43. The methods of a disruptive CFO - with Victor Wong, Flipp CFO

 This episode sees Hannah speaking to Victor Wong, CFO of Flipp, a planning and savings app that helps shoppers.

As CFO, Victor is responsible for leading the development and successful execution of Flipp’s strategy as well as the operational effectiveness of the company.

Prior to assuming the role of CFO, Victor established and scaled both the Content Operations and Finance teams. Leading Content Operations, he formed a 140 member team, working with 1,500+ retailers to deliver local savings and deal content to shoppers across North America. 

Before joining Flipp, Victor spent eight years at Ernst & Young, six years in the Assurance practice, and two years in the Transaction Advisory Services group working on both buy-side integration and transaction diligence.

This episode covers: 

• Top tips on how to support a finance team
• Creating realistic mission statements
• The symbiotic relationship between a CFO and their team
• Listening to new ideas and implementing them effectively 
• Building an environment of collaboration and engendering new disruptive mentalities

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Transcript

Ad 1: 0:00

Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance. The CFO role is changing rapidly, moving from cost controller to strategic visionary. And with every change comes opportunity. We are here to help you take advantage of this transition to win at work. drive your career forwards and lead with confidence. Join Hannah Munro, Managing Director of ITAS, a financial transformation consultancy, as she interviews key experts to give you real world advice and guidance on how to transform your processes, people and data. Welcome to CFO 4.0, the future of finance.

Hannah Munro: 0:48

Hi, everybody, and welcome to this episode of CFO. So firstly, I want to thank you, all of our listeners, for your continued support. It's been a crazy month this month of downloads. I'm very excited to hear we've hit 8,000 downloads. So yeah, so keep your feedback coming, guys. topic ideas. I'd love to hear them. And yeah, we've got some great guests coming up over the next couple of weeks. So talking of great guests with me today, I have Victor Wong. So Victor is CFO of Flip. And today we're going to talk about becoming a disruptive CFO. What does that actually mean? And how is the role of the CFO changing? So Victor, fantastic to have you on the show. Thank you for joining me.

Victor Wong: 1:33

Yeah, thanks for having me, Hannah.

Hannah Munro: 1:35

So tell me a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Flip as well. So what do you guys do and how did you end up there?

Victor Wong: 1:44

Yeah, absolutely. So for all your listeners out there, as Hannah said, my name is Victor Waugh. I'm the CFO of Flip Corporation. Some of your listeners might not have heard of us because we operate mainly right now in the North American market. So we're a free shopping app that helps shoppers provide for their families by making life more affordable. That's our mantra. That's our mission. That's what gets us all excited and come to work every day. But more specific from a business aspect of it is we are a retail technology company that helps get retailers and consumer packaged goods. So for the CPG, their local savings and deals message out to the shopper. So think about the situation where you're planning a meal for your family and you're kind of at a loss of where to go. Flip is that app that you should go to to find what to put on the table that week from a food perspective. So apples, oranges, meats, vegetables, all those necessities. We will help you kind of find the best deals and savings that allows you to provide for your family. So that's the mantra and the reason for being for the company. And as for my role, it's great that you kind of kicked off this theme about disruptive and all that. So we've obviously, I've been with the company for almost 10, yeah, almost 10 years now. Okay, wow. I'm looking at the years and counting that. So it's been 10 years now. So I was team member 21, yeah, when I joined Flip. So that was quite a while ago. And I came from professional services. So I came from RCM. did my time traditionally as, you know, six years in the auto practice and then two years in the MAA group. And then I joined Flip after that. And so the role has obviously evolved since I started 10 years ago in Flip. I think one of the things is I would say I'm not necessarily the traditional kind of head of finance type role only. My responsibilities right now and partly has been always focused on how do we execute and deliver results to the company, and then also help with the operational effectiveness of the company. I think the other thing I would add for your listeners is I think as the CFO, there's an important role to play from a strategic perspective as well. Strategy can be this generalized word that people throw out there, but at the end of the day, it's a plan to get to a goal. And I think the CFO role plays a very important part into helping the company navigate from point A to point B, including all those challenges that crosses everybody's way.

