Annual Planning: Beyond Numbers to Business Growth

[00:00:15] Melissa Howatson Welcome to The CFO Show. I'm your host, Melissa Howatson, CFO of Vena. The time for annual planning is upon us. And as finance professionals, we are certainly aware that this process requires significant time, research, and strategic thinking to get it right. No matter your fiscal year timing, it's critical to get everything in line and build a plan that will propel your business forward. Here to discuss every step of the process is Igor Stelea, Director of Strategic Finance, Analytics, and Business Transformation at CFGI, a global accounting and business advisory firm. Igor specializes in financial planning and analysis services and has extensive experience in building finance teams for organizations ranging from startups to Fortune 50 clients. He's also skilled at guiding executive teams through strategic planning. Welcome to the show, Igor.

[00:01:18] Igor Stelea Thank you.

[00:01:20] Melissa Howatson So maybe before I jump into my questions, can you tell us a little bit more about your background?

[00:01:26] Igor Stelea Sure. So yeah, I'm a Director in Business Transformation at CFGI, and I focus on FP&A and EPM/CPM systems as you call them. I'm the National Alliance Leader for Planning Solutions and developing and productizing the offering. I've been with CFGI for six years now. And previously, I was at Deloitte in audit, and I also had a role in industry, and a SaaS company. Overall, you know, I've built finance teams from the ground up, Series A startups, Fortune 50 companies, public-private, you name it. And I think what makes CFGI pretty unique is our embedded model. We operate as an extension of the client's leadership team, not only as consultants, churning out pretty decks, but also what I call blue collar consulting, really being embedded and being on the other side of the table with the clients. And like I said, yeah, my role spans from strategic planning, alliances nationally, and focusing on functional support, implementations, remediation of planning systems, and just helping CFOs navigate through complexity and actionable planning frameworks.

[00:02:27] Melissa Howatson So safe to say that you've been around the block for just a few planning cycles with various companies you worked with, as well as clients now that you serve. So, as we jump into that, then. What do you think is the first step in terms of setting yourself out as a company for successful planning cycle?

[00:02:49] Igor Stelea Yeah, so I think the first step, of course, and probably a very obvious answer is integrating your strategic goals into the planning cycle. But the very first thing you would do is just being brutally honest with yourself with a review of the current plan and performance. Like where did you hit or miss last time and why? And then including a review of the KPIs that are relevant to that particular year, because you don't expect that you're going to be doing the same operating plan in the same manner every year. So you don't just recycle last year's scorecard or whatever you may be using to kick off your operating plan. So as business dynamics evolve, your metrics should too. The other thing that I've used and a lot of the engagements that we've been on that I found very useful is using a maturity model. And by maturity model, I mean sort of the crawl, walk and run and sprint model and just kind of figure out where you are on that spectrum and what does it take to get to that next level. And then I can't emphasize it enough, but calendarizing is very important. Calendarizing your annual operating plan is also part of the first step and integrating it with any other big milestones that come down the road, including accounting close, strategic meetings, board meetings, maybe the long revenue, long range plan, and having all that sort of in a general vision is also important to start off your operating plan.

[00:04:17] Melissa Howatson And how soon do you think companies should be starting their plan relative to the timing of their fiscal year end?

[00:04:26] Igor Stelea It varies on the operating model of the companies and just the business, but I would say typically the operating plan itself, a lot of teams start around August and September, so that they're pretty much done by year-end. Obviously, if your fiscal year is different from the calendar year, then you have to plan it accordingly, but I would say August or September is pretty reasonable.

[00:04:50] Melissa Howatson And so there's a couple different streams that I think need to happen as part of a holistic plan. And you've touched on that already in terms of, you know, you don't need to understand your strategic plan as one of the first steps to get started. You need to create the calendar of the different pieces of the plan. One of the things that I tend to think about as a part of that plan, and I actually call it out as a separate stage just to raise awareness of the need for it, is the understanding of the market or at least a refresh. You should always know your market, but a bit of a refresh to take a look outside of your own four walls at what's happening. When you think about that, you know, where does that fit into planning, or how do you see some of the best, most mature companies going about tying in the market understanding with the planning?

