What’s a Cameraman & Helicopter Got To Do With Your Finance Career?
During the week I had a conversation helping a fellow finance professional through their career bone diagram and we got onto the tricky question of how best to create value and develop skills around that to get from where he was to where he wanted to get to so he could deliver the outcomes and key success factors expected of him in his new role. It brought up an analogy of the cameraman and helicopter pilot.
So in this bite-sized episode I share some thoughts on a framework that has served me well to help answer these questions enabling you to relentlessly focus on delivering the right value in your career.
Transcript
Hi, everyone. And welcome to this week’s Monday memo. And today, yeah. I’d like to share with you some thoughts about a conversation I had during the week, and it was to do with helping a fellow finance professional through their career and bone diagram. That diagram that helps you understand where you want to get to in your career.
[00:00:18] What your ideal finance career looks like, where you are now, and the steps you need to take to get there. And that’s why we bring guest mentors on the show to help you understand and what path might be appropriate, one for you and the steps to take. I There’s no better strategy that I’m aware of to get where you want to get to then are someone who’s already gone on that journey.
[00:00:38]So as we were trying tackle the tricky question over what skills exactly you should be looking to develop it, who we should be looking to mentor with and network with to deliver that. Key success factors and the outcomes, the key outcomes that would be required in his role. It actually brought up an analogy of the helicopter pilot, the cameraman and the drone. And it’s one picture that encapsulates the importance of focusing relentlessly on delivering what value you offer in the world and that others will pay for it.
[00:01:14]And on the other side, what can happen in a relatively short period of time, if you don’t and and the images shows the difference between two years. 2009 and 2019. And in 2009, you’ve got a camera man hanging outside of a helicopter with his video camera reporting. First, some news agency of what was going on.
[00:01:36] And in 2019, you just have in the picture, a drone that can do the same job. And coming back to that focus relentlessly on delivering value. The others would have a willingness to pay for. I found the model, lets you work quite well and work with others very well. We call it the gears model and it’s helped to stay ahead of those decades, shifts those, the, those changes that can happen very quickly, that some of us might take outside of our control load, those technology tools to change his art, but how we get ready and prepare and get ahead of those.
[00:02:10] That’s within our control. So GEARS it’s a pneumonic, but five key areas. We can keep focus around. And in finance, we do these areas very well. So this shouldn’t be too hard for us to do. There’s more of a mindset thing to appreciate what each of those five elements are. The first one is governance.
[00:02:31]Just make sure the right things are done. For instance. The drone follows a program or has an operation behind it. Like in finance, we have control frameworks to make sure the right things are done, establishing checklists, it’s substantive testing, and taking what we learned and putting it back into practice.
[00:02:51]So we can cover and doing the right things, not just within finance, but also within our careers.
[00:02:56]Now that said between the drone and the helicopter pilot in the camera man is probably much easier to govern the drone. So therefore the drone has probably a higher value to the operator in the organization. It’s delivering value for the, some of you might guess is economic. That willingness to pay versus the cost of deliver.
[00:03:17]The helicopter and cameraman probably costing their own bones about $2,000 an hour. And it takes syndrome based on, I know what the Irish army paid for. One that recently, one of my buddies told me about $50,000. So assuming that it’s one flight a week, then a drone pays back in half a year. Whereas you’d have the ongoing operational costs of a camera and a helicopter pilot, whereas the drone might be considered your CapEx as well.
[00:03:47] So in accounting, we’ve had a lot of robotic process automation, a lot of investments replacing the manual grunt of our work. So to say we’ve had things like optical character recognition during the way with data entry professionals and next to commerce, probably cost control. I’m more and more tools allowing management to look at reports, numbers, dashboards, themselves that decide on the financials themselves, giving them the advice, even power BI is doing that.
[00:04:18] Nowadays you can put in a wife question and it gives you back a potential answer. Not saying it’s any good, but saying that the frameworks are already developing. They’re already out there and have been around for a couple of years already. That should encourage finance professionals from an economic perspective, not necessarily to focus on cost because it’d be very hard to win, but progressing up the value ladder, which again, we’ve talked about on the show.
[00:04:43] So getting involved with scenario planning, full stock modeling, evolving options with business partners and stakeholders, and also deploying solutions around driving additional revenue and margin to the bottom line. Ensuring sustainable cashflow and recurring revenue models are very popular at the moment.
