Maggie Olson on How to Build Financial Acumen in Your Role

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The Leader Assistant Podcast exists to encourage and challenge assistants to become confident, game-changing leader assistants.

Jeremy · 0:23

Hey, Leader Assistants, have you heard the NOVA Chief of Staff Certification course is about to see a price increase? But don't worry, you can enroll now, lock in the current rate, and start whenever you're ready with lifetime access. NOVA's mission is to give you the ultimate student experience. They've packed the course with dozens of templates, self-paced learning, hands-on practice, multiple instructor touchpoints, peer engagement, and even guest authored assignments. With over 500 students across 22 countries, NOVA is the top spot for Chief of Staff Learning and Development. Don't wait, enroll today and join the community at leaderassistant.com/nova. Hey friends, welcome to The Leader Assistant Podcast. It's episode 296, and I'm your host, Jeremy Burrows. You can check out the show notes and links for this conversation at leaderassistant.com/296. leaderassistant.com/296. Check out all the links to this episode. And also just a quick reminder, if you have the Apple Podcast app on your phone, they have a pretty cool new feature that they released this year, and they essentially automatically transcribe these podcast episodes. So you can go into the Apple app and click on transcript and literally read through the episode if you prefer to read and skim versus listen. So definitely check that out on the Apple Podcast app. That's been pretty nice. I've been doing that for a few of the podcasts that I listen to. So just a quick tip there. But again, episode 296. I hope you're having a good day. Thanks for tuning in and I'm super excited to have my friend Maggie Olson on again. Maggie is the founder of the Nova Chief of Staff Certification Course, which you have probably heard about if you've listened to the show. And she was actually on a few other episodes, looks like episode 283, 281, 267, and a bunch of others. So we've had some interesting conversations about different topics related to executive assistants, chiefs of staff, and everything in between. So Maggie, welcome back.

Maggie · 2:51

Thanks, Jeremy. Happy to be here.

Jeremy · 2:53

So today we're going to talk about building financial acumen in your role. And I know that I have had many of those conversations with my CEO and my CFO, who I work pretty closely with. All those, for me, semi-awkward conversations where they start talking numbers, they start talking all this money lingo and EBITDA and gross revenue and ARR and MRR and GRRN or whatever, all these acronyms. And I'm just like, all right, wait, wait, what's that mean? Can you explain that to a homeschool preacher's kid? Because that's what I am. And it's just like, it can be overwhelming, you know? And sometimes I feel like, all right, well, maybe I'm in the wrong industry if I've got to try to keep up with this. So I'm sure there are others listening who feel similarly when it comes to numbers and finance and that whole world. But it is important as assistants and chiefs of staff for us to at least train ourselves up and be somewhat aware of what's being talked about at a high level so that we can keep up. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on this whole topic.

Maggie · 4:25

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head. I often hear from aspiring chiefs of staff, current chiefs of staff, executive assistants, that their top concern when it comes to confidence, if they can hack it in a high level role in the C-suite, is that lack of confidence in their financial acumen. So do I know numbers well enough? Do I care about numbers well enough? Do I understand how metrics work? How much like deep financial modeling or analysis or experience in profit and loss management do I have and is that important? So it's a valid concern. I've been there too. I have an MBA. I've been in analytical roles my entire life, and I've also had that concern. I don't think anyone is exempt necessarily from that lack of confidence because just like Excel, you can just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper. You're going to find someone who knows more. You're probably sitting next to somebody on a finance team, or you see the CFO, or you're hearing complex conversations, and you're like, dang, I don't know all that. Super valid, super valid concern. But I have learned throughout my career, especially in roles like Chief of Staff and Senior Executive Assistant, that it's a lot less important to have a deep financial understanding and knowledge or a deep financial practice even in your role than it is to have a financial BFF. So we should get into that. But Jeremy, I don't know if you've found the same, but that is literally one of the top things that we can talk about here is find a buddy, find somebody in the financial world. It doesn't have to be C-suite. It doesn't have to be director level. It can be a manager level, who deeply understands the finance of your business at the level that your leader looks at it. That's important and get to know them. Have a Finance 101 session about how their world works. Use them as a resource for when you do have to dive in deep, but along with a few other tactics that we'll get into, keep that person close, build the relationship, and have the confidence that you can dive in deep when you need to. You have a resource to help you with that. But you will not be able to do your job successfully from a breadth perspective if you're diving deep, deep, deep into finance every day anyway. I'll pause there and then we can go over some other tactics in a minute.