[00:05:38] Igor Stelea Some of the best teams that I've seen around, they take a number of factors into account externally, like macroeconomic signals, their customer insights, surveying customers, understanding the landscape, doing competitor benchmarking, and there's a lot of different databases and different ways of doing. There's just a wealth of information there, both free as well as subscriptions. There's Cap IQ, there's HR data, just different points of data that can be incorporated into the annual operating plan. There's also regulatory shifts that we have to take into account. And this year we find ourselves in a pretty unique situation, which, you know, unfortunately is not the first time around where teams need to be very nimble and really take into account the regulatory changes, the market uncertainty, and be able to really plan at scenario level. So scenario planning becomes very important as a key strategy against different market realities, right? I mean, we've seen this with COVID, we've seen this in the economy with inflation, with tariffs, with you know, different changes that could create a lot of unpredictability. And being able to do scenario planning on the go is very key. And you know, employing whatever technology is needed for that, I think is very important because what I find is that the successful teams are able to integrate very well the people, process, and technology. Whereas the teams that struggle the most, they spend too much time on collecting data manually, and you know, 60 to 80 percent on that, and only about 20 percent on actually the storytelling aspect, the benchmarking and market analysis. So it's very important to incorporate those, for instance, you know, what would happen if interest rates rise by another 100 basis points, or what if demand drops by 15 percent in third quarter, right? What if 25 percent tariff gets introduced to one of the key suppliers for the company? All those things need to be taken into account and benchmarked. And I think that will make for a much sounder operating plan, but also will help with the reforecasting throughout the upcoming periods.

[00:07:49] Melissa Howatson And you touched on the strategic plan. And I think sometimes what I've seen is as part of the annual planning, you get going on what's considered the financial work streams. And sometimes it's looked at as if the strategic planning sits outside of that. And I really think you've got to be running these work streams to come together. Cause at the end of the day, the financial plan is really about how you plan to operate your business and are you in line with the strategic goals that you're setting for yourself? How do you help companies underscore and make sure that they're equally putting emphasis on that strategic plan and getting out ahead of it, including even how you maybe define the strategic plan versus the operating plan and how they're supposed to play together?

[00:08:38] Igor Stelea Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with you a hundred percent. The two need to be linked. And I see strategic plan as the why and the operating plan or financial plan as the how. So first leadership, company leadership, you know, it has different names, ExCo (executive committee), department heads, right, depending on the size and the org structure of the company. They set up the strategy and the vision ahead of the operating plan. And again, having that calendar and the full picture of when that happens is important because the strategic plan can be a vision for next year, it can be a vision for the next few years, and tends to be tone at the top. And, you know, setting out those targets is basically what helps operationalize the operating plan. So the way we help it is we really sort of sit in those strategic meetings with executives, with a C-suite, with the decision makers. And I think the benefit of being sort of you can say outsider, insider, but we're a neutral party as consultants. So for us, it's a little bit easier to play good cop, bad cop, and actually push through initiatives or challenge assumptions, right? Because a lot of the challenges I see at the executive level when the strategic plans are set or they're they're stuck, and that actually affects when the operating plan gets kicked off or when it gets signed off on. You know, some teams can start their operating plan in August, September, but it doesn't get signed off until January, February, and sometimes even March, or some teams are still finalizing their budgets, you know, in the middle of their following year, which is completely obsolete at that point, right? And that's because there is no clear linking to the strategic plan that should have happened way before that, right? So having that connection and the top-down approach and on targets is important and having leadership alignment, because a lot of times the executive leaders from let's say sales or marketing or R&D, they have their buckets of money that they need to figure out in the operating plan, and they can't really agree on who needs to concede what in terms of priorities, kind of the top priorities. And that's where the strategic plans are really important. One way to think about it is through the agile methodology. I don't know how familiar with it, but for instance, within our own firm, we use the agile methodology. So we have sprints and we have OKRs. We set OKRs, so objectives and key results. We set an objective and we have four or five key results for each objective. And I've seen companies do that too. I know this stemmed more from the tech world, right? I think the Googles of the world started that, and there's books on that about the agile methodology. A lot of IT departments use that for implementation, system rollouts, their IT strategy, but you can apply that on any level for finance as well. And to the leadership of a company when they set their strategic goals, they can basically create objectives and key results because the key results are meant to be measurable and the objectives are meant to be more strategic. So that's one way to do it. And we help with that when we see that element of being able to quantify that strategy is missing. And you know, that's where external help sometimes is important because teams and leaders just struggle to agree to just get aligned on the strategy.

