76. CFO Stories: The Unconventional CFO with Jeremy Foster, CFO, Talroo

76. CFO Stories: The Unconventional CFO with Jeremy Foster, CFO, Talroo

Hannah Munro: 0:49 

Hello, everybody, and welcome to this episode of CFO 4.0. Now, thank you again for joining me on the show. And with me today, I have Jeremy Foster. So, Jeremy is a CFO over in the US, and I thought it might be interesting to explore a few different questions around the role of the CFO, particularly in fast growth companies, and also talking a little bit about organizational design. So, welcome, Jeremy. Fantastic to have you on the show. 

Jeremy Foster: 1:16 

Thanks for having me here. Looking forward to it. 

Hannah Munro: 1:20 

Brilliant. So, do you want to give us a bit of context? Tell us about the company. Tell us about what excited you about joining them and maybe a bit about your history as well. It'd be great. 

Jeremy Foster: 1:29 

Yeah. So, Tal Roo is in the recruitment marketing space. We are not the Goliath in the room, which is always indeed in the US, but we are very fast growing and are currently growing We process over a billion job searches a month. We provide enterprise and mid-market employers with the ability to access a number of unique candidate audiences through a very targeted search platform. So, we basically, you can almost think of us as effectively a search engine that helps match up both our owned property which is jobs to careers as well as some unique publisher partnerships that for example amazon might need to hire a warehouse worker in Austin and they're not going to have you know austinwarehouseworkers.com available but we've built all the tools capabilities and have machine learning search and match that will allow us to say okay amazon's looking for warehouse workers We're seeing some candidate flow over here at austinwarehouseworkers.com. We're going to match those up. And then we've also got our own site where we build candidate profiles and help make sure that both job seekers and employers are getting the right fit. 

Hannah Munro: 3:01 

Awesome. So, that's a little bit about Tauru. Tell us a bit about yourself. So, what was your background before you joined? 

Jeremy Foster: 3:08 

Yeah, so, I actually come from a pretty unorthodox background. I actually started in marketing. My undergrad degrees were in marketing and management and got my start goodness, 20 years ago now for a $500 million community bank in New Mexico and West Texas and started out as a marketing director, then worked my way up to lead retail banking operations and marketing for them. Did that for a few years, then ended up doing a stint for a company called Accenture that you've probably heard of, leading curriculum development and management for a nationwide bank client. And then from there, ended up working for company called, at the time, BankView, which became Casasa. And what we really built out at Casasa was a co-branded product suite of primarily deposit products, checking accounts and savings accounts that were distributed through a thousand community banks and credit unions. And so, the easiest way to think of what we were doing there is you might go into the local jeweller and look for a Rolex. And we wanted to basically be the Rolex on the shelves of community banks and credit unions. And we did that with a number of reward checking style products, which either paid high interest rates or gave consumers iTunes credits, those types of solutions. And grew that very successfully, ended up selling that to private equity. Then went and worked for a company, helped launch a company called Homeward in the property technology space as CFO. And then I was CFO at Kasasa, sorry. And then helped launch Homeward as CFO and then had the opportunity to go work with that at Talru and have really enjoyed it ever since. 

Hannah Munro: 4:59 

And that's really interesting, obviously. So, in terms of building the skill set and setting yourself up for success in that first CFO role, what was your strategy around that? Because that must have been a real shift. 

Jeremy Foster: 5:12 

It was. So, in some ways, maybe less of a shift than you might otherwise think. I think there's a tremendous amount of value in having a strong understanding of finance when you're in the marketing chair and of understanding marketing when you're in the finance chair, particularly if you're in technology or in a high growth company. Because a big part of what you really need to be able to do is identify where your investments can help the company grow the most quickly. And so, I'm a big believer in removal of constraints. And so, if you think about a factory, for example, you might have nine machines that crank out 100 widgets an hour and you've got one machine that cranks out 50. And if you add that one machine that adds 50, you've just doubled throughput for the entire factory. The same thing is really true of technology companies. It's just more complicated because you're not looking at machines. You're trying to understand people and understand where the resource limitations on the business are and what's the current constraint upon growth. And a lot of times the constraint upon growth is marketing. And so, I think that if you're a CFO who's got background in that, there are obvious synergies. And then if you're a marketing, chief marketing officer or VP of marketing who's trying to ask for budget, it's obviously pretty helpful to be able to know where your ROI is coming from. And so, for me, it was a pretty, I wouldn't say a seamless transition, but a pretty fluid one. 

Hannah Munro: 6:49 

And do you think there's anything else in terms of a different viewpoint that sets you particularly apart from other more traditional CFOs or CFOs from more traditional backgrounds? Is there anything else that you feel that you've brought to the role that perhaps wouldn't have been the case if you'd gone through that usual route? 

Jeremy Foster: 7:07 

Yeah, I think my background in operations helps a lot as well. I think, you know, typically if you look at what's going to make a business a business, a viable and growing business. You really need to identify three things, right? What's the lifetime value of the customers that you're going to bring in? What's your customer acquisition cost? If the ratio of those is healthy, if you can land a customer that's going to generate $100,000 in gross profit and it costs you $30,000 in marketing and sales costs to get them, then you can put 30 grand in and 100 grand comes out the other end and it's just a question of timing and financing at that point and running NPVs, net present value calcs. And so, if that piece of the equation works well, then the question is, how big is the total addressable market? And how much of an organizational support structure do I have to invest in to be able to reach it? If the TAM is big enough to build out an efficient delivery channel and an efficient, whether that's Delivery from the perspective of developing and delivering the software products or delivery through your account management team Or delivery through building out the right channels that you need to be able to distribute those products if you can if you can look at that as a piece of the equation Then it gets to be pretty easy to architect should say easy. It gets to be pretty easy to design It can be difficult to architect and build but the design function of the organization. It's a lot easier if you understand marketing and operations and finance. 

Hannah Munro: 8:50 

Awesome. And when you make that transition, did you do any formal finance qualifications to build up your skillset in that area? Was it something that you'd absorbed through marketing? 

Jeremy Foster: 9:00 

So, I'd already gotten my MBA. And so, there was some formal training there. And then when... actually was in the process of getting my MBA at the time I was working part-time and reporting to our controller and vice president of finance at Bankview. And she went to the CEO and said, look, when Jeremy finishes his MBA, we're going to lose him if we don't do something meaningful. At that point in time, our CFO left the company, and our VP of finance went and asked Gabe, hey, I believe in Jeremy. I want to work with him. I'd rather work for him than anybody else. Can you give him a shot and give him a promotion? And so, they bumped me up. Actually, the semester before I finished my MBA, So, I was in a full-time program as a full-time CFO, as a first-time CFO, and a new dad for that last semester. So, it was pretty busy. But we then brought on– I interviewed and hired an experienced CFO coach for a couple of months. And Manuel was just a terrific coach. like mentor for a couple of months to help me kind of get my bearings. And then, you know, I had a good team of informal mentors around me as well. So, our president, you know, several other, my former CEO at the bank, several other people that I could draw on for some expertise and help. 

Hannah Munro: 10:34 

Yeah, so, you had a good team around you to support that transition as well, which is so, very important. 

Unknown: 10:39 

Yeah. 

Hannah Munro: 10:39 

And in terms, and yeah, I guess in terms of your, your viewpoint, because what, um, obviously you've worked for a lot of high growth. What do you think is like essential characteristics of a, of a CFO in a high growth organization? What are the elements that people need to consider? 