Hannah Munro: 4:25

It's quite interesting as well. You're talking about how you're taking more responsibility for the operational side. And that's quite a theme that we're seeing where we're speaking to CFOs as well. So what percentage of time are you spending on different types of activities, would you say? I

Victor Wong: 4:43

would say like the traditional, because I also have a great team that works with me. on this. So there's aspects of various leaders that depend on. So me personally, from a time focused perspective, I would say it's more of an 80-20. So like 20% when it comes to going to the board, the investors, doing the monthly, quarterly reporting. So there's an aspect of the traditional head of finance role that I play. But I mean, I think that's important. And obviously from a governance perspective, from the traditional sense, that's very important. But looking at opportunities, creating those opportunities and helping the rest of the executive team look at their aspects of the business and how do we bring it all together to service that mission that I was talking to you about that gets us excited and out of bed every morning. I would say I spend about 80% of my time on that. So I think that's where the, and hopefully you talk to my peers as well that they find the same way, but it's where I think time well spent Because again, it's everyone at the exec table bringing a different perspective that truly kind of exemplifies what we do and helps the company be the best that they can be.

Hannah Munro: 5:57

Yeah, and I love your terminology about bringing, you know, realism to strategy in that way. And I think what's interesting having spoke to, you know, quite a few people both on and off the podcast is that, you know, that split is what I think a lot of people aspire to be and to have, but sometimes they can get bogged down in the other elements that are involved in their role. And so that strategic piece can sometimes take a backseat to, you know, even though, you know, it's what everyone wants to be focused on in that CFO role. So what do you think has enabled you to actually to take that time and to be able to step up and spend, you know, that great proportion of your time on more of the strategic focus?

Victor Wong: 6:40

Yeah, like I mentioned, having a strong team and a great team that you can depend on. I think the trust aspect, the delivery, the quality delivery aspect, like I can't rave enough about the team that I work with. And so that's very important to having that foundation. I think second is really setting the roles and responsibilities so that everyone understands the role they play in this, right? So running a company is a team game and everyone has their strengths, their areas of focus. And if everyone knows how they contribute to the overall goal, I think that really helps kind of set the tone for the company so that you're all running forward together towards the goal versus kind of getting crossed up and, you know, using us and, you know, the sports analogies, like who, who, who picks up the ball and who's running with it and where, where are they running it to. Right. Um, so I think that's, that's very important to, for, to create focus is what are you responsible for? And, you know, again, since, you know, we're, we are talking to CFO, we're talking about finance, like what is that KPI everyone's accountable for? And there's, you know, especially at the exec level, there is definitely that one company metric, um, that each exec should have that accountability to. And so I think really setting that up and send that management system up really helps kind of manage the entire kind of business and allows for that specific focus.

Hannah Munro: 8:04

And just to go back to some of the conversations we've had, obviously you guys are doing a lot of work with brick and mortar retailers at the moment who are going through a huge amount of disruption, not just COVID. I think the landscape itself is changing. So tell us a little bit about that shift and that change and that disruption. You know, what are you guys doing to help and support with that? And, you know, what are sort of the things you're seeing out there?

Unknown: 8:29

Yeah.

