Andrew Polito is VP, Controller at Go HQ which provides a suite of back office services, including recruiting to delivery companies. The Fort Worth-based company provides back office support for transportation and logistics, seeing 500% growth in five years, earning a spot on the Inc 5,000 list of fastest- growing private companies in America.

In this episode:

• From audit to shifting to a private company finance team
• Building FP&A from the ground up
• Power of the 13 week cash forecast
• How I introduced automation in an initial two-person finance team
• How our finance tech stack delivers the data and insights to succeed

Mariya Guttoh is Director of FP&A and Treasury at PayJoy, a global FinTech company expanding credit access through smartphones to underserved customers in emerging markets. Celebrating 10 years this year , the company has served over 15 million customers and is on track to reach $650 million in revenue and $110 million in profit by the end of 2025.

In this episode Mariya traces her steps from cosmetic marketing in Ukraine to arriving in the US with $300 and working three jobs while earning her MBA to becoming a finance leader.

• My finance journey working three jobs to pay for my MBA
• Becoming an advocate for AI in finance Two finance camps– “excited but clueless” and “cautious but clueless”
• Using AI to automate vendor reporting across 10 countries
• Identifying high impact AI wins (forecasting)
• My ideal magic FP&A solution
• How I turned myself into a self-created extrovert
• Offset in Excel

Akhil Khunger, VP Quantitative Analytics, Barclays, has more than ten years of experience in the field. Akhil develops statistical models to forecast balance sheets, revenue and probability of default. He has experience with time series modeling, statistical modeling, machine learning and building implementation frameworks using Python and other programming languages. Akhil, who has a master’s in Financial Engineering from UC Berkeley and London School of Economics, has worked in CCAR and Bank of England stress testing and know the Basel III/IV framework, SR 11/7, SR 15-18, and SR 15-19. He also has experience managing junior model developers.

In this episode:

• The worst year for modeling?
• Diving into models
• Working with big datasets
• Getting to the real reasons behind trends and data
• The power of stress testing
• What human judgement can bring to the table
• The AI component in forecasting

Esti Levy Dadon, Executive VP Finance, Fiverr ,started in public accounting at Ernst and Young, before leading the finance function at Fiverrr. Since joining the global marketplace in 2016 she steered the company to a successful IPO in 2019. In her words: “In almost 10 years at Fiverr I’m still waiting for things to be boring and repeatable, but it never happens because things change all the time”

In this episode:

• Building finance from the ground up at Fiverr
• The path to IPO and the financial work required
• Challenge of building a robust forecasting model for a public company
• Creating a finance team to last
• Business partnering process at Fiverr
• Traits for hiring in FP&A at Fiverr
• Mindset FP&A perspective shift to connect you to the business

What do FP&A professionals need to understand about data work and BI and the work that BI is doing? Marcos Bento, Director BI, at Wasabi Technologies: “They need to translate business requests in English in a way that the BI folks can translate that into codes.

That’s where the magic happens.”

In part two of our deep dive with Marcos Bento (BI) and David Suter (FP&A) from Wasabi Technologies, we explore the execution side of their successful data partnership. In this episode:

• Our 130-Iteration Journey: Net retention metric evolution
• Cost per dollar of new ARR (and how settled on it)
• Storytelling across technical and executive audiences
• Lean team compositions (4-person FP&A, 5-person BI)
• Power of the problem solving skillset in our hiring

Wasabi Technologies (a Boston-based cloud storage company with over $530M in funding, a decade of hypergrowth, 450+ team members, and multiple exabytes of storage deployed) sets high standards for its finance and analytics teams. Both teams are under pressure to deliver fast, accurate, and actionable insights. Marcos Bento, Director Business Intelligence at Wasabi Technologies and David Suter, Director, Financial Planning And Analysis at Wasabi Technologies join us for a special two-parter. They delve deep into how their teams work together, across functions to turn raw data into real-time financial intelligence.

In this episode:

• Building and gaining trust between BI and FP&A
• Getting from “10% out” to within a couple percentage points for forecasting
• KPIs such as dollars per terabyte
• BI and FP&A as investigative reporters
• Predictive analytics: forecast in the 6 or 12 months working with sales
• The manifesto for AI at Wasabi

Daniel Gardner is operational finance business partner at FirstGroup Plc, a leading UK-based provider of public transport. Daniel brings a unique perspective shaped by a diverse finance career across iconic consumer brands like L’Oreal, the Body Shop and Hunter Boots, where he led major forecasting overhauls and drove commercial transformation. Now at First Group, he is leading the development of a cloud-based forecasting system for a billion pound division, working with more than 50 stakeholders to deliver scalable real-time insights.

In this episode he talks about the power of “systems thinking” in the CFO’s Office as a way of understanding how different parts of an organization (or any complex system) interconnect and influence each other.”If there’s an area, I’d say that FP&A could do with its systems thinking. Structure makes behavior and behavior makes structure. So it travels in a loop, which means that to make changes in an organization, you either have to hire people who do not exhibit the behaviors naturally or you’ve got to change the structure and alter the incentives that are producing the problems.”

In this episode:

• Bringing my philosophy-training to finance
• Six week finance transformation at Hunter Boots
• Getting from lagging to leading indicators
• 99% of People Problems Are Really System Problems
• Python+ Excel (practical examples)

Sarah Schlott, Senior Director of Finance at Tray, a leading point of sale system in entertainment, joins Glenn Hopper to tear down the sacred rituals of corporate finance. Rising from billing temp to strategic finance leader, Schlott who has been in corporate finance for 18 years, delivers brutal honesty about what’s broken in FP&A and how to fix it. She challenges everything from annual budgets to variance analysis (“forensic accounting in disguise”) while advocating for a bottoms-up, operator-first approach that actually works.

In this episode:

• The power of aggressive curiosity in finance
• My most accurate forecast was also the one that failed
• My views on variance analysis
• Running a $100M forecast in Excel
• Why we shouldn’t treat the annual budget as a “golden idol”
• Moving away from a “spreadsheet guilt trip” every month
• From Singer-Songwriter to Finance Leader

Connect with Sarah Schlott: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahschlott/