Latest / Built by Margin with Laurie Chen / Navigating Corporate Finance and AI: Insights with Fahim Talukdar

Transcript

Navigating Corporate Finance and AI: Insights with Fahim Talukdar · Built by Margin with Laurie Chen

• 0:04
  Welcome to Built by Margin, the podcast where strategy meets the spreadsheet. I'm your host, Laurie Chen, fractional CFO and tax strategist, here to help you make smarter financial decisions, build a profitable business, and keep more of what you earn. Let's dive into the numbers that actually move the needle. Welcome to Built by Margin. Today, I have Fahim Talukdar, and he's also based in Austin, Texas area. He's VP of Finance at Praetorian, and he has previously had experience at Spotlight and Turnkey Vacation Rentals, as well as 7-Eleven. We actually just recently did a podcast with Willian, an AP automation software, and so that was really cool. And so, Fahim, welcome to Yeah, absolutely. So we had a great conversation with talking about AI and finance with William. And so that podcast episode is going to be coming out any day now. Super excited to see that. Tell us how you started your career. Tell us about your background and Yeah, for sure, for sure. So I actually, you know, I started my career in commercial and personal banking. So not the typical route. So started consumer banking, got my MBA, did a, you know, kind of a back office rotation through commercial banking, corporate trust, wealth management, things that are not really corporate finance or FP&A. And more recently, I had an opportunity to join a startup, Turnkey Vacation Rentals. I got to join at a pretty interesting spot where Turnkey was about to be acquired by a larger competitor called Vacasa. And that competitor, Vacasa, was planning to do an IPO later in the year. So it was just a very interesting role to kind of come in, work through an acquisition, work through a merger with the end goal of, you know, doing an IPO at the larger company. And sort of the backdrop of that was both Turnkey and Vacasa didn't necessarily have a built out FP&A team. So Vacasa was relying mostly on, and these are great folks, but the consultants over at a firm called Ankura, really good folks I got to work with, but they weren't employees. They were consultants, like managing an IPO and some integrations. So just a very interesting year as far as learning. You don't get many steps, you don't get many chances to, in a calendar year, go through an acquisition and go through an IPO. So really got to learn a ton. I'm a big believer that if you do good work, if you make good connections, that those connections tend to open doors for you down the road. And I was actually introduced to my next role at Stoplight via a contractor that I worked with at Turnkey Vacation Rentals. So he connected the dots for me. Such a great opportunity to come on in an FP&A role. Eventually got a promotion to VP of Finance. And, you know, had a really, really impactful role in our, eventually we sold Stoplight to SmartBear, a competitor, a Vista-backed competitor, larger competitor in the space. So, you know, got to go through that like a ARR software company and kind of ramping through an acquisition. Similarly, you know, someone that I knew at Stoplight actually recommended me to Praetorian. And, you know, again, just real, real fortunate to be able to connect the dots like that. And, you know, Praetorian's, you know, cybersecurity, it's very cutting edge. It's very, you know, let's say it's, you know, there's a, there's a bad guy out there, right?
• 4:21
  And, and so it's a very different corporate environment compared to some of the places I've worked. But I think that that inherently forces you to be a you know, not to beat it over the head, but like, you have to be a little bit sharp. You have to be a little bit like cutting edge.
• 4:36
  You have to think ahead a little bit just because there is an adversary out there that your company is constantly trying to mitigate threats that are out there. And the threats that are out there in a month may not be known today, right? So that's kind of the culture that a cybersecurity company I think needs to How big is your team? Do you have a CFO that you report to? What does your role look like on a day-to-day?
