Yeah, excited to have you on. So let's go ahead and dive in. I love your background, and I kind of wish I had done this. If I had, if I could go back and tell my young self something to do, I would have loved to have started out with CPA and audit and just have that experience, because my experience with it has been just coming up straight through the FP&A side, and I really think that's a great way to round it out. So you started your career at Big Forward at PWC before coming to FP&A. And I guess since you started your career on one trajectory, what motivated you to make that switch? And to my earlier point, how did your auditing experience prepare you for your role in FP&A? Yeah,

that's a great question. So I started an audit just like a lot of accountants in my space, in my circle at school and stuff. So I really love doing audit. It was cool. It was challenging. As you may know, it was a really long hours though. We're working a lot being with presidents of company, VPs of company really at a really, really young age. But I always love video games. And I was, I'm in Quebec City, which is a small town kind of in Canada. And there's not much work. It was pre-COVID. So you could not work like remote from everywhere. So I was just looking at jobs. I was not looking for a leap into FP&A, but I always thought that graphs and charts. And I felt like I was more of a business guy, let's say instead of like journal entries and typical accounting stuff. So I was, I was looking for jobs at Ubisoft because I really wanted to be in a company that I love that I enjoy their products. I feel like it's way easier when you love the company to actually love your job and enjoy it and put like 200% efforts into it. So that's, that's why I tried or actually I wanted to transition from actually accounting, typical accounting to FP&A. And it's just, it was just a matter of like, it just happened like that. I wasn't chasing an FP&A opportunity. It's just that was the, the job that was open. So I just applied there. And I felt like my experience in the big four, they really train you to be ready for kind of anything. As I just said, you talk to president, you're like 22 years old, you don't understand anything about accounting. And you're in there talking to president of companies, asking about their financial statements, their budgets and all of that, their BPR. So I felt like it was a logical trajectory for me to follow. So

for me, I was just, I was 100%. So I went NBA into FP&A and I was 100% really just the only financial statement I knew was the income statement. And you know, that, that was where I did everything. So when I got my first senior role, I mean, I knew what a balance sheet was and what a statement of cash flows was, but I'd never cared about them. So that was a bit of a switch. And thinking, you know, in FP&A, obviously, we're very focused on the income statement, but you have to have the three statement model and the understanding of the way, you know, what happens on the income statement, the way it flows through to the other financial statements. Did you find that your background in accounting and audit gave you

more of a full picture understanding? Was that it? Was that helpful to you in some ways? Oh, yeah, 100%. First thing is that I saw kind of a lot of clients in like three years space. So I actually started in a video game company as an auditor. So it gave me some ideas of what you you can do and like how the companies were structured internally. So I saw this graph at a specific place. Let's replicate it at Ubisoft when I entered in my FP&A role. So it gave me a lot of idea, a lot of financial reflexes, you know, like I was helping technician there with the reconciliation, the bank reconciliation. I was helping her a lot because I had seen so many in previous companies, which I could not have done. I think if I got on straight up, you know, like straight from school. So yeah, I feel like it was really helpful on top of developing my reflexes of like managing multiple projects at once. You know, when you're in audit, you're working on three clients at once. That's why you work 70 hours a week. And this workflow keeps coming and coming at you. So yeah, I feel like it was

really helpful. So first FP&A role at Ubisoft. And then, so that's a big company, obviously. But then you moved to POCA and you're now in startup world. So that's that feels like a big shift. So I'm wondering, you know, it may be relative to big company, but just in general, what were some of that when you moved into the SaaS startup world, what were some of the unique challenges that you faced? Was there a different approach that you had to take to budgeting and forecasting in a startup space versus a big going company?