Victor Wong: 8:30

Yeah. And I guess I'll take a step back because, you know, especially in Canada where Flip is based in Toronto specifically, we're definitely not out of the woods yet. I think for your listeners out there that are listening globally, we, you know, from a government perspective, we are only in what we call phase two or stage two out of three stages in terms of reopening. So we've been a lot of the Non-essential retailers have actually been closed for the better half of last year and a little bit of this year, like the first quarter or so. And even right now, they only allow for limited capacity for people to actually go into the stores and shop. And so for us, when we start rolling back to the year and a half, when the pandemic hit us roughly around the March timeframe, I still remember that vividly because we were monitoring the situation and we asked our team members to take their laptops and things home because we don't think that they'll be returning to work. And at that moment, everyone thought it was like, yeah, this would be like two weeks or like at most a month. And it's been a year and a half since we've been sitting in front of computers learning how to use Google Meets and Zoom. When that happened, especially that first stage, the retail world, at least how we observed it at Flip, was really reacting. They didn't know what was happening. Things were just shut down because a lot of government restrictions caused a pause in their business and it disrupted it immensely. And then as we went into, say, June of last year, so this is like now a year ago, so the next quarter, We saw retailers adapt. We saw retailers adapt, start having Click and Collect. I'm not sure if that's a service that your listeners would be familiar with, but the e-com aspect, they would shop online and then pick up in the parking lot. Someone would bring it to their cars. So we were, at least I was quite surprised, maybe not surprised now looking back at it, at the resiliency of the economy, right? Because When there were restrictions, obviously the retailers, in order to survive, had to figure out a way to service their customers. This wasn't something that they throw their hands up, put the white flag up and say, yeah, we're done. That's obviously not the case. So the adoption of the combination of e-commerce slash physical interaction, or at least safely physical interacting through dropping off the goods into someone's car, That got sped up pretty fast. And I was pretty amazed, especially in the Canadian space, how fast that got sped up. And then you fast forward that into the summertime. So this is like the Q3 timing. And a lot of retailer apps, like their own apps on the phone, you can start doing the ordering, pickup, scheduling, all those things all online. And I'm not talking about the traditional... like electronic stores, some of the hard goods, right? I'm talking about grocery stores. So things that you don't often shop online for, they've built infrastructure in mere months to be able to satisfy them. And so now we advanced it all the way to today. So this is like a year and a half now. Everyone's got a pretty robust e-com, at least shopping platform. And there's optionalities now for the shopper. So you can get it delivered to your house. You could go do the click and collect that I mentioned earlier. Or you can still go to your traditional in-store shopping aspect to it. So, I mean, overall, I think there was definitely some scary times for retailers and the economy earlier on. And I'm just talking about obviously the business side of the pandemic. But when you come out of it, and it's great to see retailers taking that opportunity, that disruptive nature of it, and making improvements to what they do in terms of service offerings to their shoppers. And I would say for us at Flip, we are also trying to help enable and further advance that movement for them with specifically what we do. And one of the things that we noticed during the pandemic was, and I think if you guys noticed it as well, is stock downs and shortages. So a lot of the advertising materials that retailers have put out, they're done weeks, maybe months ahead of time, just so that there's a whole planning cycle involved. But as they felt and as shoppers that we saw with the pandemic is supply chains get disrupted, but their advertising material aren't as agile as they want to be, especially with the process that's at least, like I said, in North America started off with print. So there wasn't a digital first creation. So at Flip, what we want to help them with from a retail technology perspective is provide them with the tools and the platform to be able to create those advertising materials, to get their message out to shoppers in a digital-first format so that you can change the prices on the fly. You could take products off your advertising material and replace it with something else if there's a stock-out situation. So, I mean, those are just kind of the surface-level things that we're talking about here. But, yeah, we want to continue this trend where Retailers now are able, willing, and wanting to go digital first because they see the advantages of it, whereas any of the old kind of mentality kind of got removed because of this disruption. So there's definitely an opportunity there for us to help out.

Hannah Munro: 14:09

Absolutely. And I guess the challenge is actually making that shift. It's, you know, at the moment, we've got some big drivers, we've got an impending need and motivation to change. And I think the interesting piece, I guess, is how retailers are supporting that change. And what else, you know, you talked about things like click and collect and on, you know, and those things, but in the UK, sort of, we've done a lot with, you know, online ordering. So it's quite interesting to hear how different it is. And what do you think is next in terms of for that that retail sector you know do you think it's going to shift to mostly online or do you think there's still a real requirement out there for that for that brick and mortar presence

Victor Wong: 14:55

yeah I mean unfortunately I don't have a crystal ball on those aspects but I could definitely provide kind of my opinion on on what what things are looking potentially looking like in the future I think just judging from and

