A Chat With Stefan van Duyvendijk: Accountant, Controller, and FloQast’s Accounting Operations Evangelist

Mike is BACK, and this week, he's joined by veteran Corporate Controller and FloQast's new Accounting Operations Evangelist Stefan van Duyvendijk.

On this episode, Mike and Stefan talk about Stefan's experience at Skullcandy and Kodiak Cakes, what led him to leave his controller role for FloQast, and how the accounting profession has changed significantly in the last several years

Transcript

0:04

Hey everybody. My name is Mike Whitmire, co-founder and CEO of FloQast. Also proudly an inactive CPA. Welcome to Blood, Sweat & Balance Sheets, the podcast where I talk about whatever I want, namely in the finance, uh, accounting realm. love chatting with executives, whether they're in the investment community, accounting, finance, what have you. Today, I'm very excited for our episode. I want to welcome aboard Stefan van Duyvendijk, our new Evangelist here at FloQast. And I'm especially excited to have you on board because you're going to be taking on a lot of my job responsibilities, so welcome. Care to just kick it off tell us a little bit about yourself? Sure, yeah. Thank you for the welcome. I'm super excited to, uh, have the honor to be on Blood, Sweat & Balance Sheets, uh, much cooler people and more important people have been on here. So I really, this is exciting. Um, yeah, as Mike said, my name's Stefan van Duyvendijk. I just joined the FloQast team a couple weeks ago and it's been a heck of a ride already. Um, you know, I'd say when you kind of make that transition, there's always like a little worry, like, am I doing the right thing? And it's very rare that two weeks in, you're like, oh, I made the right decision. So really, really excited to be here. You know, I come from Kodiak Cakes, which is a CPG company that makes, you know, whole grain, high- protein pancakes, and other kind of center aisle product goods. While I was there, I was a corporate controller, grew a team of roughly four people to a team of 10 with really segregated roles and responsibilities, you know, really know how to execute on their roles. And previous to that, I was at Skullcandy Inc., where I was the U. S. controller, kind of divisional controller, seeing the consolidation and, um, U.S. Entity. And that was like a really great place to learn my trade and to cut my teeth as a controller. Before I came into industry, I was at KPMG for a number of years and that, um, you know, that's a wild ride. There's, you know, when we talk about blood, sweat and balance sheets, I think that's where it starts for a lot of us. There's a lot of blood, a lot of sweat in there. So many balance sheets. Yes, sir. Very well played. And how long were you at KPMG? I was there for, I think just shy of five years, just right before you kind of transitioned into the manager role. I had a great opportunity to go into industry at Skullcandy and took the leap and never looked back. All right. And I'm a big Skullcandy fan. The Aviator headphones in particular are one of my favorites. Were those like the best-selling headphones you guys made? Uh, not the best- selling, but one of the better-performing ones. Since then, I think they've come out with some like really great product for over the ear. But those Aviators just had, you know, Skullcandy, if Skullcandy had anything they had style, you know, they had, they had a good style. And those Aviators, I think were maybe the pinnacle of that style, the other, um, there's yeah, there was, there was a few like that, but yeah, definitely one of the better sounding ones too. I had like two or three pairs of those that I burned through. Cause I wore them so much. Yeah, me too. Like the inside of the ears would start to wear away. I literally had them on all the time, but, that said, they were very durable, and like very high quality. And they looked. I think I had like brown ones, right? I think I had the brown ones. Yeah yeah, like the old school. Yeah, those are great ones. I went, you know, I'm like, I like my kicks white. I like my headphones white. So I actually had the big white ones, but those were, I did dig those brown ones. They were very awesome. And then I know, so I'm a big Skullcandy fan. I know around the office, we have a lot of Kodiak Cakes fans as well. So it's cool you come from a background where a lot of the companies like resonate with the people that you're chatting with. On that note, I actually thought it'd be interesting, you know, you made a big career shift. This is not something that a lot of accountants normally do. So could you just explain your new role at FloQast, a little bit and kind of what you stepped into? Sure. You know, it's, uh, you know, I think as you know, like the roles, like pretty fluid in a lot of ways, but a lot of it is to help with a lot of the evangelizing that you've been doing and holding the torch on for the industry for so long. I wasn't really originally it wasn't really something I was considering, I was definitely interested in FloQast. If you look at my career, it's like, you know, I worked for Kodiak Cakes, which is a product I really knew and loved. And to this day, I love that product. If anybody hasn't had it, I recommend you go try it out and before that I was at Skullcandy, which was like, definitely pinnacle, like top 10 companies. Like I love this product. So when I was looking to transition from Kodiak Cakes, very much having a product I believed in and trusted in and knew was very important to me. And FloQast was almost immediately the top of my list. We had implemented it at Kodiak Cakes. We had been very successful with it. And I just knew that if there was an opportunity there, I should look at it. So, I was talking to the recruiter about like kind of different opportunities. And she said, just hear me out on this. The more she talked about it, Barbara Teel got her claws in me and I was like, you know, I'm in, because I think what FloQast does, that's really different from a lot of other ERP and accounting and financial service softwares, FinTech softwares is you guys practice what you preach, right? And you go out and you, you don't just try to sell the software. You try to sell accounting and you try to improve the industry. And that's something, that going through that, and as you said, blood, sweat, and balance sheets, in your career, I was just