Balancing Strategy, Risk & Leadership as a CFO, with Scott Meyers

TRANSCRIPT

Wassia Kamon: Welcome back to the Diary of the CFO podcast, the space where you will always find real world insight to become a better leader and be better at life. I'm your host Waseeya Kamon, and today I'm so delighted to have with me Scott Meyers. Scott has 20 years of experience. experience in finance and accounting for large multinational firms and Canadian small and mid caps.

He is currently the CFO of Plurilock, a cybersecurity company publicly traded on the TSXV. Thank you so much for being here, Scott.

Scott Meyers: Thank you for having me.

Wassia Kamon: So before we dive in, why don't you tell us a little bit about your career journey, how you find yourself in this role, which I think is your second CFO role and what were some of the expected turns along the way?

Scott Meyers: Just a brief overview of my career. I started in Chicago area. Actually, my first company I started with, uh, my first job was for a bankrupt company,

a company named

Spiegel. And I'll tell you, if you ever get the chance to work for a bankrupt company, you're people are going to be like, wait, what? You know, that means you may not have a job, but.

What happens is you can get a lot of experience really fast because companies winding down, if you're a junior accountant, if you show any sort of skill set, they will just keep throwing work at you. Those types of environments I think are really good to learn from. But then from there I went on to larger multinational corporation.

I was actually there 14 years. I had a chance to move to France, ended up in Canada. After that bit of time, I decided to go on and do smaller mid cap stuff here, here in Canada, which eventually led to. a CFO role. And then now I'm on a CFO role number, number two, unexpected turns. I would say, you know, there was a period of my life where I didn't know I would be in two countries in like five years and moving twice.

And I think, uh, it really depends, you know, not everybody's going to be set up or have the life you may have, you know, you may have settled down and have kids. It's kind of hard to pick them up and move, but if an opportunity comes sometimes just saying yes to it, uh, it can be challenging, but also you'll probably learn a lot along the way.

So that's where That would be the advice I would give somebody or even my younger self is like, no, just, just go do it. You're going to learn something and it's going to give you at least something to talk about when you're 80.

Wassia Kamon: That's for sure. Even if it's cold, because Canada is.

Scott Meyers: First Celsius audience.

Yeah, it was like minus 12 this morning.

Wassia Kamon: Minus 12. Okay. I would not complain about the cold in Georgia. Let's keep going.

Scott Meyers: I think for our American audience, that's like, I don't know. 20, 15, 20 or

Wassia Kamon: something. It's quite cold. Well, I'm sure the CFO role keeps you warm because it's such a challenging role. I'm in my first CFO role, if I can say 90 days in, and there are certain things that I found that I thought would be easier that turned out to be very challenging.

What would you say are some things that took you by surprise as you stepped in the CFO role?

Scott Meyers: Everything's different, but I do have a joke with a few of my other CFO. Colleagues in it. I think you want to hear your podcast kind of mentioned this, but it's always a mess. It's kind of the mantra. What does that mean?

It means that there's going to be something there that needs fixing. And it's usually like, wow, how did they get this, this bad? But that's really, you know, what I would tell anybody, whether it's a mentoring call or whatnot is you're getting hired because there's a problem, you're not getting hired because something is working, you know, something's working, there's usually not a need for somebody to come in and do that job.

So any job, really, you're getting hired because there's a problem. And usually, for whatever reason, I think a lot of companies, especially in the smaller stage, they kind of have to mature. And there's simple things that sometimes aren't done where like you're. trial balances are kind of messed up and you know, nobody's organized it, but they really kind of compound to these larger problems of not getting financials out or not having information fast enough to make decisions.

Probably the surprising thing is actually how far down you need to drill in and how simple some of the fixes can be. Like I've told somebody every time I've gone into a company, usually I change the file structure just because it takes, takes you time to find like your files when your teams are going for audit or whatnot.

And I know that's very tactical and boring, not high level and how are we presenting the company and what's my executive response to that. But a lot of times it's these basic things. that um, really throw you off. And I think I'm still surprised by that sometimes, even like as to, you know, wow, it's the basics, usually nine times out of 10, not being done

Wassia Kamon: right.

