The CFO as Storyteller: Why Numbers Alone Aren’t Enough

Hello and welcome back to the CFO Playbook podcast with me, David McClelland. And here on the CFO Playbook, we get under the skin of how world-class finance leaders leverage technology, set goals, make plans, manage teams, and much, much more. And in today's show, I'm speaking with a CFO whose early-stage expertise has now seen him raise tens of millions of pounds, contribute to 4 exits, and build the financial foundations that that turn startups into scale-ups. Well, it's about storytelling. There's no point of making numbers as a CFO unless you can communicate those numbers to somebody else. The amount of people that I've seen, there's a cash flow and a red line, you're like, don't do that, especially scale-ups. You're telling them you've got no money. You can't do that. Get rid of the red pen. It's all blue. Brad, if you haven't got the scars, you haven't got anything. And he's dead on the bloody money. At the end of the day, being a finance leader is about confidence. Confidence. And that confidence comes from a place of preparedness. Raising £10 million is easier than raising £150,000. And people think, what? Why? How? The CFO Playbook is here every month with exclusive finance leadership insight. So make sure you subscribe, browse through our back catalogue, and get in touch as many of you do. Your suggestions really do help to shape our show. Right. Let's meet today's guest. This episode of The CFO Playbook is brought to you by Soldo. Trusted by over 25,000 organizations across 31 countries, Soldo combines programmable cards, an intuitive app, and a powerful management platform to replace manual processes with efficiency and control. To find out more or to book a demo, visit soldo.com. Brad Channer, CFO at Yubio. Welcome to the CFO Playbook. Thank you very much. Cheers for having me. You are CFO at Yubio and you've been there for, well, almost 4 years now. So what does it do? Where is it on its journey and what's your remit there as CFO? Yubio is, um, bot automation. So essentially, in, uh, layman's terms, we connect young connectable on the internet. So anything that hasn't got an API, we use bots to pretend to be humans to make the connection and to connect them together. So it could be anything from hotel pricing and availability information. So for instance, our largest customer is Google. When you go on Google Maps and you type in, I don't know, hotel London and the dates, you get that little map that comes up with the prices on the different hotels. We sell a third of that data to Google. We sell a lot of it to Microsoft, Skyscanner, Kiwi. It could be anything from flight times to hotels. And then we do all sorts of others. So we do Google pay us to scrape Google, which is just amazing. So that's weird. I know it's beautiful. Try signing that contract. That was a wonderful one. But yeah, so we, we essentially, um, we do promotional codes and verification as well. So we, scrape Google in German, French, and Japanese to find promotional codes. We then take those codes, use our bots to verify them that they work, and then we sell those back for Google Shopping to increase click rates. It's like having a team of people working for you, but they're, they're not real. They're, they're just scripts. One of the ways that I've heard you describe your job as a CFO is to narrate the numbers. And I want to explore that for a moment because I love the poetry. I love the alliteration behind those things, but it. It's also perhaps a different framing to what some assume accountancy, finance, finance leadership is about. So what do you mean by narrating the numbers and what's a practical example of that in action? Well, it's about storytelling. There's no point of making numbers as a CFO unless you can communicate those numbers to somebody else. And especially in scale-ups and startups where it's everything's personified and it's much bigger because They're more high risk, they're loss making, there's not, you know, the cash flow, it's not a massive company with big profit margins. Those numbers are incredibly important. There's no point of building them unless you can communicate to somebody what those numbers are about. So there's this, this great guy called Andrew Mason. I saw him do this talk and he was, he basically specializes in illustration of numbers. He's an amazing speaker and he was showing this diagram of Huel that he helped them build and it was for. So it's all about, everything to me is about objectives, right? What's the point of, every time we open our mouths as human beings, we want something, right? We need to figure out what we want. Now it's the same with numbers. So why am I building these numbers and what do I want to do with them? So Huell was doing an investor presentation. They wanted to keep their investors happy. They wanted to keep them on side and they wanted them to keep reinvesting in the company. And they wanted them to feel emotionally connected to the company. So instead of doing, you know, a boring graph, they made the graph black and white. So it really stood out and