“The Association for Financial Professionals (AFP) is a non-for-profit with a really simple mission, which makes it really easy for me to wake up and know what I’m doing every day,” says Bryan Lapidus, Director, FP&A Practice at the Association for Financial Professionals. “We exist for the success of the corporate finance and treasury professionals. FPAC, our certified corporate FP&A certification has been in the market for about 11 years now and 5,000 people have earned it in more than 80 countries.”

Returning guest Lapidus joins Glenn Hopper as they discuss the climate for FP&A including:

• Evolution of FP&A and AI
• Certificates vs Certification
• Why business school doesn’t prepare you for FP&A roles
• The impact of Sarbanes-Oxley on changing the CFO role
• Why you need different CFOs at various stages of a company lifecycle
• Why FP&A professionals are so hirable and promotable
• How to become CFO from an FP&A role

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

FP&A Today goes on the road!. Our host city is Boston and the historic Harvard Club with an audience of Boston CFOs and FP&A leaders. Our first live recording sees an all-star panel of Jack McCullough, CFO Leadership Council, Michael Bayer, CFO of Wasabi Technologies, Cathy Yang, CFO Trexon.

By way of background, Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, talked of “remarkably high” levels of economic uncertainty. “I don’t know anyone who has a lot of confidence in their forecast,” he said. FactSet, a financial-data firm, found that over half of the companies in America’s S&P 500 index cited tariffs in their earnings calls—more than in any other time over the past decade.

In this episode we probe how finance executives can navigate today’s complex geopolitical and technological landscape including:

• The ROI of a CFO AI Strategy
• How to navigate as a financial leader with tariffs and trade tensions
• Trexon’s Experience navigating tariffs affecting 12 business units and 16 sites
• Tech and AI’s role in enhancing supply chain visibility
• Pricing increases for customers due to tariffs and navigating that from the CFO’s Office
• Back to work or not for finance teams?
• The future of accounting

Shannon Nash is a chief financial officer, board director, investor, attorney, filmmaker, and CPA. She sits on the boards of Net Scout systems, Lazy Dog restaurants, and Sofi Bank, and most recently was CFO at Wing, the Alphabet-owned drone delivery company, and one of the hottest companies in the US. Here, she reveals the secrets FP&A professionals need to know about presenting to the Board and how to turn numbers into a narrative to advance to CFO and beyond

• Explaining the power of the Board to shape a company’s strategy
• The finance of film-making and my experience making a major new documentary
• The power of FP&A in securing $150 million in funding at Reputation.com
• Presenting to boards -what drives us crazy
• How improv training unexpectedly revolutionized her executive communication style

Connect with Shannon on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonknash

Watch On Board documentary: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/onboardthefilm

CEO and Principal Analyst at Amalgam Insights, Hyoun Park helps CIOs & CFOs create the ROI and strategic business cases for better AI and IT FinOps. He is also host of the weekly podcast, This Week in Enterprise Tech.

In this episode Hyoun discusses some of the quick AI wins for finance departments.

• My journey Starting as a CRM administrator to analyst
• Cloud spend getting out of control (unexpected cloud bills for $20m!)
• AI use cases: invoices, contracts, billing and spending contracts (dealing with 1000 software contracts) and reconciliations
• Agentic AI and uses in Finance
• Zero based budgeting and Forecasting in the AI age
• ROI for AI investment
• People who will lose their jobs in AI in finance vs those who will survive
• My futurist prediction

Connect with Hyoun on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hyounpark/

Host of weekly podcast, This week in Enterprise Tech: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2319034

http://www.amalgaminsights.com/

With nearly 300k subscribers on YouTube, Bill Hanna’s weekly videos on The Financial Controller Channels provide his audience with lessons over a 15-year career in Auditing & Corporate Accounting. He provides inspiration and practices in accounting and finance through his videos and courses “Designed To Save You Years of Learning” (as one reviewer wrote “I have learnt more with you than 3 years studying accounting and finance”).

In this episode:

• How I stumbled into accounting
• Lessons in accounting leadership
• The power of mentoring teams about mistakes I make
• FP&A vs controller
• The accounting crisis affecting the CFO’s Office
• My accidental influencer journey
• Bringing practical explanation of concepts through one company followed across the course
• The accounting concepts needed to get to CFO
• Having a wife who is also an accountant
• Being a Mac user using Excel

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-hanna-cpa-7653a851/ YouTube channel (Financial Controller) https://www.youtube.com/@TheFinancialController

Courses: https://controller-academy.com/