• 5:05
  Yeah, absolutely. So I am the head of the finance department. So we have an FP&A team, an accounting team. Really on a day-to-day basis, it varies completely. A lot of it is project management, you know, there's obviously there's the basic stuff of pay the bills, manage the cash, collect from customers, you know, forecast model and things like that. But I think a lot of, you know, a lot of startup finance is around, you know, helping other teams, helping them understand modeling, forecasting, leaning in to go to market. You know, as simple as I'm a big believer in, I use the term predictive revenue, right? Like, The ARR, the things that you book with customers, the closed deals, those are in a sense lagging indicators. That's the final endpoint for a sales team is closing a deal. But there's all these steps that lead up to that. There's prospecting, there's bookings, there's MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, demos. you know, I'm a big believer in like, if you measure those things, and if you understand those concepts, right, that's what gets you into being able to predict revenue a little bit, a little bit better than just, hey, here's the here's the lagging indicator, right. And I think that any sort of small startup that's growing, like that's, that's something you have to be, if you're in the finance seat, that's something you just have to either you or somebody at your company needs to be good at it, right? Because it's just, how will you ensure that you can grow? And from there, right, like a lot of it's, you know, working with stakeholders, department heads, helping them understand, you know, what the guardrails of like what they can and can't do. You know, that's, because I think it's more companies, it's harder to have like a, here's the budget you started with the year, And frankly, it's probably wrong after week two, right? You tend to get into a cycle of continual forecasting, right? And so you have to be able to adapt. You have to be able to be real with stakeholders and provide them with I use the term guardrails, right? Sometimes these things aren't hard and fast no's, sometimes they are no's, and sometimes they're obvious yes's, but it's just guardrails to end up with an overall plan that makes sense. And it's gonna change as And is your role remote or are you working in the Yeah, so our company is remote first. And I would say that that's, I think that can be, it's an incredible benefit on an individual level. I think managing in a remote environment, managing a team is just, it's inherently different than going into the office, right?
• 8:17
  Like use example, Earlier in my career, like, the number of times we just grabbed a few people that were sitting around jumped into someone's office. Talk something out over 5 or 10 minutes, and then you're kind of done right? You figured it out. You got all the stakeholders literally ad hoc, which, you know, it's harder to do that in a. remote environment, right? Maybe you grab everyone on Slack on like a little huddle or something like that. Um, I also think just some of the connective tissue, right? Like some of the, you know, when you're in the office, maybe you go to go to lunch and you get to catch up with people. Um, you get to kind of build that personal connective tissue, whereas, you know, in remote, I still think that those bonds are really important for folks that, um, you know, I'm just a big, it's something I believe in, right?
• 9:07
  Like I want to, Reasonably know the people I work with and I do care about them. Right? And so I think that in a remote environment, you've got to be just more cognizant of like. Sometimes you're 1 on 1. or a little bit longer, just because there's, how do you have those conversations about just the general conversations that you would have if you were in the office? But I, you know, to answer the question, I think remote is a great benefit. I think it can also be a challenge or just something that you have to be aware of from like a managing a company or managing Yeah, I mean, I've worked with a ton of startups that are remote first, 100% remote. And you've got to hire the right people. Not everyone fits in that environment. But at the end of the day, you've got to be productive. You've got to get work done. And so if you're disciplined enough to do that, if you're able to have productive conversations over Zoom, that's great. And it makes the annual company retreats even better because it's like, oh, I get to see these people for real now and get to see how tall they really are, not their Zoom height. You know, so, yeah, so it's like, it's fun. Not everyone is cut out for that remote working culture, but, you know, it's something that you've got to be aware of as you're taking on a new position in a company, whether it's hybrid, remote, or all in office. I've also been in all 100% in office. So that's very, very different culture, very different vibes.
• 10:38
  So it really depends on, you know, what culture Yeah, absolutely. I think you hit a point there, right? Which is just. Whether you're remote or whether you're in the office, like. You need to be available, right? Like that's kind of the, you have to have some level of, you know, there's connectivity, right? Like if you were, if someone called you at your desk, right? Let's just use the example of like way old school in the office, right? Like you would pick up the phone, right? And I think that's similar. The method probably is different. It's Teams or Slack or, you know, other messaging sort of features, but, you know, The modes of which you communicate change, but that, you know, that needing to do work and be available, it's consistent regardless of how you kind of do that.