really excited to actually make an impact in that way. So the longer I thought about it, the more it just seemed like, you know what, there's not a lot of opportunities in life that you can take a leap like this, and this is definitely the place. And this is definitely the time. And I will say, you know, it was, it was tough finding someone who, who had the right background to fit the bill had kind of the public speaking chops and was also interested in the position. And I mean, when you and I were chatting, I was like, oh man, we found the guy, this is great, you know, the mix of audit. And then as a controller at a, you know, kind of larger company and a two-time controller, just knowing what you're doing and then understanding your usage of FloQast and kind of what you think about the industry at large, at all aligned really well with obviously our DNA at FloQast.. You know, the requirement here was obviously an accountant has to come in and be taking over this position. A lot of companies might not hire a subject matter expert for this, which is very odd to me, but that is how some of them operate. Um, so I was, I was thrilled to bring you on board and with that, I'd love to hear some of your takes on the industry right now. Like when you take a step back and you think about accounting just in general as a profession and, and technology-wise, like, what's your, what's your take on what's going on out there? I mean, it kind of depends on how much time we have, right? Like this is a topic I can go on for quite a while. Uh, you know, I think a lot of the way the industry is moving is there is a, uh, a concerted effort to optimize and improve the close. You know, I think in the past boards used to be more understanding of reporting requirements, the delays, the timelines, you know, etcetera, on what, what kind of causes, hey, you know, the end of the month was, was 15 days ago. Why don't I have like a detailed report of what's going on, but what you'll notice in these boardrooms, a lot of the times is the CFO goes in there, gives their financial analysis of what's happening in the company, delivers the results and says, hey, this is, you know, even maybe gives them what they're going to do in the future to course-correct or improve or whatever it is. And the board says, well, that's great. Thank you for the information. Where are we at today? That's their immediate response. And I think you see a lot of CFOs and then you see the opposite of CFO, really getting beaten up on being able to give that reporting earlier and give that reporting more live. So the first step in doing that is just trying to get a better handle on the close, streamline that process and create, you know, a quicker timeline, a shorter runway to get that reporting out. I really do think after that building into that is just then how do you get reporting, you know, almost day of, or the day after whatever it is. And again, you know, it goes into that looking at your processes and figuring out a way to build an accruals and get everybody aligned to just get like, you know, even the potential mid-month reporting out to give those answers sooner. Cause that's, if you want to be a controller that supports your CFO and you want to support the Office of the CFO, that's one of the big directions you need to go with. Um, unfortunately, you know, the hard thing is we're dealing we're in a time where there's less and less accountants, right? I think you've even talked about the great resignation in the past in some of your work and it's harder and harder to find like good help that knows what they're doing that is dedicated to the career. And the schools just aren't pumping them out as much as they used to. And people are retiring because you know, market's hot, things are going well. And you're kind of getting, you're kind of getting squeezed on both ends. Right? You have a board that's like, I want reporting to be snappy. And then you have a diminishing team. So tools like FloQast are just really critical to really get in there and manage this like ever-constricting environment that accountants have to work in. So I have a yeah, great, great point. I want to circle back to the reporting sort of more in real time. Um, when I started FloQast was a senior accountant. I was not in the boardrooms doing those types of things and the notion of a continuous close and incident reporting started coming up. But really it was through like Gartner and their marketing-type stuff. So I always discount all of that. So when you, when you say, when you use the word reporting and mid-month reporting, does that mean a fully closed balance sheet and financial statements? Is that key metrics? Like what do you, what do you mean by reporting? Could you really just define that for the audience? Yeah. Yeah, for sure. You know, I do see this like idea of continuous close to be more of a marriage between the two kind of functions within the Office of the CFO. You have your accounting function, you have your finance function and to get to like a mid-month, you know, close the books or mid-month, you know, reporting what you really need to have is like, you know, there's certain numbers that are easy, right? You can easily report on revenue for most entities mid-month. The hard part is how do you define, you know, where your shipping bills are going to be at where your AP is going to be at, where your accruals are going to be, your SG&A. And so that is where you got to take to the next step of your budgets and marrying that back into really solid, strong accruals. And the way I look at that, that's a communication issue, right? That's a communication issue internally with the accounting team and externally with the finance team and even past them with your operations and your sales and marketing teams. So I think what you get is you get a really strong estimate based off accruals, you know, mid-month, maybe even a week, uh, you know, prior to the end of the month, you have a really good forecast of where it's going to end because you've built in really good lines of communication with your internal, external customers, and you've, um, really just upped the ante on what you can do with your budgeting and your forecasting. So it sounds like the real ask if I'm an investor of board members is effectively like, Hey, how are we doing on a budget versus actual performance? And it's not, it's