Former CFO Daniel Paik, turned founder and CEO of CuroWork is at war on back office functions. He vows to “transform back-office departments from cost centers to profit centers” with FP&A in their sights. He says: “I call the back office the last frontier. We are the only ones not measuring ourselves. Therefore we get crap given to us every single day.”
Here are some of the ways that Daniel Paik, a former CFO, fixed the “back office” mentality in finance teams.
- Salespeople at one company said that the hardest part of their job is the 4 hours of entering Excel sheets related to forecasts. After looking at the situation, Paik decided to hire a financial analyst (at $80,000) to take away the pain for salespeople previously diverted away from the selling – bringing in $4m in extra revenue
- Paik discovered and stopped a recurring report that hasn’t been read by the client in three years – giving back up to 5 hours a week to finance for strategic tasks
- By analyzing how a finance professional was performing next to her job description Paik found “she was 140% utilized just on her recurring work” (compared to ad hoc work or project work). “By reallocating a lot of our time to project work we can become a value center or a profit center.”
In this episode:
- ERP SOS! How an 8 month ERP implementation turned into two years
- Moving from individual finance contributor to manager: tips and tricks
- What Peter Drucker actually said about measurement (and why it matters)
- The unmeasured country of Back Office functions
- Managing finance buckets into recurring work, ad hoc work and projects
- How to balance a million finance projects
- The right metrics to measure the finance team
- Average worker only productive up to 4 hours a day and how to get the most of that time
- What is a business for?”
- The real power of a project
- The power of AI in the back office
Connect with Daniel Paik on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielpaik/
CuroWork: https://www.curowork.com/
Full Transcript
Glenn Hopper
Welcome to FP&A Today, I’m your host, Glenn Hopper. And today we’re joined by Daniel P, the founder, and CEO of Kero work. Daniel has over 20 years of experience in corporate finance, including his time as CFO at Invent Corporation, and as director of finance at CCI, with a strong background in establishing international offices leading ERP implementations and shaping corporate financial strategies. Daniel is a visionary leader in the back office operations space. Today we’ll dive into some of the most pressing challenges back office teams face, and the role of management and why eliminating micromanagement might be more complex than it seems. Let’s get started. Daniel, welcome to the show.
Daniel Paik
Thanks for having me, Glen.
Glenn Hopper
I’ve got a, a a list of questions, but I was, as I was going through the intro, leading ERP implementations. I just want to touch on that for a minute because I don’t know how many of these I’ve done in my career and, you know, on the other side of ’em how great they are. But is there anything more painful that you’ve done in your career than leading an ERP implementation? <Laugh>
Daniel Paik
Yes. ERP implementation globally. Yeah. That, that’s <laugh>,
Glenn Hopper
Yeah.
Daniel Paik
Multiple subsidiaries, multiple countries. Yeah. It’s, it’s probably one of the hardest things to do and the most time consuming. I’ll tell you, the first time I’ve ever done one, I was thrown into the lions den. We were small probably about a hundred people. We probably shouldn’t have done what we did, but it was right during, right after the 2008, the subprime mortgage, you know, bust, I guess. And so we were looking to implement an ERP finance, accounting, kind of sales forecasting system in a very a hundred person team. That, that was kind of, we were global. We’re in, you know, 38 countries, few here, few in Poland, few in, you know, south America, et cetera. And without, they, they put it on me. They, they said, Hey, you’re our finance head of finance. You need to do this. So I said, I’ve never, never done this before.
We’ll figure it out. So we, I figured it out. I literally spoke to 60 vendors. It took six months. First time doing it. I, I just go too, too much on diligence. That was one of the feedback that I received after doing this. But it was a lot from my learning. But the, it, the thing was, because 2008, and it was around around 2010 when we purchased it, everybody was giving deals. And so I went from tier threes to tier twos to tier ones, and I ended up with the Oracles SAP, Microsoft Dynamics av, and things that were just way above what we needed. But they were giving such amazing deals that we decided to go with Oracle, EBS E-Business Suite R 11. I don’t know if people know about that, but that it is usually done with teams of people implementations.
For the first year, I was the only one doing it. And I, I literally went with my CEO and I said, Hey, Glen, I’m working 14 to 16 hours a day, seven days a week. I need help. And he’s like, what’s going on? So I explained to him, he is like, I, I, I, and he wouldn’t, they wouldn’t gimme help ’cause they couldn’t understand it ’cause they’d never done it themselves. And I, I literally said, I’m, I’m quitting today if I don’t get help. And he goes, oh, well, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, <laugh>, let’s, let’s get you help. So the implementation of that first ERP system, it was slated to take six to eight months. It took two years.
Glenn Hopper
Yeah, two years. That’s, that’s every ERE every ERP implementation is like that, though. The sales person will tell you six to eight months, and then it always takes two years. I, I, I got one done. It was a NetSuite implementation. I got it done in a year and a half, and I was telling somebody about it, and they were like, I don’t believe that you didn’t get it done in here. <Laugh>,
Daniel Paik
We learned from Oracle EBS. We used it for seven years and we switched to NetSuite. We get that one done in six months. In six months. ’cause We were, we are, my team was now so used to this Oracle EBS monster of just how difficult it is to actually, first of all, implement it, but second of all, keep it running properly and fix all the issues as we go. Netsuite was much easier than Oracle EBS. So our team still worked six months. I remember eating dinner literally Monday through Friday with them till 9:00 PM we were, we were there working with my team to implement or NetSuite across the globe. Still difficult, still a long time. But I think if after you do one or two, it does get a little easier. ’cause You know what to look for and you know, what the requirements really, what that real, how important requirements are in the beginning to really understand the current state and what the future state should look like.
And really all really what implementation really is for ERP is testing, right? 80%, 90% is testing. Yes, there is the buy-in thing that you need and all these other things, but the bulk of it is testing. And I, I, I explained this to a lot of people actually, because a lot of my clients are implementing NetSuite for one reason or another reason recently. I keep telling them the most important part is the beginning is to understand your current state and what you actually need in the future state. And all you’re really doing is not, it’s not something new. You’re taking what you’re already doing and understanding how to do it in the new system.
Glenn Hopper
Oh, I know. And I, honestly, while we’re talking, I’m thinking that’s a whole different episode, Daniel and Glen break down do’s and don’ts of <laugh> implementations. Exactly. Yeah. Because it’s, it’s always painful, but it’s, it’s beautiful when you get to the other side, but man, it is a slog. Oh,
Daniel Paik
For years. No. One, one really tells you about what is it post go live what do you call support, right? It’s like it doesn’t end when you go live. It actually almost begins again when you go live.
Glenn Hopper
All right. So onto the meat of the show, onto the, what we really came to talk about today. But now we’re gonna, we’re gonna do another episode, I’m sure of it. We’re gonna do <laugh> e
Daniel Paik
Rrp. Perfect. Sounds good. I’d love to, yeah.
