Sara Sheehan’s guest in this episode is Gary Simon, CEO of Modern Finance Forum and FSN Talent and highly sought-after lecturer. Gary talks about exactly what the Modern Finance Forum and FSN Talent are about and what they’re accomplishing. He explains what some of the contemporary discussions on finance centre on between the professionals on the forum and how the members research issues that impact the finance function.
Membership in the Modern Finance Forum is strictly controlled and members align specifically with finance in career and knowledge. Gary explains that their goal is to expand knowledge that impacts finance and expand engagement, noting that while membership is curated, the results of discussion and research are publicly published and available to everyone. Because the membership user base is 60% EMEA, 25% North America, and 15% AsiaPac, they address global issues and innovations affecting worldwide finance.
In this episode, Sara Sheehan and Gary Simon discuss what finance transformation means to different people and the impact of modern innovation and processes on the finance function. Gary describes some of the topics the forum tackles, from the data issue and data governance to cyber security and what security implications new systems like Copilot introduce. Gary also touches on AI, the value of human creativity and originality, sustainability and the overconsumption of resources in the growth of data and computing, and his goals for the forum. The insight and knowledge Gary share are not to be missed.
About Gary Simon:
Gary Simon is in the “Top 10” most viewed Leaders profiles on Linkedin in the UK.
He is a highly sought-after lecturer and trusted provider of ‘thought leadership’ and analysis about finance and business systems for CFOs around the world. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society; a Chartered IT Professional; a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales; a Graduate of Queen Elizabeth College (now Kings) London University and the author of four books on financial software and information systems.
He addresses thousands of finance professionals annually about the issues and challenges affecting the CFO’s role. The bulk of Gary Simon’s professional experience has been as a senior consulting partner with Deloitte, one of the largest professional services organizations in the world. His field of expertise is information strategy, performance management and financial reporting systems working at the Board level with global 2,000 companies, large public sector organizations and central government as well as spells in the mid-market. After almost 17 years as a consulting partner, he set up his own highly successful publishing house FSN Publishing Limited in 2005 and works extensively as a popular market analyst, running FSN’s popular Modern Finance Forum on LinkedIn for more than 56,000 CFOs around the globe.
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Resources discussed in this episode:
- “Every time you talk to ChatGPT it drinks 500ml of water; here’s why” by Priya Singh for Business Today September 12, 2023
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Contact Sara Sheehan | Sara Sheehan Consulting:
Contact Gary Simon:
- Website: FSNTalent.com
- The Modern Finance Forum
- Gary Simon on LinkedIn
- Email: Gary.Simon@FSN.co.uk
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Transcript
Sara Sheehan: [00:00:03] Hi there, I am Sara Sheehan and welcome to my podcast, Transformational Thinkers with Sara Sheehan. Today I’m talking with Gary Simon, CEO of Modern Finance Forum and FSN Talent. This group has been selected to be part of LinkedIn’s Inner Circle program, recognized as one of the most engaging groups on LinkedIn. This group is maintained by FSN, an independent publisher and thought leader that welcomes senior finance professionals from around the world to discuss the talent, innovations, and best practices affecting the modern finance function. It is a place where you can learn about the pressing issues of the day and get your questions answered by other finance professionals. FSN’s Modern Finance Group, with 58,000 members, is now in the top five groups for CFOs globally on LinkedIn. Previously, Gary built his career as a partner with Deloitte. Thank you so much for joining me today, Gary. I’m so glad to have an opportunity to talk with you and to explore what you’re up to with FSN Talent and the Modern Finance Forum.
Gary Simon: [00:01:21] Thank you, Sara, I’m very pleased to be joining you on your podcast.
Sara Sheehan: [00:01:25] Excellent. And so talk with me, Gary, about what your mission, vision and overarching goals were in creating the Modern Finance Forum.
Gary Simon: [00:01:37] So we created the forum in 2011. I actually wish I’d created it earlier, but we were really riding the coattails of the rise in social media. We were a traditional publisher with print copy and also publishing books, and we decided that social media was gaining traction, incredibly important, so we decided to create the Modern Finance Forum, which was a way of bringing senior finance professionals from around the world together to discuss the pressing issues of the day. And basically our aim is to inform finance professionals to help them do their job better so that they have an understanding of all the contemporary issues that impact on the workings of the finance function.