Yeah. Oh man, there's so much to say. There's so much to say here. So yeah, when you're in a bigger company, you actually have a team, you have a BI team that can help you. You have a lot of data to play with, which is actually cool, but sometimes can be overwhelming as well. So you play with all these video games that came out in 2001 and you have all of this data. So yes, it's a great play field. I can say that like that. But it's a great place to be. But when you get in a smaller company, there are some other challenges. Everything is to be built. You know, you get in there, their whole company is running on Excel, which was not the case at Ubisoft, of course. But then you get in there. It was an 80 employees company. When I first got there, just give a little background on poker. It's a SaaS company suffers a service. We sold licenses. It was a nap for manufacturing world connected workers 4.0 manufacturing world, just to give you a little bit background on the company. So it was really techie people. But I was kind of alone. Yes, we had a finance team. There was a budget in place. But in the startup world, you know, the girl that hired me, first she left. Like she called me and she's like, Dave, and I worked with her at PWC before. So she hired me. And I don't know if it's because of me, but she she left just two weeks. So she trained me for two weeks. And then she left and she left me there with like this whole Excel. But she was also the person knowing the HR, the legal, the FBNA, like five hours a week when she had the time. So that's another world. That's a different world. And you don't have that BIT. So you have to figure it out by yourself with the data you have, which you don't have much in a very small company. So you have to, you're very used to play with Tableau. Like I was so hyped, you know, I had Tableau, I was doing cool stuff. But I get there and I'm back to Excel. And we were just buying Luka. So we bought Luka when we were Luka licenses. We didn't actually buy Luka, but you know, yeah, we were very, very rich. So, so yeah, so basically, I was trying to play on Luka. But then again, there's no like data hierarchy behind everything. So you don't have any access to data. And you don't have any team. So that that was one challenge. I really had to shift my mind of like, okay, I'm opening Tableau every day to just do pivot tables into Tableau, to okay, I'm back to Excel back to square one, basically. So this really shifted my mind of like, I can do anything. I can be so much more creative and do some cool charts. And you know, like learn as we go as to, okay, we're making a budget, we're sending it to VCs. And it might get denied. And we they want us to do 20x instead of 10x this year, you know, so that was that was a kind of challenges I was, I was facing. And at the same time, it was really, really cool, really challenging, but really, really cool. Because I was not on my own. I had a team, of course, but I had so much more, I don't know, I'll say that in English, but I could do so much more on my own. Like, nobody was telling me what to do. Like they just trusted me. They're like, Dave, you can do this, and that, and we trust you. Like we trust your expertise. And it's your job to go on Google and ask people like, Glenn, to get some help on on FPN, like harder stuff. Because I was so young, you know, like, I'm 30 years old right now. So I was 26 when I was there. So not a lot of experience. Like, yes, P2B, you see, yes, you be self long hours and all of that. But, and that's one thing I was really afraid. I remember back then, it's like, how am I going to do it? Like, how I'll do it? Like, I don't know, I just do basic, basic charts on Excel. So it was a really, really, really different world. And I hope I answered your question here.

Yeah, yeah. And it's funny, as you're talking, one of the things I love about hosting this podcast is, you know, we're such a niche group of nerds that we could be having this conversation like on barstools and telling war stories, because very similar to you. So my first CFO role was a retail business that had three locations was maybe doing around three to four million a year in revenue. And I left, and I was, it was pretty much just me out of the gates. And I left a team, I was working in telecom, and I had a team of like 31 people working for me. And I had, we had, you know, this is, I'm dating myself, but this is like, and this is in 2007. But we were, had crystal reports back then, which was huge. And we were, you know, at SQL guys and everything. And we were doing some really cool stuff. And then I came to this very small company that was looking to, they had raised seed round and they were looking to leverage and take on some debt. But what I thought was really beneficial was I saw the way that a finance department could run at a large company. And then I knew the way we were able to present financials. And then I saw this small company where the only, they didn't have a monthly close when I got there. They were, you know, basically their tax accountants were doing their books. That's how, you know, small they were. And I guess maybe they do a quarterly close or something. But to take them, and we were able to raise significant funds after that. And I think that the big, one of the reasons we were able to do that is we strove to make our financial reports look as clean and as detailed as at the big company. So it was kind of cool to take that and apply it at a small company. But of course, to do that, you have to find efficiencies. So you talked about you guys were bringing in liquor and find, and trying to find ways that you could aggregate your data and get these bigger reports. Did you find that early on, you know, your startup, so you don't have the staff you want, but the, and you're sort of self directing, but you kind of know where you want to get with it. Did you find yourself leaning into technology more or what were you doing to try to streamline processes to improve the FP&A when you got