Glenn Hopper
<Laugh>, but onto the meat of the show for today. I want to talk about you and what you’re doing at Kero work and some of the stuff that you’ve been through in your finance career. So I guess maybe to start off, you moved from CFO to CEO and Co-founder of Kero work. So tell me what led you to make the move and, and what you’re doing now at Kero work
Daniel Paik
As probably most people that are listening, you know, if, if you are ambitious and you want to try to get to that CFO, you know, c-suite level, you know, you’d think that I just need to get there. And I think that’s perfectly valid, and I think that’s great. My entire life, my just how I’m wired is I just need to keep moving up, right? And when I got to the CFO level, I looked around and said, wait a second. Where do I move next? And so that bothered me. I’m just, I just wired that way. And I, and I asked, I was actually at UCLA Anderson in the executive MBA, and I asked a few of the professors and counselors and things like that, and people with a lot of experience like, Hey, hey, how do I get from CFO to CEO? And literally their answer to me, I kid you not, they said, you can’t.
I was like, what kind of answer is this? I mean, I’m here getting my MBA to understand like how I can move up and do all these things. And they kind of broke it down and say, Hey, if you look at the statistics CFOs in general do not make good CEOs or do not get to the CEO level because they’re CFO for a reason. They have a different personality. They’re, they’re not salespeople. They’re not this, the only ones that really move to a C from CFO to CEO are companies that they work in that are financially they’re financial type of company, and they have expertise in it so they can actually become a CEO. And that bothered me a lot. I was like, this cannot be, I cannot, number one. And to truth be told, when I became a CFO after about a month, I literally thought to myself, if I had to do this for the next 25 years, I, I, I can’t do it.
Like, I just can’t do it. It’s just, I’ve been doing this for so long, it’s similar work. You just have more responsibilities. Right? But anyways, I can, long story short, they said, you can’t. And I said, no, no, no, no, I’m gonna make it happen. One of the workshops I was at, some guy said basically, Hey, all you guys have been working in corporate for 15 plus years, and you guys are executive MBA students. You guys are, you know, wiser in age. You know, one of the biggest things I find is that you’re always stuck in this grind. And the problem is because you’re doing the same thing over and over and over again, your creativity starts diminishing. And so you don’t know, or you, you, you, you are trained not to really problem solve big, big parts of what you’re doing. Some, some, some that nature.
But what really struck me was the creativity side. I literally was thinking, I have not been creative for the past 20 years of my career. I was just, just doing transactional work, process work, just constantly, just every single day, just doing it every single day, right? But I knew there were huge issues in companies, in my company in my, the companies I worked at so much that we can actually do and so much opportunity. And the guy literally goes, Hey, since you’re in this executive MBA and, and we’re in the middle of Covid at, by the way, said, why don’t you, why don’t you all take some time? It, it could be a month, three months, six months, a year. And just think, just think and be creative. And literally, that’s what I did. And I found a solution for some, a problem that I’ve been having for literally all my career. Never thought there was a solution, found that it actually works, tested it as 200 plus people professionals. And now I’m a CEO building the software and the structure and this methodology to help back offices transform from cost centers to profit centers.
Glenn Hopper
So we’re, we’re gonna dive into what you guys are doing a little more, but tell me so what’s the status of the business now? Where are you in product development and launch? Do you have beta customers? What’s, what’s going on at ki?
Daniel Paik
Oh, yeah. Well, thank you for the question. It’s I think it’s another episode. If you talk about startups and how it all works, it’s non-linear, I suppose. There’s, there’s so much learning to be had, but currently we are just coming out of a closed beta. We have early access, we have customers we have paying customers currently, and we have a lot of people on trials. And so we’re learning what really moves a needle and helps companies, especially back office people, really deliver value, not just deliver value. ’cause We actually are delivering, delivering a lot of value. It’s actually being able to articulate and show the value that we bring right to, to businesses. So we, we, we have customers and we have a working product. I use it every day. We dog food it every day. So
Glenn Hopper
That’s great. Great. so, okay, so let’s, let’s go ahead and dive in now to the, the problem that you saw as a finance leader and what you’re solving for. So, you know, from you and I talking before the show, we talked about how finance and accounting teams are often seen as, you know, cost centers or second class citizens within an organization. And it’s, it’s hard to show that value. So I guess from your experience, why does this perception persist? And what are the underlying factors contributing to it? And then how do you see what’s sort of the path out of that?
Daniel Paik
Hmm. Yeah, that’s the crux of it. So the perception of us being a call center is actually the reality currently, right? We are a call center and the, but the question really is why are we a call center and why are we always stuck in as a call center? There’s a, there’s a few things that I’ve learned across in my experience in my career, is that one of the major things that I picked up on was when, when, and whenever we talk about, you know, sales or customer service or like operations and manufacturing, things like that, we always talk about, Hey, how can we improve you guys? How can we improve the sales team and, and the processes and the tools and the methodologies and all these things so that you can do, be better at your job, right? But for back office, I literally have never heard that in my entire career.
If anything, we always hear, how do we reduce you guys? How do we mitigate your teams, right? How do we have less cost of your team? So we’re already, the perception in in businesses back office is already a second class citizen. And because of that, we’re undervalued, we’re underdeveloped, and we are lacking innovation, right? And so there’s, there’s a lot of things working against us. We’re already perceived and deemed a cost center. But the question is, can, is that re is that really what we are? Right? And then my question, my, that was my question, it’s like, why are we called the cost center? Well, number one, because most of our time is spent on cost generating, act generating activities such as payroll, right? Or month and close reporting, right? Payroll does not make money, right? But what I’ve also realized is, and my, my teams and others that I know, there’s so many projects that just lands on our plate, right?
Not annually. We have projects, you know, we month, we have so many projects that always come, I know of companies that when I ask them, how many projects do we have at any given point, they’re like, I don’t know, like 60 to 80, right? It’s like, well, how many, how long do you think these projects have been in this project topper? And some people go, oh, there’s projects in there that’s been in there for seven years. We talk about it every year, never gets done, right? And so I never put two and two together until I started being more creative and listening to that guy and, and from the workshop. And I realized, wait a second, we have these projects, but what are projects? Where do they come from? They come from these strategic initiatives that come from the top. So it comes from the top down, right?
So just a quick little thing, executives, right? Upper management, at the beginning of the year, they usually have an annual meeting to plan for the rest of the year. And they say, Hey, these are our top three strategic initiatives, and what does that actually boil down to? That boils down to a portfolio of projects. And then at the end of the day, it’s one project that goes to a team or department group individual, and what a person has to actually execute on that project, right? And so, projects are strategic, projects are new, they’re challenging, there’s a lot of value in projects. And so projects are growth generating, profit generating, revenue generating, right? That’s the whole point of why it’s called the project. So in back office, if you look at the type of work that we have, we have all this, what we call our day job. And I could break that down into two other ones, but let’s just call it day job. And on the right, we have projects here, but we, we can, we never have time really to get there, and therefore we’re always stuck as cost centers. But if we can reallocate some or a lot of our time to project work, then we can actually become a value center or a profit center.