Sara Sheehan: [00:02:37] Outstanding. And so I take it that the people that are in the Modern Finance Forum, those are relationships that you foster as well for FSN Talent. Is that correct?
Gary Simon: [00:02:51] Yes. I mean, it’s well known that we have FSN Talent as a branch of our business, but the FSN Modern Finance Forum on LinkedIn is primarily a resource for finance professionals to use. We do a considerable amount of research. We produce a lot of contemporary discussions, and people in the forum have free access to all of that content.
Sara Sheehan: [00:03:26] Fantastic. And so what would you say that success looks like for you in the forum, and how will you know that you’ve met your actual objectives?
Gary Simon: [00:03:37] So success is a gradual process whereby we build relationships, and many of the people in the forum have been with us right from the very beginning, and they attend our webinars, our events when we have them. And success is really about getting engagement in the forum. You mentioned that we’re part of LinkedIn’s Inner Circle because of our high level of engagement, and this, to me, is the most pleasing aspect. It’s a very respectful forum. We never have a cross word in there. We don’t have trolls, we don’t have spamming. We have just a nice environment that people can go into and genuinely discuss, or if they just want to lurk there and just listen, that’s perfectly fine as well. But success for us is actually ramping up that level of engagement. I mean, just to illustrate it, we have, during a year, we have around about 3.5 million views of our posts.
Sara Sheehan: [00:04:50] Wow.
Gary Simon: [00:04:51] In the forum, on an average week, we have 125,000 people involved. We have about 20 people a day at least asking to join the Modern Finance Forum. But I can tell you we only take a handful because we’re very picky. We want people who are experienced finance professionals in the group, and we don’t particularly want other disciplines. We’re trying to stick to the knitting, as we say this side of the pond. Do what we’re good at and deal with the issues that relate to the finance function.
Sara Sheehan: [00:05:32] Those are absolutely tremendous numbers in terms of views and engagement and the fact that you have more than 20 people a day asking to join is truly phenomenal. So I give you a tremendous round of applause for your stickiness and the level of adoption that you have in the marketplace. So that is absolutely huge. I’d love to talk with you a little bit about the research that you’re doing and the impact that it’s having on your audience. I know that the research that you do is absolutely watershed. You’ve done some very significant work in autonomous finance and analytics. I’d love to know what you’re currently up to now.
Gary Simon: [00:06:23] So our research roams across the full spectrum of the activities of the finance function. So earlier in the year, we talked about and we researched some aspects of recruitment. What does recruitment currently look like in the finance function. Not really hard numbers, but trying to get under the skin of recruitment, how people feel they’re being treated, how they would like to do it differently, what are the factors affecting recruitment currently? And now, a few months later, we’re working on cyber security and how that impacts the finance function. We tend to look at issues where finance function isn’t comfortable. We’re trying to add to the knowledge. So most CFOs don’t understand cyber. You know, they understand its implications of course, but they don’t understand how to protect themselves, what the risks are, how much time they should be spending on it. And so what we’re trying to do is identify things that make them sit up and help them in terms of plotting their way forward as a finance function. But we’ve, in the last couple of years, we’ve done, as you mentioned, research on analytics, we’ve done research on group reporting, we’ve done research on FPNA – financial planning and analysis – and we’ve also done research on data, which is a huge prevalent problem for everyone, no matter where in the world you are.
Gary Simon: [00:08:14] And that’s one of the fascinating things. Our research is global. So we have, for example, 60% of our user base is in EMEA, 25% in North America and 15% in Asia-Pac. So we get a global perspective of the issues affecting the finance function. And incredibly, after many, many years of doing this, I said since 2011, most of the issues we deal with apply to finance functions across the world without much difference. There are, of course, cultural differences in the way that people approach things. But increasingly with globalization, organizations seem to have to confront the same issues as everybody else. And technology is agnostic to culture. You know, essentially, if you roll out ChatGPT, it’s around the world. If you introduce Copilot, it’s around the world. So these things are universal in applicability and interest within the forum. So we ask our members to participate in the research, and then we play back the findings of the research to them in due course as well. So it’s a virtuous cycle where people participate and we thank them and bring them into the research findings as well.