Hannah Munro: 15:08

and

Victor Wong: 15:09

Everything is about timing. For example, right now, given the pent-up demand that we have in Canada, especially in Toronto here, with the restrictions that the government has placed, you see a lot of brick-and-mortar stores, especially with the capacity limitations, that there's lines literally wrapped up around, lining up to get into the store. So there's definitely a pent-up demand to go in-store shopping. Whether that's for entertainment purposes, social purposes, or whatever it is, I think the in-store aspect, at least as it stands right now, definitely satisfies some consumer kind of need right now. And it might not just be purely related to buying something. So I don't know if that will obviously last go forward because I think there is a new normal that will get created. What has been interesting is, and I don't think necessarily it's been created through the pandemic. It's definitely something in North America that's probably created through Amazon is I'm often pleasantly surprised at the logistical abilities of some of these bricks and mortar stores to do the econ fulfillment. I think Amazon definitely set the tone with their Prime membership and their same day, depending, I guess, where you live in the world, it's either within a couple of hours, within a day, or within two days of shipping. And there's some bricks and mortar stores now that that kind of they set the bar and so an expectation in the consumer psyche that that's that's what happens right like i go online i click on this this item that i want to purchase and i get not instant gratification like in store but like two to three hours or the same day or in two days i get it delivered to my store step um and a lot of the other retailers are traditionally bricks and mortars have adopted that that same kind of delivery speed right whether it's you know, a mental kind of like psychological aspect to certain things where it's like, okay, if I click this and I don't know if I'm going to get this like within a week, should I actually click and transact with it? So I think they want to remove kind of that psychology with e-comm. So I've seen some great successes, especially where I live, that they've delivered on that. I think there's definitely a continuation of that going forward. But again, taking it back to kind of the finance questions, like before, In-store retailers or traditionally in-store bricks and mortar retailers, I would say the deployment of resources is really to enhance that in-store experience. But now, with the combination of both and the ability to reach your customers in all these areas, I think the thing for CFOs that's going to be really challenging is how do you deploy your resources? No longer do you have a singular focus, but you have in-store resources. And you have e-comm that you have to satisfy. And it's not cheap, right, to build that infrastructure or even to outsource it. It's not cheap, right? So you have two things that you have to service, but you still have only one budget. So how do you deploy the resources as best? And I don't think it's a 50-50, like split it and deploy it. So from a finance perspective, I think that would be the challenging thing, but definitely an opportunity to position the company in that light. whether you go, you know, I don't think you could go one or the other nowadays, but I also don't think you can go 50-50 either on bricks and mortar slash e-comm and online.

Hannah Munro: 18:38

Because the bricks and mortar piece does give you a bit of an advantage, doesn't it, in terms of, and I think this is always the interesting piece, and I think to your point about the CFO playing that role in figuring out the splits and that strategic view of whether it should be fully online. You know, can you use the bricks and mortar piece to your advantage? And I guess the scale as well, because whether we'll have these massive stores, you know, super stores and that traditional way of working, it could be very different over the next few years.

Unknown: 19:12

Yeah.

Victor Wong: 19:13

Yeah, absolutely. Like you could, you could look at a traditional or traditional bricks and mortars retail, like an Ikea where even the goods that they sell, you know, boxes of, of like furniture, you could totally have that a hundred percent on e-comm. Like you don't need the bricks and mortars, but from the Australia strategic perspective, the bricks and mortars is a showpiece, right? It's the showpiece where you walk in, they lead you through, they lead you through that kind of the room setups to entice the the shopper and inspire them to discover new products, right? So that's their strategy. And I don't think that's going to go away. So while they can just, you know, turn the whole thing into an e-com play and just have it, you know, they're already pre-packaged in the boxes, right? Like perfect for shipping. But I don't think they're going to get rid of the bricks and mortars because I think it's a key way of displaying their merchandise so that it facilitates that discovery, that inspiration for the shopper. And so, yeah, that'll be interesting on how they play. Cause I know in Canada, they already starts to set up additional kind of bricks and mortar pickup locations so that you can like go to the store, but like, if you don't want to carry it all the way from that, from like, from those distances, you go to a closer kind of drop off and pickup point and order from there and just pick up those boxes. But I think the showroom is still very relevant to them. Yeah.

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Hannah Munro: 21:07

Oh, absolutely. And much to my husband's disgust, I might add, I do consider a trip to Ikea a date night. So I would say they definitely got the experience piece down. But that is it, isn't it? And it's that balance. And I guess that's one of the big challenges. We talked about, first thing was around disruption, but as a CFO, making those choices about how you build experience and how you support people the strategy of the business, whatever that might be. But we're talking retail at the moment. And what do you think a CFO needs to consider when they're going into these kinds of conversations? Because the obvious financial answer is to go e-commerce. Let's be honest, if you had IKEA on a piece of paper and you've never been there, you might consider that it would be more financially viable to shift everything online. But sometimes I think numbers can... aren't the only piece to the puzzle that, you know, that you need to have in your head.