Glenn Hopper
Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s the difficulty is trying to measure that and track it and see where, where the time goes and, and everything. And I’ve I’ve worked in, like, so whenever I had an organization, I’m, I’m a big fan of MBO Management by objective, it’s, let’s put this in place. Let’s know what we’re working on. Let’s, you know, it’s our bonuses. It’s you know, how we measure ourselves and our, it, how we combat the idea of you know, just being a, a, a drag cost center wise on the company, showing that value that we, we create. And and I, I think that that has to come just like the projects come from the top down, sort of that direction and what the objectives and goals are has to come from the top down. And I think you know, for a, a lot of our listeners are first time managers, and they’re moving, you know, from that individual contributor role to now managing teams. And I think thinking about where those managers sit you’ve spoken about the real role of a manager being often misunderstood and overlooked. What do you believe is the true role of a manager? And what prevents many organizations from realizing this? Right?
Daniel Paik
You, you actually hit something early in, in, in your question there that said, the visibility or measuring, right, it’s hard to measure. So that is actually the answer and the problem back offices historically, since, I don’t know the, the industrial revolution, maybe, maybe a little bit after that, we don’t measure what we do. I talked to a CFO about what we, what our product does and our solution. And he literally goes, Hey, Daniel, I just realized something. I said, what, what, what, what did you realize? He said, the C I’m A CFO, I have, I mainly manage finance accounting. My teams are the most analytical people in the company. We measure everybody, all the other departments, engineering to sales, to, you know, product man, product management. And he goes, you know what? We don’t measure ourselves. I’m like, that’s the problem. And that’s actually the problem that we’re solving, because that is the crux of why we’re stuck as a cost center.
So, and that’s why also your question about being, what, what does a, what, what does a manager do? Or what are they really supposed to do? Right? They’re doing what they’re supposed to do right now, except they’re not equipped properly with the right data or the tool or methodology of how to actually be effective more or more effective in management. The reason why I say that is this, in anything that we do, right? If you plan, if, if, if you’re trying to get to point B, if you don’t know where point A is or where you are, it’s literally impossible to get to point B, right? So you have to understand where you are in point A. So there’s a, as many of you guys may know Peter f Drucker, who is the father of modern management, if you don’t know him, buy his books.
It’s unbelievable the things that he says. There is a quote that he is quoted all the time, but he is misquoted all the time. And the quote is, the misquote is this, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. So many people, I would even tell you, embarrassingly enough, even in our when I was in the consulting firm for 12 years, we used to say this all the time, and I used to say it even thereafter until literally like three years ago when I really learned what the real quote was. So the thing is, if you, it’s people think if you can’t measure you can’t manage it. But actually that’s a quote from somebody else. And there’s a, there’s another part to that. He literally goes, no, no, no, we do that all the time. We manage things that we never, we never, never measure, right?
We manage a lot of things that we don’t measure. It’s like, that doesn’t make any sense. So that’s a whole different quote. What Peter Roker actually said was, if you can’t measure, you can’t improve, right? If you don’t know where your starting point is, you don’t, you don’t know how to get to the next point, or you can’t improve yourself. So that’s why when we talked about the ERP implementation, the most important part is measuring your current state to understand where you are so that you can get to the next step to the future state. So e the management, it’s, it’s literally the same thing across the board. We have to measure how do, how do we, how do, how do we know salespeople are doing well? ’cause We measure their sales. How do we know back office is doing well? We don’t measure anything.
So we don’t know. So hence we’re stuck as Costner. So going back to your question on what is a real manager or what, what is the true role of a manager? We’re already doing the true role, but we’re doing it in a less effective way because we don’t have the right tools. And really largely, we do not have the measurement or the data to really be an effective manager, if I may say, without trying to not saying that we, you guys are not effective manager, but we we’re trying our best, but we’re lacking the tools to be better. And so I’ll say this, the reason the, the role of manager is to what? Manage people on processes, right? So that there’s some sort of result at the end, right? And so when we talk about process, that’s the critical point. Like, what is the process?
Well, process can be broken down into different types of processes and the types of work that you do, whether it’s like recurring work, whether it’s ad hoc work, whether it’s project work, there’s, that’s actually the three types of work that everybody does. And the process of doing that really matters. Why? Because I’ll, I’ll tell you a quick methodology that we’ve come up with is this. Every, literally, every person from intern all the way to CEO has three types of work. Re recurring work, all the things that you do, you have to do every single week, day, week, quarter month, accountants, or, you know, we have to do payroll every two weeks. Recurring work, ad hoc work, all the fires, all the issues, the rework, the issue, the, the, the interruptions that happen every single day, right? And the last one is projects, right? We all know projects.
It’s a kind of start and end sort of a planned outcome. We need an outcome. We have a plan of how to get there, right? And it’s usually more than a week or so, the whole entire world is focused on projects. Why? ’cause we just discussed that. It’s always how we look at business right now all the time is top down, right? We look at from the, the strategic initiatives of the executives and comes all the way to portfolio of comp portfolio projects to projects. And so all these projects are so important. And how do we know that there’s like hundreds of project management softwares, right? Hundreds of them. And they all end up being similar and the same at the end of the day, just because a big to-do list. Why? Because, and the reason why it becomes a big do list and just sits there, and no one actually, it is not sustainably used.
And I’ve used almost all of them in my life is because no one ever gets to these projects, like we said. And the question is, why don’t we get to these projects? It’s because the, the, the project is actually third in line, or third most important, although the business thinks it’s the first most important in reality, is the third most important type of work. Why do I say that? Recurring work is the number one most important. Why You can’t say, Hey, Glenn, so busy this week, can’t do payroll. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no. Whatever you do to speak, you have to do payroll, right? The second most important ad hoc work, the fires, they’re in your face, you have to fix ’em. Today is urgent. That’s why we call it a fire. It’s called firefighting. And so the first two take up the bulk of our time.
When I, in our, in our studies and in, in our experience and working with clients, on average, 90 plus percent of our entire year is spent on recurring and ad hoc work. So very little, if any, is spent on projects. But we can all get graded on project work, and we never have time to do them. So as managers, what are we supposed to do here? So we’re constantly asking, what do we do? Where’s this, where’s that? Are you doing with your project? Are you doing with your objectives? But the te your team is always saying, I’m so busy. I’m so busy. I’m underwater. I’m underwater. I I need more help. So we can never actually get to these projects. They’re always stuck in the first two. Why? At the end, it comes back again to measuring. We don’t know exactly what people are doing and therefore we can’t actually manage them properly. So the answer, how do we actually become better managers? We first have to measure what everyone does so that you can make better decisions and be, be a better manager. There’s a whole thing about micromanaging that we might get to, but I’ll leave it there. I can talk for another 10 hours on this subject by itself. But it’s all about measuring, measuring, measuring, so that we can make better decisions with the data.