Jeremy Foster: 10:58 

Great question. So, I think, um, I think it's really, I'd say one of the most important is, is being nimble. So, um, Part of being able to help a company grow quickly is again, kind of identifying and removing whatever's limiting that growth. And that may be that there's insufficient marketing budget to generate leads. It might be that you don't have enough of a sales force to handle the calls. It might be that you need a marketing development rep function to set discovery calls so, that your sales team is efficient. It might be that you're taking too long developing software. And so, once you discover what's limiting the company's ability to grow, a lot of it, ends up being about thoughtful resource allocation. So, it's not just about throwing money at it, it's about figuring out what the most efficient way to deploy the funding to remove the limit on growth is. And if you think about it from that perspective, first off, you have to be nimble because if the company's growing rapidly, you're going to hit walls at different points in time. And I would say one of the big challenges that one of the things that can make a really successful startup CEO, I think, is they identify whatever the most immediate limit on the business is and they tackle that thing and they wrestle it to the ground and they beat it into submission. Most of the time, it's getting your first sale right or getting your first customer. The. challenge that a lot of times happens then when you're helping transition a company to a scaling company is they're still looking for that one limitation and the business is getting bigger and it can't one a business can't react to every single change that quickly, especially when you get to 400, 500. You just can't continue to pivot that fast. And so, part of what the CFO has to be able to do is see those limits and those constraints coming in advance. So, some of it's about looking ahead and saying, okay, well, when we hit this number of leads, we're going to need to hire more account executives. And at that point, you've already started the process of bringing them on board so, that you don't kind of hit a wall, waste six months figuring out what's going on and then lift the barrier. So, that's one big component, I think, is helping the organization be more foresighted. The other is sometimes things aren't going to work out. You're going to have a marketing strategy that doesn't pan out or you're going to have a key software platform that nobody buys, right? You're going to run in some of these challenges. And the quicker you can help the organization pivot, the better off you're going to be. So, I would say the key things to being an effective growth-oriented CFO are one, helping the organization look further down the road and being more farsighted in your decision-making. Two, being nimble enough that when those decisions end up being right, you can capitalize on them. And when they end up being wrong, you can change quickly and then three helping to build out effectively the nervous system of the organization so, that the organization can see when something's working or not and respond more quickly so, that you can make the whole organization nimbler. 

Hannah Munro: 14:32 

absolutely and when you say building out what do you mean processes you mean systems you mean people or do you mean all of the above 

Jeremy Foster: 14:39 

could be a So, it depends on where the organization is when you start. If you're starting from scratch, then the company needs a model. They need a business model and a design, a plan to be able to execute to. Then you've also got making sure that you have the right people and that the people are organized in the right way and structured in the right way so, that they've each got clear lines of sight. Everybody knows who's responsible for what. And you're maintaining tight communication between people so, that you don't run into organizational drift, right? Where one part of an organization was working on an initiative and they're still working on that initiative, and the rest of the organization has pivoted to focus on a new initiative. Well, if your account reps who are managing your existing relationships are still talking about old products and you've got four new products that have been deployed that the sales team is talking about. You're going to have a disconnect. And so, a lot of it is just making sure that everybody, one, knows what the organization's initiatives are. Two, everybody's having the conversations with each other to get better and better at delivering what their clients or customers need and communicating the value that the organization's creating. 

Hannah Munro: 16:08 

Awesome. So, because I think there's some great points in there in terms of getting everybody aligned. And I think this is one of the interesting things about certainly how I hear you approaching the CFO role. It's very much in that strategic headspace, which a lot of CFOs struggle to make the shift into, not because they don't want to, but because they're struggling to find the time and balance it with everything else that they're doing. So, how do you find the time? How do you create that space to focus on the strategic side? 

