How to Listen to an Earnings Call (And Why It Can Accelerate Your Career) with Brent Barclay

Most employees never listen to their company’s earnings calls.

Many assume they’re only for investors, analysts, or finance professionals.

But what if earnings calls are actually one of the best ways to understand strategy, build business acumen, and accelerate your career?

In this episode, Brent Barclay, COO of Acumen Learning, explains why earnings calls are one of the most underutilized learning tools in business. He shares a simple framework for understanding what executives are communicating, how to connect company strategy to your role, and why employees who consistently engage with earnings calls often build more credibility inside their organizations.

Whether you’re a leader, salesperson, manager, individual contributor, or simply someone who wants to understand business at a deeper level, this episode provides a practical roadmap for getting started.

In this conversation, Brent explains:

• Why so many people avoid earnings calls and what they’re missing
• How earnings calls help employees understand strategy and priorities
• The simple five-driver framework used to analyze any business
• What executives are really communicating during earnings calls
• How to identify the most important business drivers and metrics
• Why sales professionals should listen to their customers’ earnings calls
• How earnings calls help build credibility, business acumen, and career growth
• Common patterns Brent has observed after reviewing hundreds of earnings calls across industries
• Why developing an ownership mentality changes the way you approach your work

This episode isn’t about becoming a financial analyst.

It’s about learning to see the bigger picture, understand how your company creates value, and make better decisions every day.

If you want to think more strategically, connect your work to business outcomes, and better understand how successful organizations operate, this episode is a great place to start.

Resources Mentioned:
Join our monthly “How to Listen to an Earnings Call” webinars

Books:
Seeing The Big Picture
Business Acumen for Sales Success

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:06

Welcome back to the Business Acumen Podcast. Today I'm joined by Brent Barclay, our Chief Operating Officer here at Acumen Learning. Each month, Brent leads a webinar called How to Listen to an Earnings Call, where we break down a public company's earnings call and use it as a way to understand strategy, financial performance, and executive decision making. What's interesting is that most people assume earnings calls are only for investors or Wall Street analysts, but at Acumen Learning, we found that they're actually one of the best ways to build business acumen and understand how businesses actually operate. So, Brent, you've spent years teaching people how to use earnings calls as a learning tool. Why do you think so few people pay attention to them outside of what we would think as analysts and investors? Why do you think so few people pay attention to them?

SPEAKER_00 1:07

You know, I I I think there's probably a few reasons. One that comes to mind to me is just accessibility and knowing how to access them. That's a common thing. That being said, if you're publicly traded, it's it's there's a lot of metrics and measures that we're just we're just not as familiar with. Uh they're using acronyms, they use uh terms that we don't typically use in our day-to-day activity. Many of us through our undergraduate programs or even graduate work, we we do some finance and accounting conversations, and many of us have that opportunity. Yet we don't use it very often. So it's kind of like anything if you don't use it very much. If you, for example, stats, if you if you're taking a lot of stats classes, but you never really apply it, you don't make those connections. And so it almost seems like a little bit foreign language. Sometimes it's this feeling of uh, I don't know how I can impact it. We're talking, you know, billions of dollars for publicly many publicly traded companies, you know. Uh a small publicly traded company might be a billion dollars in revenue. And uh and so how do I really impact this? It seems so big picture. How should I make those connections? Uh for others, they just they they they just haven't had any sort of uh kind of direction or encouragement around it. I think once people kind of hear about them and they get some comfortability around it, it actually uh it kind of piques their curiosity a little bit. Like what is really going on? How are we performing? How we can how can we impact it? So uh, you know, probably that availability, uh, I'm nervous about the terms, I don't understand them all, and and how do I really make uh impact on such a big company is often some of the reasons I think that uh people don't engage around them.

SPEAKER_01 2:38

Yeah, what if someone has never listened to an earnings call before, why why should they care? Why should they care? What how how would you respond to that?