they had different bars with a different growth of different years. And instead of saying 2021, 2022, or whatever, they had grade 1, year 1, year 2, year 3, year 4. And they pictured it and they made it to look like a school, like a child going through school. And that it was growing. And instead of using bar charts, they did like, you know, when you have height charts against the wall, you know, with kids growing up, they did it very similar. So when you looked at the illustration, instantly, emotionally, you looked at that and you thought, oh, I'm looking at this child grow up. So it was this almost manipulation, emotional connection. It was, it's hugely emotional. But their objective was to get people, their shareholders really attached and wanting to feel a part of the family. And that's what they did by the way they illustrated those numbers.. And for me, it's like if I'm doing a, if I'm doing a board presentation, let's say, oh, I did a shareholder's report that went out yesterday. Now in that, I want my shareholders to feel safe and secure and that we're growing and all those nice things. So I would, the way I describe my numbers, I wouldn't do just a black and white graph. I did, you know, outcolors are yellows. So I'll put dark yellows in there and then I'll deliberately show the journey and the growth that we were going on. And I want to show the cash flow was strong. So I made the line dark blue. Never make it red. The amount of people that I've seen, it doesn't cash flow on a red line. You're like, don't do that. Especially scale-ups. You're telling them you got no money. You can't do that. Get rid of the red pen. It's all blue. And there's little things. It sounds like it's nothing, but a non-finance person looking at something, those things make a very big difference. Those illustrations and the way we communicate what those numbers say. I always say it's, you know, just like anything when you're working out pricing, it's about the pain, the pleasure that something brings. Sometimes the pain actually earns you more money than the pleasure does. But what keeps you up at night? I always think about what keeps my CEO up at night? What are his worries? And then how do I explain what I'm trying to get across while knowing that? And how does that affect us? Key for having that skill and understanding what's keeping your stakeholders, whether they're shareholders, CEO, whatever, up at night. Is empathy, is it not? It's being open yourself to understanding someone else's point of view and then tailoring or just being conscious of that in how you choose to communicate what the story is that you need to tell. Yep. And how they communicate. I mean, especially in tech, in tech, most people in tech quite neurospicy, as I like to put it. So they're, you know, either slightly autistic or Asperger's or, I mean, like myself, I'm ADHD off the wall. I mean, so it's when you understand how to communicate to people like that, it's different. So I used to work for another company in the, uh, again, the same, you know, a scale-up, and it was an owner-managed one. Um, and you know, the, the, the founder was a raging narcissist. Now that's really common in, in, you know, especially with larger companies, the CEOs are, tend to be quite narcissistic. And then how you communicate to a narcissist is completely different. Now, luckily I married a psychiatrist, which was really handy. So she gave me some great pointers. Um, and I worked for another company with a narcissistic founder, and you can never say to them, this is how to do it, because they won't do it. You have to say, I know you've thought of this before because you're genius and, you know, you always think of stuff like this and I'm sure you've done it before, but if we did do A, B, and C, do you remember what happened when you did it? Because I'm sure you've done this and it's brilliant, you know, what would happen if we did this? Well, definitely, I think we should do this, this. All right, great. You know, if I can, that'll be wonderful because I think that would help. And then of course you do it and it works out really well. And they say, that was my idea. That was great. And then you never get the credit as the CFO, but that doesn't matter. That's not my job's not to get the credit. My job is to grow the company or save the company or whatever, you know? So for all of that empathic communication, for all of that care in the storytelling, in, in the narrating the numbers, as you put it there, for all that creativity in a way that's necessary. To bring those numbers to life. The numbers themselves remain absolutely the bedrock. There is an absolute respect for the numbers as well. 100%. The numbers are the numbers. I mean, you can't fluff the numbers. The data is the data. I always say to people, it's, um, whenever I get into a company, the first thing I ever do, it doesn't matter on the size of the company. So before taking full-time CFO roles, I was doing portfolio work for years. And any company I would go in, I do the same thing. I go through, you know, whether it's a £300 million turnover edtech or