there? Yeah, so that was a, that's a super great question. First of all, we were kind of big finance team, like six people out of like 150 when I left. So kind of a big finance team. And we were really close together. Like we all worked at P2WC. We basically emptied the big four accounting firm here, which you will see. So we're really similar minded people and really that really helped me for the FP&A journey. Because if your actuals are like, you can call straight up to the finance team and say, Hey, what's, what's this in the actuals? It helps with your forecast. And it helps explaining to the CFO what's going on. But to jump on what you were saying, actually, when I got there, the Excel were all Excel 100%. And we were just onboarding a looker. But one thing I actually, I actually did is trying to keep, because we were actually accounting the number of licenses we're selling into all into Excel. And also the usage from our end users or customers. And one project that I got in is like, can we analyze which tool that we need next? Like, is it an FP&A tool that we need next? Is it a CPQ tool? So I started going to vendors and we started having a look. So what's the next step for us? And, and you know, like having this, this success, this team success at heart and not being selfish, we ended up going with not an FP&A tool. We're not there yet because our data was kind of small still. So we went for the CPQ route. So we had an ERP and then we onboarded the CPQ because the deal desk process was kind of hard. And then we hired someone from from deal desk and stuff. So yeah, we're trying to leverage technology, but I was, I was going all in on Excel as well. You know, like when I found out that Xlookup existed, it literally, I changed all of my, of my workbook and it changed, it literally changed my life and with the summets and stuff. So we're doing pretty cool stuff all with Excel. And we had a data guy, which was like, I would say more advanced Excel more into like Google script and all of that. So we could, we could have help from him as well because we're really, or the company values, like really like unified solid team. So that was pretty cool. But of course, technology is, is like, you need to embrace it. But I think it's not always the answer. Like, sometime you're just not there yet. I think we needed like to have a shorter close, like closing sequence at the end of the month. So yeah, so that was the next step when I left. But of course, we onboarded a few tools. We tried some stuff. You know, I remember we were on, we onboarded inside squared, which is a tool that plugs in onto your CRM and to Salesforce to give you some data insights and all of that. And they sell you all of this AI stuff. But we were in there as a company, we didn't have enough data. So when you don't have a big sample, the projection and predictions are not any good. So we ended out churning all of that. So we're testing stuff. But at the end of the day, we're trying to improve our process every day. And oh, God, yeah, we did a lot of cool stuff as well. So yeah.

So and that's the other thing about startups. I know. So when you got there, I think you were just a few months into your role at POCA, and then you get informed that the company was going for its series B, VC rays. And I think about seed round, even A round, you can get away with, you know, not exactly back of the napkin financials, but it can be, you know, it's that startup pre-revenue, pre-cash flow kind of thing. And everything is sort of based on, you know, nested assumptions on top of each other. But by the time you get to series B, they're pretty serious about how they're looking at your financials. And you have to really stand up, you know, be able to back up your projections. So tell me a little bit about you walking into the company, being there just a couple of months. This is happening. What your role was, what you learned from it and kind of how you got through

it. Yeah, that's, yeah, oh man, that was a journey. So I got there at September 8, 2020. So just eight months into the pandemic, fresh from Ubisoft. As I told you, my boss that hired me, she left. So I got there, she trained me for two weeks. And then we started. So I have to learn the company. And it's a budgeting session. Or yeah, so it's budgeting time in October. So we do the whole budget. So I'm trying to learn all these new SaaS ratio. So I named them like the CAC ratio, the DB, NER, the net retention rate, the growth churn. All of that I was learning. So I was listening to SaaS story podcast a lot back then during like my commute coming back home. So I go into the budget, I'm meeting everyone the VP of sales to do my budget and all of that. And then the CFO, my boss, LP that I love still to this date, it is really cool. And he's like, they were going to this funding round in the in January of 2021. So I was four months in, had to do to redo the whole budget. And then we started raising. So it was COVID. I think it was less crazy than before. I mean, they didn't have to fly was all distance and all of that. But I was really implicated into building or financials as we literally build the plane as we were flying it. Like literally, like we're developing our ratios, calculating does it make sense to make it a trailing 12 average or does it not make sense to do that? Reading a lot of blogs, tell blogs, SaaS story, all of this. And we were just on zoom, nonstop, my boss and I from 8am to 8pm Monday through Wednesday and then Thursday and Friday, we kept it kind of quiet a little bit. And during the weekend, sometimes we had to work. But it was it was a teamwork. Of course, I wasn't alone, but I had to build all these decks. And I was literally jumping on the calls with the VCs, maybe like the second call. So the CEO and the CTO were going on the first call, I was coming in on the second call and they wanted to a can you share your screen with Excel and go through your financials. Which was cool is one thing that was cool is that we had great financials. So we're pretty healthy. Of course, we had a big cash burn, but we were into the phase like that it was growth at all cost pretty much. Instead of like profitability, like it's more probably that right now. So that was that was a easy way in. I would say it wasn't easy, but it was easier with these great financials. So my role was really to make sure to answer any question they might have. Like, why does your net retention rate goes up in the first quarter of 2019? Which client was that? What's their AR? What's their revenue? So I had to be really well structured to answer any question. Of course, you can always come back, but you're at the process of selling. It's a sales pitch, right? So you have to be solid on your skates. That's what we say in French. You have to be solid. You have to own on your stuff, especially when you're new at a company. So it was a lot of presentation meeting people that sometimes didn't really care of you. You know, like the SF people and you know, like there were just two feet on the table and asking you a question about your company that got sent there. They didn't have a real interest in you. So that was a journey. That was pretty cool. And I have learned so much like I've learned so much of, you know, just just having to be part of this series B and having a serious role because like, of course, I was the data guy. So if I wasn't there one day, like it was my FPNA data. Of course, it could have done it without me, but I was the one that built every graph, every color I was putting in there, every bar chart, everything was me. So that was cool. That was a great role.