[00:12:00] Melissa Howatson Well, and it's interesting you talk about that. You know, I certainly have used OKRs as well. I find them valuable in terms of taking that strategy and starting to dissect it into, okay, so what does that mean are going to be those objectives for the next year? And then helping that frame the prioritization exercise that helps with some of the trades that you talked about. One of the other pieces, when I think about the strategic plan and getting that agreed to, I think it goes hand in hand with the long-range plan, the more the financial plan of the business. What do you want this to look like three years from now, five years from now? So at least that you know that you've got a North Star and the strategic plan matches what that long-range plan looks like. How do you typically advise your clients to think about that long-range plan and frequency of update, and timing of updating that relative to this other planning?

[00:12:54] Igor Stelea Typically, you know, teams use sort of a measuring stick of three to five years, also depends on their maturity model as well, and revenue or pre-revenue, very dependent on the industry. So, you know, in for instance in life sciences and biotechnology, the plans are really set on the life cycle of a program, you know, that's tied to clinical trials and regulations. So you really sort of think of that as the Gantt chart of from the beginning of that particular program in their pipeline until the end of it. If you think of more traditional plans, we advise, you know, clients to do it at least once a year. You could do it more often, you could do it a couple of times a year, same six months into the fiscal year. And, you know, you use the operating plan as sort of your baseline. So, really take the more detailed budget from year one and use that as your basis for extrapolating into the next few years. And of course, the inputs and the drivers become more high-level because forecasting and that level of granularity beyond year one isn't very useful as, you know, nobody really has insight, maybe beyond the 18 months, right? So some teams do rolling forecasts, which I'm sure we'll we'll touch upon in a little bit here too, because that's becoming more relevant and, you know, prevalent in a lot of companies. So the rolling forecast would be around twelve to eighteen months. And that really also helps incorporate into the long-range plan and make it a little more precise. But yeah, anything beyond even three years gets tougher, but it is important, at least on the top line, right? For companies that have revenue and they're focused on revenue growth strategy, their number one metric is going to be revenue growth, right? And then maybe some other KPIs like cost of goods sold, gross margin, EBITDA, and so on, depending on the maturity of the company. But setting those revenue targets and as dependency of the strategic plan becomes you know, a very key part of your long-range planning.

[00:15:03] Melissa Howatson You know, this starts to show how there's these different streams that start to need, you know, some of them can run in parallel, but they need to be converging and coming together as well. Do you have a framework, or you know, what advice do you give to your clients, maybe if they've not done this annual planning or not done it very structured in the past, in terms of a way to think about it?