• 11:36
  Yeah, let's talk a little bit about systems and tools and AI, because that's something that we've talked about before. What FP&A system are you guys using? Is that something that, like, what are the advantages and disadvantages of using it? Are there Yeah, absolutely. From an FP&A standpoint, we're still in the Excel and Google Sheets world. We've certainly gone through some demos with leading tools. And I think the tools that we've seen all have some pros and some cons. But I think that there's a lot of great tools out there. My general viewpoint on tech stack in general is just, You know, we constantly evaluate tools because what we don't want to do is just be.
• 12:29
  Kind of stuck in how we do things and then there's something out there on the market. That's a game changer and we didn't know that being said, I think for for sort of the. The spot that we're in in sort of a, um. Things are constantly evolving, right?
• 12:46
  And so there's some level of like. Some of our stakeholders are used to working in Excel, and that's a little bit of it too, right? Like, there's the finance team in itself, right? And it's interesting, because I think our team actually adapts to new technology pretty quickly, which I don't think is very typical in FP&A and accounting.
• 13:09
  But there is a little bit of, like, not only are you implementing a new system, but you've also got to train sort of, you do have to train the stakeholders that are going to be receiving some of those FPNA inputs. Right.
• 13:20
  So, yeah, so that so from that perspective, we haven't necessarily reached a point where there's.
• 13:29
  A big bust in the usefulness of of Excel and Google Sheets. But I think I think you reach those points as you reach a certain scale and sophistication and just a certain number of people working. Right.
• 13:44
  A certain level scale of the company. I think I think you do reach a Yeah, no, I think that's great that you're using Google Sheets and Excel because, you know, I recommend that for most of my clients. You know, all they need is Google Sheets and Excel because I like Google Sheets for the collaboration tools. You know, you're able to do live tracking, live comments, you know, show your CEO, leadership team, like, you know, all the real-time outputs. And you can also connect it with other systems like, what was that, GAcon. Like, they work specifically as a connector between QuickBooks and Google Sheets. So, there's a lot of tools that you can use. But yeah, no, like I started out in public accounting working with Excel, you know, and then went into corporate, corporate accounting, corporate finance. So I worked with Excel for many years. And if I had to choose, I would just go with Excel because, you know, that's what I'm comfortable with. And I feel like they have the best formulas and the best functionality and the best user face for a finance and an accounting person like myself, but for the client, you know, it might make more sense to just use Google Sheets because it's dynamic, it's collaborative, and it's cheap, you know? And so like the typical FB&A system costs like a couple hundred dollars a month or a thousand dollars a month, right? I think Causal is a great tool that I've been using with one of my bigger clients, and that's about like $300 a month, $500 a month, nothing crazy. But it's excellent in the way that it pulls in the data and shows all the different scenarios, the forecast and everything like that. So it really just depends on the needs of the business and the needs of the management team needing the reporting. So yeah, I'm glad to hear that you're on Yeah, and I would say that, you know, the other thing too, right, is just, there's cost issue of tools, but there's also the implementation, right? Just the, frankly, in a lot of finance teams, you're just always busy. There's always something going on and you're kind of juggling what's important. It's hard to get a solid couple of months to dedicate to an implementation. I think, you know, another thing you kind of hit on was, Some of the integrator tools, some of the, like, we found some great tools that, like. Here's a here's a tool that can bring in data from. Salesforce into our spreadsheets, like, automatically here's a tool that can bring in data points from various systems. Right? And so there's. I would say that the general Google Sheets slash Excel framework, it's actually gotten more robust, if anything, just because there are intermediary tools.
