Annette DeYoung, Principal Solutions Consultant at Datarails, is an accountant-turned FP&A manufacturing leader. She has deep experience in leading finance teams at manufacturing companies including Berner Food and Beverage, Rockford Products, Fairbanks Morse Engine, and JL Clark. It was at JL Clark, as Director of FP&A, that Annette implemented FP&A Solution, Datarails to mop up inefficiencies and end drain all-late night sessions at the finance department— she liked the product so much she ended up joining the company and has since spoken to more than 1000 FP&A professionals seeking to love FP&A again by removing tedious repetitive processes.

In this episode

• Why I fell in love with manufacturing and finance over my career
• How creativity drew me from accounting to FP&A
• Why a hard-coded accountant attitude was difficult to reconcile with more creative FP&A
• How to create finance business partnerships on the manufacturing floor
• Why I brought Datarails into my finance team at JL Clarke
• The future of Excel in FP&A
• Is finance (finally) making a move with AI?
• The power of getting out of your comfort zone in finance

Connect with Annette on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ahdeyoung/

Craig Barry has held senior finance roles at some of the most iconic companies in tech and entertainment, including LinkedIn, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and Electronic Arts. At LinkedIn, he led central forecasting, supported more than 10 acquisitions, and played a key role in the company’s integration with Microsoft before becoming Head of FP&A at BioRender- building FP&A from the ground up helping the company scale ARR from $18 million to $50 million. Now Barry is principal consultant at ClearSightIQ.

In this episode

• My winding road to strategic finance
• Junior FP&A Analyst position at Electronic Arts as my first break
• Cost center focus in creative industries at EA with $3b sales
• LucasFilm (pre-Disney) run as a sole proprietorship by George Lucas
• Pixar head of finance for their Canadian operations and production planning
• LinkedIn and focus on “revenue, revenue, revenue”
• FP&A focus on modeling for acquisitions at LinkedIn and “virtual” P&Ls
• Strategy for building out FP&A from scratch at BioRender
• My fractional CFO life

Mike Dion works at a Fortune 100 company. He has previously worked as a finance leader at Verizon-as well as startups and as a mentor to enterprise giants to scrappy startups—unlocking tens of millions of dollars in value across industries like Entertainment and Telecom. He does this through Mike’s F9 Finance: a no nonsense website and newsletter (with 20k subscribers) passing on the skills that have accelerated his career, providing a guide to new tools (based on his experience automating 100,000 hours of labour) and secrets to promotion. He tells Glenn Hopper: “Three things, increasing revenue, decreasing expenses, and making your leaders look good. Those are the three things that move your career, not the reports, not the forecast tools to get to that.”

In this episode

• Passion in media and entertainment
• putting in our first consolidated planning system
• At Verizon starting a center of Excellence (after facing a situation where 40 VPs wanted 30 decks based on Excel files
• Lack of approachable finance content: introducing Mike’s F9 Finanance
• Secrets to dynamic modeling and scenario planning
• 3 Ways teams are getting overwhelmed with forecasts
• Better prompting and my relationship with AI
• A completely new answer for Fave Excel Function

F9 Finance: https://www.f9finance.com/

F9 Finance YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@f9finance