Jeremy Foster: 16:38 

So, one of the things is I make sure that I've got the right team supporting me so, that I can focus on the strategic space. I have a phenomenal controller and I've been very blessed to have had three phenomenal controllers over the years. And so, I don't spend a lot of my time thinking about accounting. Now, that's obviously tougher if it's a true startup, right? You can't have a finance function that's 25% of the organization's revenue. That just doesn't work too well. And so, some of that's about being in a space that's the right that's the right size, right? I didn't enjoy being a startup CFO for that reason. We ended up building a very successful model and the company's been very successful both while I was there and since I left. But the role wasn't what I enjoy. And so, some of it's about if you're in a spot, the first thing you have to do is figure out how to create efficiency. And sometimes you may have to make room. So, when I first went to bank view, we didn't have an FP and a function. We didn't have, um, we had a good controller, um, but we were spending a lot of money on legal outsource legal. So, the first thing that I actually did was I, I, built out a very basic legal function that ended up saving us about $600,000 a year. Then some of that money went to building out an FP&A function. I was able to give 400 grand back to the business to help grow the business. And so, we ended up putting more resourcing in to places that really needed it. And I ended up with a really terrific director of FP&A and a good analyst. And that allowed me to become more effective. So, sometimes it's just about finding the opportunity to creatively think about staffing and structuring so, that you can free up that time. 

Hannah Munro: 18:43 

Yeah, no, that's a great piece. And it goes back to what you're saying about focusing on resource allocation. Where are you spending your resource, be that people or obviously money? And what does that mean in terms of impact on the organization? So, I'm actually going to pick your brains. It wasn't on our list of topics to which we sort of sent through, but I'd love to understand how you approach marketing investment, because this seems to be a topic that a lot of CFOs struggle within terms of understanding the value and the output. Just out of interest, how do you approach it? 

Jeremy Foster: 19:14 

So, the first thing to do is to get a good handle on your customer acquisition cost, right? And your lifetime value of your customers. So, LTV is relatively easy to calculate if you're a SaaS business, right? You've got an attrition rate that you can track to, you've got a fixed monthly license fee that you can track to, you can calculate your gross profit margins, and you can come up with a lifetime value of a customer pretty easily. After that, then you just need to get a feel for what your costs are. And a lot of times I tend to think of it in two, I think of customer acquisition cost in two ways. The first is what's our marginal customer acquisition cost. And in that I'm typically putting in the entire sales team and all of our direct lead generation spending. So, anything that is intended to drive marginal activity goes into that number. And then it's really just, Divide LTV by customer acquisition cost and you're off to the races. It's pretty basic math. The other view is you may have a lot of marketing investment and spend that is not directly lead gen. You might have brand spend. You might have head count. You might have strategic product marketing investments. And Those I usually don't put in in terms of evaluating whether the core business is acquiring customers rapidly, but I keep a view of it and I make sure that I'm taking a look at that so, that I can understand if we're actually getting an ROI for it. And if it looks like we're not getting an ROI on that, then we'll start to dig in and try to really understand, okay, what's the purpose of the brand spend? Are we trying to build... more underlying awareness so, that our let me pause and roll back one of the challenges that can happen with direct lead generation is you if you're doing it right you're hitting your lowest lying fruit first right you're getting your cheapest new prospects or most efficient new prospects first part of what that means is that there's a there's a diminishing marginal return on that spend. And so, one of the benefits, one way to look at brand is that brand spend should be an investment that makes all your lead gen spend more effective. It's not the only way to look at brand, but it's a reasonable way to look at brand. And so, if the argument is, well, we're making these brand investments to help push this down, then you go through and you look at KPIs around that. If the argument is, well, brand spend, we just have to spend it just because, just because. Then at that point, the question needs to be, okay, well, what are the metrics that we're going to use to make sure we're getting some strategic value out of it, right? Are we seeing more overall awareness? Those are the types of KPIs that I would then start to go back and look for if I suspected disconnect in that area. 

Hannah Munro: 22:19 

Yeah, it's a really interesting piece because I think the ROI behind brand is one of those harder to measure elements, especially as you're a small to mid-sized space versus obviously a more established company. There's a few options out there. So, do you have any top tips for measuring brand? And like you said, you assess it. How do you approach it? 

