Managing and Pushing Growth by Numbers - Darby Brennan - Amazon Legends - Episode #230

The guest on today’s episode is Darby Brennan. He is a highly experienced C-Suite Influencer and IT Transformation Program Manager who specializes in finance and process transformation to help organizations achieve high growth and scale. He has a track record of leading successful ERP initiatives and Financial Transformation initiatives through crisis, ambiguity, and cross-functional teams in both hierarchical and matrix environments. He has also delivered game-changing capabilities to his previous companies such as Pacific Gas & Electric Company and Kaiser Permanente. Darby has helped start-ups make financial processes and software implementations to build the foundation for future scale. Currently, he is the Vice President of Finance and Enterprise Technologies at Branded, and e-commerce aggregator start-up, where he has led the implementation of their ERP platform while onboarding acquisitions and building a technology operations framework to support Branded's growth and future scale. In today’s episode, he discusses managing and pushing growth by numbers.

Takeaways:

• Financial maturity is crucial when you want to grow your business and bring in investors or borrow money. This is important because even if you approach a family member for investment, they will expect you to have financial maturity. 
• Accrual basis accounting is preferred over cash basis accounting because it provides a more accurate financial picture by accounting for all transactions that occur during a given period. On the other hand, cash basis accounting only accounts for income or expenses for the current day. It is important to ensure that financial statements accurately reflect what happened during a given period, even if adjustments are necessary. 
• The seller needs to understand the average GMV and net per transaction to make informed decisions. 
• The biggest challenge of selling online is demand planning. If you run out of inventory, you're dead in the water. Calculating accurately how much to carry in stock is the hardest part of the operation. 
• Amazon sellers need to focus not just on driving sales, but also on profitability and cash flow to ensure the long-term success of their businesses. 
• If you don't know how to plan for your inventory, you will do one of two things - buy too much or too little. If you buy too little, you're losing sales, and if you buy too much, you're going to strangle the company with the cash resources because it's going to be time to pay for it before you've sold the whole thing.

Quote of the Show:What does financial literacy look like as a seller? You can read a financial statement, you can look at the numbers and read the story the numbers are telling you. Percentages are the language that the story is most often told, percentages turn into KPIs and we can then start to have fun with those numbers. 

Links:

• Personal - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darbybrennan/ 
• Branded – Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/joinbranded/ 
• Branded – Website: https://joinbranded.com/

Ways to tune in:

• Apple Podcast
• Spotify
• YouTube

Amazon Legends is sponsored by Argometrix, the authority on, and a leading supplier of, competitive intelligence for online retail. To learn more, head over to https://argometrix.com/