it's, uh, you know, a mom and, it was a, you know, mom and dad, £2 million turnover business. I get the bank statements and I go through line by line, every single transaction. What are you looking for? I'm wanting to get under the skin of the company. Numbers don't lie. Numbers don't lie. People lie. Numbers don't. The only source of truth is the cash flow. It shows you what's coming in, what's coming out. It's showing you where you're wasting your money, what your real cost of sales are. And the only way to figure that out is to go to IT and say, what is this subscription? What is this doing? Why is that there? What is this? Why, why does that happen? Why aren't we getting this money? And then once you've done that exercise, It's a mate, then you know the company. And it's amazing when you do that, you know a company better than the founder knows the company. And the only way to do that, in my opinion, is to go through every single transaction. I'll tell you what, £300 million edtech took a very long time, but that's a lot. Yeah, it took me about a month, but it was the best month ever because by the end of that, I was a lot more efficient, let's say. So as a startup specialist, as you've alluded to there, typically you might find yourself being the first CFO that a company ever has. What does that mean for you in practice then? And what kind of things land on your desk that our, uh, maybe our typical CFO audience to, to this show accustomed to working in more established operations might not expect to land on their desk? It's exciting because every day is an adventure. So yesterday I was writing shareholder presentations. Um, at the same time, I'm working on a new share option scheme and looking at ways of readjusting the structure of the company. To increase its valuation at an exit. And at the same time, you know, I was with Google a couple weeks ago at the England-Japan match, networking, schmoozing, trying to increase our relationship with Google, with corporate development, looking at the exit, always about looking for an exit. So at the same, and you know, at the same time, I'm also on sale. I'm selling, I'm doing that as well. I'm on the phone doing sales. Microsoft was my deal. I mean, like it's, I'm continually always selling. Um, and I'm always sitting there doing sales pitches to different people, creating opportunities. You've got to have a finger in all the pies. I think as you've just demonstrated there, you are very much the connective tissue within the organization. I'm sure there are other people as well who fulfill similar functions, but when you are working in that startup scale-up, everyone needs to roll up their sleeves. The CFO should be the glue that ties all the different departments together. And it melts it because numbers don't lie. They tell the truth. And if you know the numbers and you can communicate it, you can bring everything together and make it tick. So it's, um, it's funny with, with AI coming in and being such an integral part of our roles and in the future, even more so the communication aspect of a CFO has never been more important. And it will just continue to be more important, especially for a management accountant. Person. More and more things will be automated. More and more we're asking ChatGPT to make this and that. I mean, I'll be lost without ChatGPT. You know, it's, it's, you use it a lot, but what you need to be able to do is communicate that still to a person and to a room of people. And that's why it's even more important in the future as we go forward that we're able to read what ChatGPT tells us and then communicate that to someone, to give a hope. Let's take a bit of a step back now and go to the beginning of your career journey, because I think it starts in a place that not many, not many watching or listening might have picked up on so far, because there was quite a different script that you planned to follow before business and finance took centre stage. You know, we talk about show business. Show business is two very, very different words, but you do need a good balance of both. And it strikes me that these two different strands of your professional career earlier on and where you are right now, there is a good healthy dose of show and business in there, but take, take us on that journey from where you started, not in, not in Newcastle upon Tyne, but somewhere about half the planet away. It was so, um, yeah, no, I'm from Perth in Western Australia, uh, originally. I never meant to become an accountant. It was an absolute accident. Uh, all of this wasn't meant to happen. So I, uh, started this world as an actor. So I worked in film and TV and musicals. Studied musical theater at WAAPA in Perth and then went off to acting school in Sydney. Anyway, so I finished acting school, got into a show called Bounce House, a kids TV show. Bounce House! And I wore a giant monkey costume, got rocky, like, and jumped around like an idiot and loved every minute of it. And still got the voice. Still got the voice. Oh, I do. And then my show was, um, My show was cancelled, um, before it went live on air and I was absolutely