not, that has to be reconciled to the dollar with every account. So these key areas, are we tracking ahead or behind the plan that we had talked about? Yeah. It really, it really is having a solid discussion on budget to actual and you know, but a lot of that information, you know, it doesn't always come in internally, right. It's reaching out to vendors and saying, Hey, where are we at? What's going on? And that's where tools like Remind, you know, really are just super instrumental in being able to, uh, shorten that communication window, you know, and, and get you to the point where finally, after decades of everybody talking about continuous reporting and continuous close, I really think we're on the precipice of getting there with these FinTech tools like FloQast and, and some of the others, um, put together on your accounting team. This makes me want to accelerate the budget to actual productsthat much more , to move it up on the road. Oh, heck yeah. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. So, um, yeah, you, you had talked about the talent shortage as well that we're kind of having, and this is something we've been talking about at FloQast. And I didn't even realize how bad the stats are around this. Like 75% of AICPA members are eligible for retirement today. That's like, that's pretty terrifying. And fewer people are graduating in accounting than there were in the past five years ago. That number is declining over time. Yet, my understanding of how the economy works is the economy consistently grows and as such, you would need more accountants to help support that growing economy. So it feels like there's a crunch coming. So what are, what are some of the things that, you know, you see at FloQast that excite you about that problem slash opportunity. Yeah, I mean, so, so what I love about what I love about, you know, it's a really hard problem, but with hard problems come great opportunities, right? So you can, you know, you're kind of in a position where you can really, you're really forced to make decisions on saying, you know, I can't have my team in the mundane. I can't have them in these really repetitive manual tasks. I need to elevate them outside of that. And I need to utilize them to their fullest potential. And as tough as that is, right? Like, that's not a fun problem to figure out as a manager. And it's not always an easy thing to coach through as a mentor, but when you see that happen with a team member, they really just get so much more satisfaction out of their job. Right? So someone that's no longer just like, yeah, I'm just entering in invoices, I'm just entering in bills and you say, you know what, you've done a great job. You've done that. Let's automate that, but now let's elevate you and I want you to be a more strategic player on my team. I want you to help, you know, look at the information we have. And help inform decisions. I want you to take the data and turn it into like valuable reporting and not, you know, a lot of times I think a lot of teams give information to their controller and then it's a black box. So like, I don't know what he does after that. They were like, maybe nothing, maybe everything. It's hard to say. Now you're saying, well, welcome in. Now you're part of the real team. Like, you know, you always were, but like now you're part of this controllership. Let's get in there and do this together and you really just see team members have a lot more satisfaction with their job, you know, a lot more career prospects. So, so I do think, you know, as much as it's a hard thing, um, when you, when you solve it, you know, you have a stronger team and you're more likely to keep your team members with you because they know that, that you have growth and potential for them. And what's great about things like FloQast is it's meant to streamline all that, right? Every single tool that FloQast puts out is meant to streamline these more mundane, repetitive tasks, ease communication lines, you know, make sure that we take anything that's vague and make it really, um, you know, easy to understand and, and lines of communication, very clear. And so that's what, that's one of the things that excited me about FloQast the most when we implemented it. And then it was, we grew with the company, you know, right before I left Kodiak Cakes, we were looking at FloQast Ops, and I was like, oh man, I've wanted this since I think like the second month that we used it, I was looking at it like, I want to use this with everybody in the company. I want everybody on this, cause this is great. And then when, you know, Sheba brought up FloQast Remind, and, you know, you're just looking at us like, man, the amount of times I hear my team complaining about, well, I've reached out to them, I've reached out to them, I've reached out to them, you know, and that's a problem to solve by itself. You know, you gotta create accountability elsewhere, but the idea that the team doesn't have to take two to five minutes to do that. And I really do think, and you'll see other really great CEOs and leaders talk about this and you'll see it in like almost every fifth management book out there is people only have so much mental capacity to give. And the more directions you pull people in, the less likely they're able to exceed, to execute and let alone execute with excellence. Right? And I think a lot of what we want and what you want, and what you've talked about is being able to execute with excellence. So when you remove these little things out of their lives, all of a sudden they don't have to remember this thing. They can just focus on finishing the tactical and helping you with the strategic. And that's just so huge and important. And that is what really alleviates that hiring crunch, you know, instead of having to hire three more people to do the mundane, you have one person that's out of the mundane and now you have another person helping you with reporting and you didn't have to go find and hire that person. So that's what I love about where FloQast is going and taking accounting teams. And certainly somebody who's gone through the schooling and the work to become a CPA should not be sending out repetitive emails like that. It's not a good use of time. And you know, that was an interesting product decision for us actually. Um, you know, you haven't heard the story behind this, but Remind was a problem