The CFO's Guide to Business Acumen Development & Financial Storytelling

Megan - 0:52

Today, my guest is Soufyan Hamid. Soufyan is the leader of the finance circle and is passionate about transforming the role of finance professionals into strategic business partners. With over a decade of experience in corporate finance, he specializes in bridging the gap between technical expertise and essential soft skills. His mission is to empower finance teams with skills that are generally less learned, like business acumen, communication, storytelling, and leadership. At The Finance Circle, they offer tailored training programs that cater to both large teams and individuals. And their initiatives, including the financial storytelling program, are designed to enhance your team's ability to influence and drive business success. Leading organizations trust their approach, and they continue to make a significant impact through workshops, speeches, and personalized coaching sessions. Soufyan, thank you so much for being my guest on today's episode of CFO Weekly.

Soufyan - 1:51

Thank you for having me, Megan. It's great to be back with you.

Megan - 1:55

Today, our discussion focuses on financial storytelling and the evolving role of finance professionals as strategic business partners. And when you were first on the show in late twenty twenty-three, financial storytelling was a concept that I'd only just begun to hear about. And nowadays, it seems like I can't have a conversation about the evolution of the CFO role without this topic coming up. So I'm really looking forward to continuing this discussion with you. So let's jump right in.

Soufyan - 2:26

That's great. Let's do that.

Megan - 2:27

So to start, can you take us back to the beginning of your journey in finance, and what sparked your interest in the field, and how your path has evolved to where you are today?

Soufyan - 2:38

I started my career in finance pretty much a classic way, meaning that coming out of my studies, I was hired by PwC in auditing, which in Belgium is quite classic because a lot of us from business schools and finance schools go to big four companies to start in audit. And I stayed there for four years, and I really liked that. But at the same time, I didn't see myself in that career for my whole life because I really wanted to be involved inside the companies. And when you work as an auditor, you really have this external view, but you have no decision power. You have very little influence on the business. And so that's why I decided to work in FP&A. However, it did not really go as I wanted to because it was very hard to jump from auditing to FP&A, basically because you had no business experience. And so my workaround for this was to join Deloitte in a very little department that was called Financial Sourcing and Outsourcing, in which we were assigned to companies in order to work as an FP&A professional, as an accounting professional, treasury also, in different companies for projects like six months or one year. And this is where I really learned what controlling was, what FP&A was. And I did that for five years. And this is also where I discovered a bit the career of entrepreneurship because since it was a small department, as you grew in responsibilities, you also had to deliver more than just doing your job. You were required to train other people. You were required also to participate in recruitment by interviewing candidates or simply by participating in job fairs. And you also had, and that helps me a lot today, to work on reaching out to people on the commercial part of the job, meaning finding new clients, finding new projects, finding new assignments. And that was great until a certain moment where I started to think about the frustrations that I had. Because although this was interesting to learn the first steps into FP&A, the most difficult, and I'm sure FP&A's and CFOs will tell you the same, the most difficult is to continue to work on the duration, meaning that you work on a budget. Well, you want to see it through. You want to see if it worked, if it was well done, if it's accurate, if it can be improved, and you want to see your work evolving together with the company, things that you could not do as a consultant because you were there only for six months to one year. So I decided to leave Deloitte and join a telco company in Belgium, which is called Proximus, as a finance business partner. And this is really where I learned what controlling finance, business partnering, and FP&A was. Because in the first steps there, everybody was impressed because I joined from Deloitte, from PwC. I brought many new technical skills like mastering Power BI, Power Pivot, Power Query, Visual Basic. So in the first month, it was all successes because I brought things that were not inside because many people were there since twenty, twenty-five years, and they only started to renew a bit the staff in finance. And in the beginning, it was great, but then I started to feel some frustrations because contrary to some of my colleagues in finance, I was not invited to important meetings. I was not involved in the projects from the beginning, and I only got the business cases two days before they had to be presented. And I didn't really get many questions or requests to help the business. So I started to think that I may have misunderstood the concept of finance business partnering or simply that I was doing something wrong. And it all became clear what I was doing wrong because every month, we had to present the monthly results to the VP of Finance. And every month, it was somehow a frustration for everyone because there were more questions unanswered in the end than in the beginning. There were a lot of details, a lot of unclear items in the analysis that many people were frustrated not to have. And so one day, the VP of Finance, I had to present to every month, I think he couldn't hold it anymore, and he just told me that I needed to improve my storytelling and my stories. And for me, that was the first time I heard about stories. For me, when you talked about storytelling, it was more marketing stuff, sales stuff, in order to sell things to people, to deceive people into something that they didn't especially want, but I never heard of it in the context of finance. And that's where, because I'm a sensitive person, I took it a bit personally. For me, I was doing things great, and I wanted to prove him wrong that I could build great stories, great presentations. And I started to follow training, training to deliver a good TED talk. I joined Toastmasters. And by learning all of these, I started to get more sense about what was expected of a good presentation. All these were not especially destined for finance. I got the basics of how to improve a good presentation in finance. And I started to develop my own methodology that I applied first myself, and it started to work pretty well. When I presented the budgets to the different VPs of the companies, well, I started to get questions. I started to have more interest, like real questions, not the ones that are just given to you in order to block you, but things of real interest. I started to think maybe there's something to do here. Maybe the way we present stuff has a clear impact on how people understand finance, but also on how they can use finance. And that's the basics of storytelling, and that's the basics also of finance business partnering. You want finance to be useful to them. And that's basically how I discovered the power of storytelling and how I decided that it was something I wanted to be a specialist in.