gutted and we filmed the first series of it and it was going to be my big break and I was all excited and then I found myself working back at Belgian beer cafes as a waiter and I was like, so I bought a one-way ticket to London, maxed out my credit card. I arrived here 17 years ago with 30 quid in my back pocket. An Oyster card with £20 on it that someone gave me, and two suitcases. I was doing street marketing work at that point in time for a company called Novus Leisure. They used to run all the Tiger Tiger nightclubs. And, um, my job was to go around Golden Square in London, go to all the receptionists and give an empty bottle of wine and say, I'll tell you what, you bring that back to me on a Friday night and I'll give you a full one, you know, so I was giving away free alcohol to get people into bars. And I thought, there's something here. And I figured out the Novice Leisure were paying 1p for a bottle of Stella. And I thought, there's a business here. So smartphones had just started to become a thing. So I started, I made an app called Free Beer, and it was an app that gave you a free beer every day around London. And that's how it all began. And I thought, brilliant. And I got, let's just say everything that could go wrong went wrong. And it— I have scars up the wazoo. And there's this beautiful old Welsh man called David Ap John Williams who I respect heavily in Wales, and he once said to me, um, Brad, if you haven't got the scars, you haven't got anything. And he's dead on the bloody money. Everything that went wrong was just what makes me and made me where I am now, is all the lessons of everything I did the wrong way, everything I didn't understand but just did. Scaling? What does scaling mean? No idea. A business plan? Who writes a business plan? Financial models? But I learned all these things while doing it and that was invaluable. We then separated when that stopped working. Basically it was because it was free. I mean, I learned a big lesson. No one appreciates free. If I called it 20p beer, I'll be a millionaire. Oh yeah. Because everyone would go, ah, you make 20p a beer, it makes sense. Free beer? Why is it free? What's the catch? What are you doing to my data? What are you doing? How are you doing it? So that was the main sort of issue. But anyway, so at that time, craft beer was taking off in London. So I pivoted, and this is before GDPR. So I took all my users from that app and all their data that registered, and I turned it into a beer magazine. Called I Love Good Beer. I went to America for a little while and helped scale Free Beer in Florida. And I came back to London, just got married and was like, well, I need a job still. What am I going to do? So we moved to Cardiff at this point. And, um, I just started meeting all these really great Welsh startups, but they just didn't, they couldn't get their act together. So they had brilliant ideas, really inspirational founders. And I would meet them because they were trying to raise money. Now I'd raised money for my other two businesses, so I was good at the chat, right? And I could understand the metrics. So I would look at them and I said, oh yeah, but you're doing this wrong. Or if we just changed this over here and we did that, and I was building big financial models for them and big business plans. And I'm like, look, you're missing this. And so I was helping— You're hustling again, aren't you? You are hustling at this point. Yeah, I am. For years, my sales pitch was My name's Brad. I'm not an accountant. And that's how I got these founders to like me because I can communicate was my sales pitch and they can't. Got the letters after my name and never looked back. That's great. And that hustle. That resilience. Um, and there's a few things I want to pull apart in there, but there's another moment I want to touch on. I know it's something you've been open about in the past and you mentioned it earlier on. You got an ADHD diagnosis a while back. What did that mean at the time and what has it meant since? I was an actor and an entrepreneur. My wife being a psychiatrist after she was married to me and knew me for many years, said, you know, you've got ADHD, don't you? And I said, no, what are you talking about? And I did the test and it's the best results in the test I've ever gotten in my life. I aced it. But back then there was no adult services. So I had to go to England and find a doctor privately because the NHS didn't do adult ADHD then. It was before it was trendy like it is now. Um, it was life-changing. Meds, it was scary at first, emotionally quite vulnerable because you've got to realize I've made a whole life so far at this point being me and then taking medication that would potentially, I felt, change me or my personality, which it hasn't. All it does is I went from taking, you know, a month to write a business plan to being able to pump a business plan out in an afternoon because suddenly I can focus. Focus. Yeah, there was no noise. I didn't go to the kitchen and open the fridge, um, which was my continue go-to. And I can take this The medication absolutely changed my