How scenario planning helps bring certainty to the uncertain

When Christian Geyer took over financial planning and analysis for the Center for Naval Analyses in 2012, he created a model to forecast how the organization would do over the next year or so. What he discovered stunned him; despite the organization's 75-year history of steady operations, his model showed a steep revenue drop within the next 12 months. 

"I took a few days to kick it around," Geyer said in a CFO Thought Leader podcast. "Where did I go wrong in my modeling, in the math and statistics? I tried to punch holes in it."

Once he concluded his work was sound, Geyer took the news to the CFO, who did his own analysis and asked him to share the forecast with the organization's board.

"I remember it clear as day," said Geyer, now CFO of data security and analysis company ActiveNav. "I got a call that night to come into our CEO's suite. It was the first time I had walked into a board meeting."

The organization's leadership directed him to work with his team to develop contingency plans. Before the 12 months were out, revenue in fact dropped by half, but the organization was prepared. 

"Credit to the C-suite," Geyer said. "They really absorbed it. They believed in the model."

As an organization that depended on federal government contracts, it was hit hard by the so-called fiscal cliff in 2012 — when Congress couldn't agree on a federal budget and forced the executive branch to shut down non-essential operations and furlough much of the federal workforce. 

"Sure enough, the budget uncertainties came to reality," Geyer said. "Budgets were cut, funding was pulled back. We were looking at pulling in 50% of funding we expected. Our rap rates, consistent with the model, were skyrocketing."

Crisis preparation

As bad as the experience was, it showed Geyer how powerful finance can be, which helped him last year.

Just two weeks after he started at ActiveNav in his first CFO role, he was at the company's U.K.-based main office when the United States began issuing lockdown orders. 

"I had to decide in my second week to close all our global offices and send everyone remote," he said. "That was a shocker to me."

Even so, the company wanted him to stay focused on why they hired him: to create a plan for using money the company had just received in its series A capital raise to scale its operations and accelerate growth. 

The company decided it would hold back for a short time, then rapidly go to market with new branding, a new website, a ramped-up sales team and a bigger back-office operation. "That's where our investment was best-suited," he said, "penetrating large markets, squeezing margins to increase profitability, building out the sales force and getting in front of clients."

Career plan

Geyer started in finance 15 years ago as an accounts payable specialist at SSI, a construction company specializing in government contracting work. 

From the start, he saw his AP role as a launch point for gaining experience in all aspects of finance and accounting. 

"On a sheet of paper, I wrote down what I wanted to do in one year, two years ... to reach the CFO seat in year 15," he said. "I lived and breathed that. It's like a contract to yourself."

He advanced to management at SSI after identifying and solving bottlenecks in the AP process. 

"I put in 12-14-hour days, looked at purchase requisitions, the purchase order process, the payment approval process," he said. "After a month or two I had whittled down what was a 160-hour-a-week job with four full-time equivalents (FTEs) to 10 hours a week, and saved the business $300,000 a year."

Key metrics

At ActiveNav, Geyer is closely involved with the company' sales operations to help ensure it has flexibility to customize deals to get them closed.

"I'm embedded in every deal," he said. "My rapport with the sales team can be on a daily or weekly basis, depending on deals coming through. I speak almost every day with the global sales leader — how we can structure something to turn a cold client warm again, using incentives for different methods of penetrating that account again."

With his finance team, sales metrics are top of mind, because those measure how well the company is doing to meet its forecasts. "Are we generating enough pipeline?" he said. "We know our win rate, how fast we can close a deal. So, do we have the number of deals out there to grow the business?"

He also looks at churn, new clients, time to close, and win rate, among other metrics. For the company's services division, he looks at bill rate, average bill rate per client, profitability in markets, and use rates.

All of the metrics lay the groundwork for the one he cares most about, which is enterprise value. "That's the most important metric," he said, "I look at the other metrics to help us get there."

The coronavirus has compelled CFOs to build up resistance — not just to COVID-19 disruption but to other external risks such as cyber attacks, tariff wars and climate change.

The pandemic underscored to CFOs the vulnerability of their companies to the broadest range of external risks in decades, according to financial executives and experts in business technology.

CFOs face the possible spread of COVID-19 variants, fragile supply chains, rising pressure for disclosures on sustainability and extreme weather such as the recent winter storms in Texas. They also need to watch for signs of financial instability from high levels of federal and corporate debt and record fiscal and monetary stimulus.