Jeremy · 7:00

Yeah, I think that's great. I think one of the things when I first, I was higher number one at our company capacity and my executive hired a bunch of engineers, which I'm not an engineer. And so the first day it was like, hey, I'm the non-engineer, everyone else had that background. And my executive essentially said, listen, I'm going to need you to manage people and numbers and finance for a while until we can get things going and actually bring on someone that likes people and is good at math, which was the opposite of me. I was an introvert that was not good at math. And I was like, all right, we'll see how this goes. So the first thing I did, like you said, I found that BFF, I found that contact that was HR, and then I found that contact that was accounting.

Maggie · 7:53

Awesome.

Jeremy · 7:54

Finance. And so that was like my first step. I was like, all right, I'm not going to try and pretend to be able to figure it all out my own. But I am going to find someone that we can maybe outsource a little bit of it to and then kind of walk me through how to get things set up. And then the funny thing is a couple of years later, we got audited for that first year. And I was like, oh, no, we're going to get we're going to get audited for the year that I was in charge. But everything, of course, everything went fine because I brought in those experts.

Maggie · 8:25

So, yeah, yeah, I love that. And it's such a common question. Like, I'm asked all the time, OK, I'm new in this role. I don't know a lot about it. I want to learn quickly. So how do you like learn at all? How do I become an expert in everything? And it's just it's just you can't. You don't, you do not. You cannot become an expert in everything if you're going to be effective in the many, many areas of this expert generalist type of world that we're in. You know, so you have to nail the most important things. I think that's probably the first thing that I recommend here when chatting about the financial acumen that you absolutely do need. You absolutely need to understand the top five to ten metrics that drive your business at the level that your leadership team looks at them. And you need to know them deeply. Understand how the numerator works, understand how they work with each other, understand who's talking about them and why they matter. Learn those deeply. And it's okay if you don't know them when you start. You have confidence that you can do hard things, that you can dive in, dig in and learn them and really understand those top five to ten metrics to begin with.

Jeremy · 9:36

Yeah. What would you say? I've got a list kind of running in my head. What would you say in the Chief of Staff world are a few of those top metrics that generally speaking people need to be aware of?

Maggie · 9:50

It's a good question, but the hard part about that answer is that it's going to be different for any industry. So I've worked in the telecom industry, I've worked in retail, food and beverage. All of those metrics, there might be a few similar ones, especially if you're looking at something like a balance sheet. But often in a big company, you're not going to be looking at a balance sheet. So in retail, what's your margin and your turn, your markup? Those are some obvious ones. In telecom, we also looked at churn. We looked at, oh my gosh, so many terms that I don't even remember. It's only been a couple of years, right? Because it's like a 101 dive-in deep analysis that you have to cram and learn. We looked at customer tenure and there's a switching metric moving from provider to provider that we looked at deeply. Then food and beverage, you're looking at cost, you're also looking at margin, but it just depends on your leader, it depends on your business, it depends on if your product's driven, it depends on if your people driven, it's going to be different. That's why we can't tell you what those are on this call. That's why you have to reach out, find that financial BFF, find that resource, and start to, if you're not already, start to really understand, take notes on the metrics that are coming up consistently in the meetings that you're listening in on, in the emails that you're receiving for financial performance updates, what your leader's talking about. Listen in and listen to the ones that are repeating, that are coming up and that are being talked about together, and then meet with that financial partner to dive into them and understand them really well.

Jeremy · 11:34

Yeah, and I'm in the software world, so there's a different set of metrics for software. If you're in the... I came from nonprofit world, that's even different. So, for example, a couple of them just off the top of my head... Yeah, which ones come up for you? The biggest one is ARR, annual recurring revenue. So, in the software world, it's all about the subscription, recurring revenue. How much of your revenue is recurring subscription versus professional services or one-off services?

Maggie · 12:06

Yeah.

Jeremy · 12:07

And then, you know, what's your burn rate? You know, how much cash are you burning through? Are you breakeven, profitable, nowhere close? You know, all those things.

Maggie · 12:19

Yeah, customer lifetime value brought me back to my telecom days. How much money are you making from the lifetime of that customer if you average it out and project it and apply it to everybody else? But you can tell, I mean, and then let's think about health care and then the nonprofit sector. And then you've got big business, small business, startup, you know, mature, like it's just media, entertainment. My husband's a news anchor and I'm like, oh, what do you guys look at? Completely different. It's like viewership percent. I mean, it's just like totally things that I've never heard of. But if I were a chief of staff in media, I would have the exact same advice. Find the most important metrics, what's being talked about, top five or 10, understand them, understand how they work together and deeply learn those metrics.