life. And I went literally, you can, my wife loves talking about it. It was, you can, you can literally draw it in a diagram from the time I took medication until I started being full, like a CFO. It's, it's very obvious where, when, when the meds started, because I went from being this entrepreneur with a billion ideas who couldn't keep focused to now being able to go and just focus on that one thing. You know when you have something inside of you, when you have, you know, there's something in you, you know, there's this energy, you know, there's this, you've got the thoughts in your head, but you can't get it out. And that was it. Meds, going on this medication allowed all of that to come out for the first time. My thoughts of why this business had to do this or this or how or why and how I was going to scale it to here. I was able to actually eloquently explain it on paper as well, you know. Final one before we come back to finance leaderships for scale-ups. Coming from a non-traditional background for a finance profession at least, yet still having amassed this wealth of experiences, what was your experience of career progression and mobility before you had the letters after your name? Being a hustler and a salesman, I create, I've always created my own roles. I was basically a portfolio selling day, day, day work or, or, or for different tasks that needed to be done. So it might be, you know, help them build a business plan or a financial model or raise money and they will all attract fees and, and, and, and commissions and stuff like that. But anytime I tried to be a full-time CFO, what always held me back was not having the letters and it was the recruiters. They're that necessary evil. You hate them, but you need them, but I hate them. It's this love-hate relationship and recruiters don't under— for them, they don't understand that you could be QB, qualified by experience and have heaps of a wealth of knowledge behind you. And I think it was a very, but it doesn't matter without those letters. And there was a very good mate of mine, still is, Brad. Very good entrepreneur, great entrepreneur. And he said to me, Brad, bloody either get on the bus or get off. It's your choice, but don't sit half-half on the road. Like, you know, either get the numbers and play the fucking game, mate, or get off, get off the pitch. Play the game. Like, if you need the letters, get the bloody letters. Like, stop trying to be proud and say, no, I don't need them. I know more than these people and it's great. Just get the bloody letters. And I did. And it was the best thing I've ever done. The best investment of my time was to get those letters. Yeah. But if there are people listening to this who haven't got the letters, but have the experience, I would highly recommend looking at all the qualifications. Coming back to specific sort of advice there, you know, you've mentioned being that first CFO for a scale-up. You mentioned the money that you've raised across your career from venture capital, private equity, grants, debt, all the rest of it. For a founder who's setting up to raise for the first time, what do they tend to get wrong? In your experience, maybe before they engage a specialist CFO like yourself? They don't have traction. Raising 10 million is easier than raising £150,000. And people think, what? Why? How? And that's because £150,000 or £50,000 is even harder. It's an emotional investment. It's an angel, it's a dad, it's an uncle, it's an auntie, it's a cousin, it's a friend. They're the ones who give 20, 30, 40 grand. They're doing it emotionally, purely based on the founder. So it's based on the CEO, the founder, the person making that technology. Either they're a relation or if they're an angel, it's because they like them. It's all about the founder. It's got nothing to do with the business. It's got nothing to do with anything. If the founder's the right guy, they will give you that SEIS funding because they feel that you're going to do something with that money. And also it's a tax write-off, but it's all about the person, the founder. Now, when you're doing $10 million, let's say, you're talking to VCs, you're talking to further down the line. Now, the business would be much more mature by that point, and they're investing in the numbers. They're investing purely in the numbers and the management team, of course, is really important, but the numbers take priority, then the management team, because they could fire the, if it's a good enough business and it's, and it's PE funding, let's say, they'll fire the management team if it's not performing, because they should be able to run it. So then you wouldn't get the money. So it is much easier to get £100 million, because if you're going to get £100 million, you're going to have a business that obviously will raise, you know, is good enough to raise on it. You're not raising it on a dream startup. You're raising it on a dream. You're selling a dream to someone. So it's a lot more emotional and I always find that a bit harder. So, so hiring someone like me to raise money for you necessarily might not work. You