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Well, you're gonna see a lot of passion for this, uh Steve, because this is this is a core one too, right? It's about how do I help people truly understand how their company makes money, how decisions are made around the money-making process, most importantly, what can they do about it? How can they impact it? It really speaks to engagement, right? Once an employee kind of understands what we're doing, why we're doing it, and then how they can impact it, it changes their engagement and involvement in the organization. I often refer to these as I teach our courses as a hidden gem, these earnings calls. Now, as you're well aware, Stephen, we go out and work with some of the best companies in the world. And we'll go in, it's a customized program. We're talking about their financials, their strategies, et cetera. And often people think we're employees of the company. They'll say, How long have you worked for XYZ company? Uh, you know, and and they're surprised when they find out, well, actually, I'm a contractor. And they'll say stuff like, Well, boy, you seem to know a lot about this. And I often joke with them, look, I wish I could say it's because I'm brilliant. I wish I could say, you know, I know so much about your company because of my academic background. But fundamentally, it's because I can read. That information is available for all of us. And once an employee gets comfortable with kind of going reviewing them on a quarterly basis, it's like this kind of quarterly check-in. I I as you think about day in and day out, I'm working on activities, I got projects, et cetera. Well, at the first of the year, you set some goals. Well, three months later, has anything changed? Six months later, has something changed? What about nine months later? And you think about what's just happened in our economy over the last six months of 2026. Pretty significant uh things that happen on a geopolitical level, uh inflationary pressures, uh, a number of challenges that we're dealing with in the global economy, that can shift where we should focus our time and attention. So that hidden gem provides that check-in, but it really helps me make sure I'm working on the right things. What's the common saying? Uh, we want to work you want to work hard, but you also want to work smart. That smart side is doing that quick check-in, seeing what the company's talking about, and then go back to your individual role and say, so what should we do about it? So to me, it's this huge uh underutilized kind of hidden gem that uh boy, once you get comfortable with them, and by the way, if you're looking at your own company or a company you invest with or a company you sell in on a regular basis, what you'll find is they have a pretty regular pattern. So you do it two or three times, you get real comfortable, what they're gonna address, what metrics they're gonna talk about. And so at that point, it's a bit of you're just kind of waiting to hear, well, what happened to their key profit measure, whether it's gross profit operating or net, or even like an EBIT or EBIT doc calculation. Well, what's happening around our top line revenue growth? What about our profitability growth? And then be able to go back and say, what can I do about it? So it's it's a to me, they're they're they're mission critical. And those employees that do them on a consistent basis, it builds their credibility, it builds their career, and it obviously drives their company's uh success as well.

SPEAKER_01 5:36

By the way, if you like what we've been talking about, you'll love our book, Business Acumen for Sell Success. It's the ultimate guide to more strategic deals and starting to think like a business partner. It's gonna change the way you sell. I think one reason why people avoid earnings calls is that they assume that they're too technical or too financial or they simply don't know where to start. But you have developed, and and when I say you, I mean you and and Acumen Learning has developed a relatively simple framework for approaching them. So if someone's listening to us talk today and they wanted to start doing this tomorrow, let's say, how how would you teach them how to listen to an earnings call? What is your approach?

SPEAKER_00 6:24

Well, first of all, reach out to us and we'll we'll help you for sure. Let's make this helpful for you. Come join our webinar. That's a big time where every quarter we look at a different company, different industry. But simply put, there's kind of a simple framework and a couple tools. And of course, I'm biased. It's a framework that we've had since 2002, and it just works really well with people. If you have a different way to approach it, I'd say just do something, get engaged with it. But for me, there's five fundamental drivers every company focuses on. That's cash, profit, assets, growth, and people. So that little mental model helps that that individual think about okay, as I listen to this call, rather than me trying to synthesize all this data and make sense of it, do I have a common framework I can kind of pull it from? Now, maybe there's a different internal, like maybe it's the four pillars of your strategy in your company. But for us, that five drivers, whether you're a multi-billion dollar uh oil and gas company or small little street vendor, these are fundamental drivers every company focuses on. From there, there's two or three questions. One is which of the five drivers did they seem to focus on and why? I like the why part because it really depends on who they're talking to, you're gonna get a different approach. For example, if a CEO is talking to analysts during an earnings call, it's gonna have a lot about growth, it's gonna have a lot about profitability, cash potentially. Whereas if you're talking internal, like at a town hall meeting, uh, there's gonna be a lot more about their internal team and the people driver. Well, being able to understand what's going on around them, what's causing the communication, uh, if uh, for example, if commodity prices are increasing or inflation pressure is increasing, that's gonna impact why they're focused on a certain driver. From there, it's doing a little assessment around uh we have a tool called the executive alignment. What's that tool in about? Well, the time it takes to read it, you can do an analysis in about 15 minutes around what's going on from a strategic perspective. Take the time to read it or listen to it. It takes about 15 minutes to fill the tool out, and you'll be really in a good position to think about what are they focused on, why is important, and what can I do about it. From there, I think the second part of it is can you keep score? And that's what the financial statements really are. A lot of times people, when they think business and financial acumen, they're thinking the financial statements. To be quite honest, it's that that's an after-effect, right? You're looking at financial statements, it's gonna cover the most recent quarter, it's gonna cover the most recent year. You've got to take that information, what happened in the past, and say, okay, based upon that, what can I do to drive more cash flow? What can I do to drive more profitability? But if you can't keep score, you don't know what the key metrics are, and you don't know what are the key levers to impact uh those key metrics, that's a challenge. And I think that's one of the things that getting real comfortable around what drives cash, what drives profitability, what drives asset utilization or asset strength? What are those key metrics? By the way, when you get to growth, it's basically all the metrics you just talked about and cash, profit, and asset. That's what you want to grow. You want to grow your cash, you want to grow your profitability, you want to get greater utilization of your assets, et cetera. So the the little tool of a framework of five drivers, how to get aligned with the executives are communicating. And then can I see in the numbers what I'm hearing the executives communicate? From there, the last part of it is okay, based upon my role, what should I do about it? And that's the game changer, uh, Stephen, as you're well aware. I mean, when people get comfortable, they do it two or three consecutive quarters. People believe them. They get much more credibility in the organization because I'm not just looking for my individual role, I'm seeing the big picture. Then with my expertise, I go back and say, what can I do to drive those results? And that's the game changer. Not only does it build their credibility, but when opportunities for promotion or opportunities for special projects, you're gonna go with the people who really understand what you're doing in the organization. Those are the ones that are gonna get those opportunities. So it builds their career. And then, of course, the outcome of all this is the company gets better. And that's a real value for a company. Why they want their employees to engage around these earnings calls is to help them see here's kind of our quarterly check-in, where we're at. Now you go with your expertise, go back to your role, and you help us drive these metrics and measures. Anyways, it's it's awesome. Everybody should be a part of them, is my opinion.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