Yeah. And those meetings can feel like you're doing a PhD dissertation or something where you're having to, and it's great when you have a track record and you know, you show, you know, whatever your year over year growth is or whatever, and you have the data to back it up. But it was always whether you're talking to potential investors, debt providers, the board, upper management, very nerve-wracking when you have to keep in your head all this data and understand what your assumptions were and all that. And yeah, one trick I learned early on was don't give them everything you know in the first shot because there's always going to be someone. It's usually just one guy who's just not even listening to you. He's just staring at a printed out copy of your budget and he's like fixated on one thing and then he wants to go like three levels deep. So if you give them the high level and just be prepared for that, that guy as you go through.

Oh yeah. And I think the jump on that, I think the preparation was actually, you know, whenever we were doing board decks every quarter, and we had so many notes like below the slides just in case. And most of the time it was as well, you know, like a BPR for us, a business performance review, like, okay, what happened during the last quarter and really going deep down? And oh man, the CFO was so great. Like every time that was something wrong in my data, he could tell like, Dave, what's that? And I could not answer and I will go back to the drawing board. Like it's crazy how experience is like it shows in high skilled people like that. So I learned so much to be actually prepared and more prepared than less prepared because if they don't ask the question fair enough, if they ask and you have the question, you have the answer, then you're looking rock solid. That's great. And

thinking about having, it's great when you have a CFO who's that dialed in and is picking up on the very small things and being able to ask those questions. So that's always an added plus. A lot of times it can feel like you're just out there on your own doing this. So, and I know we talked a little bit before the show about sort of the perils of dealing with mis-budget, unexpected changes, kind of the stuff that goes along with being in the startup world. For you, does anything stand out as something you dealt with or how you handled a particularly challenging situation? And if you have any strategies that you've used that you advise any of our other FP&A listeners for getting through these tough challenges that I know we've all faced.

Oh yeah, and everything can change. And I think it's true for any companies. But yeah, I had some Friday PM, it was 2PM about to leave and the VP of sales calls me like, I'm not too sure about my forecast that we're going to present to the board on Monday. Let's change everything. And I was like, are you serious? And then we change everything because it wasn't too sure, like, you know, like VP of sales and stuff. So I go in and you know, it's all about how you structure your stuff. Like, I used to have a lot of scenarios and you know, all my stuff were kind of automated and stuff. So it was not too bad to change some slides. But that's one thing that happened. You send your budget to the board and then get denied completely. And I saw, I actually saw that the whole team, I think, I think the CTO was crying, legit. Like, it was December. And it was like, Jesus, I can't believe because you know, all the VCs were like, oh, it's not enough. Like, we want you to go from 100 to 400 employees this year. And you're like, Jesus, how are we going to do that? And we presented like aggressive, aggressive ramp up, maybe 300. And it's not enough. And we have to redo the whole budget all over again. But I never get discouraged by that. I mean, sometimes I do and I have a story about that. But I never get discouraged because it's when you do an undo, like, it's, it's because you're working, right? And it's not because I try to never take it personal. It's just a fast moving environment. And we, they told me when I joined, you know, like, it's not going to be like as as quiet as Ubisoft, like it's, it's a roller coaster. And we're using Slack and my CFO at actually a roller coaster next to his name. So it was known, you know, but sometimes we it's even though you know, sometimes it's just hard, like, I could feel the pressure on my shoulders, even though I wasn't the CTO or the CEO, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's used, it's carrying the waves of like all these, these numbers. And it's like it needs, it needs to be changed. And we need to change everything. And, and you know, when you change last minute, like how many errors it can be. And I remember what I remember one day, we're like, we're visiting the whole revenue strategy. So like, are we targeting new, new region? Like, are we going Europe? Are you going Asia and stuff like that? Because it was kind of big company. And we, we, me and my, my previous CFO, we call that the June 3rd day, because it was June 3rd or something. And when I Googled this day, it was like a, an emperor or a king that died this day. And it was the sales in the marketing that could not, you know, align. And we're just texting each other on Slack. It's, oh my God, it's June 3rd again. And so yeah, that's, that's startup life. So I keep, I have really great, super near really great memories of that. But it can be really hard sometimes. And if people listen to us and they can relate to what I'm saying right now is just try to not care that much. I know it's hard. Like I was biting all of my nails. I was stressed out because it's changing. And you're like, Oh my God, did I make a mistake? Am I good in my projections and stuff? So, so yeah, try to not care too much. And I think it's something I, I started early in my career. Same thing at PWC when I was an audit, try to not care too much. You did a mistake in your auditing procedures or whatever. It's fine. You'll make it true. It's not, it's not your company. Like you got discovered. You're good. So, so yeah. I