Glenn Hopper
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You do have a, a, a kind of a pro provocative statement around micromanagement. I do want to come back to that, but while you’re talking about all the, the different types of work we do from the recurring work to the ad hoc work, to the project work, I think about you know, sort of analysis paralysis. And when you have just the too many choices in <laugh> in what you’re doing every day and thinking about trying to prioritize. If it isn’t directed by a manager and you’re an individual contri contributor, and all these requests are coming in, it’s, it’s very hard to know what to work on. You’re just, it basically, it’s the thing where the person who’s loudest in your ear is probably gonna get, get the most attention. But when, I mean, when you have this laundry list of all these different types of work, and you’ve got the emails and the ad hoc requests coming in and you know, forget about trying to do deep work or anything, you’re just, everything is just, is firefighting.
I mean, for finance teams, what are some strategies or best practices that they can do that they ensure that, you know, yes, obviously you’ve gotta get your recurring work done. You’ve got these ad hoc things that come in. It could be some director or VP from another department, you know, saying, I’ve gotta have this today. And you’ve got your, the project work that is a company priority, that is part of your MBO. I mean, how do you <laugh> how do you balance all that at the, at the contributor level or maybe better asked at the management level,
Daniel Paik
Right? And that is exactly with that problem, or those are, that’s one of the major problems we’re actually solving for. So the question that you’re actually asking is, how do we improve our situation as a manager or an individual contributor, right? That’s the actual question. But then we know improvement can only come if you actually measure what you do. And actually there’s an initial there, just to make it a little bit more full on what this measurement means. Yes, like other project management tools, they do measure to a certain point, right? That you can put in the task. You can maybe put in hours or things like that. But the thing is, the current tools, their methodology is not measuring in totality your total work. And it might sound scary, it might sound like people are like, oh, I’m gonna spend all my time now measuring everything I do, right?
It’s actually count very counterintuitive. Just like micromanagement is counterintuitive. Measuring work is counterintuitive. We think it’s gonna take a lot of time. We think that, you know, that, that, that, that my manager’s not gonna micromanage me more. But actually, it’s the opposite, opposite effect. When you, when you actually start measuring your work, what actually happens? Well, let’s talk about what, what happens when you don’t measure your work? When you don’t measure your work? You’re just constantly, like you said, bombarded with all this ad hoc interruptions, calls, emails, plus trying to do your work, plus, you know, manager telling you to do these projects. Everything’s just everywhere, right? You don’t, it’s very difficult to prioritize. That’s why we always say, well, I’m busy. I’m busy, I’m busy, because we don’t measure what we’re actually busy with, right? And so since we don’t know what we’re busy with, how in the world is management gonna tell you what to do or manage you and direct you what to do?
’cause They themselves are now one degree removed from even yourself. That is the, you’re the, you’re the, you’re the person that received all this work. Now you’re asking a manager that doesn’t know, even they, they know even less about what you do to manage you to direct you in the right direction. Like that doesn’t even make any sense, right? They have less information than you and they’re, you’re asking them to manage. What are we talking about here? Right? So the main thing about measuring it provides visibility. So when you start measuring work to, in totality, what you have actually created is a single source of truth of your work. Therefore, you and the manager on the same page, and you’re talking about the same things. You’re aligned, you have better communication, less misinformation. Actually. It’s actually exact information. So now you can say, Hey, we agree that I’m gonna do this this week, these 18 tasks.
Well, the CEO just sent me this project. I think it’s gonna take me like two days to finish this. He says, this is urgent. Well, what can I do here? So now the manager can actually manage. You can say, Hey, actually what you have to do this week is you’re in month in close, man. You have to do, we don’t wanna be late. We have, let me talk to the CEO. So now what happens is when there’s visibility, true visibility, ma managers are not ma they’re not micromanaging anymore, they’re actually helpful. They go instead of saying, where is this? Where is that, where is this? They say, how can I help you in this? And users or the, the, the individual contributors, they actually start owning their work and they go to the manager and say, Hey, I need help in these two things. This has happened, right? So it becomes the workplace that we all desire, right? Where the individual contributor has autonomy, has ownership, has empowerment, and at the same time, managers can actually do what they’re supposed to do.
Glenn Hopper
You know, as I think about that, as a manager and as a data guy, I love having, I would love to have data on what my team is doing all day, every day, and you know, where they’re to help me figure out where inefficiencies are, where things they’re getting distraction. But I’ve, you know, two things that you’ve talked about are things that just get people to roll their eyes. So I’ve done a lot of work in service companies that do like time and materials, billing people understand if I’m, if this is billable to a client, track my time. No problem. If as soon as you ask them to track their admin time and it’s outside of something that’s billable to a client, they just, oh my goodness, I can, I could never do that. <Laugh>, you know, I, why are you, why are you micromanaging me?
Why do you know? Why do I have to fill out a time sheet for this, you know, the administrative work I’m doing? You know, that’s, I feel like I’m being micromanaged. That feels terrible. And it’s you know, it’s a, it can be a demotivator. And you know, you think about someone, if you call someone a micromanager, that feels like the worst you know, insult you can give someone who’s a manager is, oh, she’s all, you know, she’s trying to watch everything that I do. And it’s you know, it’s, she doesn’t know how to manage because she’s so involved in everything I do. So, kind of walk me through both those two things. One, the, the problem that people have with logging their time where it, my experience has been it makes them feel like they lack agency and that they’re just, you know, that they’re just another cog in the wheel. And that they, you know, I, that they’re contributions aren’t valued if you have to watch what they’re doing every minute. So that’s two big things to overcome. So maybe, I don’t know if they can be addressed together or if they have to be addressed separately, but sort of the notion of logging everything you do, mapping out, planning, everything you do, and then the idea of what a manager does and their visibility into it.
Daniel Paik
So that question presupposes, there’s, there’s underlying assumptions to, to those questions, right? And the underlying assumptions are, you are going to be, if, if I show you everything I do, you’re gonna be more micro managery, right? You know, and, and, and the negative impulse that we have when someone says, Hey, hey, measure or track everything you do, tell me what you do. We have this negative, like, ugh, I don’t, we don’t want that. Right? You, you, you’re impeding on my privacy and things like that. But the, there’s a couple things. Number one is, at a very high level, why are we working, right? We’re working for a company so that we can be successful. And success, success, how do we know if we’re successful? ’cause We measure from one thing to another, from getting from this place to a better place or from, you know, $5 million to $10 million we’re measuring.
