Ep. 122: Arno Wakfer - Training and Upskilling for Enhanced Business Performance

Contact Arno Wakfer:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnowakfer/


Arno's Articles:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/make-everyday-value-creation-day-arno-wakfer-ca-fmva-/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/finding-your-value-creation-opportunity-gap-arno-wakfer-ca-fmva/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-finance-needs-ask-questions-getting-closer-arno-wakfer-ca-fmva-/ 

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTMitch:
(00:00)
 Hey everyone. Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast
about all things affecting the accounting and finance world. This
is your host Mitch Roshong, and I'm here to bring you episode 122
of our series. Today's conversation features Arno Wakfer, a
former CFO with over 15 years of commercial finance and general
management experience. He is now a coach and trainer focused on
upskilling managers and professionals through learning programs
in Power BI and business finance literacy. In this episode, he
talks with my co-host Adam about value creation and how finance
and accounting professionals can get closer to the business
through insight and storytelling. Keep listening as we head over
to their conversation now.

Adam: (00:51)
So Arno, what are some of the value creation ideas that the
finance and accounting team can use to set reminders and form
habits?

Arno: (00:59)
Thanks Adam, thanks for the question. I think before I go into
that, I'd just like to share my own view on what I think it means
to drive value in a business. To simplify these, that I think
whatever finance does will contribute towards increasing the
value of a business for its stakeholders. Any business, any
stakeholder business, wants an asset that increases in value and
I think finance should be there to help increase the future value
of an asset, which is the business. Alright, so looking at some
ideas around finance creating value, some ideas around that. So
the first thing I do is looking at financial analysis. So what
they can do is they can perform business off assessments and
troubleshooting risk areas. The second one is cashflow
improvements, you know, working with businesses to improve
strategies, to improve the cashflow. There's many strategies that
you can use to accelerate in delayed cash flow coming in and out
of a business. And we all know cash is King and it keeps the
doors open so we need to protect our cash. The next one is
cashflow forecasting. A lot of business is done with forecasts,
when it comes to cashflow I think it's vital. You need to do at
least 12 weeks of cashflow forecasting and try and at least have
a safety of margin of at least three months of your fixed
overheads, just to give you a little bit of buffer in the time
that the business struggles. So that's another way that you can
create value. Maximizing profits, monitoring all the key drivers
in the business that generate profits and measure that in real
time if you can. And then, any early warning signals when
anything's off track is not on track that management can address.
The next one would be, I think where we can also add as early is
auditing spreadsheets. I think a lot of managers use their own
spreadsheets to make decisions on, and we come across
spreadsheets that can have errors in them and those errors lead
to poor decisions. So I think finance can be more involved in
analyzing and checking those spreadsheets for correctness. The
other idea is to, for finance to get more involved in data
analytics, you know, being able to use it’s auditing data into
analysis and to be able to analyze underlying transactions or key
activities that drive business. For example, if we want to
analyze where we bleeding on profit margins on a specific
customer, on a specific product, on a specific location, I think
finance should be able to analyze and give that intel financial
intelligence to key decision makers, which will assist the future
planning and strategy. And the next one is data visualization,
which is becoming a hot trend skill in finance and accounting is
being able to turn data into storytelling. Most of us are visual
learners. When we see a picture it explains a story to us and I
think instead of just pushing out financial reports, we can spend
more time on actually visualizing and storytelling the
performance. And with that, you can use business intelligence
like Power BI, which is the top-rated business intelligence
platform in my opinion, by Microsoft. The next one is finance
literacy training. I think finance can help educate non-finance
people in business about the numbers so that they can just make
better business decisions. Finance speaks a foreign language to
most because we understand the numbers because we've been taught
that and we work with it every day, but non-finance people don't.
So we need to be able to remove all the technical jargon and try
and simplify the numbers for different levels of management so
they can just help make better decisions. The next one is
business metrics and KPIs. I think we need to work with business
units through finance business partnering, to be able to define
what metrics they use to make decisions. Every person's got
different inputs that they need to put the full cost and their
budgets together and draw strategy. So work with the business
units to develop the business critical KPIs and then have regular
interaction with those people to monitor those KPIs. Then we can
also do businesses systemization. So, I mean, that's processes
systems, improving those to create efficiencies and automation in
business. Businesses want more, they want to do more with this
and I think finance can help create those efficiencies in
business. Alright, so that's kind of like, the key value creation
ideas after I liked it that I think would add value to business.
Thanks Adam.

Adam: (05:31)
Yeah, so I think those are wonderful ideas and now that we've
kind of covered those ideas, what are some of the challenges that
can prevent those same professionals from delivering value
creation?

Arno: (05:43)
Yeah great, great question. So, the obstacles I see finance have
in terms of driving value creation. Cause it's easy to say let's
drive value, let's do more, but it's, for me, it's a change of a
mindset. And what one is to focus on first is the need to find
ways to speed up the month-end reporting process. I think before
finance looks again, they're spending time on reporting again,
and then when they finished the next reporting cycle starts. And
reporting is looking backwards, it's not looking forwards. So, I
think we need to look to find ways to do more frequent recons, to
be planning and eliminating bottlenecks in the month-end
reporting process, so that's the first thing. The other thing is
the obstacles you'll face is the company culture, its that people
don't necessarily like change. And when they do happen, they're
not supported by the right people. And then people are not very
clear while they're being implemented and they don't really
understand the benefit to them in the business. So typically what
one would need to do is cost versus benefit and being able to
negotiate and be persuasive as to why we need to make changes to
drive value creation. Next one is not having the right finance
team. You can put all these value creation activities in place,
but if you're not driving, if the leader of the team is not
driving the right behavior and getting a mission statement of the
finance team that's aligned to the bus...