still need to come there and perform on the day because they're going to invest in you and not me. Yeah, tell him a story. Your numbers are telling a story. Your model's telling a story. Your deck is telling a story. Don't write an investment deck on A4 white paper with black writing in Word, you know, lots of pictures. I always say if you're making an investment deck for investors, think that you are pitching it to a 4-year-old because little words, don't put much text, big pretty pictures, and you've gotta explain something in the smallest amount of time possible. They're gonna look at 3 pages of it and that's it. And they're not even gonna read it. They're gonna see what pops into their head when they look at it. What's your take when you're coming in as a CFO working potentially with a founder who's never had any accountancy accountability before, who's never had anyone really kind of, uh, asking them to, no, you can't do that. How do you look at that relationship and what strategies do you counsel other CFOs on making sure that relationship works as best as it can? There's no point of you being there. If you can't make the CEO change their ways or see or make those differences. And it all comes down to communication again. What sort of person are they? How do you, you can never say things in a threatening way. You've gotta, you know, it's about that whole psychotherapy of an idea where you try to get them to have the idea or it's about listening. It's about listening to them on why they do something. They are the experts at their business. I always spend a lot of time when I first start with a new company, you know, I've gone through the bank transactions and then I'm asking questions to the founder on why things are done certain ways on purpose from their experience of how their business works. If I go into a business and tell them how their business works, they're never going to listen to me and they're going to write me off straight away. I can't do that. They are there for a reason. I've got to respect that. My job as a CFO is to say to you, I think we should do A, B, and C. And then here's my evidence of why I think we should do it. Here's some examples, you know, classic management accountancy. Here's the top 3 things you have to do and here's the different examples of why you need to do it and some case study. Now they can go, no, I don't really want to do it. I want to do X. And you say, are you sure? Because if we do X, A, B, C, and D could happen and we have to mitigate for those things and it could be a risk. Yeah, no, I'd want to do X. Are you sure? Yes, I do. Okay, great. My job is to now make X the best thing it could possibly be. Yep. My job is not to throw my toys out the pram and storm off because that's me failing my job. My job then is to go, all right, you're the founder. This is what you want to do. Now I'm going to do that the best I possibly can. And I'm going to mitigate the risks that I've already identified. And now we're going to make that work. Now that is a teammate. That's what a CEO looks for. He looks for that person who challenges the critical friend, challenges it. And then after challenging it a couple of times, that's it. You jump on board and you go for the ride with that person. And if you don't, that's when problems start. And that's when relationships break down. Another good technique that I recommend to people. Again, married a psychiatrist. First week of getting married, my wife says, oh, can we do this marriage counseling book? And I'm like, been married a week. Come on. What am I? I'm not that bad, am I? And it was called, I don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's called The Five Love Languages and it's by a guy called Gary Chapman. And the audiobook's quite funny because he's a real Southern American guy with a big Southern drawl and he's very preachy. And but anyway, it's a great book. What it basically says is, as humans, we communicate in 5 ways with our partners. Um, touch, which is obvious, you know, sex and touch. And then you've got, um, positive affirmations, so saying positive things. You've got acts of service, so doing things for the other person, um, and giving gifts. And you've got quality time. So Everyone, we have all 5 and you're thinking about yours now, aren't you? And we all have one. Yeah. Yeah. We all have one. I was sitting on a bus listening to this audiobook and I thought, you know what? Why aren't we doing this in business? It's the same thing. My first startup, this guy, Brahm, I was in business with, he would come from the Isle of Wight to London and we will walk around the Hall of Westminster together. I was infuriated. Why are we doing this? I need your help. And then it hit me. He's a quality time guy. He wants quality time with me because that's how he communicates. He wants one-on-one time with me when he knows that there's no distractions because we're walking around the block talking about things. There's nothing, no phones ringing, there's no emails pinging. Me, I wanted acts of service. I wanted him to get his ass into the office to help me sell this