Jeremy · 13:05

Yeah, well said.

Maggie · 13:08

Okay, so along with deeply understanding the most important metrics and finding that finance BFF, what else can you do to really understand the finance world of your business? And we touched on this a little bit, but it's just to truly be an active listener, to ask to attend some of those meetings that might, you might be like, oh, I'm going to glaze over, it's not my area of specialty, it's not what I'm interested in, but you've got to attend some of them and have a cup of coffee beforehand. Pay attention, take notes, find someone to ask questions of afterwards. There's no wrong answer when you're learning your business. You're always learning your business, so there's never going to be a wrong answer, truly. So attend those sessions, get involved in things that maybe you wouldn't get involved in previously to help learn a little bit, drive a little bit of that learning. Maybe you're going to jump on and put an investor update together with a couple of your peers. That's a great opportunity to ask questions in a low-stakes environment when maybe the room is smaller. Jeremy, any other tactics that you've used as you're learning a new financial business?

Jeremy · 14:24

Yeah. You mentioned drinking coffee before a meeting. Also have Google open so that if somebody shoots out a bunch of acronyms, you can type them in real quick and be like, okay, what this means. I did that when I was in the software world. Initially, with engineers, they'd be talking about Python. I'm like, why are they talking about snakes? This is a software company. So Google and all these different CSS and Python and all this, and I was just like, okay, these are coding languages. Okay, I get this now. So you just have to have Google-ready. That's my big tip.

Maggie · 14:56

Yep, have Google-ready. Oftentimes, like Jeremy and I were talking about how there's all these different KPIs for different industries. You could go look up retail math, top 20 retail math metrics, and there's a Google image for that that you could print and have right next to your computer. I had that in my Nordstrom buying days because they're complex. You can't memorize all of them because for me, I was a little bit more involved in the finance portion, and so I needed to know way more than five or 10. I had a cheat sheet right next to me. That's okay. That's totally fine. For people that we're talking to today, as you're listening more, as you're getting involved more, you're starting to understand those top metrics, you're having conversations, then dig in to the scorecards that are being sent. Dig into the dashboard, identify those KPIs in the scorecards and dashboards and performance summaries and see how they work together. Some of it is basic math that is simple but not easy, an equation that has been nailed into my head is new minus old divided by old percent growth. That was a retail math equation that we did nonstop. I do that on a calculator now to help myself understand and stay connected to the metric. That one shows up a lot, industry agnostic. So pay attention, start to read things and read the things that you're getting in the financial world. Let's all be honest. Oftentimes, we just move to another inbox. We don't open, start to open those things. Even if you don't understand most of it, you will get a handful of really good takeaways and your learning will just continue to grow. I think the last thing I would say here is just to really hammer in the why. Why can't we be deep financial experts in, let's say, the chief of staff role? And that's because our role is dependent on breadth versus depth. So, let's say that my company doesn't have a financial scorecard at all. We don't have a dashboard, we don't even have projections and summaries or anything being sent via email to our executive team. And I identify this as a problem and I want to solve it. Okay, check, check. Identify the problem, want to solve it. It would solve a lot of issues with the executive team and everybody needs better insights. The situation here though is the Chief of Staff and often the Senior EA as well, cannot be the person that executes this solution every single week. We have to identify the problem, build the solution, work with other people to kickstart a process, help with the launch, but identify the doers who are going to do this every week in order to be able to solve problems across the company from a breadth perspective. This is the same issue with getting too deeply involved in finance, for example. There are people for that. We need a deep understanding so that we can tackle projects and speak credibly and all the things. But we can't dedicate tons and tons of time to spending in this financial world, or it's going to take us away from the breadth of problems that we need to solve in such an expert generalist role.

Jeremy · 18:08

Yeah. Love it. Well said, Maggie. And I think this is all a great, great summary of this financial acumen topic. And I know that it's relevant to assistants and chiefs of staff alike. And I appreciate you diving in a little bit today. And of course, those listening want to dive in more and learn more from Maggie and learn more about her course. Be sure to reach out to her Leader assistant.com/nova. And then the show notes again for this episode will be at Leader assistant.com/296. So, Maggie, thanks again for sharing your tips and tricks. And always a pleasure speaking with you. And we'll look forward to the next one.

Maggie · 18:52

Yeah, you too. Thanks for having me. Have a good one.

Speaker 2 · 19:06

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