• 16:39
  And I think with FP&A tools, one of the things I think is pretty cool in some of the demos we've seen is just like the the ability to kind of lock down data to share certain data but like get input on certain pieces and then uh you know embedded ai and i'm sure we'll talk about ai but like just the embedded ai that is within some of these tools is is frankly it's pretty cool and i think um you know uh so there's that's what i that's what i mean when i think there's pros and there's cons right like i think having Some of those embedded AI tools within an FPNA platform that's managed well, like that can be a real game changer for, you know, So that's probably why we have not moved on to an FP&A tool. So we're in QBO, and for all intents and purposes, we've outgrown QBO.
• 17:33
  So that's probably another reason why we've put off getting into an FP&A tool, just because, and I think within the ERP world, there's a number of tools that are just very robust AI native slam dunks. I think from a startup finance perspective, there's more than enough options. I can think of at least three that I would gladly move our ERP system over to, and we're constantly evaluating them and demoing them. And so that's where, you know, I see a lot of value in upgrading ERP. And again, not to knock QBO, but QBO has a ton of functionality to it as embedded AI. There are some features with multi-entity that can be a little challenging, like other currencies. You know, it's meant for it's meant for a certain audience. And I think once your business gets a little too complex. But again, that's also another thing where like, when you think about how do you plot out your year, right? Because if you're going to move ERPs on the worst case, that can be many months, right? If you're lucky, maybe it's just a few months, but that's. you know, working that in small team with like audits, other big projects that you have, budgets, forecasting, right?
• 19:01
  So it's just, it kind of becomes one of those things where it's like, where do you schedule it? Where do you where do you put it in the year to Um, yeah, so, um, we do, we do both a normal financial statement on it and a 401k on it, just based off the size of our company. Um, and I think those are, I believe those are both requirements just based off of number of employees in a 401k plan. And then just, um, you know, we have, uh, investors that, uh, you know, I believe they require it.
• 19:42
  This might be 1 that we need to edit out because I actually don't know off the top of my head if it's a requirement, but. But, yeah, so, and that can be a lot of. When I think about audit in general, it's sort of a, it's sort of a double edged sword because. I can, I can relate to the auditors. I know that the work. is good in theory, but it also became a lot of work for my team. And if we're running our team correctly, there's not much that actually comes out of it, right?
• 20:15
  Do you get what I mean? Where it's sort of like, I appreciate that we do it, it's a lot of work, but then I guess it's good that we're not finding a whole lot out of it, right? So it Yeah, so you mentioned, so that you're on QBO and QBO is not very sophisticated when it comes to multi-entity consolidation or international accounting or anything like that. I know because I work with a company that was doing like 15 million ARR and they had like four sets of QuickBooks because they had four different legal entities. So that's not the ideal setup. Yeah, I would never recommend setting it up that way. So that's something to think about as you're evaluating your accounting systems. QBO does work for a certain set of clients or companies that are certain revenue level, but at some point you outgrow it and you have to evaluate what that next system looks like. What does the relationship between accounting and FP&A look like in your team?
• 21:25
  Because you mentioned that you're overseeing finance, you're overseeing accounting.
• 21:31
  How seamless or not seamless is the data flowing between accounting and FP&A? And what does a typical monthly close look like? Is it a five-day close, 10-day, 15-day?
• 21:44
  Yeah, for sure. And I would say, like, in our company, it's, it's seamless, right? Like, there's no, there are FP&A activities that certain folks on accounting actually are involved in, and vice versa. There are accounting activities that FP&A is involved in. You know, I think one of the best pieces of advice I got early on was, you know, FPMA should have some insight and some direction on what the accounting sort of closed checklist and calendar looks like, right? So we have, we reorganized our accounting close to where there are sections In the accounting clothes that are mostly wrapped up at certain times, right?
• 22:28
  And the rationale there is like, obviously, we want to, we want to wrap up revenue as quickly as possible. We want to wrap obviously cash is pretty reconciled daily, but like, so, like, if you can, if you can.
• 22:43
  in an accounting close to wrap up revenue early, then folks in more FP&A roles can start doing the analysis, right? Because this is set, this is basically done.