It is the basics. I'm realizing it too. But then you think about how much the role entails, right? What are the things that you oversee? Not just accounting, not just finance. Sometimes I feel like I'm a therapist, an advisor, a counselor, like there is so many things. What are the things that you think Besides being at a bank or a company when you started your career, helped you, what are the skills that really helped you to be able to realize those things, problem solve quickly?

I think,

Scott Meyers: you know, I've been lucky to have some really great managers slash mentors in my career. I think that's, that's just one of the things where if you come across people and, and. Sometimes it's, I guess I call it luck, but you can also, you know, if a manager or position is not working for you, you don't have to stay there.

You can find and grow in your career, or you can find outside of your work, how to grow and get skills. So that's been lucky. I think the, one of the companies that I worked for, you know, most of my career, that large multinational, it was super complex. Probably unnecessarily complex, but that said, it gave me a mindset of, okay, how, how can we do things

that

opens expands what's possible.

And I think the other thing is just taking that leap and jumping in and figuring stuff out. I guarantee you, if you're taking a job and you know, a hundred percent of it, like. Either you're going to be bored, or it's probably going to be automated away or something at this point. You should be what I always call the right level of scared when you take on a role.

So, you shouldn't be completely terrified that either you're going to fail and everything's going to go wrong because maybe it's too big of a role for you. But you shouldn't be completely comfortable with it either. If you're trying to grow, I guess. If your goal is, I want to just kind of work my 40 hours and go home and, you know, that's it, then absolutely don't go in scared.

But for most of us, I think in the spirit of what you're doing here, get that right level of tension.

Wassia Kamon: Nice. I like that the right level of scared. So what would you say was a bit scary when you moved from not being a CFO to being a CFO? What was the scarier part of the role?

Scott Meyers: I think what people don't realize is, especially in the publicly traded world, the amounts of liability you have.

And you're really on the hook, or as some people say, like the CFO is hired to get fired, that can be because if the company goes wrong and it's the finances, it may not be your fault, but you're definitely accountable for it. So there's always this, this tension of, we used to call it in finance, like you're accountable for everything and have no responsibility, meaning you're not directly impacting everything, but you're the one who sees the numbers and needs to guide the business accordingly.

And that piece, along with just making sure you're dotting all your I's and crossing your T's, it's really serious. I mean, even in Canada, they'll, they'll say like, put your house in your, in your spouse's name, just in case, you know, like, Oh, wow, this is not, this is not playing around by liability. But that said, I think.

It's a great honor to take the helm and guide a company, especially in the smaller cap space, because you're not taking over something that's been making money for decades. You're taking over something that's trying to create something new and that is immeasurably harder than just running something that's there.

Wassia Kamon: I think I read an article a couple years ago that was talking about how it was actually beneficial for somebody in their career to go through larger company versus medium and small, because at the larger level, you may see bigger things, how things could be done better, and then it will help you if you have a smaller company to optimize things because you know where this could lead down the road.

So for you, when you think about being a CFO at a smaller cap company, still public company, what do you think are some of the challenges that somebody at a larger company may not go through, or it won't be as bad?

Scott Meyers: That's a kind of joke with some other friends. I mean, sometimes you're the one putting together the financial statements, you know, you're doing almost all of the work depending on where your stage is at.

And that takes a certain set of skills that you've had to, had to see everything in your career. If you're used to a large company, sometimes you're only doing specific tasks or you have a team that's doing the accounting. So you don't have to worry about that. You get a finished product and you can have your business conversations.

It's a different skill set to actually be able to do the whole full cycle of everything. And I guarantee most people are not going to be able to just run in and do that. Like, you're going to have to go back to like, Oh man, I did this last in university, or I did this last, you know, 20 years ago, how am I going to do it now and doing it effectively.

And then getting that work outsourced. Cause you're almost going through what your current large company did. But maybe a hundred years ago, even, or 50 years ago. So you really need to understand each of the pieces and then get it kind of off your plate as, as fast as possible. So you can focus on the important things.