Sara Sheehan: [00:09:44] That is a fantastic context on who you’re reaching globally. It’s great to have that context that you really are global, very EMEA focused, very interesting. Now, in terms of the research itself, it’s also fascinating that the community is serving in that research as well. The topics that you shared are also very interesting. I’m sure it keeps your audience coming back every day, once a week on a regular basis, whatever it may be. I’m certain of that. In terms of topics, one follow-up question that I do have is what are you seeing in terms of finance transformation adoption? How are things going in the transformation side of finance and how people are doing on the success of making a finance transformation stick.
Gary Simon: [00:10:50] So finance transformation isn’t a term I’m particularly fond of, really because it can mean so many different things to different people. So what are you transforming? Where are you starting? What skills are involved? What’s the culture of your organization? Where are you trying to get to? And for me, finance functions have been doing transformation forever. There’s nothing new about it. What is quite interesting is we’ve done a lot of research around innovation in the finance function. What does that mean? And it comes down to different meanings for different people, again depending on the maturity of the company that you’re working in. So for example, if you’ve always used spreadsheets, then moving to a dedicated planning, budgeting and forecasting application could be argued as both a major transformation and extremely innovative. To a top 100 global business, that’s not innovative at all. They’ve done it years ago, and it’s not even transformative. And so it’s impossible to dissect out what is transformative without trying to set it in the context of the business at a particular point in time. But as I said, the term is overused and we’ve lost some of the, I think some of the core disciplines around information systems strategy and technology strategy that really are part of a transformation if you want to try and define it that way. And also there are a lot of people running around who are practitioners of transformation. But what qualifications do they have to transform a business? So I think in many cases, I mean, I don’t have a problem with the idea of making processes more efficient and making the organization of the finance function more coherent with the applications and processes that they’re managing. But I think transformation is overworked. You need to break it down and say, what is it we’re trying to achieve? And usually small bites is a better approach within the context of a larger plan spread over 2 or 3 years.
Sara Sheehan: [00:13:45] Exactly. And the comments that you made with regard to technology strategy, it definitely is critical for the CFO to be in partnership and lockstep with the CTO or CIO, if you will, so that whatever the work or project is at hand, they are literally on the same page of music, if you will.
Gary Simon: [00:14:17] It’s absolutely essential. We sometimes draw up what we call the Golden Triangle with the CIO, the CTO and the CFO on the three sides of the triangle and data in the middle, because the data issue has become so vast that no one can claim ownership of it. So in that scenario, everybody’s got to play nicely together to manage that data and develop that data and use it for the corporate good. And that’s something that’s, although it’s simple to draw, is very difficult in practice to achieve. But that is the essence. And if there was one thing that comes up time and time again in the forum over the years, it’s about managing data, data quality, and now we talk about data health as distinct from data quality. And this is the holy grail, being able to manage your data. And as we speak it’s growing and growing and growing.
Sara Sheehan: [00:15:30] It absolutely is. Over the last 10 to 12 years, I have worked on a number of projects where data, formal data organizations have been, created a data czar, identified and hired. And really, those clients have put tremendous effort into completely transforming the quality and coherence of the data that they have. It’s because of all of these ERP systems that companies have implemented over time and needing to, for instance, upgrade or transition to a new software. You have to make sure that the data is clean and good before doing that, or it’s an absolute nightmare.
Gary Simon: [00:16:28] Having said all of that, people don’t realize how lucky they are these days. When I started, and I won’t tell you when that was, in the profession, I remember literally carrying ten megabytes of data on a disk platter this large and this wide, and carrying it along the street from one computer in one building to another computer in another building. And none of it was compatible. You couldn’t easily read data from one computer to another. And people today are spoiled. They don’t realize how much advantage they have when it comes to managing data. But what’s happened is the volumes have grown out of all proportion, and the advent of the cloud means that organizations have mushroomed, different applications all around the world with more data sets that are different from the data sets they had before. And all of that creates a muddle unless data governance is good. So it’s probably the biggest issue of the day and we’ve done lots of research in that area, and it’s one of my favorite areas as it happens. But it’s the plumbing, so it’s not very glamorous. So I always say no one got promoted for fixing the data.