• 22:55
  Payroll and a lot of people costs are essentially done before you get to month end, right? So FP&A can, and the analytical arm can dig into some of those variances early on.
• 23:07
  But I think that it took some level of Again, obviously it's one team, right? But just structuring the close in a way that you can generally start the analysis ahead of time. And that way when you're, you know, we close the books and then the FP&A, like the full package is basically available the same day because we've been, you know, kind of looking at the variances and looking at the forecast in So we touched a little bit on AI and automation. Where do you see the biggest opportunity for AI and finance right Yeah, absolutely. So there's, there's a ton, right? So I think they, you know, we talk a lot about like individual level AI, right? So there's, there's, there's obviously we touched about this, touched on this a little bit earlier, but the, I think the stuff that's systemic that's in the tech stack, like that's just going to happen, whether, whether people Want it, know it, whatever, whatever. It's just going to happen, right? AI is going to be in your tools. On the individual productivity, I think there's a lot. I think it's very exciting. And I will say this, I think that the barrier for your, you know, if you think about the finance business partner role, the business partner role that exists. I think it's it's so cool now that you're going to have business partners or you're going to have department heads. They can create pretty robust financial models on their own, right? Like, there's no, the barrier for them is lower, right? So I think that that naturally shifts some of those business partner roles into more of a strategic, like, if the barrier to create a financial model is lower, how do you deliver value, right? Similarly, I think that for a certain subset of folks in accounting, right?
• 25:05
  Like. It makes it makes it a little bit easier to delve into data analytics and some, some disciplines that weren't necessarily part of the finance role, right?
• 25:15
  Like, in the same way, the department heads can lean into financial analysis.
• 25:20
  Finance can lean into areas that weren't necessarily in their domain. So I think there's a lot of that. I think that probably the biggest thing I think about is just the scenario analysis that creating a robust model and then trying to run through scenarios and test variables is, that's a painstaking process. That's tough, right? And with generative AI, with other AI tools, the ability to just Do some scenario analysis test out some variables. I think that that's. I think it's 1 of the cool things that's already happening and potentially. On the way as well, like, we, we do run some generative AI revenue models in addition to.
• 26:05
  Our standard revenue model, just to just as some level of, like. Sanity check, you know, um, it's there's never really been a point where. General AI based on the inputs that we're giving it is pointing us in some. You know, crazy direction that we wouldn't expect, right? We wouldn't expect that, but, like, it is. It is an interesting sanity check to just. To run that against your own models, I think also just for. Um, from a finance perspective, so there's, there's a lot of ad hoc analysis that you do.
• 26:42
  Um, and so, you know, do you create, do you create a financial model from scratch to test out a tax scenario that is 100% of one off, or do you lean into, um, You know, general AI to with the inputs, right? Like, it can be a little bit of a time saver for some of those ad hoc analysis is that you. You kind of knew where you're going to get to. I know it sounds terrible to say, like, why analyze something if you knew what the app is going to be, but like. Sometimes it is part of the job to look at it analytically, even if you knew that this is what I expected. Some of those one-off models can be just a lot quicker, right? Like, I don't need to create a tax model from scratch. I can get some help from this, right? In certain scenarios like Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think that that's a great benefit of AI is testing the model and generating it and comparing it to what you created, right? I think that's a very interesting way of using AI. I also think there's an opportunity with AI in benchmarking and data collection, right?
• 27:52
  Because if you think about it, one of the main advantages of AI is being able to to collect a ton of information across different sources. And so I think it could really be an advantageous use to have it with benchmarking in your particular industry, right? And look at key KPIs that make sense for your particular industry or even against your competitors, right? Yeah, like public data Well, and I think this is a perfect, perfect topic, right? Because even those KPIs, even those data points, it still requires some level of industry understanding and thought, right? Because I'll give you an example of like, you know, comparing the size of an IT team or a finance team or a sales team on a per revenue basis to a competitor, right? But that's a KPI or that's a metric that could be worth tracking. And maybe there's data out there, but the secret sauce is in how was the company capitalized? What was their margin?