“We’re in uncharted waters with respect to the size of the risks we face,” according to Barry Keating, co-author of Forecasting and Predictive Analytics, now in its seventh edition. Companies that fail to forecast external threats based on analysis of near- or real-time data “are going to be the ones who don’t exist in the future,” said Keating, a professor at Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business.

During the pandemic CFOs have used advanced data analytics to cut costs, tighten cash management and safeguard supplies. For example, detailed analysis of consumer demand and economic growth in several countries is helping automakers adjust their just-in-time production to a severe shortage of semiconductors.

CFOs who most effectively manage risk today have discarded old forecasting methods that primarily relied on spreadsheets and backward-looking historical data. They have adopted advanced analytics that track external and internal risks based on high volumes of near- or real-time data, according to CFOs and experts in business technology.

Using cloud computing and data analytics, a CFO can perform the detailed econometric modeling that for decades many companies rejected as too costly, according to Prevedere CEO Richard Wagner. “It’s like having an army of economists in a box,” he said.

CFOs will sooner move on from traditional forecasting to advanced data analytics after recognizing that just 15% of the variables that shape business performance reside within a company, Wagner said.

The remaining 85% of factors — such as political unrest, recession, social turmoil and regulatory changes — influence a company from the outside, beyond a financial executive’s control.

Casting a wide net

A CFO can gather details on external risks from news reports, social media, regulatory announcements, quarterly earnings calls by industry leaders and other sources, according to Jérôme Basdevant, chief technology officer at Datamaran, a provider of software analytics. They can analyze the findings based on likelihood and potential business impact.

Financial executives with such information can identify and measure emerging risks, such as the reliability of suppliers in countries struggling with COVID-19 or the impact of lockdowns and other coronavirus stresses on the wellbeing of new company hires. 

“You can transform something that was unstructured and difficult to assess into something that you can start to compare with your other risks,” Basdevant said.

Using a dynamic data dashboard, a CFO can alter the degree and balance of risks based on a range of scenarios and build a strategy for risk management that is comprehensive, forward-looking and timely.

“You need to be able to look at what’s actually going on” across the full landscape of risks, rather than rely on expectations based on internal historical data, according to Sharon Daniels, CEO at Arria NLG, a provider of artificial intelligence that turns structured data into natural language. When it comes to identifying and measuring risks, “there is just no room to be any further behind.”

CFOs who disregard outside threats may face greater regulatory and conduct risk. Pressure from regulators and investors will probably compel businesses to disclose more about external risks related to public health, climate and workforce diversity, The Conference Board and Datamaran said in a study.

“The events of 2020 brought risks related to climate change, social justice issues and public health to the forefront of public consciousness,” they said, noting that U.S. and European companies currently give limited attention to those issues in public statements.

“Now is the time for companies to examine whether their financial disclosures adequately acknowledge systemic risks,” The Conference Board and Datamaran said.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has already started such an examination. It is considering ways that companies should provide detailed disclosures on environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks.

Most CFOs foresee obstacles as they ramp up advanced data analytics this year, Gartner found. Eighty-two percent of financial executives have made adoption of such technology a top priority and 78% expect difficulties in reaching their goals, according to a Gartner survey of 173 CFOs.

Similarly, 99% of CFOs want to use real-time data to navigate risks but only 16% say they tap data at the needed scale, according to an Accenture survey of 450 financial executives at companies with at least $1 billion in revenue.

Thirty-four percent of CFOs rate real-time scenario planning as their highest priority for 2021, while 24% have made gaining real-time insights the No. 1 goal of their finance function.

Other benefits

Financial executives who launch near- or real-time data analytics often gain more than insights into external risks, the CFOs and experts in business technology said. For example, they benefit from more frequent and timely predictions.

Many CFOs at the start of the pandemic began meeting with their leadership teams on a daily or weekly basis rather than monthly, Wagner said. They “now have to do ‘now-casting’” rather than forecasting, he said, “so they know what’s going on this week and next week.”

Advanced analytics shared on a data dashboard prompts structural improvements within a company by spurring communication and collaboration, the CFOs and business technology experts said.

“Risk has to be perceived and discussed in a collaborative manner,” OneStream Software CFO Bill Koefoed said. Given the variety and rapid evolution of external risk, “everybody has to have visibility into it, everybody has to be talking about it.”