[00:15:24] Igor Stelea Yeah. So I mean, I think, you know, treating the budget exercise not just as a finance exercise, but cross-functionally, I think, is very important. And also really paying attention that there is a link between the strategy and the resource allocation, having those top-down targets is important. And again, creating shared ownership, and linking the longer range planning, the strategic plan with the operating plan means having the right team structure from the finance business partner perspective and giving enough attention to the business partner on the functional side and the operational side, not just sending out email templates and hoping for the best, right? Having those planning sprints is important, always challenging assumptions, not just dictating numbers. And again, can't emphasize enough the cross-functional collaboration, not working in silos, but also talking to accounting, understanding how your actuals data, historical data flows in, and really leveraging that level of granularity to make sure that the planning done is done at the right level. So it makes it easier to roll up into the higher level assumptions for years two, three and so on and so forth. And I think what's really helpful is I know a lot of teams operate in Excel, and they think they can get by with that, but again, what makes it complicated, there can be user error of version controls. There is no workflows that are very well defined. So linking the calendar, the workflows, having responsibilities and having a tool in place, I do think is very important just because it just it makes managing much easier, managing all these processes and also assigning responsibility cross-functionally. And just having that connectedness, because the connectedness gives the ability to have to create more inputs, more assumptions that are more accurate, and update them on a regular basis so that they don't become obsolete, whether it's a reforecast or resetting the annual plan for next year or the long-range plan. And having the ability to do that in a single source of truth in a system by creating dimensions, you know, all the way at the SKU level, at the Sales Ops level, right? And having all of those connected all the way up to sort of the chart of accounts level, I think is what gives that connectedness and the ability to forecast beyond just core financial planning, but go into extended planning and business planning for the entire company.

[00:17:54] Melissa Howatson Couldn't agree more. And I think about that extended planning to work streams that I like to sort of define as their own and make it clear they're such a critical part of being able to come up with, at the end of the day, an operating plan. Every business I can think of, we are in business, we build something, there's some product that we're bringing to market, and we need to sell it to customers. You know, without those two things, hard to picture many businesses that don't have to think about what's our product, how are we going to take this thing to market? And so I like to get on top of those two work streams because I find they're such critical inputs and need to run alongside coming up ultimately with, you know, that plan for where our resources are going to be allocated, how much are we going to need where what markets, etc.? And so I think if you can get that go-to-market stream running, and you mentioned the finance business partner, you know, this is one where it's interesting. I've seen it done different ways. You know, finance absolutely needs to be involved. Sometimes we lead, sometimes we support, depending on the maturity of the organization and whether, you know, you've got folks in the go-to-market side that actually can run that. Okay, how are we going to go to market? Or similarly on the product side, what is this product roadmap look like in terms of the investments we're going to make, the levers between near-term horizons, long-term, et cetera. So, you know, I always like to think of it as the things we're building next year become the following year's go-to-market. Now, obviously, it doesn't work exactly like that with timing, but you know, thinking of how this starts to roll out over time, it's a continuation of a business we happen to measure in these 12-month increments, but it's at least a good, a good opportunity to stand back, look at those couple of critical assumptions so that we can start to, as we land on what they're gonna be, we can play with those assumptions in the model, see what it might mean in terms of changes that are needed to be made. Do you see lots of other customers going that way?

[00:20:04] Igor Stelea Yeah, I mean, it's a critical component of the strategic planning, right? I mean, your growth goals can be achieved in different avenues. And those go to market strategies are, as you had mentioned, either new product creation, product growth, volume changes, or you know, as you call upsell or cross sell, depending on how many products you have, and you know, what's the nature of your industry? And I think it's very applicable in the SaaS business and retail, and manufacturing, right? Anything where a very defined product can grow into different directions. You productize multiple SKUs, and then you have other types of businesses where it's really based on services, right? So your metrics are gonna be on utilization and capacity, and how do you expand that? How do you utilize excess capacity, revenue backlog for professional services? In, you know, life sciences and biotech manufacturing, it's about R&D for new programs. What do you have in the pipeline, and what are investors interested in, right? So a lot of the rare disease companies typically have at least four or five programs in the pipeline, and then just sort of a big bucket of money for R&D that's still undefined, but is in early stages of research. So as part of that strategic plan, always adding in more specificity to the next programs that they're gonna roll out or additional avenues for royalties or partnering with other similar companies, or selling some of their intellectual property for licensing with other companies and joint ventures. So these are all different strategies to go to market and growth, right, for revenue, whether it's a product, subscription as a service or professional services.

