Entering a Mature FP&A Market as a Start-Up - with Julio Martinez Co-Founder and CEO, Abacum

Julio Martinez, Founder and CEO of Abacum has been involved in Finance for most of his career. He then transitioned into the technology industry and was responsible for launching products for 4 years before founding Abacum.

During this episode, we will cover 4 primary topics with Julio:

• The vision behind founding Abacum
• Three common FP&A mistakes
• FP&A’s role in developing corporate strategy
• Unique challenges of a start-up in a crowded category

What was the catalyst for founding Abacum? After 20 years working with Finance teams across hundreds of companies, Julio saw and felt his client's pain of managing the financial planning and modeling process which was an area that Julio had seen challenges repeating again and again for his clients.

What are the most common challenges facing the FP&A leader in 2024? The most important one is that FP&A teams need near real-time access to financial and operational data to deliver near real-time insights based on the metrics that matter to the senior leadership team. Today, it is a very manual process for most FP&A teams.

The above need suggested that FP&A is being asked to go beyond period-specific modeling, planning, and budgeting and be able to have insights on near real-time performance, at least every week, and highlight the metrics trends quickly to the executive decision-makers.

Over the last 10 years, FP&A's role has been elevated to a more strategic function that is involved in analyzing performance trends and metrics "in-period" to accelerate how their insights are factored into the next period's operating decisions and priorities.

One of the recent posts that Julio made on LinkedIn focused on the most common mistakes that FP&A organizations make. A classic first mistake under indexing the importance of partnering and building strong relationships with other departments and their leadership. This "relationship capital" will result in gaining additional insights into the issues impacting the financial performance trends. A second challenge is the FP&A professional is great at modeling and using analytical tools, but often does not understand the business well enough to gain a seat at the executive table to go beyond reporting on performance trends, but also on what to do about the challenges facing the business.

Many finance teams are spending 60% - 80% of their time gathering and modeling financial performance trends, and if they could flip that time to 60% - 80% of their time being spent on the analysis and then solution ideation specific to what the financial operations reports are surfacing.

Next, we discussed the unique challenges of introducing a new product into a function and process that has been using technology and mature vendors for many years and even decades in certain industries. Julio says it starts with diving deep into your target market's and prospects' business to answer how your product meets their highest priority pain points and the challenges that are specific to their environment. Secondly, Julio highlighted having a "strong opinion" and "innovation" into how technology can address business processes and challenges that still exist even after using alternative technologies or approaches. Another key factor is to ensure that some of the key customer-facing resources are "domain experts" who have served in the role of their buyers and users and can quickly develop shared experience and trust-based relationships with both the customers and the internal product team.

If you are responsible for leading an FP&A team, or use the outputs of the FP&A team to plan, manage, and improve your operational function this conversation with Julio Martinez, Founder and CEO Abacum is a great listen!

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