Jeremy Foster: 22:41 

Yeah. So, a lot of the time it's one thing to do, I think, is make sure that the finance team is really partnering with the CEO, the marketing department, and the sales department to make sure that everyone has thought about and agreed upon what the intent of that brand spend is and what are the outcomes that you're looking to achieve. And that may be something that is highly measurable, like... You can conduct a survey in a specific market if you want to go into that market. You can conduct a survey and say, all right, I think in this area we've seen awareness go from X to Y over a year or two years. It might be we want to look at the impact that moving into this market and spending this brand investment represents. What impact did that have on our actual customer acquisition? And that gets a little less precise when you're dealing with smaller numbers, right? If you had eight customers sign the quarter before you spent the brand money and you spend a million bucks in brand and you get 10 customers that sign the next quarter, you don't necessarily know what the impact was. But you can at least start to go back and look at it and say, you know, is this worth continuing or should we just kill it? And, you know, a little bit of that is intuition. It's, it's, is this bigger than a bread box? Some of it is measurement, right? If you do have the customer acquisition cost measurements tracked on a regular basis, then at a minimum, you can see whether or not it's going up or down. 

Hannah Munro: 24:25 

Absolutely. So, and you incorporate brand, you can incorporate branding, or do you keep it separate? 

Jeremy Foster: 24:31 

I keep a separate view of it, but I calculate it both ways. So, I, I actually have a, graph that I one of my favourite graphs is actually one that looks at that looks at our customer acquisition cost and then it has two lines one line that does not include brand one line that does include brand and what you can see is if there's significant drift in those lines right if you start to see if you start to see the brand line going up a lot, your overall customer acquisition cost is rising pretty rapidly if you're including your brand investments and you're not seeing any improvement in your CAC without brand included, then you know that you may not be getting that marginal reduction in customer acquisition and direct lead gen costs, right? And if that's the case, then you need to see whether or not that brand spend is something that you want to continue making. 

Hannah Munro: 25:28 

Absolutely. That's a really great, great insight. And final question before we shift away from marketing in particular. And I'd love to know, are there any questions that you ask or ways in which you challenge the marketing team, perhaps that's slightly different from a typical CFO? Have you had that conversation with your team? 

Jeremy Foster: 25:50 

In some ways, I'm probably less challenging of marketing and sales than the typical CFO. I think most CFOs actually bias towards prove that we should invest in sales and marketing. And I think that's a really candidly not great way to grow a business, right? The real question should be, we need to invest in sales and marketing. Let's prove that the investments that we're making are the most efficient and the best ones we can make. And that's a very different approach, right? I think the heads of sales and heads of marketing that have worked with me in the past would probably tell you that they spend less time having to fight with me about their budget and they spend more time investigating with me whether or not specific initiatives are yielding fruit. 

Hannah Munro: 26:50 

Yeah. That's a really great way to think about it. And I think you're right. I think there is a tendency to say, prove to me I should invest this money, then this is the budget. Tell me where you're going to spend it and why you should spend it there. 

Ad 1: 27:03 

Yeah. 

Hannah Munro: 27:04 

It's a really, really great point. I think that should be one of our catchphrases for this podcast, to be. 

Jeremy Foster: 27:09 

fair. Yeah. Yeah, I think it makes a huge difference. Just the difference in mindset is, becomes less about proving that the organization needs to grow and it puts the sales and marketing team less on the defensive of like, what? I remember at one point I had to go back, and I actually built a market-by-market regression to identify the correlation between marketing spend and growth in that market. As a marketing person, I did that. And I think that it was a good exercise, but also what was really more important as the marketing exec was for me to understand which initiatives were working. And so, I think if you go into it from the perspective of telling your sales team and your marketing team, I've crossed my arms and, well, we're profitable. Tell me why we should take away some of our profit to grow. The answer is that the CFO should know whether or not it makes sense to make a growth investment because the CFO should be looking at lifetime value and customer acquisition costs, and the CFO should be the one saying, hey, our customers Our customer acquisition cost is out of whack to our LTV. How do we get LTV up, right? Or how do we get our CAC down? And if the CFO is not having that conversation with themselves six times a day with no one else in the room, then they're doing something wrong if they're trying to grow a business. But then the next conversation that needs to happen is, hey, marketing, sales, I think that if we do this, we're going to get our customer acquisition costs down. Can we explore this idea? Yeah. Great. Awesome. Now your ratios are right. Throw money at it, right? In an efficient way, but get the, get the engine working the right way so, that when you pour, you know, you need to pour a dollar in and get $3 out. And if you can do that, then it becomes about figuring out how you can continue to funnel more and more into the system without having that ratio fall off. 