Wassia Kamon: Wow. So as you're moving fast, you definitely have to build those relationships to help you, whether it's your team or your peers or directly working the CEO. Can you share a bit more about how you are navigating all this? Cause it's also a fast paced environment.

Scott Meyers: The main thing is communication. So if you're a CFO, somebody said this the other day, I don't know how much I like it, but basically your CEO needs to be your best friend.

You need to be talking to them all the time. And you have to foster that relationship because that's the main person with which you can influence and make sure that they have what they need to do a good job for the company. And then you really need to be talking to almost everybody in the business.

Understand, depending on the type of business, if you're manufacturing, you definitely need to understand, like, what is your operations floor doing and how are, how is that working? If you're more service sales oriented, like how's the software going, what's your delivery cycle, what's your customer intake sales is very important for you to get involved in.

So you need all of these pieces. To understand, you know, one, like, where's the company headed? What's my sales forecast gonna be? How accurate is it when my sales team tells me a, what do I get? Do I get a plus 50 or do I get a, you know, minus 50 , do I get, do I get 80%? Yeah. 80% of a, like, you don't have these conversations over, over time.

You need to build that knowledge to say, okay, where am I heading? Really? And then you have to be conversing with your board, make sure that everybody on the board is, is on the same page because, 'cause I think many people probably said your board meetings really happen kind of outside of the meetings.

And you need to make sure that you're not surprising anybody in that meeting. It should be more of a formality at that point.

Wassia Kamon: That's very true. And thanks for bringing up dealing with the board is you want them to not be too much in the weeds at a certain high level, but you also need them to not be too surprised when things happen.

So how do you balance that? How did you learn how to deal with the board and finding that right balance of sharing information?

Scott Meyers: The first thing I would say is communication. Make sure that you're, you know who you are and you've had regular conversations with them. I think the second thing is. depending on your various committees.

So the CFO, you're going to be attached to the audit committee just naturally by what you do, making sure that they have the information they need and heads up particularly in bad news, I think is really where when you're giving bad news, that is where your speed is important as well as your ability to deliver it calmly.

Most people can give good news very easy. Like everybody wants to hear good news. Nobody wants to hear bad news. Which is why also you need to do it quickly because the faster you do it, the light, the least painful it is, and the more time people have to react to it,

Wassia Kamon: because if

Scott Meyers: you say like X is going to happen in the future, but I give you, if I give you two weeks to manage something, then that's way better than me giving you like two minutes to manage it.

So the difference is like, yes, people may feel strong emotions. You may just have to sit there and kind of listen to them, hear them out. But if you give somebody time, sometimes they get time to process it and then actually be productive. If you don't give them that time, it's very hard even at the board level.

Even if you think, you know, these are professional peoples with sometimes 40 year careers. In our case, you know, we have people that have probably been shot at before, you know, and because we have people in the military that are on, you know, or disarmed bombs and generally they're very calm people, but you also want to give them time to process too.

Like everybody's still human at the end of the day.

Wassia Kamon: Yes, and it's those non finding skills that I feel like I'm really making a difference here because yes, you can have all the technical knowledge, you know how it works from A to Z, but how do you communicate? How do you build those relationships? How do you build your team, for example, in those environments?

Scott Meyers: Your team is going to be your next thing and I will say like when you come in, it depends. You will have a team that's there. I've been in many different situations. You have to assess the skills and do they have the right skills? Are they going to be able to move forward? Do I have the right people?

And

can you bring them or are they?

And if not in the right role, because a lot of times when you're coming in and it's a problem, it's because the company, usually it's a good thing. The company grew and as I always tell my team, like you need to keep increasing your skills because the world, like if you, even if you think GDP on average goes two to 3%, what does that, that means the world's kind of improving two to 3 percent a year.

Okay. If you're not improving two to 3 percent a year, maybe you get away with it for like 10 years, but then think in 10 years, you're going to have this gap that you're going to have between where the world is and where your skillset is, has gone down. So either you're going to be someone who can't do the job that you're actually currently doing today.