So actually everything in business we measure to be successful, we have to measure. And, and again, I said all other functions in the company, sales operations, like manufacturing, to customer service, to, you know, engineering. They measure the problem is we’re the, like, literally, literally I call the back office the last frontier. We are the only ones not measuring ourselves. And therefore we always get lack of a better term. We get the crap, we, we get a lot of crap given to us every single day, right? Because we don’t measure it. Imagine if we can measure all the crap that we get and go, Hey, look, this is all crap work. Do you still want me to do this? And they’re gonna say, no. Why are you doing that? Right? So I’ll give you an example. We did this with, with a client. We looked at an accounting manager’s job description.
She was 140% utilized just on her recurring work. Additionally, she had another may, at least 40% of ad hoc work that she was getting. So we, we were looking at her a couple things. We’re looking at her current recurring work. We’re like, what are you doing here? We can now see it. So we can ask questions like, what is that? What is this? And she was doing a ton of reporting. And we said, I don’t, I didn’t even know. The manager was like, I didn’t even know that you’re doing this reporting. What is this for? What is this for? And then they’re like, oh, this is four ops. I do this every week. They’re like five hours a week. They’re like, you make this five hour every single week, five hours. It’s like, yeah, I’ve been doing this for like three years. We’re like three years.
Like, whoa, that’s just a long time. Do they still use it? Actually, they were doing it for five years. They was like, they’re five years, five years. Like, are you sure that they still use it? And she goes, I don’t know. It’s like, what do you mean you don’t? Well, well who do you send it to? She’s like, we, we talked to the person we sent him. We say, Hey, do you use that report every Friday that you get from this person? And he goes, what report? Like the report on Friday. Please check your email. And did I go, oh, that email, I haven’t even checked that email. I I haven’t opened it in three years. Three years. Another similar story was we looked at someone’s ad hoc work and we found that all these reports for sales were needed. And it stemmed mostly from this one person.
Now that we have visibility, we said, we went to this person, it was literally like 60 plus hours a month for accounting. This one person was getting 60 plus hours for reporting all the reportings that he needs every single month. And we went to him and he said, what’s going on here? Do you need all these reports? He goes, whoa, am I in trouble? He’s like, no, no, no. We just wanna know if these are important. And he goes, I’ve been here for years. No one said anything to me. Like, understood. We just figuring like, what do you, can you tell us like answer the question please. Like, is this important? And he finally looks at this report and he goes, oh yeah, those, those sales reports, most people don’t even use it. I just need these three. If you really ask the question, you’re like, seriously, we went from like 60 hours to five, right?
It is just like, just ’cause we lack visibility. So the question is, it’s gonna be a waste of time. I put all this time to measure. Well actually you’re wasting so much more time by not measuring. You have no idea. And the, and the kind of a hilarious thing is we actually do measure our work. Partially, I ask people, Hey, how do you manage your ad hoc work? All the things that you get. People go, oh, I put it in my asana or you know, Monday or I put it into my calendar. And some guy goes, if you see my three monitors in front of me, I have 75 post-it notes. So I’m like, so you are measuring to, you are managing it to a certain extent. You are writing it down, you’re putting time to it. All we’re saying is do it in a universal way that may actually take about the same time, if less as you, as you get used to it.
And so measuring is the most critical component of all this coming to micromanagement. Now, I think we kind of talk about it a little bit, but what is micromanagement? Why do people have this? Ooh, feeling about micromanagement is because they’re trying to keep you accountable. They’re by asking you questions. Where is this? Remember I told you, remember we talked Wednesday, you said you’re gonna be done on Friday. It’s Monday. I didn’t see the report. You’re like, oh, I can’t do it for whatever reason. Where is that? Where is just, they’re constantly asking questions and that’s called micromanagement. The question is, why are they a, are they asking questions? Why is there micromanagement? At the very underlying at the very bottom, at the very beginning basis of it is lack of trust. The question is, why is there a lack of trust, lack of visibility.
They’re asking you ’cause they can’t see or they don’t know that you actually did what you said you’re gonna do. So now if you have visibility and say, this is what I’m doing this week. These are the 18 things I am supposed to do, I did 16 at the end of the week, I have two that I didn’t do. And I could explain those because I got four other ad hoc work. Imagine if you could do that. There are no more questions of why it turns into how can I help you do this? Why are you getting four ad hoc work? I see this happening every single week and it’s coming from this department. Lemme go talk to that manager and see what’s going on. Lemme see if we can like mitigate that or fix it for good that you don’t have to keep doing this every single week.
And so it becomes, that’s when you actually are able to manage properly. And at the same time, you were able to work properly as an individual contributor. ’cause You know exactly what’s expected of you and you can explain the variance. So it’s really, I talk to fp and a people, right? We always talk about forecasting and what is the basis budgeting a budgeted or planned versus actual and variance. And we wanna manage the variance is everything we want to plan. We don’t care. That’s all good. It’s the variance that we were concerned about, especially the negative variance. So we should be looking at tasks and our work in the same way. What do we plan our tasks for the week? What do we actually get accomplished? And what is the variance? So now instead of talking about all the things, you just talk about the variance, the 2, 3, 5 things instead of the 40 things that you’re supposed to have done,
Glenn Hopper
If I’m managing a finance team, what are, what are the metrics? What are the measurables? Kind of the only thing that comes to mind for me, the first thing is obviously, how long does it take us to close? And, you know, did we miss payroll? What mistakes did we make? So what I mean to effectively manage the team, if you could have this omniscient view superpower in what are the, the key, the KPIs, the things that we would want to measure on our own performance?
Daniel Paik
Good question. I would say that it’s more general than that. My assumption here is that people in the back office, finance, accounting people, we actually know how to do our job. That’s my number one assumption. We know what we’re supposed to do. We know how to do it right? The problem is all this other stuff that happens that derails us. So the question really becomes, and I I don’t think we, we covered this. We, we kind of did. Oh actually we did. Is that the back office? We’re the last frontier, right? Like I said, the last frontier. How we are the only function in the business that doesn’t have a measure of success. All other functions do sales. We say we, we say, hey, for this company you have to, every, every single sales person has called 500 leads. You know, you go through the sales cycle, the conversion rate is 2% and you’ll make a million dollars.
So it’s, everybody has to do that. But in back office you can’t say, Hey, all fp and a people, you all have to do this. Like that doesn’t even make any sense why. There’s a Gartner study that said that for back and Fortune 500 companies, every single month back offices do 600 to 800 tasks and services for the company. 600 to 800 on average, right? So how are you you gonna say, oh, everybody do 600? That doesn’t make any sense. So the measure of success, what I found the secret sauce, if I may say, I’m just gonna tell you guys the secret sauce of how to measure performance is actually an individual measure of success. And it’s based, first off your job description, your recurring work, it comes back to that same thing, recurring add up projects. So once you, ’cause recurring work is actually measurable.