that I faced personally following up back when I was a senior accountant with our customer service people to get our percentage completion. And I just got so annoyed with it. So it was really calling back to a personal pain point and being like, let's build this, some of the pushback we got at the board level and the executive level was well, I can't sell that to the controller. It's not their pain point. Like, are they gonna want to buy that? And it was kinda like, well, I get that concern. Yes. It's not a direct value prop. It's not a pain point that they're experiencing, but their whole team is experiencing it. And if we can make their whole team more productive, presumably that helps them. So there is really that, like for us to focus on that mundane that's happening in the trenches. And, um, I want to follow it up with another story calling back to, you know, being strategic and data entry. Like one of the more embarrassing accounting stories I have is my very first close. I was doing deferred revenue. It took me forever, like literal days to close this deferred revenue account because of how much manual work was going into it. Today, you would use one of our products to automate all of that. But I spent a couple days doing it and it finally balanced and I was like, yes, there we go. It all reconciles like, felt really good about myself. And then the CFO comes out. He's like, so what's our deferred revenue balance? And I was like, I don't even know. I couldn't tell you within like 30% what this number is because I've been so focused on every little one-off transaction to make them match and get them off my plate, that I completely lost sight of the big picture. And that was like a real epiphany for me of maybe I should be taking a step back also and thinking about stuff, but you legitimately don't have the time when you're looking at every little thing and trying to make sure it reconciles from there. So personally feel what you're talking about, for sure. But, you know, you make a great, you make a fantastic point that, you know, in my opinion, if you're going to be a controller, that you know is able to do well and execute at your role, it's not always about you. In fact, I would say most of the time, it's not about you. It's about your team, right? It's about all the downstream processes. A lot of times we get lost as accountants as thinking, OK, well, what's the ending number? What's the report? But it always goes back to the transaction and if it's, you know, if you have crap of the transaction, it's going to be crap by the time you get to the reporting. And it's so important to recognize the importance of that. And that's a lot of what FloQast does, and that's why it actually succeeds in this space, is it recognizes that and allows you to do that, you know? Um, so yeah, and you know, I think every accountant probably has your same story. I think I had within my first week. I think it was maybe my second week at Skullcandy, you know, we had just closed the books and the, uh, director of accounting, the now-CFO, Autumn asked me a very similar question. She was like, yeah, you did it. So like, you know, like what do you think? And I was like, I don't remember even the number nor do I think I really understood how the number came about other than that I reconciled it and I looked at the report and she was like, OK. And I was like, you know, noted. What do I think? I think I'm ready for a day off after all that. So do you have a, can you think back to a story of like a staff or senior level person who was able to get some work off their plate and elevate and do something more interesting with their time? Oh yeah. I mean, it really, um, gosh, there's like so many, I'm trying to think of like the best story, but, you know, with, uh, you know, I'll just go back to the accounting manager at Kodiak Cakes. Um, Sonja, also huge lover of the product. Hope she doesn't get upset that I told everybody that, but she's a huge FloQast believer. Um, and Sonja was really instrumental in managing the close, making sure everybody got their tasks done. And that's a really mundane thing to do, right. Just following up with every single person. Hey, did you finish your task? Hey, now it's this person. Hey, now it's my person. And she was spending so much time doing that and you know, that's, that's not just, it wasn't just a waste of time, it's also just like, like I said, a huge mental burden. So, yeah. You know, we implemented FloQast and it was a real quick, easy, really frictionless implementation, got the team up and running on it. And just by the fact that she no longer had to tell Person A that something was done and Person B can review and kind of be this like module of communication barrier between everybody. We, one, reduce the close days down, you know, almost immediately I think by like two to three days, like just overnight didn't even have to like try to identify all the other issues. It was just like overnight. And it was like, yeah, we're just, as soon as someone's done something, someone else is moving on to it. And so Sonja was able to stop doing that, and she was able to take on a lot more close tasks earlier in the process and look at them in a lot more detail. And so all of a sudden, like overnight, when I was having conversations with her around the end of the close, when we're trying to do reporting, it was no longer like, well, this is done, but like, there's a couple of questions. It was like, Hey, this is done. And because I had so much time to look at it, I noticed A, B and C, and I think, you know, X, Y, and Z about it. And as a controller that made it to when I go into giving my budget-to-actual, my month-over-month, you know, I had great information at hand to help. And she was the one that was instrumental in providing that, right? Cause she was able to be strategic and look at it and enjoy it. And, you know, it just grew from there. She, you know, as the company grew I mean Skullcandy went from, or sorry, Kodiak Cakes, went from four individuals to 10, but the company grew from like, you know, a hundred million to, you know, almost 300 overnight, you know, just like growing like crazy. And, with that comes a lot more reporting. And so it's like more and more stuff is getting thrown on our plate could handle it. She could handle it. You know, granted she's a rock star, but also she had the tools in