A data dashboard shared throughout a company breaks down organizational silos and opens the way for “self-serve analytics,” Daniels said. “Your IT department is basically democratizing data.”

Advanced data analytics reveals opportunities as well as risks, the CFOs and experts in business technology said.

“You could say that those are new risks or new challenges, but actually think of them more as opportunities to strengthen your company,” Dun & Bradstreet CFO Bryan Hipsher said.

For example, a technology company could view social media describing a lack of diversity in its industry as an opportunity to refocus hiring on a broader demographic and stand out from rival companies, Basdevant said.

Using advanced data analytics, “you identify where you have the best opportunity to not only contribute to society, but also to differentiate yourself” from competitors, he said.

Mining data pays off

Insights from advanced data analytics can boost the bottom line.

A beverage company that was determined to dominate the space on store shelves in China knew it was overproducing and holding excessive inventory but lacked accurate estimates of future demand. It aimed to improve forecast accuracy by at least 3% and save $9 million by reducing inventory, Wagner said.

The company analyzed several consumer indices — including online spending, retail sales and spending on luxury goods, gasoline and travel — and improved its forecast for beverage demand four weeks in the future by 18%. It cut inventory with confidence and met its cost savings goals, Wagner said.

AT&T sought through data analytics to more effectively identify ESG concerns, improve communication with stakeholders and gain insights for its decisions on reporting and strategy, Basdevant said. AT&T’s usual surveys lacked the nuanced, qualitative insights that it needed.

The company used software to automate information gathering from social media, regulatory notices, peer reports and traditional media. It also surveyed 26,000 stakeholders across several groups, including investors, business customers and consumers, expanding its reach well beyond prior research.

Using its findings, AT&T plotted several issues on a chart — including work/life balance, company water use and network security — based on relevance to company performance and importance to consumers and stakeholders. The resulting scatter plot helped rank priorities and clarify company strategy, Basdevant said.

Monitoring external risks

CFOs today identify several major external risks, all of which can be tracked around the clock by advanced data analytics. For example, the increase in the yield on the 10-year Treasury note from 0.917% on Jan. 4 to more than 1.5% on March 5 has pushed up corporate borrowing costs. With analytics, a CFO can monitor in depth the real-time impact on markets and company cash and investments.

Rising interest rates is a major concern for 49% percent of the respondents to the Accenture survey. The trend threatens to undermine Federal Reserve stimulus. At the outset of the pandemic, the central bank cut the benchmark interest rate to a record low and began buying $120 billion in bonds each month.

“Whenever there is cheap money, that has come to an end — not always in a good way,” Koefoed said.  

Record monetary stimulus and a $1.9 trillion coronavirus rescue package headed toward congressional approval have fueled concerns the economy will overheat and stoke inflation.

The surge in federal spending “is going to heat up the economy like putting a blowtorch to a pan on your stove,” Keating said.

Forty-seven percent of survey respondents flagged further pandemic disruption and the possibility of recession as leading concerns, while 42% identified hiring and retaining talent.

Even in the face of an unprecedented range of external risks, many financial executives still use just internal data and outdated technology to build their business strategy, the CFOs and experts in business technology said.

“I’m afraid a lot of firms today do their forecasting on the back of an envelope,” Keating said. “The use of predictive analytics is a very important way to compete.”

When the pandemic hit, the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team at a U.S. manufacturing company did something different than the typical modeling exercise; it created an uncertainty cube, a process in which planners multiply the variables and paths used in scenario planning to better assign probability ratios to outcomes. 

"The uncertainty cube is an expansion of other forms of analyses," McKinsey & Company Partner Aleksander Petrov said in an analysis and webcast. "If you think about a couple of scenarios with a couple of variables that evolve over time, the uncertainty tube just expands those with a bit more variables and a lot more paths."

The key is to include more exogenous business impacts than is included in a traditional modeling exercise — six rather than three, for example — and to model far more paths, such as 10,000 rather than 1,500.   

"We are in a great period of uncertainty," Petrov said. "To estimate the full depth of effects that are happening in the balance sheet, a technique that is rich and deep in analysis should be used."

In-depth analysis

The manufacturing company, for example, constructed an uncertainty cube that followed 10,000 paths based on six exogenous variables over seven quarters under three scenarios.

"Most companies [already] have a taxonomy of financial risk," Petrov said. "If not, finance leaders should work with business units to create one."

In its analysis, the manufacturing company looked at steel and oil prices, BBB-rated credit spreads, U.S. GDP and the movement of European and Brazilian currencies against the dollar

It fed those variables into its model and analyzed how they fared over seven quarters, assuming a quick recovery, a moderate shock and a severe shock.  

Company leaders, Petrov said, were "surprised to learn that the probability of insolvency was nearly 30% over the next 24 months." 

The main reason: the pandemic's effect on global currencies and oil prices. 

In one path, U.S. GDP dropped sharply in the fourth quarter at the same time credit spreads and steel prices rose dramatically. In another, GDP dropped but credit spreads remained constant and steel prices softened. 

Insolvency risk

Against these scenarios, company leaders wanted to know if it made more sense to raise cash or cut costs. 

The company ended up applying for a paycheck protection program (PPP) loan, restructuring its existing bank debt, shelving a planned acquisition, and accelerating its purchasing program to help supply chain partners. 

The company, Petrov said, "found out that … it was able to decrease its probability of insolvency — that is, the likelihood of its going bust — from 25% to 5% under most scenarios." 

Given the number of data points it's based on, the uncertainty cube is a big task but Petrov said the extra work comes  mostly from identifying as many of the company's exogenous risks as possible. Once that's done, the modeling doesn't require much more computational power than what companies are already typically using.  

"It actually doesn't take a lot more time and effort than the standard analysis," Petrov said. "The key is to spend enough time upfront thinking about which are the right variables to expand the scenario with. But after that, the methodology and application don't need to take a lot more effort and time."

Your next finance hires must be comfortable with modeling and can't just be proficient number crunchers, CFOs said in an Argyle Digital finance leadership webcast.

The pandemic has accelerated the need for analytical-minded finance staff because without people who can incorporate internal and external data, including macroeconomic data, and use AI and other predictive analytical tools in forecasting, organizations will founder, said Nayab Siddiqi, CFO of travel technology company REZY360.

"Someone who can't connect the macroeconomic events to the financial impact would not be able to deliver [on expectations]," Siddiqi said. "If someone doesn't understand risk, probability, and statistical techniques, they won't be able to create scenarios and translate those into probabilities."

Scenario planning

Given today's uncertainties, you need to look at multiple scenarios to really cover your bases, said Sara Baxter Orr, head of global CFO practice for financial software company Anaplan. "We basically run seven or eight plays of what could possibly happen," she said. "You start to build this competence and you get better and better at it. It doesn't have to be scary or something a data science team does in the back room."

COVID has made the financial planning and analysis (FP&A) function the hub of the continuous planning that organizations must do to survive today, said Orr.

"Finance teams are at the epicenter of this," she said. "You take the strategy that goes into the finance plan and then into the operating plan and you get those synced up."

The days of creating a static budget and annual operating plan are over, she said. Organizations today have to do continuous planning, using a rolling forecast that updates with as close to real-time data as possible from the organization's business units. 

"The one thing we know about our annual operating plan is it's always wrong," she said. "Just pick a month — October. That's your annual operating plan. Then just keep going, because things are moving at such a rapid pace. The more you can roll your forecast, the more you might be better at predicting the future."

Orr uses an 18-month time horizon in her forecasts; the longer period helps with long-term planning by picking up trends long before they become problems. "It gives you alerts if there's a risk," she said.

Qualitative skills

Analytical competency isn't the only finance skill new-hires need; they must be comfortable working with other functions within the organization so they can understand the business from these other points of view and incorporate that into the financial plan. 

"It comes down to two things," said Kenny Cheung, chief of procurement at the World Bank Group. "Strong communication and change management — how do we implement the operating plan consistently across the organization? They need that comfort level."

The increased need for analytically-skilled staff with a broader vision of the organization is part of the long-term shaft among FP&A teams away from backwards-looking analysis of internal data to forward-looking planning, Siddiqi said.

"Basing numbers on historical trends was very simplistic," he said. "Now we're going deep into different scenarios."

In the travel industry, for example, companies used to track the number of people traveling and average cost per trip. Today, that data is just the start.

"Now you're looking at cross-border travel, business travel, even going down to the city level," he said. "How many people are going to certain types of hotels? What is the leisure division doing? What is the business division doing? That's a much deeper analysis and that's the only way to go forward."

The acceleration in finance teams undertaking deeper analytical work is one of the beneficial impacts of the pandemic. "It's coming out of a negative event, but it's moving us in a positive direction," Siddiqi said.

When states mandated staying at home in March, the School of Rock, like every other type of school, felt the impact. But with insights gleaned from modeling by its two-year old FP&A team, the company rolled out a virtual program in just 12 days, giving it a revenue base until in-person classes are feasible. 

"We’re deriving 100% of our revenue from something that did not exist two months ago," John Cappadona, the company's CFO, said in a CFO Thought Leader podcast. 

Rather than reduce tuition because virtual classes can't include the in-person band-practice component it was known for, the company held firm on pricing and brought in premium features, including classes led by popular recording artists. 

"What’s been great is, a lot of the artists are home," he said. "They’re not on the road, and they want to help. So, for an hour, an artist will get on Zoom with our students. We're also doing master classes and songwriting classes."

The premium additions haven't kept the company from losing revenue but they've helped keep the losses under control. "We've lost a bunch of students, but we've preserved many more than we've lost," he said. 

What’s more, the company now has a product that it plans to continue even after it can hold in-person classes again, Cappadona said.

New FP&A capacity hits the right note

The company's ability to do the kind of modeling that helped it map out its pandemic response had to be created from scratch when Cappadona joined the company in 2018. 

The company, which owns 49 schools and oversees more than 200 franchisees in eight countries, had just relocated its corporate offices to the Boston area, from Philadelphia, and had few senior finance people in the new location.

"We had a senior accountant that started a couple of months before I did," he said. "I had a controller ... who decided she didn't want to continue. The day I joined, my new controller and I walked through the door on the same day, not knowing anything about how to make this thing happen. And we were going through our audit, year-end. So, it was like, 'Oh boy.'" 

The company also had no financial planning and analysis (FP&A) function, which is the background Cappadona brought to the job. "That was my first big hire," he said. "[The person I brought in] has been outstanding and really helped us navigate these waters."

At the start of the pandemic, Cappadona worked with his FP&A chief to model three scenarios, including a worse-case scenario that envisioned the company losing 50-60% of its revenue, selling no more franchises, and running out of cash. 

"We isolated all the scenarios, with the same cost variables," he said. "It was a menu approach."

The scenarios gave company executives a set of levers to pull based on what was happening. "We said, 'What if we have to do more cuts? What if we do these types of things? How much more will that give us in EBITDA by month?'"

Cappadona honed his skills at scenario planning in 2012 when he had to wrestle with the impact of Hurricane Sandy while heading up FP&A for WB Mason, an office supply company concentrated in the northeast.

"Pretty much all of their operations were out of business for several days after the hurricane," he said. "So, we had to quickly enact our forecast models and ... shore up costs because we had bank covenants we had to maintain. We had to look out and say, when are these businesses going to be coming back? Very similar to what I’m facing today."

Cappadona said decisions based on the scenario planning have to be made knowing you're not going to get everything right, so you have to be prepared to shift tactics as your forecasts get replaced with actual data. 

"If you have to course-correct, do that," he said. "That's what we've been doing here. If we had waited to get all of our data in, we still wouldn’t have an offering right now with School of Rock Remote. We did it in 12 days. If you're going to fail, fail quickly and move on."

Engagement is key

Since he's been on board, Cappadona has been tracking three metrics: revenue, student count, and net promoter score. "As revenue and student count go, that's how the business is going to go," he said. 

He tracks engagement as well, and that's taken on new importance since the virtual classes started because it can let the leadership team know if the premium features are working or if they need to do something else to keep students coming back to the Zoom sessions.

"People canceling lessons is a key indicator," he said. "It tells us how student count will perform going forward."

The metrics are a central talking point in meetings the CEO holds three times a week with his executive team and franchise owners that attend.

"That's where we've been able to get some of our best ideas on how to keep the ball rolling," he said. "How do we come up with other things that are able to entice customers to come in and then turn the ideas into processes quickly?"

"We kid we need a vacation," he said. "It's been 24-7 for two months now."

Verizon's Matt Ellis, CFO of one of the largest companies in the United States, has ample resources and lines of sight at his disposal. However, it was crucial to get an outside perspective as he and his team put together plans in early April for managing the economic impact of COVID-19.