’cause You’re, that’s what you get paid for. You have to do that, you know, when you’re supposed to do it by, you know about how long it takes. You understand that you have that utilization, right? So that’s the basis. How much time am I spending just on my recurring work? You can actually calculate that pretty simply. And it’s recurring so you don’t have to keep inputting it, right? You just do it one time. And the flip side of recurring work is free capacity. Free capacity. You’re supposed to be doing what projects. Why? ’cause it moves companies forwards, it grows companies. What’s the problem? The second work in the middle ad hoc work that derails everything. So how do we measure success? What are the metrics of success? Well, you can measure it like what’s month and close end date. But actually in my opinion, where you start is the individual.
And, and that’s how professional growth happens as well as, and the same time it helps grow the company and it helps grow the company. And the reason why I say this, this, there isn’t, and I, and I believe in the back office, there isn’t a measure of success that is universal for fp and a people or accounting people. ’cause You have two accountants in one company, they can be doing drastically different things. So really what back office does is we’re very fluid to a certain degree. So everybody has a set recurring work. Now that’s your one of your metrics. What is that for you, for that individual? What is the amount of time this person should be putting in for ad hoc work? What is, what is a reasonable amount of time that we should set? Is it two hours a day, eight four hours a day? Is it one hour a day? Is it zero? Depends on the, on the company. And then how much time should we expect them to work on projects that helps the company move forward, right? So I think in a high level sense, that’s, those are the metrics and it’s actually an individual, the the method standardized. Everybody should be measured this way at the, at the very basic level. But in terms of what the metric is, it’s an individual metric per where their company is per the maturity of the person and, and the role, right?
Glenn Hopper
Yeah. And I think, you know, without that measurement and visibility, you do things as a manager. Like you have your team spend more time putting together status reports for the week and updating their projects and just, you know, the, the sort of verbal communication around it. Whereas if you’re actually logging the hours and tracking it and everything, you have an idea of, well remember we had budgeted five hours a week for you to work on this project and now I see concretely you only worked on it two hours this week. Where, where did that extra time go? And I, I think, you know, this could, you could really get bogged down in sort of the sausage making of our job of the month end, close the quarter, close the filings, the ev everything that you go through running payroll, bank recs, whatever is happening in the department.
It’s hard to provide value when you’re just going through the motions of <laugh>, of doing the work, of being sure that everybody’s paid on time. That being sure that we don’t miss the close time and inventory counts, whatever, whatever we’re doing in our group, it doesn’t feel strategic. But there is the, the role of finance has shifted over the years. And certainly you have to have the people who are, are doing the close and providing all that information. But then it’s what you can take and do with it. And I’m wondering, you know, do you see, are there efficiencies to be gained? Because it, when you talk about the management of it, it’s, it’s easy to lose sight of the end product that we’re actually providing. But if you are effectively managing this, do you see the potential for teams to gain efficiency and to be able to, because they’re tracking at this kind of level transition to where they actually do have more time and they can carve out time for strategic work and sort of that deep work and, and thinking at a higher level than just transactional
Daniel Paik
A hundred percent. That, that’s literally the goal. So the, the perfect business actually is in terms of people, is to keep ke to give people perfect autonomy that they are able to do their own work themselves, make the best decision themselves, prioritize themselves, right? That’s, that’s the holy grail. Now how in the world do we get there? I, I repeat myself so many times that it’s, it’s, it’s actually measurement and visibility. And this is what I say. So we, we talked about the initial layer, the benefits of measurement and visibility. It actually does, it takes a lot less time to actually measure than to actually how we’re currently working. There’s statistics you can look up on Google online that says the average worker worker’s productivity in a day is anywhere in between three to four hours. So in an eight hour day, you’re really only productive three to four hours.
And the question is why? And we say switching costs, we say, you know, interruptions and all these things, all the things that we said, but it’s because we don’t really know. We’re not clear on our expectations. We don’t know what we’re really supposed to do that day. So we spend a lot of time thinking and analysis paralysis. How that works is this. Now imagine you have measured your recurring work. Just let’s say just your recurring work. Let’s say you do payroll every two weeks. It takes three hours, you know, month and close. I have eight activities or or tasks on there that takes me 14 hours a month. All these things, right? I have to do this thing, this report for operations. So now you can add not, the first question I ask is this. Once everybody has that, I say, Hey, in your recurring work, what is unprovable?
What is alignable or what can we eliminate? If you can do anything, if you had everything at your disposal, right? What if you could do, if you could improve, what, which ones could you improve? You can delegate, eliminate, right? And you’d be amazed. People go, oh, this thing that’s 15 hours a month, I, that’s actually three hours. And you go, why is it 15 goes, I it’s probably spent 10 to 12 hours a month fixing re-audit, reworking things that people send to me. It’s not even my fault, but I have to fix it and tell, tell them, do it again. Do it again. Do it again. So Daniel, if I had it my way, if they just did it right the first time, my job would take three hours. Cool, well let’s write down as a project, not your project. ’cause You can’t, you’re not man managing them, but it’s a project for somebody else to do because this is a problem that we have now.
We can find ROI we simple things. How much time are you currently taking? How much time can you save about how, what is the dollar amount that you that you are and the improvement and, and, and you extrapolate that out to a year or whatever period you want. And then now you can actually do a weighted average of ROI and then now you can, you can literally go, hey, outta my 32 recurring tasks, actually 14 of them are I improvable and it’s in this order of priority. So now you have these micro tasks that you can do or other people have to do. And now the business knows, hey, we can actually become better and save time. So now that I’ve saved from going from 15 hours to three hours, I’ve 12, what do I do with 12 hours projects? Right? All the things.
And I, I think, I think back office especially even as an accountant, as a finance person, even in, in the CFO role, it’s not really until I got to the CFO role, I would say that I truly understood or really I finally had, I was able to kind of think about what is my role here? And I realized one thing, one of the major things I realized was this. The question is what is a business here for? What is the primary purpose of a business? You can say a lot of different things, but I’ll say to make it very easy and simple is to grow a a, a goal of a business is to grow. If you don’t grow, ooh, then what is it? You’re dying, right? If your revenue is stagnant at 50 million and every year is just 50 million, well you saw inflation, this the past couple years you’re dying.
Then you have less resources, less less resources to hire, less resources or money to pay bonuses and do all the great things that you want for people. So actually the purpose of business is to grow. So we all in a company should understand this and have a mindset of growth. So instead of just, ’cause payroll does not grow companies. So the question is, how can we now be creative and eliminate or make payroll time as short as possible, right? Without diminishing quality. Just put more time into growth. And you may think, well, I don’t care. ’cause That’s, I don’t get anything of that. That’s, that’s business. Business. That’s the business side of things. It’s like actually no, it’s actually, you get so much benefit when you do projects. Why? It helps professional development. What is professional development? We want to grow as a person. How do we grow as a person?