Sara Sheehan: [00:17:50] Well, I would tell you that many boards are thrilled when they see that data is better in the future. And so I could argue that it could definitely secure someone’s job in a great way at the CFO level if they are addressing data. So I appreciate your comments greatly on that. Is there an emerging business area that you would like to see the forum expand into?
Gary Simon: [00:18:25] So the area that interests us most at the moment is the the use of digital assistants, Copilot, and you know, Windows 11 and all of the developments in Microsoft. And it will soon come in Apple. We’re about to take off again. You know, we’ve had some stability for a few years and now AI, which is talked about so much, but some of it justifiably. But it is about to take off because the computing power that we need is at another level. So we need bigger, faster, bigger in terms of capability, and faster computer systems with more storage, with more advanced operating systems, and even with their own chip. Traditional chips are no longer fast enough to process 50 million transactions per second. You know, it’s becoming phenomenal. So I think we’re going to be, over the next few months, we’re going to be exploring that some more. What does it mean for finance? Do they need to get their hands dirty with these PCs, these new Copilot PCs where you’ve got Microsoft have embedded Copilot into the PC and what are the security implications of it? I mean, last week I had great fun with ChatGPT 4.0 because I interviewed her and asked her to attend one of my webinars, and we had a long conversation. You wouldn’t have known that I was talking to a computer. She was giving amazing answers and asking me questions that put me on the edge of my seat, actually. Much more difficult interview than this one.
Sara Sheehan: [00:20:34] Really? Wow.
Gary Simon: [00:20:35] Yeah, really. It’s on our forum. If you have a look, there’s a recording of it.
Sara Sheehan: [00:20:41] I definitely will because that’s fascinating.
Gary Simon: [00:20:43] It’s so exciting and we’ve got so much of this development to come. But the security issues around AI and the legislative issues around AI, which is another big area of interest, is becoming quite fraught. For example, Europe has rushed out an EU AI act. The US doesn’t want to, it seems, doesn’t want to introduce legislation. Because if I look at it cynically, it’s the new arms race. No one wants to limit the development of AI and let perhaps another sovereign nation, I won’t mention which one, get ahead in terms of AI developments. It’s becoming that crucial. So there are a lot of fascinating areas to deal with. And CFOs have got to assess the privacy risks, the confidentiality risks that are associated with AI. And they’re not trivial.
Sara Sheehan: [00:21:51] I would even offer that there are intellectual property risks as well.
Gary Simon: [00:21:58] Totally. And, you know, one of the, I don’t know if we’re coming on to it to talk about the sort of content we produce, but one of the saddest things I’ve seen over the last two years is people resorting to AI to produce content, and in my view, it’s a race to the bottom, because what you end up with is bland content that anyone can produce, that no one really understands, and isn’t innovative, isn’t on the leading edge of developments. And this is where I see us being differentiated, because we’re not going to produce content like everybody else. We never had. We never have. We’ve always produced original content. It gets copied within seconds. We can’t stop it. That’s the way of the world now. But it’s a tragedy that actually the inspiration, the creativity, the spontaneity of content is being destroyed by a lot of platforms because people are using AI engines and it’s in all creative fields, as you probably are aware, and your listeners are aware, and this content is being really ripped off. The intellectual property is being stolen and homogenized and regurgitated. And where does that take us? You know, how does it advance? Oh, you’ve gone, you know, content is becoming homogenized.
Sara Sheehan: [00:23:42] It is.
Gary Simon: [00:23:43] It’s stodgy. It’s not interesting. It doesn’t elevate interest. It doesn’t look innovative. And we’ve always, as I’ve said to you, Sara, we’ve always focused on content that we produce ourselves with our expertise.
Sara Sheehan: [00:24:02] Originality is always better. And, you know, as I look at what’s going on with the use of tools like ChatGPT or even Google’s, I believe it’s currently called Gemini, that there are many others out there, but as I look at that and I continue in conversation with, for instance, friends that are in higher education as professors, they are seeing a step change in their students’ writing, but it is literally powered by computers. And this is not teaching great writing. It’s not teaching great innovation or creativity. So I understand completely where you’re headed.