"Initially, our corporate FP&A team put together three different cases, at the macroeconomic level, of what [the pandemic] means for our volumes," said Ellis, who was promoted to CFO in 2016 after heading up finance for the company's wireless and wireline businesses. "But to ensure we hadn't missed something, it was valuable to pressure-test our assumptions against external parties — consultants and banks, things like that."

The pressure testing didn’t change any of their assumptions, Ellis said in a CFO Thought Leader podcast. But it helped validate the scenarios his team put together and now he feels relatively confident the company can pivot quickly based on what the economy does going forward.

"In this scenario we'll do this set of actions; in scenario B, we might do a completely different set of actions," he said. "It gives you a chance to think about what those sets of action would be in each scenario rather than having to do it on the fly."

That kind of scenario planning is indispensable for dealing with unexpected macro events like the pandemic, but it's also something many finance heads, including himself, don't do as much as they'd like.

"Like so many companies, we've talked about scenario planning for quite a while," he said. "As you think about it and read about it, you think it would be great if you could do that. But for so many businesses, just getting the base plan built is a huge effort. The idea of producing multiple versions of the plan is not immediately met with a lot of smiley faces from the finance organization. 

"So, like many companies, we haven't been great at scenario planning. But you come into a situation like this, and ... the range of what the operating environment will look like over the next six to 12 months is as wide as any of us has ever dealt with,” Ellis said. 

Network behemoth

Verizon, one of the baby bells spun off in 1984 as part of a landmark antitrust settlement between the Department of Justice and AT&T, is 13th in the Fortune 50 ranking of the largest businesses in the U.S., with 2019 revenue of $132 billion and 136,000 employees. 

When the scope of the pandemic became clear in late March, the company took only a week to move almost its entire workforce to remote status, Ellis said. Today, about 115,000 employees are working away from the office.   

The transition was especially tricky for the finance team, Ellis said, because at the time it was closing the company books in preparation for the company’s quarterly filing. "It was just a tremendous response by the team," he said. "Every step of that process happened on time, even though nobody was in the office together and we actually even got a couple of things done sooner than we expected."

Ellis attributed that success in part to a communication policy the company adopted early in the crisis that put a premium on keeping employees connected while operating remotely. 

A daily webcast, in which the CEO and HR chief discussed the company's plan and what to expect going forward, was the core of the communications plan. "It took some of the uncertainty away," he said. "Because a large part of what causes people to slow down and not get things done is uncertainty."

Focus on what is ahead

Ellis launched his career decades ago in the United Kingdom as an accountant for a large retail operation and moved into public auditing at Coopers & Lybrand. For much of his career, his interest has been in the forward-looking aspects of finance and he brought that focus to finance leadership roles at Tyson Foods before moving to Verizon. 

For any finance leader to succeed, he said, it's crucial to set aside the skill that helped you rise through the ranks so you can focus on the strategic tasks that are unique to your role.

"There's this security blanket nature of that work you used to do," he said. "You got promoted because you did that work well and you like doing it and this management thing at first feels squishy and different. So, one of the challenges I had when I was first in a supervisory role is realizing your team is going to get a lot more done if you spend your time helping them do their work instead of spending half your time trying to do some of the work yourself."

His ideas about leadership stem from his earliest days in business, he said. There was a lesson at Coopers & Lybrand when it became clear weeks into an auditing project that the head of the team had failed to organize the project in such a way that the team could complete it as expected without working late nights and weekends at the end. That changed his perspective on what leadership owes the people who are doing the work. 

"It's okay to do something that affects you negatively," he said. "That's your choice to make. But when you're a leader and you don't run things the right way, it's not just you who gets negative consequences; it's the people on your team."

For Ellis, leadership entails asking a lot of questions to get as wide a view of the situation as possible and then taking responsibility for making the decision, even if you couldn't get all the information you wanted. 

"There'll be times when, after you've asked all the questions and gotten as much information as possible, you're the one who's going to have to make a decision about how the group goes forward, even if you don't feel you have any better information than any of the other folks in the room."

For him and other finance leaders trying to navigate the downturn, making decisions with incomplete information is the rule, but by hammering out alternative plans and getting those tested with outside eyes, you can approach the challenges with a set of tools so you’re not working entirely in the dark.

"Finance doesn't just have to be the scorekeeper," he said. "We can give business leaders a view into how the business operates and maybe it's an opportunity for a better financial outcome."