And you have to take a step back, or you need to constantly skill up. Sometimes it's very hard as a manager to get somebody to make 10 years of skill in 10 months, even. And you have to make some of those tough decisions of this isn't the right role for you anymore. On the flip side, a lot of people do want to learn and keep growing their skills, and you need to make the time to actually spend time with your team to help them manage that, that learning.

It's time. Spare

Wassia Kamon: time. Where do you find the time or how do you help people? Because I feel like sometimes there is a, yeah, I have this much work to do and you want me to do this much of learning. How do you deal with that?

Scott Meyers: So everything's a trade off. And true. It's looking for the 80% kind of thing that'll get, or the, the item that'll get me 80% of the way there, that'll take 20% of my time.

It's always going back and reflecting. A good process is, am I reflecting on what, what I'm doing at least, at least monthly? I would say weekly, ideally. Like what, what did I do during my week? What was effective, what wasn't effective? Mm-hmm . What would I have done differently and how should that guide my actions?

And if you do this regularly, you get used to it of like, okay. We had these meetings, maybe I, it's sometimes as a CFO, it could be like, like I've said, I'm not going to take any vendor meetings for the next six months. Once you get that CFO role, I don't know if this has happened to you, but a lot of, a lot of software companies that have this awesome tool, like they could suck up your time.

I'm using that as kind of a funny example, but there's also. Multiple things that are going to happen in your day or your week, even just looking at your calendar and putting a red X by the meetings that you really didn't need to go to or weren't effective can inform you of what should I do in the future.

And that's how you start carving out time for things, which I think are really important, like one on ones with your team, depending on how many direct reports you have, you need to spend it, you know, in my mind, at least 30 minutes a week with them. And it sounds like little, but that compounds over time.

You need to give them feedback, especially when you're in a CFO role, because a lot of us are hard charging and you just want to get things done. You need to take that pause, if you will, to let your team talk to you, but that also does things like it sounds, it sounds silly, but the more you spend with your team, the more you're going to retain them the last time you spend, you know, with your team, they're kind of like the joke that I use is, you know, your team, your customers are kind of like teeth.

If you ignore them, they just go away. You spend time with your team. And that's probably the number one thing about retention because you want your team to also quote unquote complain to you, but you want to know what their challenges are because you Sometimes it's a simple fix you've seen before, or you can help them troubleshoot, you know, the golden spot is to help them solve, just be able to solve their own problems.

And then they're coming to you and saying like, Hey, we had this issue. Here's how I fixed it. Just letting you know, that's usually as a CFO, the best thing you can hear from your team. It's not a problem. And you're like, they're like, all right, what'd you do about it? Like, I don't know. I don't know what to do.

So you're trying to get them to help you solve problems in the business. And that works for them because it increases, it helps their career out. You want to build their resumes is kind of the way I look at it.

Wassia Kamon: Nice. And now what are some of the things that helped you with that philosophy? Because when you look at our traditional finance and accounting education and background, there's nothing about management, right?

When you think about sales or HR, you know, they have customer service, building, psychology, we are all about the numbers. And then you get to a point in your career, like, Ooh, it's people now. What helps you make that switch? Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely.

Scott Meyers: It was gradual over time. So, you know, if I would recommend not to recommend some resources, but, but there's a, there's a podcast called manager tools.

I think that's a really. They have a lot of just basic managerial, how do you do, you know, A to Z management and some of that over time, I think you have to have the desire to want to work with people and to be clear, I don't think everybody needs to be a manager. Agree. Um, if you don't want to be a manager, those specialized skills, I mean, most of the people I know in, if you don't want to be a manager, those specialized skills, I mean, most of the people I know in tax are very happy to do tax work, and it's a very lucrative career that you can have and, and potentially not need to manage a soul.

The flip side of that is you're, you're always gonna have to deal with people even if you don't. Yes. Like it, even in accounting, in my mind, most businesses are what your people do and, and that's just not your team, but it's your mm-hmm . Your entire organization. Is how are we, you know, how are we structured to, to produce a result?