place with FloQast to be able to do that. And I think that provided her just a lot more enjoyment out of work. There's so much less stress. Well, I have found that it's the best accountants who like FloQast. You know, they want to get better at what they're doing, not just tread water. And so I'm not all that surprised to hear that it all started that. Dude, that warms my heart, saving a few days off the bat and then getting to enjoy her job more. That's very, yeah, that's very, that's very cool. Um, you, you had made the comment at the beginning that you wanted to get more ops on FloQast when you were doing it, like. You're the controller. A lot of people wouldn't say the controller should be running operations. What makes you feel like that made sense for you guys to be owning some of that? You know, it's, um, the buck has to stop somewhere, right? And a lot of times, you know, the person that delivers the message is, you know, is the one that has to like take the first hit. So you look at the, you look at the CFO and you look at the CFO in the boardroom. Well, you know, even though it might've been an ops error, the CFO's probably delivering the news sometimes. And the CFO's the one that gets beat up versus say, Hey, you know, why'd you let this happen? So I think, you know, my perspective is a lot of accounting functions, a lot of the opposite, the CFO at a lot of companies takes on this burden just naturally by the way it's communicating everything that goes on, but what you also see with it and so you kind of have this, uh, I would say we have a motivation to prevent ourselves from looking bad, even though it's not something that has to do with us. But above and beyond that, I think, you know, accountants kind of have two competitive edges on other departments and this isn't to knock any department, but we come from a field, um, that preparation and review is an iterative process that is expected in everything that you do. And so every time you do something, you know, someone else is going to review it and they're going to critique it. And that's the expectation. And it's not the expectation that you don't find errors. Errors are human. It's fine. But you always know that you got to prepare something as if other people are going to look at it and you don't know to what level someone's going to look at it. And when that's in your DNA, you know, you will execute on the finer things very much, um, you know, just at a very higher level than others will, because you just have that rigor built into you. And a lot of other departments, they don't have it, you know, they're fast-moving. They're trying to get things done. Managers don't have time, but accounting, it doesn't matter how much time. It has to be reviewed, you know, it's the way it is. And so, um, because of that, we have a lot less errors and we look, we understand the details, just that much better. The, you know, and I think the other thing that is really important and you've talked about this a lot and that's one of the things I love about FloQast and this opportunity is the recognition of this accounting really is the language of business. Right? It's, you know, we kind of say that and I think a lot of people don't take it super seriously. But you don't have reporting and you don't really know how you stand until accountants, get in the numbers, clean them up and tell you how you performed. We really know the business through and through from the transaction all the way through how the transaction occurred all the way through. So if something falls through on the ops end of the house, let's say, you know, um, the demand signal was wrong and that's what's causing all these issues or the supply signal was wrong and that's what's causing all the issues. You know, accounting cares about that number. Cause we have to deliver that, but we also understand how it occurred. And so we have this really critical insight to the whole function and the language of business to be able to come back and say, Hey, you know, immediately I can tell you this was what occurred and how we need to improve it because I have this 30,000 foot level. But I also am there right at the tree level, seeing everything else that went on and that's a rare thing to get in any other departments. So, those are the real two competitive advantages I've seen in accounting. And I just look at an organization and I say, well, why, why wouldn't you use, you know, if you're going to set your lineup for bat, you know, like you put your best hitter in a place where they're good, you know, where you need them. Right? And that's what you want to do here. Right? You don't want to have this asset that you're not investing in that you're not utilizing to its fullest potential because I mean, heck that's why we're in business. Right? Like we're there to get the most out of things. Yeah, the number cruncher notion is, you know, I guess we're good at crunching numbers, but like a lot of software does that on our behalf. At this point, I'm not pulling out my calculator to do too much stuff on the fly and yeah, it's more about the rules, regulation guidance. We do so much around documenting policies and procedures with Sarbanes-Oxley and just control tracking and all that stuff. Uh, I'll also throw out that, as we've discussed, we're generally understaffed and as such figure out how to get stuff done as efficiently as possible with the tools that we're given. So I think it lends itself really well to an operational role. And I'm curious if this was the case at Kodiak because that does, it does seem like a very operations intensive. Was there a COO independent or did that roll up to the CFO? No, there was an independent COO and you know, like listen, the ops team at Kodiak Cakes is fantastic, but the issue is, you know, it kind of goes back to, um, you know, there's probably someone famous that said this, but I have no idea who it is, but those who don't know the past are destined to repeat it. Right. And accountants, we know the past, right? That's the world we live in. We live in that reporting. We live in the past. And so we're very much keen on not letting it occur again in the future. And so you look at these operations teams at these fast-growing companies like Kodiak Cakes and these crews are just so focused on tomorrow. Right. And being able to meet tomorrow's objectives, it's really hard for them to