Hannah Munro: 29:30 

Absolutely. And in terms of figuring out where those ratios should sit, are there particular benchmarks that you work to? Does it depend on the organization? How do you think about it? 

Jeremy Foster: 29:39 

I really think about it in terms of time sensitivity. So, the typical private equity and venture capital rule of thumb is kind of three to one, right? And three to one gross profit to CAC is a reasonable metric. You can do different treatments to it, like discount it back so, that you're at least taking into account the sensitivity of the cash flows. I think there are some businesses where if you have a fast cycle time, so, for example, one of the models I helped build out, the biggest advantage we had was a very fast cycle time. So, the total transaction time was five months. You didn't have this really long five-year lifetime value. And normally that's a drawback in the eyes of private equity and venture capital, right? Show me what your recurring revenue is, right? What's your ARR, right? That's always the question. But there are some businesses where the advantage is that the cash flows are fast. And so, we were able to build out a model where every five to six months, we were effectively tripling the value of the marketing spend. And so, if you can do that every five to six months, now your annual number's 9X, right? Because your cycle time's quick. And so, we have a lot of traditional finance tools that work great with a little creativity for adapting that, right? It's an old school... discounted cash flow can tell you a lot on what you need to do. Um, but I think that it's really important to think about the, the risks associated with the cash flows, the time that it takes to generate them, um, the long-term potential. So, another one of the businesses I worked for the big advantage that we had was we land a client, and they didn't pay us a lot upfront. Um, but we could predict to a high degree how much that would grow over a five-year period. So, it's kind of the opposite, right? The big benefit at that point is you've got this highly predictable model. And so, part of where that really weighed in for us was, we were able to change our pricing structure to de-risk for clients so, they weren't paying us a bunch of money upfront. It was a more variable priced model. And as they began paying us, based on the performance metrics that they cared about, making it a success-based metric that they cared about dramatically reduced our sales friction. So, our customer acquisition costs plummeted, and we kept, like we ended up keeping 97% of revenue and 94% of gross profit with our pricing change per client, but our customer acquisition costs got cut by two thirds, right? And if you can do that, you can really change a business pretty quickly. 

Hannah Munro: 32:53 

Awesome. No, and I think there's some, some really interesting, um, pieces that in this, in terms of figuring out, like you say, how, where do you hold your value? And like you said, it depends on, it depends on the LTV, but also like you say, your cycle, your acquisition time, all of those things, as well as, um, Cash acquisition. So, very aware that we are rapidly running out of time. And we talked earlier about this being a nimble CFO and creating almost this agile finance function. Talk to me a little bit about how you structure your finance functions when you're going into these high growth organizations. 

