Lauren Pearl is a Business Strategist and CFO Advisor who helps startup teams build data-driven businesses. The 3x founder with over 13 years of startup leadership experience now serves as CFO, advisor, and instructor for over 300 growing companies. She also runs the podcast “Growth Minded CFO” and offers a free course on financial modeling.

In this episode:

• Financial models at startups
• Sniffing out BS at startups
• Storytelling as a pitchdeck
• Getting startups to engage with finance
• Free financial modeling course
• Being a punk band roadie
• Functionality of Excel

Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laurenepearl/

Daily CFO newsletter: https://www.laurenpearlconsulting.com/newsletter

Today’s guest barely needs an introduction. Purna Duggirala (aka, “Chandoo”) is a celebrity in Excel circles. Since 2004, Chandoo has been regularly sharing everything he learns working with Excel training hundreds of finance teams, and had roles including as Data Lead, Remuneration Modeling & Analytics for the New Zealand government.

The 16-time Microsoft MVP runs Chandoo.org , which aims to “make you awesome in Excel and Power BI” getting 250,000 visitors per month from all over the world and his YouTube channel has 750,000 subscribers. His stated goal is “to make you awesome at Excel and Power BI”, and produces the go-to Excel resources from blog posts and videos to full online courses.

• My Excel Journey and Community building
• Skill gaps in FP&A Teams
• Power BI vs Excel vs Python
• Copilot – advantages and limits
• My favorite Excel function

Check out https://chandoo.org

Chandoo’s Free Data analyst course: https://chandoo.org/wp/free-data-analyst-course/

Connect with Chandoo on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/purnaduggirala/

In this special episode Glenn is joined by Nate Saperia to answer the 10 most burning questions in FP&A. Nate brings nearly 20 years of finance experience including at Accordion, Spruce Finance, Hess Corporation and GE. At Saperia Consulting Nate specializes in real-time dashboards, financial planning, and interim CFO/FP&A leadership.

The questions:

Q1: How can I use AI in FP&A?

Q2: What do you think of FP&A solutions?

Q3: How can you get to driver based decision making

Q4: Fastest levers FP&A teams can pull with margin pressures rising?

Q5: How can an FP&A function trust the financial data it’s using when it doesn’t control the data?

Q6: Should the CTO or CFO own the data?

Q7. Skills to get from M&A Financial due diligence to FP&A?

Q8. FP&A Internship, what advice?

Q9. Things I wish I had known earlier in FP&A?

Q10. What’s the future of Excel in FP&A?