We have to be challenged. We have to do something new. We have to collaborate and learn how to work with people. We have to learn how to communicate better. And what is all, what are all of those? How is that, that is all encapsulated into, in a project. That’s exactly what a project is. It’s new, right? It’s challenging. You have to talk to people, right? You have to struggle with it. And so your professional development grows and it’s actually perfect that you brought the ERP thing up upfront just by chance. ’cause I think, and I’m sure you also attest to it, you probably grew so much professionally just by doing an ERP implementation so, so hard. So not only does it help projects, help business grow, it helps you grow. And if you actually now have the visibility, it’ll tell you, right, this is what this person has done and you will now get rewarded and recognize by merit and not what your manager remembers, what the last two months you did, but forgot the great thing you did in January and February, right? You, you will have that visibility.
Glenn Hopper
What I hear in that, and I think about, you know, you can grow a business really in, in two weeks, obviously the first thought is top line. But then I think from a continuous improvement standpoint, if you can’t grow the top line, if you can get more efficient and grow the bottom line by that, by being more efficient in, in what you do, then that has it, its merit as well. And I think about what if you’re gonna do an ERP implementation before you pick the software, you have to figure out what your process is. What’s our conversion, you know, from here, here they are in the sales pipeline, and this is when we’re we win and we bring ’em in. What do we, what happens with client onboarding and everything that we go through? What kind of project management tools are we using?
What CRM are we doing to track the customer while they’re with us? What happens when they churn out? But you have to figure out that whole process and everything, all the touch points with the customer and how you interact with them. And then what ha you know, likewise what happens in the back office to sort of support all that. But you have to document the processes so that you can <laugh> know where your kind of, your roadblocks are and where you may have gatekeepers and where the, the process is broken. So if you don’t have the data and you don’t know that it takes 15 hours a month to run this report, you know, if, if you’ve got an employee that has x number of hours in a month and you’re seeing that they’re spending the bulk of their time doing this thing, that’s maybe a, a low value add that tells me we need to automate this is, I mean, there’s so much you can, once you have that data, you can make so many decisions around it.
Daniel Paik
It opens up everything. Literally having the data, the back office can now literally be on par with the front office. This is why I say we’re gonna be second from, we’re gonna move from second class citizens to first class citizens or from pro cost centers or profit centers, because I, examples are, are, are actually the most important, right? So how do, how did we actually do something like this? Or how does back office actually become a profit center? We may not actually sell to the client directly, but we’re one degree removed, but we’re just as important. So as an example, what we have done with the client is this, we found that we did it with salespeople as well, so it’s not just actually back office. We actually did the same exercise with salespeople. And we found that this sales team, every single person on average had nine hours of administrative work a week, nine hours.
First of all, no one knew that until we did the assessment. Secondly, we said, you are not selling for a whole entire day. And he goes, they all go, no, no, no, no, no, we sell every day, but I have to do this nine hours during nights and weekends and it’s killing me. I hate it. And it, it like stresses me out so much. Right? So imagine the inefficiency, just the mental, the mental, you know, drainage. How, how would that affect sales number one, right? So we asked them out of all those, I think they had like an average average of like six tasks. And we said, which one of the tasks can we help you with? What is the most, what’s the thing that you hate the most? And we thought we, they’re gonna say Salesforce, we hate enter into Salesforce because most people don’t like it.
But they actually said no, that’s actually second. The first one is what the finance team gives us, the Excel sheet that we have to put in what’s in Salesforce into this thing with the probabilities. They go, that takes me four and a half hours on average a week. And that, that actually does, you know, that, that’s so important ’cause that’s for cashflow and all these things, right? And we said, well, how can, how can we help you with that? That’s, this is just your knowledge. He goes, no. He goes, entering it in is the hardest part. I just need an accountant or somebody that, that, that can do Excel. You just need 30 minutes of my time. The other 3, 3 4 hours can be done by the accountant or somebody. We’re like, so you’re telling me that if we hire a business analyst for $80,000, that we can literally take four hours of work away from each of you a week?
And they’re like, yes. That, that when they, when they literally the business goes, hire that person now. And, and I think they said they made upwards to like, they, they believe anywhere from 1.2 million to 4 million depending on how you actually do the calculation, extra revenue just by hiring that $80,000 person. But they had no visibility otherwise, right? So that’s how, and, and, and the business analyst analyst did it. The back office actually helped understand this ano. Another one was, there was a scheduling, there’s consultants everywhere and scheduling and there’s a, and this company was doing scheduling by Excel in business for decades, still doing it by Excel. Hundreds of people. They were missing on average 10 to 15 engagements a month because they had to actually go to the site and they would yell and scream. The C client would call, why isn’t you a consultant here?
Like, what, what happened? It take you hours and like, oh, we’ll send someone right away by the time it’s too late, we have this lost revenue, this lost time, et cetera. And I, I found this and there’s hundreds of engagements a month, right? And so I found that there’s leakage here. And I asked the team, I was like, Hey, did you guys know that this is happening? And they’re like, oh yeah, this is happening for 10 years. Like 10 years. I did a quick back of the napkin math on how much it would be if 10 to 15 a month times the average engagement times whatever it was millions. I said, this is happening just ’cause of a scheduling issue because it’s on Excel and you’re ex and you guys are not even good at your Excel is, it was so bad. It was not, we’re not even using the proper formulas. And so we, I talked to the back office team, I said, Hey, I need two accountants. I believe about 60 hours. I need you to fix the spreadsheet. They did it in a month and a half. That went from about 10 to 15 missed engagements to literally like one or two in about a month and a half. And it went to zero in three months.
So the back office made them millions of dollars just by fixing the spreadsheet. This one problem that everybody knew was there, but they did not even quantify the effect of it. And the person that can actually fix it was back off is people. Right? And that’s millions of dollars every single year.
Glenn Hopper
Yeah. And you know, you’re talking about this from a, a human resources standpoint, but right now with you know, the onslaught of ai, it goes beyond that. And I think about, you know, automation integration data and and implementation of AI solutions here. Really not to get into the whole debate on, you know, how many, how many of us will be replaced by ai but augmenting what we do and getting these efficiencies and removing us from these archaic systems like scheduling and excel and, and stuff like that. But moving out of that into more efficient ways to work. I don’t think anybody goes and get a master’s degree in accounting or master’s degree in finance with the idea that they’re gonna be a data entry person and, you know, doing all that <laugh>, this kind of stuff. Exactly. So the more of that that we can automate, but by having visibility into how much time we’re spending on things that, that tells us where to focus our our automation.
And I think about we have to have the data as the foundation once we have the data and we can see where we’re spending our time, we’ll know where to point the laser to to focus on our automation projects and to, and to get the gains. And I think, you know, looking at that and seeing kind of where we are with technology right now and with more and more data being collected, you know, everywhere, but in particular on like tracking what we’re doing on, on a daily basis and, and the data and that we’re creating and the, and the value that we’re adding. I mean, how do you see this type of data and this type of insight into our work efforts merging with ai? And what do you kind of see where, where do you see corporate finance evolving in the next five or 10 years with this sort of, this convergence of technologies that, that are coming right now? Yeah.
Daniel Paik
I love the question. I’m very opinionated and that doesn’t mean I’m right. But I do have an opinion on, on a couple of these things. Number one, you said something actually amazing, like you totally understand it, is that once you understand, once you have, once you measure and you have visibility, it will actually tell you what you can automate or even eliminate, right? Or even delegate to maybe, you know, third party somewhere. So it actually gives you clarity into what you need to do to make it more efficient. But with, with ai now, if you put AI on top of that, well imagine you now have the totality of what each individual is supposed to do. 95 plus percent of what they do. AI is really good when you have good data, right? So now you have data AI can, I would say in three to five years we, we would be able to say, Hey, we wanna grow this company by 10% in this region.
What, what do we need to do? And so now AI the thing, ’cause we know what people do and what the out outputs were. We know the ROI of the projects that we’ve done, how we actually grew. So we’ll say, Hey, the perfect workforce to do this is this, these people need to do this. That people, that person needs to do that. So it’ll give you it, it’ll give you a benchmark of sorts a a a guideline of where, what you need to do. But it’s, at the end of the day, people are indispensable. It will, AI will not replace the people side. ’cause People are actually, in my opinion, smarter, not in terms of compute power, but we have in, in intuition, we have relationships, right? A lot of businesses done by relationships, right? Most of it actually. And so AI cannot replace those things.
What AI can replace are the repetitive things. But again, I have a opinion on that. People say 30%, 40% of back office is gonna be replaced by ai. I question is, well, which part? AP automation has been around for more than a decade. I, I, I know more companies not using AP automation than companies using it, right? And they have AI and everything like that. Now, the que the reason is this, it’s actually a very simple example. If I have a Home Depot receipt and I bought things for Project A, project B and my workshop at work and it’s on one receipt, how in the world do I ai that you can’t, you still need a person go, hey, these five things at $687 is project A, $282 is project B and the rest is project is internal. Like you cannot, someone has to still tell you AI cannot read your mind.
It doesn’t know what your intent is actually is in buying those things. It can maybe guess here and there. ’cause If you buy similar things for similar projects, it can kind of say, okay, but if you buy a bucket, it can be inter how are you supposed to know that you don’t? So people are even in the simplest thing, a receipt. And most people think AP is probably the easiest place. ’cause We have the just, it’s just volume and transactional, but it’s actually even the easiest place we think is really hard. So can we replace it by ai? I think that the only way that can happen is if we standardize receipts. If we standardize the process of buying something, which is probably almost impossible. I I just don’t know a world that you can do that in. ’cause People are, people will do whatever we want.
And so if you cannot standardize, you actually cannot automate. Standardization is so, so AI is all about what is it? I forgot the exact term, but it’s finding all this data from all these places and making a best guess. Well, that’s okay if you’re okay with error. Like if you have, if you’re okay with the margin of error. But if it’s mar, if the margin of error is 2% right, and this thing is, you know, it gets 2% wrong. Well how, what’s the dollar value of that? It’s probably a lot depending on the company.
Glenn Hopper
So, well, I, I mean, I know we could go on this all day and I’m really I I need to get on the books, our ERP episode <laugh>, where we talk about that next. Yes. But I do, before we go, I do, you know, we’ve, we just dove straight into some really nerdy finance and, and back office stuff. But before we let you off the hook, we do like to know a little bit more a about you personally. So maybe maybe share with our listeners something that that not many people know about you. Maybe something they couldn’t figure out, you know, just by Googling you real quick.
Daniel Paik
Yeah. that’s an interesting one. I was fourth grade our, someone vacuumed over our TV line. I came home from school, didn’t know that I tried to turn on the TV and I was like, oh, oh, the line’s disconnected. I went up there and I put it together and my whole body, I just remember the feeling of this, the electrocution just, just like I pa I don’t know what happened two years later, sixth grade, I’m just daydreaming in class Ms. Williams class. And I’m like,
Glenn Hopper
Oh
Daniel Paik
My, I was electrocuted two years ago. I did not remember for two years.
Glenn Hopper
Wow. <laugh>.
Daniel Paik
And maybe that’s why I’m weird. I don’t know. <Laugh>, but that’s
Glenn Hopper
Rewired brain synapses, I guess when that <laugh>.
Daniel Paik
Exactly. Maybe that’s why I think differently or whatever it may be. But yeah, that was it was h it was hilarious. I started laughing in class. I was like, I cannot believe, I just remember this two years later. But <laugh>, don’t unplug the thing before you guys put the <laugh>, put the wire back in. <Laugh> was not thinking good
Glenn Hopper
Advice. Yeah. Alright. And here’s one. We know we, we did talk a little bit about Excel and I think your answer is not gonna be scheduling <laugh>, but what is your favorite Excel function and why?
Daniel Paik
That’s an interesting one. I used to use a lot of functions when I was in the CFO accounting finance role. But these days, CFCE role, CEO role, I don’t play too much in it. I just do it for forecasting purposes. And I would say currently I use the summit function a lot. It’s a very simple function. My general philosophy is in anything you do with Excel, if you, if you design it and structure excel properly your formula should be as simple as possible. ’cause If it’s not, it’s very hard to understand and backtrack and audit what the heck is happening. So I would say like some, if X lookup, like literally the easiest ones as much as possible, if you can do it, you should use the easiest one. If you can’t, you should rethink probably your dataset and how you’re actually structured it. Some datasets are very hard and I had, I had functions that were like nested like 10, 10 deep, right? So that happens. But I would say currently some if is my favorite. I I’ve been using it a lot recently. So, so simple.
Glenn Hopper
I love your response because it’s sort of the difference between finance people and accounting people. It’s like, if I’ve gotta make this <laugh>, you know, for, for audit and be able to explain what I’m doing here, we need to simplify it as much as possible where I think sometimes in finance, we just geek out on how complex our formulas can be. Yeah. And like, look at this, this is 13 nested ifs and I’ve got <laugh>, I’m referencing this
Daniel Paik
And sheets in two different files. And you’re like, what is this, what is this, what is this from? How do I interpret this <laugh>,
Glenn Hopper
How can our, how can our listeners connect with you and, and learn more about kero work and, and and what you’re doing.
Daniel Paik
Yeah. Our website, cureo work.com. C-U-R-O-W-O-R k.com. Or you can feel free to LinkedIn. Me, I actually look at almost a try to at least almost all my messages. So Daniel P-P-A-I-K and if you look up your work, you’ll find me there.
Glenn Hopper
Alright, Daniel, thank you very much. Really enjoyed this episode and appreciate you coming on.
Daniel Paik
Oh, really fun. We should do it again. Thanks Glen.