[00:21:52] Melissa Howatson Here's our audience question. What's one thing you always do before kicking off annual planning that you think more CFOs should be doing? Now, on this one, I'm gonna cheat a little bit because I have two things. I'd say the first one is I always do a retrospective as soon as planning is done. It's a good chance to get feedback from the team and the key stakeholders on what worked well and what you might want to do differently next time. Then, when it's time to plan for the year, you pull out those notes, and you incorporate that. And that leads into the second piece, which is I always have a plan for the plan. I take that feedback, and I lay out a roadmap of how it is we're gonna go about the planning for that year. And I find that those two things really help you start off on the right foot. And now back to our conversation. So you touched on rolling forecast. And that's an interesting one. You know, curious what your thoughts are in terms of how important it is that companies have one and whether they do or don't, how that might change the way that they think about their annual planning process?

[00:23:07] Igor Stelea Yeah, when you have a rolling forecast, your annual planning process is a little bit different because you're constantly, you know, overflowing into the following fiscal year. So there is no rigidity as much. So your rolling forecast is a more extended and detailed way of thinking about annual planning. And it's become more and more popular with teams, but I think again, the key assumption is that it's very cross-functional and collaborative, and you have enough resources to be able to do an effective rolling forecast and have the technology for it. When you have a planning tool, it's very easy to create new scenarios and open up a new period for the rolling forecast. When you just do it manually in Excel, it can become a logistical and mechanical nightmare. So the teams that I do see successfully rolling out those rolling forecasts are the ones that are essentially implementing best practices around budgeting, having really good hygiene around budgeting and forecasting very clearly delineated business partnership relationships where, you know, they follow the calendar, they're reforecast, they go granular enough on the sort of minimum viable product where they can afford to forecast out into the next twelve to eighteen months versus just the next quarter or a few quarters. And that also comes with having the ability to get historical data quickly, because if you can't, you're stuck with one quarter of actual data that you're bringing in and you're just spending too much time on that. So you need to be able to bring in the data quickly and to nimbly do a budget versus variance analysis, forecast versus variance analysis, and any other kind of analysis on the fly. Then you could do a true rolling forecast. And that just gives teams and companies better insights into how well they can perform and tie it even closer to the strategic plan. Right. And I think more and more teams are moving towards that. And they believe that a rigid annual operating plan becomes obsolete quickly. So it makes more sense to expand that period and continue rolling it either on a quarterly basis or maybe, like in the middle of the year, do a more detailed forecast than usual.

[00:25:18] Melissa Howatson Well, and that leads us into, you know, recently, you know, some of that uncertainty around a business, whether it's the economic uncertainty, things that are happening in the geopolitical environment with supply chains, etc. How do you think that factors into the annual planning, and how do companies stay agile even after they've got that plan as they get into the actual operating the following year?

[00:25:47] Igor Stelea Yeah, I think the key here is to be able to update your inputs quickly and on the fly. And historically, you know, over the last few decades, teams haven't been able to do it as effectively as they can now. And I think that's attributed to just having so much more experience and data points and what's happening certainly around the world, but also having the understanding and the technology to update those inputs on the fly. So again, scenario planning. What-if scenarios become key to even past your annual operating plan, being able to do at any point in time to flip the scenarios, right? Change those inputs, let's say interest rate growth, as I had mentioned previously, changes in interest rate or inflation, adjusting for inflation, adjusting for tariffs and building it at that product level, at the SKU level, at the geography level or business unit, whatever your dimensions may be, being able to do the scenario planning on the fly, even if, you know, most of the time what happens is and I'm sure you run into this a lot where you ask your team to run you another scenario because you have either a board meeting coming up or you are in a board meeting and somebody asks a question that maybe wasn't really scripted, so to speak, right, but you need to have the answer right away and being able to do that scenario planning, but also leveraging some of the available technology these days. It's something that we've never had as freely available as before. And I'm not talking just machine learning or predictive analytics, because I think historically only really large teams or companies that were very financially stable, that'd be able to afford data scientists and have machine learning. Now with Gen AI, it's much more freely available and much cheaper. So you can generate insights and democratize data as people like to say these days, you know, in a much more efficient way. And generating those insights, leveraging technologies such as Gen AI, I think has allowed to create that scenario planning and be prepared for, you know, uncertainty times that we find ourselves in this year and have, you know, in recent years.

