outcome, we need to focus, we need to focus on something that moves the dial, all of our teams just got too much attention on too many things, let's build a strategy allows us to focus. Now, they have had a very successful turnaround, and consistency. I said, Look, when you went back, let's go back to when you actually started to go through this turnaround, you encouraged people to focus on two or three different product lines, as opposed to all the other stuff moving around, what did that feel like for you as a CEO, he basically said, Look, I didn't know it was gonna work, I had a pretty good instinct, it was gonna work that I was making a bit, I'm making a bet on the fact that those industries or those clients in that space, had a strong propensity to buy at a higher margin at a lowest level of a notion to our team. And we had strengths that could make that work really well. All the logic was the I didn't just sort of shoot from the hip, I got my head of sales and my finance guy to look at the situation and start to like, rationalize and and diagnose where our options were. But then eventually, we just have to make a call and rally everyone behind it. And of course, the old culture said, you know, we are used to doing all this stuff. Now you're asking us to change in focus. And then of course, the next thing after making that bet is well, supporting people through execution. So I think as a finance person in that environment, the challenge is not only just making the call is then monitoring and supporting and saying, Well, hey, if the bet was wrong, how do we re correct it? How do we be the GPS towards that longer term initiative objective? And so you know, when when we ever we make these sorts of decisions, I often find that from a finance mindset perspective, we almost go black and white. So it's got to work or it's not gonna work at this is gonna work, right, this thing's got to work. So that advice to, you know, on the margin stuff as well, clearly, it's gonna work. now. Go back to my point about a collaborative decision around that. If it doesn't work, and your recommendation is wrong. Where do you stand in order to nullify this idea of needing to convince people it's about exploring and agreeing on what we're trying to solve and then agreeing on the best path for big bets or not on that small bet some transactional stuff can be good The answer, Bob, and it's something significant like that where the sales team are going to really need to change. The call is quite great. It's saying let go of all this stuff that we've been doing for a long time, that just takes a whole different form of influence. So I think it's a great story. I guess I just wonder when I hear those things, is it a symptom of a lack of alignment?
Richard Holmes
35:20
Well, there's definitely an element of that. And I think, just listening to them, right, I was thinking, I was trying to recall a situation where someone's tried to give it a go in terms of business power in like, let's try this. And it's backfired on them. By adding finance people were tried to change something, and it's really backfired on them. I can recall with one example,
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Brad Eisenhuth
35:38
I've seen situations where the the recommendation from finance has been a nice idea. But when it's overlaid on the context of the business people see as their reality, it bounces off them. So while it makes sense, very rationally, you look at the numbers, clearly, it makes sense. Your Business kind of goes, Well, hang on. But the context is, this is what I have to deal with every day, you know, so I go to the customers, and they don't see it that way. I've never seen a finance person come to the table, I'm going to give you a silly idea that's got no credibility, or added, usually, you know, I find actually, it's the opposite. It's like, actually, I'm so convinced that this is really good. I've done the analysis, I'm pretty confident I'm on the right track here. It seems like a bad idea to others, and it bounces off them, because they haven't had the chance to digest it and understand the same way. So it's not that it's wrong. It's just that it's not understood, and therefore it's not executed.
Richard Holmes
36:35
It comes about how you presented it in the first place. It's a constant involvement in finance, I think. I mean, throughout these episodes of the podcast, we've talked about how exciting it is to be in finance these days, and the stereotypical accounting days. It's a really interesting department and other thing, get your insights broaden. And what you do in the outperformer, is, he's only going to take finance teams like next level, it's great to see that appetite from clients needing your services. Yeah, thanks, man. It's Bob, I think it's
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Brad Eisenhuth
37:02
a really, really interesting time in business, let alone finance generally. And to me, I think there's this maturity in finance developing around the importance of culture and system and function. Right. It's, you know, the great leaders in finance know that the two go hand in hand, and they work on both proactive. So yeah, thank you, man, I, I've enjoyed today's chat. And I think, you know, it's, for anyone who's listening, if we're originally talking to sounds a bit abstract and a little bit, a bit unusual, you know, I respect that as well, because, you know, everyone's got their own version of what's important to them, and so on. But I guess for me, possibly the bias I have is that I'm often talking to leaders that want to proactive, great change, and they know there's something bigger and better. And for those that don't know what that is, but they know that the problems that are getting in the way now are not what they want to keep having. So it's a pretty exciting time knowing that a lot of that, as we said at the start moving and changing pretty rapidly.
Richard Holmes
38:05
That's exciting. And and hi brought up, I think you've been a great guest. And there's plenty of other topics we could have discussed. I and one, I do actually want to get round to whether it's I get run through on the podcast, he's talking about culture. How can you have a culture when everyone's working from home? Let's start with the CFO of other couple of weeks ago, he said you can't I mean, you can chat to people on video and things but you can't. How do you create a culture when we're all working from home, which is a different topic, which we'll address at some point, I guess, why haven't you been a great guest? I mean, what you do is excellent. And then definitely required in the finance community. And I'm sure we'll have you on the podcast again.
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Brad Eisenhuth
38:37
Say good luck with everything man. Thanks for all the good work on this podcast. I enjoy listening to your other interviewees or speakers they've been good band. So I hope it keeps going