remember, you know, maybe errors in the past and mistakes that have been made in the past. And, hey that you need to make sure you don't do that again. And that isn't a knock on the individual, but like that's the nature of fast-paced entity, you know, it is what it is, and that's a good thing, but that's where, you know, the accounting team is so instrumental in assisting or even driving where operations is going, because we can say, hey guys, you know, uh, six months ago we made a similar choice and it was very costly. And what we've learned from that looking back is we need to do X, Y, and Z. And, you know, operations don't like you said, they don't write that stuff down. The documentation isn't there, they're moving fast, they're breaking things. And so having that, um, you know, conservative and not in the political sense, conservative in the sense that, like I take a step back and I look at something before I leap in is really important to going to the next level from an operations point of view. And that is something that, uh, you know, the Office of the CFO at Kodiak Cakes really delivered to the operations team. As we worked lockstep with them, we had great communication rapport, and honestly, you know, they really appreciated what we brought to the table and how we helped them because they knew we had their backs. And when we gave advice, it was worth listening to, and honestly, you know, different because Skullcandy was not in the same growth stage as, uh, Kodiak Cakes, but Skullcandy had the exact same thing. This is a company that's already matured and kind of, you know, at the time had a lot of its growth though I think they're still going to be growing and they have been growing and doing great things since I've been there. But that really close relationship with the accounting department and the operations department was really influential in the company. Just being able to make sure they didn't bring on too much of the right inventory that we identified slow-moving inventory early and pushed it like sooner rather than later, to maximize margins of profits. And when you're, you know, when you're kind of not in that growth cycle, you're kind of later in the later stage, man that's what's really important to driving your EBITDA on your margins, is having that help from your Office of the CFO to drive true results. Operations is really interesting. It's a super broad term. And at different companies means different things. Like, we're a SaaS company, obviously, so supply chain isn't really like an operational thing we have to worry about. And what has inventory, all that kind of stuff. Um, so you're more with those types of areas, like collaborating with them, providing information, presumably through the budget to actual process, or maybe the flux analysis process, looking at trends on things. Um, and then there's the other area of operations, which I really think accounting should kind of own, which is the cadence of how the company is getting stuff done. What's your, what are you doing? And, you know, this was really kind of brought about by just some reading I was doing around how accounting gets into a quarterly cadence and we're closing the books. We're reporting, we're doing all of this. And at first we worked closely with sales to set a number and track progress and report on if we're hitting the number. Um, was that, is that how it worked at Kodiak as well? Or am I in too much software world where it's like give a sales rep a quota and go hit your number and that's how it works or do you guys have revenue targets that people were trying to make also? Yeah. I mean, it's a different product, but it's really similar in a lot of ways, you know, working with your sales team to set what a reasonable number is for them to execute against. You know, you might, um, you know, it's a little hard to explain where you came up with your number, especially as a growing company, like, you know, for Kodiak Cakes, we might look at points of distribution and velocity to set a sales budget number for the year, right? A revenue number for the year. And then you give that to a sales manager that's like, OK, so I just need to take them from here to here, but how do you want me to do that? You know, so there's definitely that same aspect where, um, you know, accounting really is in that cadence of, hey, we close every month we report every quarter we report annually. Um, but I think, you know, if you, if you watch a lot, like any like, you know, sports documentaries, or anything like that, you know that like all the greats man, they will just grind away at one thing. Right? They are hyper-focused and they grind away and it's very iterative what they do and that's how they become great. And that's accounting in my mind, like that really is what we're doing and bringing that level of rigor to the rest of the organization, whether that is operations or even sales and saying, you know, set your plan, you know, set your execution and just keep doing it, keep refining it. It is really the only way in my, you know, in the way I see things, it's the only way to take it to the next level is you've got to grind out that iterative process. And there's always, you know, this is why I love our analytics product, not to pitch FloQast too much, but it is like, hey, where's the next bottleneck? And we can, we can solve that bottleneck and then move on to the next one after that. Was that how you guys kind of utilized that solution? So, 100%, yes. Uh, you could, you know, we used the close analytics tool to kind of identify the longest pole in the tent, right? We're always talking about, that's what we, that's what we always refer to it at Kodiak Cakes, the longest pole in the tent, which one's the longest pole? What are we taking down? What are the dependencies? You know, it really helps with, uh, not maybe the close analytical tool itself helps us understand those dependencies, but the analytic tool was really important to that. But we actually used it another way that I felt was almost equally impactful, which is a motivator, right? Yep. You know, we were talking earlier about the great resignation and you've talked about this in other work and it can be hard, especially in this virtual world to keep your team motivated. You're getting squeezed from all sides. There's a lot of pressure, you know, accounting definitely is the school of