Victor Wong: 22:11

Yeah, no, that's a very great point for your listeners to keep in mind. It's like numbers, like, again, you know, finance, everyone just sees dollars and numbers associated with the role. But the one thing I would call out is it's the numbers, the dollars, all ground decisions, right? but decisions should be made solely on the numbers. So I think what I kind of want your listeners hopefully to take away with is like, as you scale and participate in a business that's disruptive and all that, I think it does start off with where does the company want to go? Where is the aspiration that the company has? And this is like the typical, like what's your three to five to 10 year plan? And I know that sometimes sounds scary. It sounds scary for me when I first started, but it doesn't have to be that, you know, manifesto that, you know, a hundred page business plan that you fall to a tee. This is literally exec team gets into a room and it's like, okay, what do you want to be in five, 10 years? And what's that aspiration? It doesn't have to be, it could be on the back of the napkin to be quite honest, but just to have that alignment with the exec team on the direction of the company is very important to start off with. So that's why I would kind of employ your listeners to, if they're having those types of conversations, make that the most important and the focal point of those discussions about deciding where the future of the business goes. The second part of it, and this is where the CFO comes in, it's like now that you understand what the direction of the business that the team wants to take it, what does that look like in numbers? And again, going back to the theme of like, let's put it on the back of the napkin. Don't have to like, you know, get this like 100 tab spreadsheet to model everything out. Just put some numbers down. And this has to be based on, you know, your current business model, your current process, your current monetization. And to really kind of stress that down. Like, can you get to that destination with what you currently have? Or does that need to change? I think that's the most important part that I think the CFO can help with is like having that foresight to look in the future. I'm not like going back to my earlier comment, not looking for that crystal ball, but at least some sense of reality on like, can this actually work? Right. Because it's, it's looking at what you have and whether that needs to change in order to take advantage of those opportunities. And I would also employ listeners not to focus on like problem solving, but it's really opportunity creation. I think that's where kind of this, this, The disruptive nature, the scaling nature really needs to happen. And you can't really put the clamps on ideas at this early stage. Because if you can't dream, then you're really just operating a business. And operating is like when you get to a size and you're running. But right now, we're talking about how to scale and build up the business, right? So actually, I could give you a quick example on how this all kind of played out for myself personally at Flip. was like when I first started 10 years ago, we had aspirations of working with all North American retailers. So that was the goal. That was like the five to 10 year dream, like working with and partnering with all North American retailers. And I'm really talking the large and mid-sized retailers, not necessarily the small local mom and pops yet. So that was a 10 year dream 10 years ago. And what the mission there was to help them take their print advertising and bring them to a digital first aspect. Okay. So that, that was, that was the mission 10 years ago. And so I looked at the current process and this is like literally probably the third month I was, I was, I was at the company and I saw the operational process of how we turned the printed asset into a digital asset. And I literally did a back of the napkin math. I'm like, okay, if we wanted to go, and I think there was approximately 500 retailers we want to work with. So I did the quick back of the napkin math. I'm like, if we had to do this, like if we ran our current process and we had to achieve our aspirations of working with 500 retailers, I would need 400 people just to run the process. Like this is not the whole company. This is just the operational process. And I was like, okay, this is not going to work. This is not going to work because that scale is not scalable at all. So that's what's been, this is the grounding part, right? This is like, here's a dream. Here's like understanding how the business runs and putting some numbers to it. So that's what I meant by that. So this is like impossible if we were to achieve that aspiration with what we did. So we actually changed the process. We, We started building a system. So it was a mixture of offshoring the work and then creating systems to start to automate the work. Because we knew that we couldn't start from zero and just build automation. We needed a mixture of human interaction and then machine learning. So we started building that up. And that's how we started to scale the business was as we... that also gave the rest of the company, including the sales team, confidence that we could take on more and more retailers, right? Because if I go back to the original problem set and we kept operating the business the way that we were operating, it was like 400 people. And just for the operation side, that would be quite the cost, not to mention just like people management would be very costly as well. So yeah, that's kind of my example. Hopefully that resonates with some of your listeners. But yeah, That's the finance hat with me. That's what the finance hat on that allowed us to kind of think about what it looks like, not to shut down the possibilities and dreams, but how do we actually create opportunities to make that a reality? And that's the important part that I think the CFO can play is like bring some reality into the dream, but also be able to deliver the results and make it happen. Because I'm happy to say that we do work with all of North American retailers now, 10 years after, and we don't have... And we don't have 400 people working on just the operational process. We do have, you know, the outsourcing established and then also the automation well established now 10 years in.