bloody thing and to do things. I didn't want to talk all day. So it hit me. And then you meet old, especially some older men when you meet those, you know, 60 and more than that, and they're more probably in their 70s now and retired. But there was a day with old businessmen, it was about a handshake, you know, it was very important. And it's touch, sometimes a firm handshake. It's touch. Buying a coffee for the other person at a meeting. Quality time is good time, of course. The elements of Brad, the trained professional actor. Which of those play out now in your work as a finance leader? And we've spoken about the obvious communication skills, the obvious kind of empathy piece there as well. But in terms of understanding where you are, in terms of understanding, you know, as actors, it's about motivation, you know, is again the cliché, but there's a lot of truth in that cliché. So how does that play out in your day-to-day interactions now as a CFO? One of the methods of acting I learned was the Larbin method. And in there it talks about what we call a super objective, an objective, an action, a through phrase. I was saying before that anytime we open our mouths as humans, we want something. And our job is to figure out, if I'm an actor, my job's to figure out what I want. And if I'm going into a scene, I've got my text, And I sort of walk into the scene and then I've gotta figure out what do I want as a character? What's my super objective? Being what do I want out of life? Not, I'm not gonna achieve it in this scene, but what do I, my character wants out of all of life? Then my objective, what I'm trying to get out of this scene. What do I want from you? What do I want from you to do? My action, which is my verb, which is like, how am I gonna do it? Is it to flirt, to, to argue, to, to, to scare, to what am I gonna do to do that? And then a through phrase, which is a small little phrase, sentence. That I would think of, the only thing I would think of in a scene if I ever felt a bit self-conscious or I felt that I've lost that moment or I'm out of the character, I'll think of one little through phrase or 3 or 4 words and then instantly I'll be right back into it. And I came up with this idea years ago going, why can't we need to be doing this in business? So I now do this in finance and I do it for everything. So before coming on this podcast, I worked out why am I doing this? What's my objective? What's me? A through phrase. If I'm nervous or I feel self-conscious, I'm going to read the little sentence at the top of my bit of paper here on the side and it gets me back in. If I'm going into a board meeting, same thing. Why am I in this board meeting? What's my objective? What am I trying to get my shareholders to feel? What do I want my board members to feel? If I'm doing the board report, if I'm doing a shareholder report, a, you know, anything. Why am I writing this? End of year accounts. This is one everyone always fucks up. End of year accounts. There's a dialogue at the beginning of your end of year accounts talking about what you do as a business. Why are you doing these accounts? What's your objective as a company? Why are we doing this? What's our through phrase? What message are we trying to tell people who are going to read these accounts on Companies House, which people do, because at the end of the day, being a finance leader is about confidence. It's about confidence in your decisions and what you're telling other people to do. And that confidence comes from a place of preparedness. And you know, if you are prepared when you go into a meeting and you know what you want to achieve, naturally, subconsciously, you will achieve it. There are some quickfire CFO Playbook podcast questions that we put to all of our guests before we let them go. Brad, are you ready for some quickfire answers? Yes, go. All right. What's the one thing in the finance world today that you would like to leave behind, to consign to Room 101? And why? Payroll. I don't know. Nothing. I enjoy all bits of my job. I can't think of anything right now. Good. Great. That's fine. None of it really. Well, here's another one then that might build on that a bit. If you could automate one part of your role tomorrow that maybe you can't do quite yet, what part would that be? You watch, I'm going to say this and then every single salesman that's listening to this is going to come out of the woodwork to sell me a tool. Going to solve this problem. You watch. It is taking, it's going to sound a bit more complicated. It is taking my compute and, you know, AI costs and being able to pull that into a financial model based on what APIs and what things are using what. So for instance, my cost of sales based on my token spends and everything else. Taking that data and then being able to put that into my financial model so I can work out what's spending a lot. It's very hard to track cost of sales when you're looking at tokens on AI. It's not very mature. The platforms aren't very smart yet or savvy. Yeah. And it's incredibly difficult to do. So that's the one thing. And in fact, yeah, leaving behind, I'd