Jeremy Foster: 33:32 

Yeah. So, typically I like to have a controller, and I like to have an FP&A function. I like an accounting function and an FP&A function. And if you can afford to have them separate, it's great to have them separate. Sometimes it makes sense to have them together. But the key thing is making sure that you have both kind of your traditional gap financials covered in a reliable way and also making sure that you have all the management financials that the organization needs Really, I kind of alluded to this. I do think of the finance function as the nervous system for the business, right? It's a coordination function that should help each hand know what the other hand is doing. And a lot of that shows up in your management financials and in making sure that the metrics are there for people to be on the same page. I would say that part of being agile is being... consistent, as weird as that sounds. So, if you are, on the one hand, it's important to have a budget, right? It's important to have an annual budget that you can set and that you can measure yourself against. So, you can say, how good a job did we do predict 13 months in advance of what was going to happen? It's an important accountability metric. However, if you're running the business off of a one-year plan that gets updated once a year, you're not going to be agile. And so, part of what I try to make sure we do is build out, first of all, a recurring and consistent cadence for effectively a quarterly re-forecast process where everybody gets fully realigned, any major strategic decisions get made, captured, recast, and you've done a full-fledged re-forecast. The other thing that's really important is to have good If your budget's your map, it's important to have a decent set of, you know, GPS and altimeters and speedometers, right? You need KPI measurements that help you identify what's happening on a month-to-month or even sometimes on a daily basis. So, you know, we've got a daily income statement that we can look at and see how we do today. And it's not gap, but it's close, right? There are daily updates on sales and marketing activity that's happening every day. We review it as a team every month, maybe twice a month, right? So, some of being agile is just making sure people are communicating and coordinating and you keep the map, you keep the budget, right? But you use your compass, and you use all these other tools to help you know we just walked up on a big mountain that wasn't on the map. Do we go around it, or do we go over it or we dig through it, or do we tunnel under? And if you've got the right tools and the right team, that's a lot easier to do. 

Hannah Munro: 36:39 

And you also talked about your team structure. So, obviously FC plus FP&A, so, basically operational and the FP&A elements. And you mentioned tools. So, without, you know, we do try and keep product free on this podcast, but what sorts of tools do you find essential to be able to create that agile. 

Jeremy Foster: 36:56 

function? So, we really... historically always excel right and I don't know anybody that doesn't use excel in the finance space it's a very versatile tool um you know cluvio or other visualizers other dashboard you know applet functions that you can use to help the business see what's going on are important and then in two of the places I've worked it's been really important to have um call it data and ETL governance tools. So, things to help manage multiple databases and make sure that you've got consistent treatment. So, at one place it was MicroStrategy, and then we've just deployed Sigma. And so, there are some tools that can be used to help normalize and standardize data, and that's really important too. 

Speaker 02: 37:50 

Awesome. So, lots of pieces in terms of obviously separating out the functions. Are there any other top tips that you think are really important for CFOs and high growth that people should be thinking about? 

Jeremy Foster: 38:03 

Focus on what matters, which is for most people, people, right? And then focus on identifying whatever your bottlenecks are and figure out the most efficient way to remove it. I mean, it's, you know, I kind of joke a lot of times in our weekly revenue meetings that, you know, my job's pretty easy. The direction we want to go is up and to the right. Like, let's just figure out how we keep revenue going up and to the right. You know, it's not rocket science. 

Hannah Munro: 38:41 

This is what we need, up and to the 

Jeremy Foster: 38:43 

Yep. Yep. What's hard is figuring out how to get everybody aligned to do it. 

Hannah Munro: 38:49 

I was going to say that. I think that's always the challenge, isn't it? It sounds super simple, but it's actually sometimes super simple is actually quite hard. That's right. Awesome. Well, thank you so, much, Jeremy, for joining me on the podcast today. For any of those listening, I'm sure they find it incredibly valuable, particularly I think your viewpoint on marketing and as an, you know, it is an investment and an expectation versus an ask. And I think that's a really great shout out. For anyone that is listening, I'm always open to new ideas for podcasts and guests. And this has been really, I think, really insightful and a different shift. So, if you have any questions, questions this is a shout out to our listeners or thoughts on topics to come up please send them through you can find me on LinkedIn um just send me a quick message I'd always love to hear feedback on the podcast what's what you like what you want more of and maybe what we should change so, please keep it coming I want to say a massive thank you to Jeremy um for joining us on the podcast today and sharing his insight and also his unconventional background as well I think it gives hope to those that are perhaps not in a typical CFO background that you know that those opportunities are there. And it's been great to hear your insight on all things fast growth and, of course, marketing. So, thanks, Jeremy. You've been a brilliant guest. So, thanks for coming on. 

Jeremy Foster: 40:09 

Really enjoyed it. Thank you so, much for having me. You have a great day.