Gary Simon: [00:24:54] So I think we have a duty to carry on, to fly the flag, to carry on producing original content. And I think soon the market will wake up and come to the realization. I mean, if I look across, you know, 20 or 30 vendors in the accounting space and look at their websites, they all say the same thing, the same straplines, the same marketing messages, and it’s just bland, boring, ineffective. And look, it’s not the only industry it’s happening in. It’s the way of the world. We’re building almost a, you know, I hate quoting anything biblical, but it’s almost like a Tower of Babel we’re building, where everybody is converging on a very similar path in a similar language. And it will eventually break apart because people will not see the value in it.
Sara Sheehan: [00:25:57] Mhm. Yes. And we definitely want to keep originality as part of the best that’s out there in research and writing. It’s really critical. It’s critical for our world, it’s critical for business, and it’s critical for people that really want to be their best each and every day.
Gary Simon: [00:26:21] Well said. I agree with you.
Sara Sheehan: [00:26:23] In terms of if you were to fill in the blank on if a CEO or finance leader says this… I’ll know we made a difference.
Gary Simon: [00:26:41] Right. If they say they’ve learned something, they’ve learned something new, I’m happy.
Sara Sheehan: [00:26:48] That’s wonderful. I’ll always be learning and sharpening the saw. That definitely means that you’re always going to be on the bleeding edge of growth and comfort. So that’s always good. When you’re growing, you’re not going to be comfortable. Growth and comfort do not coexist. So I do love that. What big goals or aspirations are you currently working on accomplishing?
Gary Simon: [00:27:19] So we are looking to grow the group to 80,000. That’s our immediate numeric goal. But our goal more broadly is to keep producing content that people want to read. It’s as simple as that. We don’t, we don’t drive ourselves too hard against loads and loads of metrics. You know, while we’ve got people coming to our webinars where 90% of them stay till the end, or who come on to our LinkedIn group and read every week, and the figures keep getting better, that’s good enough for me. That’s our purpose in life.
Sara Sheehan: [00:28:05] That’s outstanding.
Gary Simon: [00:28:07] Someone said to me the other day that growth for its own sake is the philosophy of a cancer cell. Very interesting because a lot of people are saying to me this, and you can see it in the stock market right now, that there’s a shift from momentum buying and growth stocks to stocks that are actually producing profit. People have recognized that growth for its own sake is not necessarily a good thing for the companies, for the planet, for the organizations, for people more generally. There are a lot of negatives to it. It’s a difficult thing to sustain. So we’re adopting, I said, you know, we have 20 people a day wanting to join us. I could accept them all, and I could reach my 80,000 target and say, aren’t we clever? You know, look what we’ve done so quickly. But what would we really have achieved in terms of quality, in terms of participation in the forum, in terms of professional exchange of ideas? We won’t have achieved very much. So, you know, our metric, our big goal is over a period of time, and I’m not going to specify, maybe a couple of years, to grow to 80,000. And then we’ll be pretty happy. I mean, we’re happy now.
Sara Sheehan: [00:29:42] Excellent. Well, that is a wonderful goal to reach 80,000 engaged members. I applaud you for focusing on quality in those members as you admit them. And I also would love to double click on your comment about growth for the sake of growth is not necessarily a good thing. I would love to explore that a little bit more with you, if I could. Talk with me about what you think people are seeing that growth for the sake of growth is not necessarily good. They’re actually demonstrating reason and in looking at a company’s performance is what I heard. Is that correct?
Gary Simon: [00:30:33] Yes. There’s been a palpable shift in, I mean, I’m not an expert in stock markets, but what I’ve observed is that there’s been a palpable shift from momentum buying and valuing and pricing stocks that are just growing and growing and growing without any profitability to concentrating now on, you know, stocks that actually produce profits. Profit, I trained and learned with a senior partner who was a corporate finance partner, and he said, I remember one day he turned around to me and said, Gary, profit gives you permission to do whatever you want.
Sara Sheehan: [00:31:26] That’s beautiful. That is absolutely beautiful.
Gary Simon: [00:31:29] And he was right. You know, if you’ve got, if you’re well and prudently managed and you have profitability and you have good cash flow, then you’ve got the ability to do what you want to do in business. You can make the choices. They’re not forced upon you.
Sara Sheehan: [00:31:48] That’s right.