And usually that results is free cashflow at the end of the day. My encouragement would be over time. If you find yourself in your first management position, for example, like look on how other people's managed. There's, there's a lot of resources. I just mentioned one, I'm sure, you know, you've got a ton to me.

The most important part is. It's a process over time of I learned something and then I implement it and I see how it worked and if it worked, I'm going to keep it. And if it doesn't work, I'm going to try something new. And just like I said, was one on once I heard that I'm like, okay, I'm going to make sure that I do these in my calendar.

They work really well. Other things that work well are making sure you give your team feedback often and making sure you coach them on how to. If something happens or you see like, hey, this happened in a meeting, you kind of didn't answer the question that the CEO asked you directly. Whenever you get asked a question, especially from a higher up or a customer or whatever, make sure you just answer the question.

And I use that as an example, because I've seen that even at high executive levels, they get you get asked a question. And five minutes later, somebody's said a lot of words and you're like, I still don't understand what the answer to my question is. If you don't get that feedback or you don't give that to your team, how do they.

So again, learn something, try it out and then see how it works and you either keep it or you go. And you do that over 10 years, you're going to have a heck of a lot more skills than somebody who's not doing it.

Wassia Kamon: I totally agree. And it reminds me of something I saw early, I think it was in the year they were talking about how.

You are the CEO of your career. You, you have to almost operate your career. Like someone will run a business. The marketing could be the personal brand, but you also have a, what I love to call the personal board of directors, mentors, coaching, and all these things, but you do have to be proactive in our growth.

And I ha I love how you said 3 percent growth. What are you doing? 10 years from now, it'll be tough to bridge that gap. Right? So thinking about that, what are some of the things that you said? If I was to look back, I should have done X or Y better to prepare me for where I am today.

Scott Meyers: If I go all the way back, I would say even in, in high school right now, and you're like, maybe I want to go into accounting, find any way you can do any sort of accounting work for anybody or spreadsheet work, even And the reason why is I think once you, this is maybe my personal philosophy, but when it's, it's one thing to kind of do it for fun, it's another thing to get paid for it.

If you can find any sort of paid work for it, because then, then all of a sudden, like the stakes are a little bit higher and really like when you're that young, you can make so many mistakes and, and one people are just going to be like, oh, they're young. Of course they made mistakes. And two. Yeah. That's true.

It doesn't matter because you're going to, you could just, you're going to get way more chances. That would be kind of the first thing. If you're, if you're even older in your career, I would say the next thing is what is the constant feedback you've gotten from people or what seems to be like where you get tripped up and how do you explore that to where you can push past that?

Are there kind of invisible glass ceilings that you're putting around yourself? How do you get past those, you know, drive around them or break through them or how you avoid them at completely because some of us have habits we built up over the years. And, you know, if you take a step back, you may be like, Oh, that's not a good habit.

And it could be many things could be. I just don't like calling this person. Maybe you need to because they're on the board and it could be grumpy. But how do I get more comfortable with talking to grumpy board member or how do I get more comfortable with. Just maybe your, your CEO is a hard person to work with.

How do I, how do I deal with them? And, and doing that will help you immeasurably.

Wassia Kamon: Yes. It compounds over time. So now as a CFO, what are some things that you think we may be missing as a profession when it comes to the next generation of leaders, what could we be missing? Cause there is fewer accountants. I heard there was fewer lawyers.

Like what could we be missing in generating that next level of leaders?

Scott Meyers: So, so I may be a little heretical, but I'm, you know, as an accountant, I'm actually happy that there's fewer accountants, I think. And you can say like, well, why? And I'm like, well, I understand economics. You know, the secret is if I was giving somebody advice, it's like, well, if there's fewer accountants, it may be better for you to be an accountant.

That's why I would tell, and some people are in accounting, like where should I specialize in tax? I would say absolutely, because there's no tax accounts. Like I remember, I think still, it's very hard to find. qualified tax people. The secret is a young person. This is actually a field that nobody is doing.

And I think part of it that we miss is historically accounting is terrible at work life balance.