Yeah, if you can't hear it through uh either you're watching or listening to us, Brent Brent is passionate about these things and about earnings calls. And again, we'll we'll link in the show notes too to some of the resources that Brent mentioned, as well as a link to, you know, every every month, probably for the past, I don't know, Brent, it's been five years. You've done yeah, you you've taken a publicly traded company and done kind of this breakdown of their most recent earnings calls. So that actually kind of shifting gears a little bit, having reviewed all these different earnings calls across many different industries, when you kind of step back, do you do you see any patterns that consistently show up?

SPEAKER_00 11:15

Yeah, as you look at all these industries and different organizations, uh, a few things that stand out is you know, everybody wants to try and grow, right? That's a big factor of publicly traded companies. So how do we think about growth? How can we drive growth? How do we withstand challenges? If you go back to COVID, for example, in 2020, many industries you saw a significant drop. Well, how can we withstand a big uh issue or situation like a pandemic, which uh nobody could expect to overcome that? But how can I extend just uh different changes in kind of technology or innovation in my industry? Am I able to kind of adapt? So growth is a big one, uh, adaptation. Am I aware, or or maybe another term would be innovation, right? That ability to think about the life cycle of my business, the life cycle of my product. You know, that typical life cycle, there's eventually kind of that maintenance or or or the uh kind of top of your curve. But what happens after that? It starts to drop. So the idea of how do I continue to innovate and create new opportunities of growth for my company is big. So, so growth, innovation. I think some of the other things over the last few years is just between the pandemic and various geopolitical issues, just realizing the global economy you're playing with. And so, business, you you can't just focus on your geography. So many of these publicly traded companies, uh, the economy is the world. Uh and our ability to transact and engage with customers, provide a great product for customers, it really expands your ability from a marketing perspective, for example, of knowing your ideal customer profile. And that's a big thing that companies are trying to understand is what is the future look like? What do different uh customer buying habits, what's changing about the industry? Uh, and how is technology changing some of that, whether it be automation, that's another key message, automation, obviously AI and how AI is impacting uh your business. So uh those are some of the things that I typically get from them. I uh the overarching thing is I go to the people drive. One of the things I just see with these companies is it's good people trying to do good things. You know, you got an individual customer who has a need. You got a company who's trying to help them, to help themselves, help them drive whatever their outcomes might be. And and so that opportunity to have good people trying to provide good products for their customers and that partnership it creates, that the symbiotic kind of relationship, I think is just uh really cool. It's fun to see people uh trying to figure out their business better, understand that so they can be better leaders, if nothing else, leading themselves to their role. So uh those are some of the things that really stand out uh as I've had a chance to do this over the last five or six years.

SPEAKER_01 14:03

Awesome. So trying to make this, if you know someone's listening, trying to make this you know practical. Um I think you've convinced people, Brent, the the importance of listening to earnings calls. But I can I I also should mention, I can relate to that feeling of kind of like overwhelm, and it's like this is too technical. Even when I went to school and got uh my MBA years ago, um I have always been intimidated by like earnings calls. And I remember even uh being in business school and thinking there's no way I can understand this. Luckily, I I knew about acumen learning even before I worked here and and would listen to your earnings calls, Brent, it's kind of to give me a framework. So trying to make this practical. So let's say if someone's kind of inspired by this and they say, Okay, I want to I want to get into listening to earnings calls, you know, where where should they begin? I mean, you know, what company should they start with? Probably their own. How often should they listen? Should they listen to customers, competitors? You know, I guess I guess what advice would you give to someone that's kind of starting their journey on on uh getting into earnings calls?