[00:28:00] Melissa Howatson So you've seen a lot of annual planning processes happen. What are the top two common pitfalls that you see companies fall into?

[00:28:10] Igor Stelea Some of the common pitfalls some of the teams do bottoms-up planning without necessarily having a link to a target. So, operating in silos, where even if there is a strategic goal and targets, the lower-level planning does not connect to that. So what ends up happening is you have one iteration of the operating plan, and it doesn't fit at all into the strategy or even into the targets, and then you have to revise it. And you have two or three or four revisions, and that's where you find yourself. The team that should have been done with their budget by December or January, they're still revising in March or April. The other pitfall, again, shared ownership, not having the shared ownership and operating in silos, I think is where there is a lot of disconnect because then you're not even after the budget is done and you go into reforecasting, nobody takes ownership for their numbers, or if they're asked to find risks and opportunities in their budgets, there's a lot of blame sharing that goes around and nobody wants to take ownership. And it really depends on how if it's a matrix organization or how do you define the budget ownership, right? You can have tiers of budget ownership from the executive level to a couple levels down, or you can have it at program level. Activity-based planning tends to be more efficient in my experience from what I've seen with teams, instead of just having a strict bucket of money and an undefined way of budgeting and allocating budgets. So, that cross-functional and shared ownership, I think, is a big key and the pitfall of not having that, you know, leads to just prolonged and disconnected budgets.

[00:30:01] Melissa Howatson It's interesting when you talk about that. I think about, you know, I always try to set the stage right from the get-go. This is an annual operating plan, not a finance budget. Because the notion at the end of the day, when people think, well, those are finance numbers, I'm like, there is no such thing as finance as numbers. This is our budget, our operating plan, and it needs to be collective. And so on that point, do you have any tips for companies you've seen that do a good job with aligning with the business and making sure there's that sense of ownership and alignment between the stakeholders?

[00:30:39] Igor Stelea Yeah, so tip number one is not just using email templates in a vacuum to send out to your business partners on the functional side and the operational side, but being more involved in the process and planning cross-functional sprints with finance and being more of a facilitator versus just dictating numbers. And really leverage the finance team to challenge assumptions as well as, you know, when priorities don't align, use the business cases as a forcing function to understand what gets funded most, what's needed the most, and prioritizing based on, you know, on the key activities for the year, which I think will tie best to the strategic goals. As you've mentioned earlier about potentially rolling out new products or just variations of the products or maybe some additional capabilities on the services side, prioritizing that and understanding how the resources, the budget gets allocated and working closely with the operating teams becomes more useful during that process. But also, you know, breaking down the internal alignment, updating strategy even before the budgeting kicks off, challenging every assumption from last year's plan and really investing into those rolling forecasts, I think will pay dividends because it's gonna be a bridge between finance and just being more agile.

[00:32:05] Melissa Howatson And when have you seen companies, obviously you deal with lots companies, bringing in you as an external consultant? What are some situations where that works the best, or there's an indicator that might be a way that a company should think about it?