If you go

into the firms, you're working tons of hours. There are ways to get around it. But I think there's, there's kind of two things that drive it. One is just And we're kind of a victim of our own ethics is that I think generally people in accounting work really hard.

Another thing that drives it is, I will say, we hurt ourselves because even if you look at like IFRS or US GAAP, it only gets more complex because somebody's trying to, like somebody did something and it caused a fraud. And we need to really take a step back and say, like, okay, are we preventing or helping people with these regulations and rules?

Like, I can tell you who reads the financing note. Nobody reads it. Nobody. And why? So, so we're kind of hurting ourselves with creating all this extra bureaucracy that maybe, like, investors aren't really using. It doesn't really help anybody make decisions about the company. Like, most of the time they're not drilling in that deep.

And there's some reasonableness, I think, to levels of work. We need to say, okay, what's, what's works and what doesn't. Usually the answer is always bring in more automation, but automating a process that you don't need is, is like the definition of waste. It's the throw pillows from the movie along cam Polly.

And, you know, like people were just saying like, wait, every morning you take these pillows off and every night you put them back on. You never use them and it costs you three minutes each time you do it. So you're wasting six minutes a day. So how much time in your life are you wasting that adds up into work life balance a lot of times.

And then finally it is, it is again, like, what are you focusing on? Which is, as you came just to come back to that point on time, what's the most effective use of our time? I think, you know, I've worked with some accountants who said like, look, we have to do everything. It has to be perfect. And that level is, is usually not sustainable.

It's a good ideal and goal to shoot for, but there needs to be another constraint of how much time am I actually putting into this and what decisions am I making with this information? So what fidelity do I need? Or am I just worried, worried about getting good information out and I'm not even making decisions on it because there's always going to be attention and always going to be a trade off and it's getting comfortable with that 80 20 is really where I would say that the core issue is, but there's a lot of things on top that that we could do to make things just.

Better for, for accounts.

Wassia Kamon: Yes. Yes. Love it. I mean, time, doing things that we're not really supposed to be doing. Like I love when you said automating something you don't need.

Scott Meyers: Exactly.

Wassia Kamon: It is so true. So when you think about that and work life balance being, you know, besides pay, work life balance being such a challenge for us in the profession right now, how do you try to keep boundaries?

for you.

Scott Meyers: There's something I also call about the tyranny of working too much. And what that is, is if I know I'm going to work, like we're all humans. And I think if we're honest, like if I know I'm going to work an 80 hour week, sometimes I'm not as effective because there's no escape right from that. At that point, like you're just going to be in your office working until you go to sleep.

Somebody I knew who was a partner basically said, yeah, when I was a junior, I just went to work. I got home. He had time to have a glass of wine and then you passed out and did it all over again, you know, for all of busy season. People are like, well, why do people not want to be in accounting? I'm like, does that sound like a great life?

Like I'm going to just go to work, come home. I have basically enough time to have a glass of wine. And then I do it all again. The tyranny of is, how do I say, like, kind of flip it on its head and say like, okay, I'm only going to work 10 hours today. There's times you're going to have to work more. How do I get what I need to get done in that 10 hours and you will prioritize even, um, I mean, and this isn't really an accounting thing.

Like there was, uh, you know, the great Peter Drucker, if you haven't read his books, uh, like I would highly recommend cause he was kind of, I don't know. He's like the grandfather of managerial thinking, I think right now. Yes.

Yeah.

He, he was talking about, you know, the guy that was really ill and I think he can only work like two or four hours a day, but he made those four hours count like super sick person.

I think it was World War II or whatever, but, but anyways, the point of it is you can get really effective. If you condense your timelines, it's kind of like giving a deadline gets sometimes gets you to get faster.

And I think

sometimes I've, I've just noticed in my career, when we start getting into these long hours and pushing things through, sometimes you're not thinking about the actual work that you're doing.

Right. And so you'll do something in effectively or you'll make that report that nobody really reads and you're spending all this time doing things that are aren't. really important. Whereas if you just collapse down that time and then it compounds in, look, I'm a, I'm a fan of health and fitness. It compounds down.

