On 16 May 2023, I was featured on the FP&A Today podcast.
Unfortunately, the special offer has not expired.
Can I help you? Here is my story…
About 10 years ago, I set out on a mission…
“Something’s got to change…” they were the words spinning around my mind as I sat in my car. I had just arrived home from work, it was 11pm.
I sat there for another 2 minutes, building up the mental energy to get out of the car and go into the house.
It had become a common routine. Sometimes it was 9:30pm, sometimes it was 11:30pm. The exact time was largely irrelevant. What mattered was that I had missed seeing my children…again.
About 3 months earlier, I had been made redundant from my previous company. The news came a few weeks before my second daughter was born. So, with 4 mouths to feed, I was grateful to have this new job.
The people at the new company were amazing; some of the best people I’ve ever worked with. But the hours were killing me.
As I had a young family, I wanted to be around and see them grow up. But because of this job, I never saw my children, I hardly saw my wife, and most days I didn’t even see daylight.
No matter how fast I worked, it made no difference.
There was a solution, there must be! At that moment, I decided that if I could learn how to automate my tasks, I could make it work.
Through this, I discovered something surprisingly simple, yet unbelievably powerful.
Here is the secret…
All financial reporting and analysis can be achieved with a 7-stage blueprint. If we can identify the Excel tools for each section of that blueprint, and ensure they pass information from one stage to the next, then we can automate all sections of our work.
Automating Excel is a bit like the 4 x 100m relay at the Olympics.
The race is not just about running fast, it’s also about passing the baton from one person to the next. If a team drops the baton they’re disqualified.
The individual tools and features in Excel are like the runners. They each do their job to get further along the track. But automation is our ability to pass information (i.e. the baton) from one tool to the next. If the information gets dropped at any point, we must step in and handle it manually.
Over the last 10 years, I’ve discovered the best ways to combine these tools, so that we can automate Excel.
I now teach financial professionals how to do the same; Using Excel to pass information along every stage of the journey; creating automations that are repeatable and save huge amounts of time every month.
Join the academy and learn how to automate Excel.