love to be able to leave that behind. There is, as we're recording in April 2026, That is a very, very 2026 answer, and I don't think we'd have had that in April 2025, and certainly not April 2024, about token spend management. Maybe building on that, what emerging tool, habit, or idea do you think every startup CFO should be paying attention to right now? AI, without a doubt. Yeah, AI, AI. And you have to learn how to automate. You have to learn how to automate your whole finance function and what's going to happen. And if you have any sort of graduates or young finance people listening to this, I wouldn't hire a graduate anymore because of AI and because of what AI I know is going to do and can do now. The person who comes on as a graduate needs to be more senior than the skills and training they currently have. It's going to be really odd and it's going to be a weird couple of years, I think, for finance people because you're going to need to, all those lower level finance jobs where people earned a crust and learned the hard way and did the hard yards, they're not going to exist anymore. AI is going to automate the whole process. And in a couple of years, all the auditing is going to be done by AI and everything else. You need the person then who's smart enough to look at it and then figure out and analyze it. To A, figure out if the AI is correct, prompt the right questions in the AI to get the right answers out, and then be able to be smart, to be experienced enough to ask AI the right questions on something, or if it has missed something. A good example is like when I write contracts, I use a lot of ChatGPT. Now I could just get it to draft and send it out, but that's not a very good contract. I've gotta go back and go, I did notice you haven't put this, this, and this in there. Why is that? And we'll say, oh yeah, you've just, I must have missed that. Now unless you been around the block a few times and know that, then, then how am I meant to know to input that or to say, well, you've missed this or that? The problem is with graduates coming through now is they're not going to have that experience to be able to do that. And when they learned that, that was because they did the work that the AI is going to do now. So they're going to be coming into a job at a much higher level of experience, but they haven't, they're not going to have the experience. So it's going to be a very interesting couple of years on how we train our next generations of finance people to have that knowledge. Very similar in the technology space, obviously where you work as well, where a lot of lower-level, particularly in the development space, a lot of lower-level roles are being replaced by coding copilots. So if you think of the career as being a career ladder, as somebody I was in conversation with a few weeks ago described it, those first couple of rungs are being removed from the career ladder, which is making it a much bigger step before you can kind of climb that ladder into a company, which is a real challenge for those who are training the next generation or those who are the next generation of people entering the workforce. I think one thing for finance people, maybe it's especially at my stage, I say it was, I was working with a group of a finance leadership program the other day I was talking at and there was a young lad there who wanted to be an entrepreneur and I said, great, do it. Go start a business and fail, please. Best thing ever. Hit a wall because you're going to have more experience than the next CFO that comes along because you've done it before. You've got the scars. Like experience is going to become entrepreneurial. Everything is going to be about going out and actually just having the effort to build that thing or do that thing or give it a crack and that confidence. That's what graduates are going to need in the future. Final question, Brad, here on the CFO Playbook. We are building an actual playbook, a collection of top advice from finance leaders like yourself that we plan on turning into a resource for the community. So what top piece of advice, and it may be something you've already shared today, but what top piece of advice for a fellow CFO would you like me to enter into our CFO playbook? Communicate, communicate, communicate. What's my objective? But yeah, communication and believing in yourself and confidence. I think that's the main things. We buy from people we like. It's been great to speak with you today, Brad. Thank you for the communication. Thank you for the inspiration as well. I think it's fair to say, I'm sure everyone watching and listening today will agree that the energy that you've brought is infectious and the insights that you bring likewise as well. So thank you for sharing your, your journey, uh, and what it is that you do right now for us here on the CFO Playbook. Thank you very much, David. Thanks for having me. And thank you all for joining us too. Don't forget to join us every month here on CFO Playbook for more insights from finance leaders. But for now, from me, David McClelland, and all the team here, bye-bye.