Like if you're not sleeping properly, like you're not going to be making good decisions. And then if you're not making good decisions, it kind of compounds to bad decisions and then you're still not sleeping properly. So yes, there are times where you need to deal with fire drills. If you're not pulling yourself away, if you're noticing, Hey, I'm like, this is a constant as I kind of joked, but it's true.

And I've talked to more people, especially as you're in a CFO, like how many teeth have you cracked? You know, because you're so tense that you're grinding at night and whatnot. Like that's like a measure of, Hey, maybe I needed to either allow the stuff bother me or I need to cut down my time. But ironically, or kind of counterintuitively, sometimes cutting out of the time that you spend on a process will actually make the overall.

Process better.

Wassia Kamon: Great productivity tips. Cause for me, how I know I had two bags of Cheetos this week. That's how I know something was up. So I didn't grind my teeth, but I did crunch on the Cheetos.

Scott Meyers: That's probably a better habit. That's a good, that's a good point. Yeah. If you notice yourself. Seeking like that, that pleasure of whatever it is.

Like sometimes people will play, go play video games for a day or something after like a hard tax season, or they'll drink too much or smoke or Cheetos, or just I'm grinding my teeth at night or man, I just yelled at my dog. Yeah, this is all kind of symptoms of do we need to kind of take a step back?

It's tough. I mean, we deal with really hard problems. And sometimes in finance, you're the first person to see an existential threat to your company. And it's kind of hard to be the first person that sees, you know, the trouble on the horizon as we get back to it. I mean, that's another skill, though, too, is getting it.

tolerant to, or being able to be calm in the face of danger. And I mean, oddly, I'll say you'll probably get bored with it. If you do it enough, like you'll say like, okay, I know what happens to this problem. It's like, if the house is on fire, I know where the, I know where the fire extinguisher is.

And

then, uh, you know, I cleaned it up and then I fix it again.

And that's the same thing in accounting. Like, okay, if this happens, I know what the procedures are and you go through and, uh, just keep, uh, whittling that down. But again, it comes back to you. Am I spending way too much time doing this? And what, what really do I need to be effective? Or at the sea level, do I need to hire a person to take off this load of work if it's still important?

How do I do

Wassia Kamon: this? And again, it goes back to the team, right? Because Yeah. Sometimes we also have to be mindful of, yeah, delegate. And then you look and there is really nobody to delegate this to. How do you build your team as you go to, you know, think about, think about the, the same lines that I think it goes back to what you said in your one on ones and I think one on ones are great, but it's sometimes a two way street that many people don't realize.

It shouldn't just be the leader coming with, Hey, we're going to do that, but it. It's also an opportunity for the employee on the other side to bring up things. So how do you encourage that two way exchange?

Scott Meyers: For me, it's simple. My general one on one agenda is it's 30 minutes. I want 10 minutes, the employee can talk about anything.

Now you'll have some employees that will always be like, here's what I did. Here's what I'm doing. Boom. Like some people are taskmasters. Some people will come in and talk about their cat for 10 minutes and I'm totally fine with that too. And usually I'm being a little funny here, but a lot of times there's a mix, right?

Like if somebody has just come back from maternity leave or something. Chances are they're going to be talking about their kid or whatever, and that's what you need to know, because you may need to say like, okay, I need to be a little more flexible with this person because they're figuring out their life, and that's your really opportunity to become a great boss, or at least a good boss, and being like, okay, if I'm flexible with them, a lot of times you'll find out that, you know, if they're a good employee, they will be flexible back with you, meaning Yeah, maybe they showed up late to my nine o'clock meeting because they were dropping their kid off at daycare and they still haven't quite figured it out.

But at the same time, this person, you know, after a kid goes to sleep, works another two hours for me at night and kind of makes up for it. And then, so let them talk for 10 minutes. In the beginning, usually if you have a new employee or you're a new team, they may just talk the whole time and it's on you to listen and figure out, okay, what's happening here.