Hannah Munro: 28:41

Yeah, and I think that's a really good example of how finance is an enabler because, you know, when we When people talk about the traditional view of finance, it's the no person, you know, it's the person you go to, to get a yes or a no. And actually what, what we're talking about here, what that example shows is actually, it's not about, it's not about a no, it's about yes, but it's a, you can do this, but this is what you need to have in place and actually feed, like you say, feeding into more than just a financial aspect, actually helping them understand the realities of what that would mean. And I wish it's challenging, you know, it's hard to you know it's too easy to say no and it's a lot harder to sort of step up so and you know have those conversations and have those ideas so what are your you know for those that are sitting out here and going yeah okay so maybe I'm more of a you know I say no more than perhaps I should or I could so what are your top tips for being that supportive sort of right hand

Victor Wong: 29:42

yeah I think

Hannah Munro: 29:44

the

Victor Wong: 29:44

The place I go to on that question is really about empowerment. So having, like going back to it, it's running a business as a team game. And I have a perspective as the CFO on the finances and the numbers. So obviously to your point, like, yeah, we typically can just say, no, it's not in the budget, right? That's like the common answer, right? I could just like, you know, create it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's not in the budget. But for me, if someone has an ask and the view that I want them to take is I want to help them achieve that ask as long as it's good for the business. But the perspective I bring in, this is where the collaboration comes in, is I want them to see my point of view on like we have certain financial goals that we need to hit in year and then also in the future. So is the ask, and I'm talking about big ask not the tactical ask but are these asks really helping achieve both like short delivery on short-term objectives but also don't deviate our path or change our path to our long-term goal and vision and what i need from them um is i need to see that that pitch right like give me the business case um and facilitate and like provide me the context so that we are all on the same page so that we can actually look at the decision together on the same playing field, right? Because I would say I probably hold obviously more financial knowledge than most in the company, but they hold the knowledge on their specific aspect of their business. So if it's a sales ask, I don't know sales, right? So they need to articulate to me why is that important on their sales side, whereas I tell them on my side, this is how I look at it from a finance perspective. So I think it's really that conversation and understanding encouraging them and empower them to have those conversations with me or, you know, someone on my team on the finance side to get to the better option. So we, at Flip, we call that like option C because one of us comes in with A, one of us comes with B, and then we come out with option C because it's that collaborative approach that really kind of, you know, that leverages everybody's knowledge and aspect to it that makes us better.

Hannah Munro: 32:06

And how as a CFO do you actually approach those kind of conversations? You know, what is it that makes them successful? Because it's so easy when somebody is expecting you to turn around and say no for them to come in with a, what's the word, maybe a pre-expectation of how that meeting is going to go. So how do you sort of manage to get them on side and understanding your view whilst helping, like you say, support that collaboration process?

Unknown: 32:35

Yeah.