Gary Simon: [00:31:50] But the problem with growth for its own sake is what it leaves in its wake. The overconsumption of resources. I mean, taking AI as an example, right? There are data centers in the Republic of Ireland that are serving some of the big tech companies, Meta, Google, so on. Those data centers, there’s only a couple of them, they are estimated to use, within a couple of years, a third of Ireland’s electricity.
Sara Sheehan: [00:32:28] Right. That is absolutely phenomenal.
Gary Simon: [00:32:32] And the water cooling requirements. I mean, I don’t know if you’ve visited one of these data centers, but they’re the size of a shopping mall that I would find in Texas. Right?
Sara Sheehan: [00:32:49] Correct. Absolutely.
Gary Simon: [00:32:51] Your shopping malls are bigger than ours.
Sara Sheehan: [00:32:53] Correct.
Gary Simon: [00:32:53] And they’re crammed full of computers. They need to be cooled.
Sara Sheehan: [00:32:57] That’s right.
Gary Simon: [00:32:58] So you’re using all that water, and I keep reading again and again about the water challenges that America is having. That whole central part of America. You have to answer the question, can you, can we–
Sara Sheehan: [00:33:14] — is this sustainable?
Gary Simon: [00:33:16] Is it affordable, crudely. The Turing Institute published some comments about three weeks ago. They said every single ChatGPT inquiry uses 500ml of water to cool. Now when you consider how many–
Sara Sheehan: [00:33:37] — that is stunning–
Gary Simon: [00:33:38] — millions of millions of inquiries there are with ChatGPT per hour–
Sara Sheehan: [00:33:49] — it’s, that is a stunning piece of data–
Gary Simon: [00:33:55] — you realize how much water we use. We’ve got too many people in the world. We’re over consuming. We’re creating waste. We’re not good at recycling. And all these things are a travesty. And we’re storing up a problem. And we’ve gone way off the topic of finance. But I think companies have to have a social conscience. We talk about ESG, which is very big around the world now. And part of it is conservation of resources. And part of it is companies, we have to be good citizens, good corporate citizens.
Sara Sheehan: [00:34:35] Right. And that means not only managing your finances in a concerned, very almost, I think prudent really is a great word, in a very prudent and cogent way, so that you’re not hurting others in what you’re doing, and you have very high integrity about how you’re operating. I think those things are very, very critical. What does being a transformational thinker mean to you, Gary?
Gary Simon: [00:35:10] It was interesting because I’m not sure what that transformational thinking means. I like to regard ourselves as thought leaders. So it is taking, I think it’s about having that broad perspective of the world and being able to draw on bits of information, both in the near term and on the horizon, that allows us to assemble a picture of where and how the world is developing. There was a professor, and I’m going to misquote it, because I can’t remember which American professor I used, oh, it was Greg Hackett who used to own and run the Hackett Group, which is a well-respected group, as you know. And I was sitting in one of his smaller lectures one day and he said something interesting, there aren’t, we’ve got too many managers, was the first thing, and there aren’t enough people looking on the horizon.
Sara Sheehan: [00:36:30] Interesting.
Gary Simon: [00:36:31] So businesses are very much focusing on what they’re doing without realizing what’s about to hit them that’s coming over the horizon. And if you think about it on a board, there is no one particularly who is charged with scanning the horizon. He was saying it in the context of how big the turnover is of companies in the top 1000.
Sara Sheehan: [00:37:02] That’s a really good, really good topic.
Gary Simon: [00:37:05] They’re there for maybe 20, 30 years and then they disappear or, and in fact that time scale is accelerating, so they might be there for 10 years and then they drop out, or less, and then drop out. Right. And why is that? And part of it is because something hits them like a steam train and they don’t realize that it’s coming down the line.
Sara Sheehan: [00:37:33] Well, I think I think there are so many companies that have literally developed toxic workplace cultures and the turnover that we have at senior levels, it seems to be accelerating. And that experience and knowledge loss is absolutely prohibitive from being strategic in many cases. And if no one is scanning the horizon and looking at what’s going on out there so that they can make really good decisions, it’s a huge problem for business performance at its root.
Gary Simon: [00:38:21] Totally. That’s exactly it. And cynically, we probably pay our leadership too much money. So…
Sara Sheehan: [00:38:32] There you go.
Gary Simon: [00:38:33] They don’t need to be around very long to be well rewarded. And that’s not helpful.