And then slowly start interjecting more, I would say feedback instead of like, this is what I need you to do. If it's a status meeting or a work meeting, don't do that in your one on ones have a separate. Meeting. And that's usually for your team of like, Hey, here's the goals. Here's the direction. Where are we on each of these things?

That's not a one on one meeting. That's a status update meeting. One on ones are what's going on. What are the challenges you're facing? How can you make your work easier? Or what, what's the worst thing you do in the week? What's the thing that makes you most happy that you do during the week? Cause we don't always have to be negative too.

We could focus on like, Hey, what's working really well. And they may surprise you. They may be like, you know what? Our sales teams really turned it around and they're forecasting like they're getting it to me on time. It, it's so far been accurate. Like you may find these good things that are happening in your company and you want to foster those.

And of course you'll find problems because most of us are humans and we're wired to talk about our problems.

Wassia Kamon: Yes. Yes, that's so great. So one last question, as you think about the role of the CFO and helping your team, how do you think we need to get people into more strategic thinking and operating strategically?

Because it is hard when all the strategic thinking is on the CFO, like how do you help your team get to that level?

Scott Meyers: One of the rules that I would have for people is try to spend 30 minutes a week just thinking on strategy and the other thing is probably defining what is what is strategy and in my mind strategy is how you're going to play the game and not actually playing the game.

So what are the things that I'm going to do and then figure out like what are the sub supporting activities of those high level. Right. So that's how I look at it. And it's really like, that's the time where either you're thinking about what did I do last week? What was effective? What wasn't? Or if I'm going to take out to the next 90 days, what should be accomplished?

What strategically, what would be the right tasks to have gotten done in that 90 days that would give, put us in the best position to be that nice strategic thinking. And anybody could do this at any level, junior accountant, I'll go down to there. Let's say, you know, wow, okay, my goal or strategically, like it's taking us a long time to close.

Why is that? And then what are the activities that would support that? Oh, maybe I should do my reconciliations earlier. Maybe I should do post entries more regularly. Maybe I need to roll forward my files quicker. Like all these things are. You can see these are strategic actions or strategic thoughts that lead me to actions to do my job better.

You could work that all the way up to the chain, you know, usually at the CFO level, you're like, okay, uh, strategically, we need to focus on growth. Well, what does that mean? Okay. Does that mean I need more salespeople? Does that mean we're Need to be more effective with our salespeople because you could always hire more salespeople.

It doesn't mean you're going to get more revenue. You have to figure out how they're going to go to the market and sell. Is it a product issue? Are we missing features in our offer set that so there's that high level thinking, but that you could drill that all the way down to the accountant level at anywhere in between.

Or if you're an accounting manager, Hey, we're not closing fast enough. What do I need to do? Or while our forecasting cycle, if I'm an FP and a is really slow example for my career is. We had the FP and 18 was struggling getting in their forecast to the mothership company and some of the strategy was, okay, let's just plan out the forecast process.

What does it look like? When do we need to have forced deadlines by then have we set up the proper tools to just load the information as opposed to trying to, you know, they were like hand king things as opposed to just doing a load file, basic stuff. Sometimes if you just take that 30 minutes a week to map out what you're going to do.

Then you can wake up. If you do it Friday, you can wake up Monday morning and you have a plan and go for it.

Wassia Kamon: Yes. And that's why I like to have one on one meetings with myself, my calendar, one on one meetings with myself to do this. Well, thank you so much for being on the show. I really appreciate all your feedback.

We'll definitely share your information where we can find you on LinkedIn and other places. Thank you so much for being on the show, Scott.

Scott Meyers: Thank you. This was so much fun. I appreciate it. Thanks for the

Wassia Kamon: opportunity. That's it for today's episode of the diary of the CFO. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any topic you would like me to cover in the future, please send it to ask at the diary of the CFO.

com again, send an email to ask at the diary of the CFO. com. If you connect on LinkedIn, you can just send me a DM. The reason I need it is because I want to make sure I bring you the insight you need to be a better leader and be better at life. If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to leave a review, subscribe, and share it.

And I will see you next in another episode of The Diary of a CFO. Cheers!