hard knocks. It's not for the faint of heart, even though it sounds like, oh yeah, they're just an accountant, they're just a CPA. It's like, oh no, this is, uh, this you're in for a journey. And that was one thing that we saw like really great results with FloQast as this close analytical sent out to the team day three of the close and say, Hey guys, we're beating the close, we're beating it into submission; you guys are slaying it. The team goes into the next day saying well, I mean, I'm doing well this far. Like I'm not going to quit the last two days. I'm not going to take it easy. I mean, if you have it, if you have a, I feel like most accounting teams want to achieve and be better and be best. And, uh, that is a really impactful thing to show them that on the whole, this team is killing it today. You are keeping up with stuff. And if they're not, let's say they're not achieving it. Right. You're like, oh, well, do you want to share that? A hundred percent, you want to share with them. It's like someone that's in the gym and they're like, so close to hitting a PR on the bench. You don't grab the bar, you get in and you yell in their face, like "you got this!" You know, and that's what the tool is there for, you send that to be like, guys, you are so close, you're so close. We can do this. And next thing you know, you go to the next day, you're ahead. You didn't even have to do it. You didn't have to individually coach, you didn't have to change any processes. You had a motivation tool to come in there. So, it really is great from a lot of different perspectives. Like, you know, process improvement is really just ingrained in the heart of accounting in the Offices of the CFO. But then you have a whole'nother thing with motivation. You can use it for that too. Yeah. And what about team building? You know what, one of my things back in the day was work was definitely unevenly distributed based on your skill within a department. So did you, you know, were you able to do any workload balancing, like redistribute stuff , did it allow you to highlight all-stars who were going above and beyond? Like what kind of effect did it have on the team itself? Oh, for sure. Yeah. I mean, you know, we hadn't even implemented the tool. We were just working with the customer success team, and uh, was it the ATC team just putting the mapping documents together. It's an informative process. It really is you're like, oh, this is like, listen, we already had an Excel document that listed everything out there we're using to track it, which is, you know, kind of a joke, but like, that's all you really have if you don't have a close tool like FloQast, what you have is Excel, and you know, the implementation and the customer success team at FloQast, just like putting that gentle pressure on your back. Right. Of saying, Hey, um, you know, we got to get this done. We're here to help you really like that by itself brought about a lot of discussion on workload and everything. Um, but like you said, you know, if you have, you know, go back to that close analytics tool, you might see a team member that's like always beating by a day, their tasks and all of a sudden you're like, OK, well one, um, I can move up their work maybe a day. Right. And have that discussion with them, be like, Hey, you're so great ,I got to move this up and like, thank you for that. But it also allows you to have that conversation with them being like, Hey, you know, do you want more? And what is that more for you? And that's really important for motivation and like career alignment and everything, because all of a sudden they might be like, you know, I've really wanted to help out with inventory. Really want to really want to look under the hood. Maybe I'm entering all the inventory bills, but if I could do the, uh, inventory reserve analysis, um, I would love to do that. And all of a sudden you elevated your team, right? You brought it to the next level. And that feels great for everybody. You know, you're like, they're happy that they get to be involved in more. Uh, you're happy to see their excitement and then, you know, you also are happy because you have less work to do, like it's a win all around. Yeah. So, OK, so I'm curious, I don't know if this is me being a pain in the ass millennial, or if it's just me as a person, but I really enjoy visibility and transparency into what I'm working on. And I didn't feel like I had that. I was so siloed to my thing, but did you find your team like digging around FloQast? Cause that is at the core of our application, right, is transparency, giving everyone visibility into everything that's going on. So did you find them learning more about your overall accounting operation and digging into it from there? Yeah. You definitely saw a better understanding across the board, you know, um, previous to that, there was an Excel document; it's clunky, it's not easy to flow through. You don't really see the dependencies. And so having that open, let people in the AP department really understand what the AR team was doing, right. And vice versa and have better conversations about how maybe they're impacting each other in little ways or where the ways they can help. Um, and so that was really, you know, I think a lot of them enjoyed that and learned quite a bit from that. And then it also, um, you know, the flux analysis tool that, that FloQast has, you know, a lot of times, I think you'll see controllers just take that burden on themselves. Like, all right, I'm going to answer X, Y, Z a lot, do all this. Um, because it's so hard to like rally the troops and they already have so many other things to do. But if you use that tool and you, you, uh, delegate it to the team members that are relevant to the things. All of a sudden they're reading through all these explanations that the other teams are doing. And they're also not only are they maybe understanding what other team members are doing, right. But they have an understanding of AR or they have an understanding of AP or they have an understanding of inventory, or they have an understanding of the controllership. And that really will, again, just like help them get to the next level in a way that, you know, you having conversations with them every so often about things will never do. Right. There's no real other educational component in there for them. And so by giving them that exposure, uh, man, I just like, it's like night and day, what you can see with your team. It's so crazy. I love Flux. I feel like that's where you do start to really understand what's going on at the business and what type of strategic or operating decisions are we making as a company and how is that flowing through the financials and everything. So that's awesome to hear. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. I remember when we did some more, I did some of my first fluxes at Skullcandy. I realized how dumb I was, you know, like they're like, yeah, like you would say something and the CFO would be like, is it though? I mean, oh my gosh. Like I just felt like I learned so much doing a flux and getting feedback from a flux that I was never going to learn by performing the work, you know? And, um, it's just. Yeah, just so impactful. It's not like it was an audit where you do a flux procedure, but it's really just rolling forward whatever happened in the last year. And hopefully that account went up again and hopefully it's the same explanation and I can just roll it forward from last year. It's not like that when you get into industry and it is more no-no, I actually care about what happened. We're not just trying to get the documentation done to get the audit over with. It's like, tell me what happened. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you better have a good story. Cause like we will make decisions off of this, you know? And you're like, oh, this got serious. It's no joke. The flux goes from being an audit, something you're just trying to blah, get over with, to an actual, incredible strategic task as part of it within an accounting department. And I want to, all right, so we're creeping up on time, but I want to wrap it up. Like where do you think, and don't let me influence you on this, I'm curious, where do you think accounting is going? Like, what do you view as sort of the future of the role and how it's going to evolve? You know, I, um, I truly believe this. I truly believe that accounting is the accounting team and department, the whole Office of the CFO is this huge a catalyst for change within an organization. Right. And we talked about a little bit of it, right? Like, you know, just in the DNA of accountants and the way we run ourselves, our work, the foundations of our principles, all of that just makes it to where we can provide really an elevated service to the organization, but also coach the rest of the organization on elevating themselves. So I really do see the accounting department, if you can maintain a strong relationship with other departments, really being able to be this catalyst of great change in the way we do our business, right. Taking out the mundane, simplifying it, you know, there's a huge, I mean, everybody's known this, every business writer for decades has written about how there's a huge communication problem in every organization that manifests in a thousand different ways, right. We're humans. And we have a hard time communicating. So when we put in tools that help simplify, like FloQast, it just helps simplify and really draw clear lines of communication and you don't have to get worried about, OK, did they say this, what is this, how do I need to do this. You just are able to unlock so much potential. And so that's where like FloQast Ops, which unfortunately came out right as I was leaving Kodiak Cakes so we really didn't get a chance to really implement it. Um, or I didn't get a chance to really, to play around with it. I'm just so damn excited to see like how that is going to change the relationship of counting with the other teams, how those teams are going to feel about themselves. I mean, I look at, you know, your customer service reps and, you know, that's a team that gets beat down in almost every organization. That's really hard, a lot of processes and you give them a tool that helps simplify that. I think you're going to see amazing change in there and that's being driven by your accounting functions. So I really do see accounting as this great catalyst to change the future of the organization. And because like I said, you know, those who don't know the past are destined to repeat it. And I probably ruined that quote, but, um, you know, that the idea is simple

enough: 42:44

Accountants, we know the past. And if we can get out of, you know, how long it takes us to report on that past, and we can look to the future, there is no better player to put in place from an operations, hell, even a sales point of view, you know, we can just be so impactful for that. So I'm really excited to see, I mean, you, I think you've made some claims about trying to get COO s to actually come from an accounting background, to have that rigor. And I think if you start seeing that in organizations, those are going to be the ones that everybody's going to be talking about. You know that everybody's going to have on their shelf, is going to have on their phone or whatever it is. Those are going to be the organizations that are really making the big plays in the future. Well, I could not agree more. That to me sounds like a very bright future for accounting. And I know at FloQast we're going to try our damnedest to make that happen with our product and training and yeah, going out to market. So, man. Great alignment. I'm really excited to have you on board, Stefan. I'm going to wrap it up here, but, uh, any parting words for the audience before we sign off? You know, uh, I would just, I think the last thing I would say is, um, there's few companies out there I've only been at Kodiak or, sorry, at FloQast for two weeks, but there are very few companies out there that practice what they preach that have it in their DNA. And just within a short period that I've been here, it's been so apparent to me that I'm just so excited to be here and have this opportunity to, you know, as we said, be a cast of change in this industry, to drive its future instead of being a passenger. And that's just super exciting. So if you want to be a part of that, you know, come join the FloQast family. And we are hiring. Yes, for sure. I like wrapping up with that message. Well, I'm going to, yeah, we'll wrap it up there. Stefan, thank you for joining us. For the audience, thank you for tuning in. I hope this was informational and enjoyable as well. Thanks, Mike. All right. Have a great rest of your day.