SPEAKER_00 15:11

Well, a couple of things I'd share with you is uh even I have those same feelings. You know, I I spent time in uh training development of leaders. So typically in developing of people, there's three areas leading self, leading others, and leading a company. I spent a lot of time on leading self and leading others. That's where my PhD is, and you know, understand what motivates people in their career, that type of stuff. But if you're bought in, if I've inspired you enough to say, but the third part, leading the company is vitally important, that's that's the first hurdle. Like I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna give it a chance, I'm gonna go take some time to invest into this. And what I would say as far as who do you start with? Yeah, number one, if you're a publicly traded company, absolutely start with your own company. Because what you're gonna, that's where you're gonna get the most kind of benefit for your time. Because no longer are you just looking at your role, you're able to make those connections. One of the common things we work, even before I was doing business and financial acumen in the leadership world, is every year people do kind of their performance management. And what are my goals? And they say you got to align them with your businesses. And that's challenging. I I can understand my individual role as a marketing leader or as an operation leader, but now I got to tie it into this bigger picture. Well, that's that's the real value. So if it's your own company spending time every quarter, what's the big picture? Now, based upon my role, what can I do about it? That's a game changer. Now, if you're in sales, folks, man, the second best opportunity is if you're in sales and you're selling at publicly traded companies, you should listen to your uh your your customer's earnings call. Here's the value of that. You already know your features, advantages, benefits of your products. You can speak better than anybody can on that. But one of the common feedback we get from senior leaders in these corporations is they don't understand my business. So they're they're throwing a product at, but they can't speak to what I'm trying to do. But imagine you walk into a sales experience or you're interacting with them, you've already reviewed their call, and you look and you say, you know, it looks like you're looking for growth in your top line by X percent. As you look at this product, let me tell you how I help to drive that. Or a real initiative you have is some cost management. Let me show you how our product can drive that. Basically, you're able to articulate to your customer what they're focused on. And then your whole goal is how does our product or service drive your success? That's a game changer. When we do our sales organizations, we help them get comfortable assessing their customers. They no longer are a sales individual, they're a trusted partner because you know my business. Once you understand my business, then I'm willing to buy from you because you're helping me drive the outcomes of my organization. So that's the second group I think is absolutely important. The third group I'd say, if you if you don't want to work for the publicly traded company, uh you're not selling into them. Another one would be if you if uh you have a publicly traded company from kind of your supply chain, it's good to understand your suppliers as well. But the last group I'd say is just for your personal understanding of business from an investment perspective. You know, as you look at investing, you can do all the technical investing with PE ratios and volumes and betas and all this. That's all there. But if you can really understand the business, the economics of a business is incredible in making your investment decisions. Uh so I think that's a great opportunity. If you're investing in a company, Warren Buffett, for example, he typically looks at cash flow. What's going on from a cash flow perspective? Are they generating positive cash flow? What's happening with that? Do I understand their business model as he looks at it from an investment perspective? So that's another opportunity. You get more comfortable looking at companies, understand what they're trying to do, helps you uh from an investment perspective. So though those are some groups that that uh stand out to me and uh highly recommend uh uh those three groupings for sure.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

Well, Brett, this is this has been great. And again, this was uh just kind of a short conversation we wanted to have on the importance of earnings calls. Encourage anyone, again, who's listening. We'll link in the show notes to uh the tools that Brent uses to break down these earnings calls, as well as you know, feel free to join our monthly webinars we do on these earnings calls to help you. So I guess before we leave, Brent, is there anything else uh maybe I didn't ask you or missed that that uh you want to leave the audience with?

SPEAKER_00 19:11

No, Steven, you did a great job. I the one thing that's coming to mind as I wrap up is just a phrase that popped into my mind. I don't know if it's helpful or not, but the idea of an ownership mentality, you know, that this is available to you. And man, if you want to build your credibility, you want to build your career and you build your company, you do two or three quarters consecutive, I'll guarantee you you can even knock on my door if it doesn't help you, give me a call, I'll uh well reimburse your your uh if you do our online training or whatever. But in the end, that ownership, like this is an opportunity, this is a differentiator for employees to say, you know what, I'm part of this company. Uh yes, I have an I can be a brand new employee, but taking that time to go through that and assessing that, it's gonna keep you so much more connected to what's going on and then help your decisions really drive corporate success. And that's a huge outcome. So that ability to kind of own your role in the company, to see yourself as a mini CEO, uh chief operating officer, whatever you want to, but I'm really understanding the business of our business. And then with my functional expertise, what can I do about it? And that that's a game changer, in my opinion. So uh that that's what came to mind as we kind of wrap up today.

SPEAKER_01 20:15

Love it. Well said, Brent. Thank you for joining us again, Brent. Thanks for listening, everyone, and we'll talk we'll see you all soon.

SPEAKER_00 20:22

Thank you much.