[00:32:21] Igor Stelea A lot of times it happens when the company is in hyper-growth mode. So it's two very different situations. One is hyper-growth mode; they're rolling out a new product or entering new markets. They need some of that external expertise. So similar to thinking about benchmarking and understanding the market and the customers, the product market fit. Sometimes just bringing in external help and consulting, having that, you know, the quals under the belt of servicing specific industries or verticals becomes very useful. Another example would be the opposite when the teams are going through hard times, and they need cash flow forecasting, runway forecasting, business case modeling, for instance, during COVID or times of uncertainty, thinking about, you know, customer churn analysis, demand planning, changes in demand planning, changes in workforce planning. It's actually, you know, fortunately and unfortunately, that's when the external help is needed too. You know, the ability to be agile but also understand how to influence market or how to react to market changes. And especially when companies need to tighten the belt and see when and what they need to reconsider in terms of their both operating plans as well as longer-term strategy to be able to respond to those changes in market conditions, right, external factors. And then I think the third scenario is we get embedded into a client, we're standing up a finance organization from scratch. So A lot of private equity firms come to us to just get help on their portfolio companies or acquisitions or portfolio companies that have had a lot of acquisitions, they're highly acquisitive. And let's say in the last 18 months, you know, something like an insurance company that acquires smaller insurance companies or carriers, they tend to have a lot of different legacy systems that you need to integrate. And that typically becomes a data governance nightmare. And they bring us in to help with defining the data strategy, standardizing it from the KPI perspective, from data governance, data flow analytics, and then standing up best practices in and finance and cross-functionally. So those are the most typical use cases. But again, when the processes break down, even in strategic planning, I think, you know, I find myself playing that neutral party that can affect change because as an outsider, you can really have a different perspective. And with the experience in certain industries and sort of being seasoned professionals, both from professional services as well as industry experiences when, what you know clients are really looking for us to help with, and you know, bring in at the board level, at the executive level, or any other levels in between.

[00:35:10] Melissa Howatson Igor, thank you so much for joining me today. Now, whenever we do have a guest, we have two rapid fire questions. So are you ready?

[00:35:17] Igor Stelea Sure.

[00:35:19] Melissa Howatson Okay, the first, what is the hallmark of a mature finance team in terms of how they operate?

[00:35:25] Igor Stelea Good question. A mature finance team in my mind, operates as a strategic partner, not just as a reporting function. So what I had mentioned earlier in the very beginning of the podcast of the, you know, finance partner that focuses more time on storytelling and analysis versus data gathering, I think is a really good example of a strategic partner. They drive decisions with insights, not just data, and they proactively challenge the business instead of reactively explaining variances.

[00:35:55] Melissa Howatson Excellent. And one more. If you could recommend just one book that has had a major impact on your career or your life, what would it be?

[00:36:05] Igor Stelea I think one that comes to mind that really is, I think, particularly relevant to my career and just servicing the office of the CFO. It's a book called: The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It's by Ben Horowitz. And it's really about building a business when there's no easy answers. And I think some of the key takeaways is that leadership is never smooth sailing, as I'm sure you can attest to in your own role. And you know, some of the key lessons there are that there is no secret sauce or playbook. Even though a lot of consulting companies, including ourselves, always roll out some new playbooks and points of view and thought leadership. At the end of the day, a lot of it is a journey you have to navigate on your own. And it really comes with experience and, you know, being radically transparent is one of the other takeaways from the book. So it's one of the books that I think influenced my career more than the others, but I'm sure there's a few more out there.

[00:37:01] Melissa Howatson Excellent. I haven't read it, but I have heard about it a couple of times, and I'm definitely putting it on my list. Igor, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time and sharing your insights. Great to have you on the show today.

[00:37:15] Igor Stelea Of course. The pleasure is mine. Thanks for having me.

[00:37:19] Melissa Howatson If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more on this topic, sign up for our free newsletter, where you'll get exclusive resources designed to help you grow your leadership skills and drive strategic transformation across your business. Visit theCFOShowPodcast.com to sign up now. For The CFO Show, I'm Melissa Howatson. Until next time.