Megan - 10:07

And now you've built your career around transforming finance professionals into strategic business partners. So how do you define financial storytelling, and why is it crucial for today's finance leaders to be good at this?

Soufyan - 10:21

Exactly because of this. You want to make finance useful to people. I know that we often have this image of the back office finance, the finance that is only for compliance purposes. The thing is that finance must have been useful all the time, and it's expected of finance for decades. It's just that now the pressure is more and more important on finance professionals to provide value, to be useful to people because we don't have so many excuses anymore with all the automation, with all the artificial intelligence, with the efficiencies that we have. We need to become more and more useful. And financial storytelling is the aspect among others, but this aspect I decided to be the expert on because it makes it available to people. It makes it important to the people in the rest of the company, and it makes it actionable. And that's why storytelling is so important as a tool in the skill set of FP&A professionals, CFOs, and finance leaders because you basically want to use the tool that is finance to make decisions, to drive the strategy, to make sure that everyone in the company has the necessary financial literacy to drive all their decisions based on the financial outcome.

Megan - 11:56

In your experience, what are some of the biggest challenges that finance professionals face when they're trying to communicate financial data to non-financial stakeholders, and how does storytelling help bridge this gap?

Soufyan - 12:08

Well, the basics is the message that we bring because the most difficult in my conversations with CFOs, with CEOs, and everyone that has to, excuse me the expression, has to suffer a finance presentation is that people don't select what they communicate. They just go through all the structures that are finance presentations with the P&L. And then in the P&L, you have the revenue, and you move on to the margin, you move on to the OpEx, you move on to the CapEx, and so on. They just detail what they found out, but people need to have a message. And so you have to filter in the sea of information that you got from your analysis. You have to filter everything that's useful to people, important to people, and that they can do something about it. And that filter is the three 'Whats'. You make sure that with this filter, you only bring the information that matters, that can be acted upon, and that's material enough to be important to people.

Megan - 13:20

And looking back, can you share a success story where you saw firsthand financial storytelling make a significant impact on a business decision or relationship?

Soufyan - 13:31

Well, I have a good story when I was head of controlling in a Belgian company. Historically, the budget presentation had to be planned for two days because the review of the budget consisted in going through all the details and showing all the assumptions. And there were discussions on all the assumptions one by one. We don't like this. We will change it. We go back and forth. We change the model, and it had to be planned for two days. When I arrived, I simply could not say yes to this, and I simply did not consider that it was efficient. And so I applied my concepts of storytelling by choosing what to show, choosing what was important, and focusing on the outcome, on the business outcome rather than on all the assumptions. Because all in all, the assumptions were related to a story line. And the most important was that the management could buy into the story line. And when the story line was brought in, well, the assumptions were just a consequence of that strategy being translated into a budget. And the success story that I got was that these two days of presentations were reduced to three hours, which was kind of impressive. Three hours was still a lot in my opinion, but going from two days to three hours was already a success that I could just assign to storytelling.

Megan - 15:13

That's amazing. Today in your financial storytelling program, you focus on business acumen, communication, and leadership. So can you talk to us about how these three elements work together to enhance the effectiveness of storytelling?