mean, talk about trial by fire. You go, you know, you're still relatively new to FP&A when all this happens, but you go through the fundraising. And then I know another part of your career is in, I think you said it was in 2023. You're one of the first employees that finds out about this pretending potential merger. And before we give away the ending there, but due diligence is its own beast. I mean, it's, you know, it's potentially more difficult than than the fundraising because you're getting the acquirer or the person that you're merging with the due diligence that they're doing is they're picking up every rock and looking under it. So you've got to be really tight in everything you do. And I know, you know, that goes to the accounting side as well, depending on who's, you know, who's acquiring whom. But tell me a little bit about M&A activity and what your role was in that.

Yeah. So I remember it was somewhere around March of 2023 or something like that. And the CEO comes in and is like Dave Felix, which was the director of finance in my office. And we're actually five only that knew what's going on. And he's like, a blah, blah, blah, you know, there's an table. And I don't want you to tell anyone. And I was like, Oh, cool, cool. But you know, am I working to lose my job in a few months, you know, which is it's kind of scary when you think about that. It's a bit, it's a bit inception. You're working very hard to maybe, maybe you're got fire. You just don't know, maybe it's not going to work. Maybe it's going to be a lot of work for nothing. So yeah, we started the journey. And then, you know, you, you, you question everything that you made like, is this accurate? Are my numbers right? Am I following the right, the right ways of accounting stuff? So my role was really more into the beginning, I would say, because I was really into F P and A straight, you know, I wasn't doing nothing about taxes, nothing about accounting itself. Yes, I have financial statements, knowledge, but it was not like my specialization. So when it came to the due diligence, we really had the team on our side with all the taxes because we were selling to different states as well. So that's a little bit more complicated. So they were taking care of that. But anything I could help, like the projection of the sales, what happened when their client turned five years ago, I was to go to guys. So I was making all of the charts for the financial, so more of the KPI cash burn and everything. So that was my role, kind of, but it was also inserting many, many, many, many questions. So when there was like more people in the race, until it got to the actual due diligence where there was only one person. So it was my role to like, oh, it's 6 p.m. I'm about to leave. Oh, no, you don't leave right now. We have 20 questions that just came in and you have to answer. And as it kept going, it was easier and easier, I think, because we answered some question and we could reuse the formulas, but the answers and stuff. So my role was really to be there because I had a really great knowledge of the company as well, being in Fpna, you talk to every department, that's another strength we have. So what happened there? And we kind of have a small sample of clients. It was kind of easy to remember what happened. And so I was the guy to tell the stories and like, oh, I think this happened in that. And we called data check and oh, yeah, that's true. It makes sense. And then we could answer. So I was the go to guy for a lot of stuff from bringing out the contracts on Google Drive, from like the past employee of the first day the company just started to answering the high level financial question to preparing the decks, preparing some random decks as well, like only three, four, five slides with 15 hidden slides as well, just in case that I was saying, you have to overprepared because once again, it's a pitch cell. And now that's the real pitch cell, you know, like, that's the real game. So again, it's it can be really stressful. And you're in those meeting with the CEO, the CTO and every important people, the acquiring CEO and stuff. And like, you're, I remember at one time I did a joke and everybody laughed with the CEO didn't laugh my CEO. And I was like, he told me after his like, that was close to be like a really bad Joe. I was like, oh, no, no, but that was fine. That was fine. I was really close to the guy and everybody laughed. And but you know, it's it's going almost on the edge. It was a little bit stressful. So yeah, it was a great, a great journey

overall.