Victor Wong: 32:35

It's funny you mentioned that. I feel like some of the recent asks, I don't think they come in thinking that I'd say no because I get the asks. So there's not that gate that I've created. But I think that's great that everyone could be open about the ask because, like I said, going back to scaling about business, I think my mindset is really around not to problem solve, but it's like, I'm always willing to listen to opportunities. I think that's the one thing that I would encourage your listeners who are in a position to do so, is to just listen, right? I always have our goals, both revenue, profitability, and all the financial metrics in the back of my head. So I know that's what we can do and what we can't do. But if I also, like I said, I also encourage and ask the person that's making the request, for that business case so that they actually think through how do we make this happen without necessarily changing those key financial metrics that we talked about. I mean, that would be the perfect scenario. It's like we make this change, it betters the company, but it doesn't impact the metrics. The other side of it then would be an investment ask, right? So it's like we have this big strategic initiative, we need more resources, but it's going to better the future in the long run. So the view I take on that, it's like you're making an educated investment into the request. Because at the end of the day, if I were to sum up what a CFO does is resource allocation, because you're placing the resources in the areas that will drive the biggest growth of the company. And that's kind of the responsibility, I would say, of the CFO in a nutshell, right? It's like how you deploy resources to generate the highest ROI for the business, both short-term and long-term. And so with that in mind, it is asking, and sometimes you can't have perfect data to make a decision, right? But it's a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data points that you need to collect. But this is where asking for that business case, and I think that I've said that a few times now, the business case where they not only pitch you, give you the sales pitch of why they need the resources, but I also... help them or ask them to do the financial calculations and how this will impact the business for short term, long term. I think having that type of rigor and process into investment making decisions is important, especially at our size. We're 400 plus people now. And so that rigor really needs to happen or else we'll just, I miss those days, but I know we can't have those days as a startup anymore where we chase after opportunities and everyone's really excited. we now have to make deliberate, thoughtful choices because there's so many things we could do, but we really need to actually create focus for the business to, again, going back to what I said at the beginning, like really focus on how and where we are at on our progress bar to that mission and vision that we set in the business. So I think that that's where I would say from a process perspective, I would ask is really have the requester perspective present the business case, especially for these large investment requests.

Hannah Munro: 35:54

And I sort of heard a few things through that. I'm going to pick up with you actually, because it sounds like you've got a bit of a process that you go through internally about evaluating, almost like, like you say, a pitch. You're always treating it like a VC process where they pitch an idea, you do some verification. Do you have like an actual structured process around it? It was more this, this is the process that you go through in your head.

Victor Wong: 36:19

Yeah, no, we actually have a, we actually have a, what we call the strategic initiative review process that we actually run every six weeks so far. So I'll roll it back up. So I work with, so I also look after the strategic management side of the business and I have a director who looks after it. He does an amazing job at helping us run this process. So first we leverage a tool called the OGSM, which is, We took a page out of P&G, Procter & Gamble's playbook, where they have a document that summarizes the company's objectives, their goals, their strategies, and their measures. So really, again, a very KPI-driven concept. But in the OGSM, which is a tool, a scorecard tool, what sits on top of that is what they call the playing-to-win framework, which basically asks, what's your mission? What does winning look like to you? which, you know, where to focus, like so geographies, demographics, and then how do you win? And then what's the capabilities that you need to build? What are management systems that you need to build? So we've ran that process to come up with an asset, which we call our corporate multi-pager. So it's like a multi-page document that basically lists out all those questions that are answers to those questions that I talked about. So we review that as a company and exec team around every six months, just to ensure that We tick any learnings that we made during execution. We update our multi-pager so it's a living and breathing document. But we also share that with the team so that they can frame any decision-making around that, right? They could challenge each other. And this is the part of scaling as well, right? So that they're all not always just coming to ask and asking questions. There is a set strategy that we all aligned on that they can challenge each other based on that framework. And then every six weeks, as I was mentioning, For any of these big, what we call strategic initiatives, these are big investments that might not yield in-year revenue results, but we're looking to the future. We set milestones for the teams to execute on, and every six weeks we review where we stand on those milestones, whether we need to invest more resources, pull back, change direction, edit direction, change the milestones, whatever that might be. That keeps everybody connected. as well so that we all know what's happening in the business. And I'm talking about, you know, a team of 34, 40-ish directors that look after 400 people. We do need to, we need that leadership team to stay very close together and very up to date on exactly what's happening with the business, challenges, opportunities, et cetera. So that's the process that we run on, yeah, from the kind of the yearly process to the, monthly process to the every six weeks process. Yeah. So it's something that was born, I think, yeah, around the same time we kind of entered a pandemic because we wanted more focus for the business, but we've been running it ever since.

Hannah Munro: 39:31

Yeah.