Sara Sheehan: [00:38:40] Very interesting. Is there anything else, Gary, that you’re working on that you would like to share with the listeners today?
Gary Simon: [00:38:50] I think I’ve given you a pretty good insight into what we’re about and where we’re going. I don’t think there’s anything dramatic to tell you about. I mean, we’re putting a lot of effort into FSN Talent. We, the recruitment side of the business, we really think we can do that better than it’s been done in the past. We want, I keep saying ‘we’, the new way of doing recruitment is the old way. Actually not AI selection of candidates and analysis of CVs, but actually talking to people.
Sara Sheehan: [00:39:29] Actually knowing the individual.
Gary Simon: [00:39:32] On both sides of the fence, both the candidate understanding their aspirations, paying a lot of attention to that, and also the hiring company, understanding how this all works together, what they’re really looking for, what’s the thinking behind the job spec? What is the real culture of the organization? When you’re recruiting senior people, it’s not about the technical skills. You can assume a certain level of competence. It’s about the cultural fit.
Sara Sheehan: [00:40:05] That’s right. That’s right.
Gary Simon: [00:40:07] So we’re focusing on that. We’re bringing our finance skills into the equation, because a lot of, we think that finance recruitment ought to be finance led. You need people who understand the finance world, understand where financial reporting is going, for example, where financial systems are going, all of that. If you don’t understand it, how can you possibly engage and find the right sort of people? And then finally we’ve got this wonderful network. So we’re putting quite a lot of energy into the recruitment side because we think we can do it absolutely better, not faster, we’re not going to be a CV factory churning out CVs. We want to do very few jobs a year, but do them well.
Sara Sheehan: [00:40:55] Gary, I have tremendous respect for how you’re approaching your work with FSN Talent, having better, deeper relationships not only with the client that needs the resource, but the actual candidate, is an absolute winning combination for me. I feel that it’s something that has been lost with all of the proliferation of online job boards and the selection software that so many people use. It’s become a game to try to create a resume that will be seen by ATS and filtered up to the top. So if you’re actually picking people based on their experience and skills and their personality for the organization that they may be presented to, you’re going to be more likely to be successful there.
Gary Simon: [00:41:58] Mm, I totally agree. That’s what we’re about.
Sara Sheehan: [00:42:02] Excellent. Well I really appreciate that context. Gary, how would our listeners find you?
Gary Simon: [00:42:09] So I’m going to take the brave step and give you my email address.
Sara Sheehan: [00:42:14] Perfect.
Gary Simon: [00:42:16] So if they want to reach out to me it’s Gary G A R Y dot Simon S I M O N at F for Freddie, S for sugar N for November dot co dot uk. Gary.Simon@FSN.co.uk. Or they can find me on LinkedIn, or in the Modern Finance Forum and connect with me that way.
Sara Sheehan: [00:42:43] Super. Well, Gary, this has been a fascinating conversation. I can’t wait to see where your business expands and grows, and I know that it will. So I look forward to staying in touch with you so that we might be able to even have a conversation in a year or two about how things have changed for you.
Gary Simon: [00:43:08] Thank you very much, Sara, for that vote of confidence. It’s much appreciated.
Sara Sheehan: [00:43:13] Thank you so much for listening to episode 15 of Transformational Thinkers with Sara Sheehan. Today I had the pleasure of discussing modern finance with Gary Simon, the CEO of the Modern Finance Forum and FSN Talent. We touched on some critical topics about the future of finance, the impact of technology, and the importance of integrity and financial management. Some of the key takeaways from today: Integrity and prudence in financial management. Managing finances with the highest integrity and prudence is crucial to avoid causing harm to others. It’s more important than ever to prioritize ethical decision-making in business. Transformational thinking and forward-looking strategies. Businesses need to adopt transformational thinking by anticipating future challenges and opportunities, emphasizing the necessity of long-term planning and forward-thinking to maintain a thriving organizational culture. And finally, human-centric recruitment approaches. FSN Talent focuses on personalized, relationship-based recruitment strategies, ensuring a cultural fit and understanding of finance in the hiring process rather than relying solely on AI and ATS selection. Thank you so much for listening. As always, we love to hear from you. Please consider subscribing so you never miss an episode, liking, and commenting. Let’s keep the conversation going.