Soufyan - 15:28

Well, indeed. Because the basics of storytelling when you work as a finance pro is to go back to the business events. And so business acumen is of paramount importance when you work on your storytelling skills because without that, you have no story. Let's remember that what we have in our financial reports is coming from accounting, and accounting is a basic translation of what happens in real life into a language that we only know ourselves. That's accounting and finance. So business acumen will be important because you want to go back to what happens in the business to build your story. And this story has to be taken from a standpoint of the decision-makers. You don't want to start with the details before bringing your conclusion. You will want to take it from a leadership perspective where they need to have the global view before going into every supporting evidence that you brought in your story. That's why leadership as a finance pro or as a CFO is important because you take that step back that leaders, the C-suite, will take to make their decisions. And that's one of the elements of financial storytelling where you want your story to be based on these two assumptions.

Megan - 17:01

I'm just curious, how can people find this program? For people that are listening that are interested in becoming better storytellers, how can they find your program, and how can they become a part of it?

Soufyan - 17:14

Well, my program is a methodology that I share, and I share it in three different ways. I share it first, and that's the main way of sharing it, via corporate trainings. That's something that I do with companies where the CFO or the FP&A manager wants their staff to improve their storytelling skills. And so I train them in a full-day training where we go from the analysis part, which is where most finance pros start, and we go from selecting what information to share to the moment in which they indeed communicate it via presentation. This is through a four-step approach where they first have to prepare the message, then prepare the story based on the audience. They have to prepare the slides, and they also have to prepare themselves on how to deliver a good presentation both remotely and in person. That's the main way to do so because people want their stories and their storytelling skills to be trained in a tailored way based on their own presentations, based on their own industry, based on their own way of working. But, of course, this is only for big teams because I train as from six to seven people. And so when you have smaller finance teams, I also organize cohorts in which I share the same methodology but with people coming from different companies. That's the best way I found because you also can train. You also can practice live, asking your questions, getting feedback on your skills, on your presentation. But, of course, that does not always work for everyone because you have to be there on time. You have only live sessions. And so for people who prefer a self-paced version, I also have the program that is shared in a self-paced training that is available on my website.

Megan - 19:29

Do you find that people early in their career can be good at storytelling, or is that just something that comes with experience?

Soufyan - 19:37

They can be good in presentations, but storytelling is also a question of experience and business acumen. So the more you train on knowing what's inside your company, the better you will become at storytelling. And it's also a question of knowing your audience. And when I say knowing your audience, it's a question of analysis, but also knowing them more personally. The more you work with them, the more influence you will have with them. That's how storytelling works because it's a question of influence, and the influence can come from data. It can come from your analysis, but also from the relationship that you build with them together with the business acumen. So experience will still be important in storytelling, but, of course, the sooner you train it, the more efficient you will be in your career.

Megan - 20:35

And you've mentioned that financial professionals need to develop soft skills alongside their technical expertise. So how can finance leaders cultivate their communication and storytelling skills? You mentioned something like Toastmasters, but what other ways are out there?

Soufyan - 20:53

It's simple in three words that are exactly the same. It's practice, practice, and practice. The first thing that you have to do is a first step in knowing where you are. Are you good? Are you lacking some skills in the way you speak, in the way you behave, in the message that you share with people, in the structure? So all these elements are part of storytelling, and the first step is to know where you are, learn what your weaknesses are, but also develop your strongest points in order to become the best presenter and storyteller that you can. It all comes through training, and this training can come first by developing your public speaking skills, which you can find through Toastmasters, through following specific training on how to speak in public. It can come also through theater if you like comedy, for example. But what's important in financial storytelling is that it's not a... The goal is not to create a presentation of one to many. In financial storytelling, you are in a meeting. You are in a boardroom. You are in an exco room. And so it's a business meeting in which you communicate, but you will be interrupted. You will have questions. You will have to go through a structure that will be significant for you but also for your audience. And that audience is adapted according to the level but also to the company, to the industry. And this can only come through training with your own industry, with your own company as the basics.

Megan - 22:49

And let's talk for a bit about empathy and the role that empathy plays in financial storytelling.