[00:05:03] So there’s a lot of attention out there about them. So getting those skills that will set you up very well because recurring revenue does a lot of those things. It just, the growth customer creation. It does the sustainable cashflow. So you’re not having to look for the big wins every week. As long as you keep your customers happy, the revenue will keep flowing in the cattle. Keep coming in a, another, the, a element of the gears framework. Again, in finance, we appreciate the principle of accuracy, the pride, the drone, for instance, you point to where he wants to get to, and it will do exactly what you want it to on that area.
[00:05:39] That’s fine as professionals. We know the importance of accuracy. We also know looking at not only what’s there, but also what’s not there. That’s something that drone can’t do. Probably what a helicopter pilot. And a camera man can do is they can see what’s going around the place, maybe a drone can’t do that.
[00:05:58] And that’s where if you can demonstrate that skill to do that, particularly when it comes to forecast in the future and deliver an accurate forecast of what might happen. A lot of companies will pay for that.
[00:06:10]But there wasn’t enough. And of that looking outside of what a drone can see from a camera man, a helicopter pilot perspective that organizations like the news agencies and so on would evaluate.
[00:06:23]And again, if you look at the adverse reactions that.
[00:06:29]That bad news can have on stock prices or missing things. So not being accurate around numbers and reporting, then you can see there’s a lot of value for organizations in that particular area. If you couldn’t bring additional accuracy to the table, the, R element of the gears frame markers for responsiveness, the drone super responsive to the direction of an operator it’s near instantaneous.
[00:06:53]For a cameraman and helicopter pilot direction might take a bit longer cause your coordination, the actions of a couple of people, at least. So you know, the boom way to get ahead, not just within your careers but also what customers is the appearance of being responsive. And that doesn’t mean being a slave to responding to every email that comes into your inbox as fast as you can.
[00:07:17] Or you’d be missing the point. That’s not very strategic. Responsiveness is more to do with customer intimacy. It’s getting out there understanding their needs ahead of time and imagine a camera crew whose business was getting head of events and report in the news before it happened, essentially that that I think that was actually a plot in James Bond movie, come to mention it tomorrow’s news today or something like that.
[00:07:40] But knowing. The needs of stakeholders and customers are getting ahead of companies again, pan out a value for that. And it’s not that hard to get to needs. All you got to do is start delivering what their wants are. And a lot of instances wants meet needs, but sometimes wants and delivering those helps builds trust around responsiveness to meeting needs or wants even.
[00:08:02] And then that allows you to go and deliver what they really need. And then final S is security. And it’s a bit of an odd one probably to throw in because of that photo with the helicopter pilot, the cameraman and the drone, but information is extremely valuable. Think about the impact of the information from the cameraman’s feed, go into another network, at least with drone.
[00:08:26] You’ve got that security that it should just be you assuming you’ve got the right software and the drone, and it’s not been hacked at any way. And finance with high level of ethical standards. We’re very much aware of the costs of data breaches and again, share price movements. When those have been reported in the news.
[00:08:44]And in finance, we exhibit certain levels of discreteness. We like reducing cash leakage and where things aren’t exactly optimized in the financials. Safeguarding assets is key for us as well. It’s a fiduciary judiciary of the board of management. So we’re there helping them do that and ensure that the agents of the principles managers are best representing the shareholders, interests and safeguard and their assets.
[00:09:09] So we do a lot of the GEARS framework already from a delivering value perspective. So as long as we keep focusing on the gears and delivering value, It’s going to be very hard for events in technology that are more cost plays at the moment to userp the value we offer.
[00:09:28]And again, as I mentioned earlier, there’s real value in sharing with others. Like we do on this podcast, the experience that they might need before they actually need them. And that’s why when guests, mentors onto the show, and it just makes much more sense. If you want to figure out the path to delivering value.
[00:09:47]Particularly within your careers and remaining relevant to your stakeholders or like the cameraman and the helicopter pilot is to ask people who’ve already gone on that journey, got ahead of the game a bit and stopped to do everything that they did because there’s some hard won lessons along the way, again, that they could help you avoid.
[00:10:04] It’s more like that. 80, 20 principle investing 20% of your time on those things that give you 80% of the impact. Look, hope you enjoyed this week’s episode. If you did, please remember to share with your friends and colleagues when all the major platforms iTunes Stitcher, SoundCloud, YouTube, and Spotify, and as always, really appreciate investing your time with us today. [00:10:23] So until next time, take care of yourselves and let’s keep on building our strength in the numbers.