• 29:08
  What was, you know, like, what was their sales strategy? What was their unique strategy? Um, you know, it's it's a metric to compare, but understanding the context of, like. This is this metric over here. This is how our company is capitalizes how our company is built. Right? If you're if you're a bootstrapped company. then you're going to staff and structure your departments and your teams a certain way. If you're a Series A, Series B, well-capitalized company, you may be chasing a different sort of overall strategy. And that may lead to just an example. I think there's a lot of a lot of context to some of the publicly available data that I think that, you know, this is the perfect realm for someone in a finance or in a role to take data. But actually, like, what do you do with it? Right? Like, here's the benchmark, here's our benchmark. What does that mean? Right? And that's where I think that you lean more into a strategic finance, because the numbers just, the numbers are the numbers, but it comes down to like, That's where the human judgment, the professional judgment, the human judgment of having an actual, you know, finance team comes in is, you know, like AI will only get you so much data, but you have to like run that through and Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Right. Like, what are the things that you're you know, there are things that your company may do that are unique, right?
• 30:50
  Like, and a metric, we'll just point that out as an outlier, but you may know that like, this is our unique advantage. This is something that we invest in.
• 31:00
  This is something we believe in. It's part of our corporate strategy, right?
• 31:04
  And so I think we kind of hit it on the head, which is just that human element and that strategic element and that interpretation of what do Yeah, and I think AI, the generative AI will at least point you in a certain direction, right? And then you have, as the human finance team, have to tap to take it and run it through and make sure that it makes sense and that it's accurate and that it's comprehensive for your particular industry, your particular target.
• 31:43
  Yeah, let's talk a little bit about the future of finance, especially as you think about it in your career and profession. What do you think the VP of finance role is going to look like in five to 10 years, especially with all the increase Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think if you were starting if you were starting a new company from scratch, I just, I think in general, I think companies would just be smaller.
• 32:15
  Right? There's a, there's a. you know, for good or for bad, right? Like there's just, there's a lot of ways for, you know, someone that knows the tools, AI, agentic AI.
• 32:31
  There's so much automation. There's so much, there's so much good stuff in the finance tech stack and just easy to acquire technologies. I think if you were starting from scratch, I think teams would generally be smaller. But it's hard to say on a 5 to 10 year basis.
• 32:52
  I assume that teams would be a little bit smaller or that folks would be taking on more. That's just the nature of it, is that there's a high level of automation that's happening. I think one of the things that can be challenging in a finance role in general is just, and I don't see AI addressing this at all, is just the data challenges and the history of the integrations. It's hard to sort of when you have separate systems that don't talk and don't, sometimes they don't even agree, right? Like you can have Salesforce data over here or CRM data over here that doesn't necessarily agree with your ERP, right? So I see that more and more from talking to my peers is that finance as a department tends to be the department that like, there's a ton of things happening upstream, but there has to be like one source of truth. And so I think that that'll continue to be, I think that will continue to be a role, right? It's the one source of truth. And so it's a very interesting question that you're asking. I don't necessarily know that I have, I'm not sure that I have a well thought out answer. I think that, again, I think that, I think some of the changes that we're seeing, like, I just feel like there's gonna be just a lot of things that are embedded In the tech stack, like, whether it's your, whether it's your, um, that will frankly make people more productive. But I think I think 1 of the challenges in general is just. Data is always a challenge and getting systems to talk and getting them to. Interpreting the data and making it. Seeing to an extent like that, If you could put one key performance metric on a billboard for all CEOs to see, what Okay, that's an interesting question. So, I mean, I think for the companies I've worked at, it will probably be I mean, it's probably in that new ARR or MRR or.
• 35:20
  Got it. Yeah, I mean, it's it's probably, you know, it's such a such an interesting question, right? Because the context of of your company, are you trying to reach profitability?