Unknown: 39:31

Yeah.

Hannah Munro: 39:31

And so when you think about some of the changes that you as a business have seen, COVID, that was one of the big shifts and it's one you've actually adopted and I'm guessing continuing to use it moving forwards as well.

Victor Wong: 39:47

Yeah, absolutely. I think the one thing, and maybe for other businesses too, is that some of your listeners can attest to, but COVID really caused us to focus everything. When we first entered it, the focus was really ensuring the business continued operations. Again, it was such an uncertain time. So that was the main focus. And we knew that in order to do so, we couldn't divert our resources to everything to try to tackle everything. So we needed specifically, what are those things going back to the mission vision? Like what's the key KPIs that we really need to hit in order to ensure our business's success? And then what are those strategies that would really kind of pull on those levers. So that's how, yeah, that's exactly how kind of we took on that approach. But yeah, absolutely continued it going forward.

Hannah Munro: 40:40

And so I think that's a really good space for us maybe to bring the conversation to a close, because if we talked about when we started, which is talking about what does a disruptive CFO look like, it's quite interesting, actually, when we come out the end is actually there's quite a bit of structure behind that disruptive CFO. And, you know, and if you think, you know, what we talk about, so for those that are sort of maybe working in a industries that are particularly dynamic, which a lot of are at the moment, what sort of top tips would you give them to maybe take away and think about moving forwards?

Victor Wong: 41:18

I think the biggest one is kind of what we were kind of bantering back and forth about and joking about. It's like the traditional no answer, I would kind of put that in the back pocket and kind of lock that away for the time being and really start off with just listening to the ideas, right? Having those conversations with the rest of the business, but just understanding the opportunities that are at hand. Talk to your peers, talk to your VPs, directors. What are some of the opportunities you see in the business? And then the question would be, why aren't we seizing those opportunities? What's preventing us from taking it to the next level? And kind of just like, yeah, just have conversations, have one-on-ones, have coffee, have like Zoom calls, I guess, in our space. Hopefully people would meet outside, maybe at a park, but whatever that may be, facilitate those conversations and really try to understand what people are seeing as opportunities that the business is really not taking advantage of. And then I would say the second thing is if they're, isn't a process I would strongly advise, especially in, we're now a mid-sized business. So I think for us, it's really important to have a process. And the reason for that really is people want to know what they have to do next. Like, what are next steps? Because you've heard that in meetings. Like, what's the next step? What's this, right? And to have certain things, I still remember on a startup, like we were like thinking through this, like what's the next step on the fly? That's not going to work at a 400 person scale. company for us. So even going back to the idea jurisdiction, after you kind of canvassed your VPs, directors, or even the team about ideas in the business, what's next? It shouldn't just end at a conversation. So if there's a process we had, if you want to ask someone to put together a business case, establish that structure for them so people have clarity on what to do next. Because that's where usually ideas go to die, and we've experienced that too. We've Ask people to put in ideas and to submit the ideas in an idea box. And then no one knew what happened to it. Everyone just thought it was a black box. They submitted an idea. I never heard a thing about that. And so it was very demoralizing for everybody. It was like, okay, I said these things, but I had these great ideas. At least I thought they were great ideas, but no one even had a conversation with me and responded to say next steps. So I say have a conversation, but establish a process for next steps. Maybe it's a business case. Maybe it's whatever that might be. But I think there's definitely a part of that 80-20 split from the CFO perspective to evaluate or help evaluate new ideas. Because at the end of the day, it is to make the business better, either through better achievement of your mission and vision or faster achievement of it. There's both sides of the coin. So that's what I would encourage your listeners to do who are able to is to facilitate those conversations and really just listen to opportunities.

Hannah Munro: 44:19

And I think that is a perfect way to finish the podcast. So for all of you that were listening, there's definitely some huge takeaways from today's podcast. And I think for me, that concept of evaluating ideas and opportunity creation should be a huge part of, certainly in this day and age, every CFO's toolkit. So thank you, Victor, so much for sharing your experience and how you guys are disrupting the world of brick and mortar finance well finance of retail and taking things forward it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show

Victor Wong: 44:57

great thanks

Hannah Munro: 44:58

Anna