Soufyan - 22:57

Empathy is very important in the sense that the first step before creating your story is to know who you are going to speak to. So you have to understand what's important for them. Because when you know what's important for them, I do not say that you have to agree with them, but when you know what matters to them, you know the angle and the structure that you have to adopt in your story. For example, you have an audience of the exco with a CEO, but the CEO is an ex-tech which is really keen to hear the details. You cannot use the same storytelling structure with this person that you would do for a CEO that has always worked in leadership positions and has had less appetite for details, has more for the helicopter view that you bring. And so the empathy in that sense will be the first step of understanding what kind of story is important. But at the same time, during your presentation, you also have to be aware because presenting is not just, like I said, a TED talk where you would be one to many. You will have to understand the reaction of the people in the meeting room. You will have to understand if there are doubts, if people agree with you or not. You will have to also understand what's really important to them so that you have all the potential questions prepared. So empathy is a skill that will be important in terms of preparation so that your story will be as strong as possible for everyone in the group.

Megan - 24:54

How do you think that storytelling has contributed to making finance more visible and influential in driving company strategy?

Soufyan - 25:03

That's a great question because that's the goal of storytelling. Let's say it's the selfish goal of storytelling in the sense that you become more visible and you have what we call a seat at the table, which means that when decisions are made, people want to believe that they base themselves on data. But most of the time, decision-makers have already their gut helping them make decisions. And they will use data to help them support the decision. Or if it does not go in the same sense, they will have to understand it very well. So if your analysis is just supporting the decision that's made and everyone knew what a good decision was, well, it was easy and does not really need a good story. But if you are in a context where the decision that is to be made does not go along with how people have their thoughts, in that sense, storytelling will be even more important because you first have to convince them before they start analyzing the data. And how do you do that? By making it important to them and, in a sense, playing on the pain that a bad decision would make to them.

Megan - 26:31

When you're helping finance teams to develop their storytelling skills, how do you measure success? How will I know when I'm becoming a better storyteller?

Soufyan - 26:41

I do not have specific KPIs, but it's something that you can assess yourself during and after your presentations. For example, if you receive more questions during your presentation, that's a first step to understanding that your presentation was more interesting than in the past. If people start discussing the true points about your presentation rather than the details, you will understand that storytelling has an impact. If you have real action points by the end of a meeting, that means that storytelling has an impact because the goal of storytelling is to make sure that people find it important enough and interesting enough to do something about it. So if at the end of the meeting, they just say, "Hey, thanks for your presentation. See you next week." It did not make a good effect. But if they say at the end of the meeting, "Okay, thanks for your presentation. This is what we will do, do, do. And next month, we will assess our actions by checking this and this and this." This is how you understand that your story has had an impact. So all these elements on the follow-up and on the drive of your meeting will show how storytelling had an impact during your presentation.

Megan - 28:06

And looking forward, how do you see the role of storytelling evolving in the next three to five years, especially with the increasing use of data analytics but especially AI?

Soufyan - 28:17

I see that more as the end of our excuses to not do that because I asked my audience to explain why storytelling was not yet something that they did. And most of the time, you have the lack of structure but also the lack of time. And I can understand it if you do everything manually, if you have to do your reporting manually, that you have to look for your analytics, that you have to also look for the specific outliers, the trends, and so on. But more with the new analytics tools, with AI, all of these should be done by the machines, the robots, let's say. With the new tools, it's not yet 100% correct. But with the new tools, you will be able to put a data set in an intelligence, and they will just outline what the trends are, what the outliers are. And so from there, something that used to take 70% of our time, it will take, like, five to 10% of our time. But what to do with the 90%? Well, you will have to go and challenge your findings with the business. You will have to know the business partners you will work with and you will present to. You will also understand what kind of story structure will work to make a decision relevant. And all these things that we should have done already in the last ten to fifteen years, well, we will have time for this. So definitely, using AI for storytelling is very important because it will allow us to still remain relevant with our human skills in the coming years thanks to the technology.

Megan - 30:16

And last question, but for listeners out there who are interested in learning more about your program, where can they find more information? Do you have a website?

Soufyan - 30:26

Yes. I have a website. It's called thefinancecircle.com. So thefinancecircle.com in one word. This is where you will find my contact details. You will find the different programs that I lead both for teams and for individuals. And for people who are curious to have a chat with me, you can contact me on LinkedIn. Just connect, and we'll start discussing on how I can help your teams become better storytellers.

Megan - 30:55

Soufyan, thank you so much for being my guest today.

Soufyan - 30:58

Thank you for welcoming me, Megan.

Megan - 31:00

Yeah. Absolutely. I appreciate you taking the time to come back and share all your knowledge with our listeners, and I wish you all the best.

Soufyan - 31:08

Thank you. See you next time.

Megan - 31:10

Thank you.