• 35:32
  Are you trying to. OK. I think it'd probably roll 40, because that's just hitting both ends. Are you growing and are you approaching some level of profitability? Although that isn't necessarily, that's a tricky metric in of itself, right? Because you could be growing hand over fist and unprofitable, or you could be a highly profitable company that's slow growing. Great question. I think it depends on the context of your company. to Okay, well, that makes sense to me. Lastly, Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, I post I don't post too often on LinkedIn, but I'm pretty active there. I definitely respond to folks that reach out. You know, I would say that's probably probably the best bet out at conferences. Also, you know, on a personal level, I'm a board member of the Austin CFO Leadership Council. So it's a local group here. There's chapters all over the US, so it's a national sort of leadership group as well, but I'm on the Austin chapter of that, and I go to all the events. It's great to meet people in person, to put a face to someone you've talked to, and just to To riff, honestly, so much so much of 1 of the biggest piece of advice is 1 of the biggest pieces of advice I got over the last few years is sort of as you kind of rise up the corporate ladder within finance. Having a network is so hugely important. You may not know how to handle every single problem that comes your way on a given day. If you do, that's awesome. But just knowing who to talk to and having folks in your network, I would say that finance is It maybe doesn't seem that way, but it's such a social discipline, right? Like, you know, when you go beyond the numbers, when you're influencing strategy, but also just being able to learn from other people that have different companies, different challenges, different industries. But yeah, so I think those are, for me personally, I'm fairly responsible on LinkedIn, and I try to network within the Austin community as Okay, great. Well, I'm definitely going to link everything that you talked about in the show notes so that people can connect with you on LinkedIn, as well as find the awesome leadership, CFO Leadership Council. Fahim, thank you so much for being here, sharing your expertise. You've given us some really solid insight into the future of finance. And Laurie, thank you so much for having me on. It's been great. getting to know you and getting to pick your brain a little bit as well. So likewise, Yeah. And I look forward to, um, when our, uh, episode with really on publishes, which should be within the next two weeks, I'd say before Thanksgiving. Right. So, uh, really looking It'll be, it'll be really interesting to see. I'm so curious. I have watched the I have watched the other two. I thought I thought everyone.
• 38:55
  Oh, yeah. The ones on the ones on LinkedIn, the one that they posted on LinkedIn. Yeah. She never sent the the photos. I was surprised she forgot to send the photos that we took from the from Yeah, yeah, that's cool. Yeah, because I was like, oh, I don't have anything to like post on my social regarding that. I was like, Maybe that maybe they're waiting until until it's live and then I'll just share it with us. But but no, I think I But yeah, I'm going to I'm going to check out the the CFO leadership council.
• 39:37
  Um, if you're not part of it, I also I can in any event that you want to go to, just let me know. And I can just, I can invite people for free. So just let Um, I think there's actually AI one coming up in in December. So more more of Yeah, I'd be interested. I'm currently working on the end of my book. I'm like at 30,000 words and I'm trying to get to like 38,000. So I'm at the very end of my writing. So after this month, I should be much more free to network, free Yeah, for sure. I'll, I'll, I'll shoot you a link and if you can make it, that'd be awesome. There's, I think there's like 8 to 10 chapter events every year. So it's. You know, I think generally there's a December event. And then the next ones in February, just because January is tough to, to, to throw together a networking event. Most people are, um, you know, deep into your enclosed. So, yeah.
• 40:43
  Yeah, cool. Well, this show is going to publish in about 2 to 3 weeks. And so I'll send you links once they're ready and you can share it on your social as well. Awesome. Yeah, So yeah, I do a lot of editing, so I'll make sure that there's no weird pauses or silences or whatnot.
• 41:10
  So yeah, definitely all about personal branding Yeah. All right, cool. Well, it was great chatting with you today, and hopefully see you at the December event.
• 41:34
  All right. Thanks. Bye. Thanks for tuning in to Built by Margin. If you're ready to turn insights into income, subscribe and join me each week as we break down the numbers behind smart business growth. I'm