In the latest episode of The CFO Playbook, David McClelland is joined by Ben Dooley, CFO at Accel to explore nuances of the CFO role within lean, agile organisations with vast geographical footprints.

Highlighting venture capital's vibrant evolution, Ben shares the ripple effect of successful startups and Accel’s strategic focus on early-stage tech investments across Europe, Israel, and India. Hear how Accel's vision complements Silicon Valley's tech dominance and the necessity for European firms to establish their US presence while preserving their European roots.

Highlighting the role of a CFO in guiding companies through growth stages, including pre-IPO rounds, in a rapidly evolving VC landscape, Ben explains the significance of nurturing relationships with portfolio companies and investors alike.

Drawing clear distinctions from other industries, Ben highlights the nuances of being a CFO in a VC firm, explaining the predictability of revenue streams and cost structures that set venture capital apart. With universal importance of clear communication and strategic foresight when engaging with stakeholders remaining paramount, particularly in the fast-paced world of venture capital.

Reflecting on his own approach as a CFO, Ben emphasises the use of storytelling in boardrooms and the longstanding power of the elevator pitch, especially in an era of AI and cybersecurity challenges.

From emerging trends to best practices, this episode is packed with insights for aspiring and current finance leaders navigating complex business environments.

Find all episodes of The CFO Playbook here. 

Hello and welcome to the CFO Playbook podcast.

My name's David McClelland.

I'm a journalist and broadcaster.

I cover business, technology and leadership.

And here on the CFO Playbook, I get under the skin of how world class finance leaders from across various industries leverage technology, set goals, manage teams, make plans, and much, much more.

In today's show, we speak with a CFO at a leading venture capital firm about the unique challenges and opportunities for.

Of their role as CFOs.

We're often reporting information or fielding questions for our stakeholders.

And the ability to present that information clearly and concisely can be something of a superpower for a cfo, particularly if you're giving thought to how the readers will likely get going to digest it.

Trying to preempt the questions they're going to ask before they ask them goes a long way to kind of cutting through process time, getting answers quickly, decisions quickly, things happening, the right things happening.

I think that can really build your kind of status and affirm a reminder.

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A demo, visit soldo.com Ben Dooley, Chief Financial Officer at Excel.

Brilliant to have you with us here on CFO Playbook.

Hi David, great to speak with you.

First things first, where are you joining us from today?

And well, what's your day look like so far?

Great.

Well we're just coming off the bank holiday weekend.

I'm in our our office in the west end.

We're about 50 people here on one floor just off Regent street and looking forward to a busy week.

So it always feels a bit busier coming off bank holiday.

Yeah, it does.

Those shortened weeks.

As much as we've enjoyed the weekend, boy do we pay for it in the few days that follow.

But thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day for joining us.

Before we get into your role today.

I kind of want to ask what it was that first brought you into the finance world and ultimately into where you are right now in venture capital.

Was this.

Was this always the plan?

Was this always the direction that you were planning on going?

I kind of fell into it a little bit because when I was younger at university, I had a lot of ambition but didn't have a clear plan of where I wanted to end up.

And I kind of fell into the doing the ACA as a way of getting a good kind of base to my career and thinking I was kind of keeping my options open.

The world changed a bit.

A lot of the kind of newly qualifiers that were leaving practice were going into kind of product control roles at banks and they were kind of paying the highest at the time, but really didn't appeal to me as kind of a style of a role or size of firm that I wanted to be at.

So instead I joined the private equity house called Daphne Hanson and I worked in their in house fund accounting team.

It was probably in my early days there that I really honed in on becoming a cfo, because the CFO when I joined DH was someone I respected greatly and was really drawn to the nature of his role.

He was involved in pretty much everything the firm was doing and was regularly used as a problem solver beyond the normal responsibility that comes kind of in owning the finance function.

So I kind of saw that as somewhere where I wanted to get to.

Yeah, I think that's really interesting.

And many of us leave our studies or even embark on our studies without a clear idea of exactly what we want to do.

But there's a sense of direction of some sort, a North Star of some sort that pulls us in a direction.

But what I really like about that is that there was an individual, there was somebody who inspired you, who you looked up to.

And it's like I want to do that because that person pulled you in a particular direction.

Probably I'd add more than once.

I was at Dallas Hansen for 12 years and three or four really big influences in my time there.

And it reminds me a little bit of like I'm quite into my football and I see like whenever a football manager get asked about their influence, they always say I take a little bit from everyone that ever managed me.

It's a little bit like that along the way.

Tell me a little bit more about what Accel is and well, kind of answering my own question, what its focus is, what its investment focus is and what it looks like globally.

Accel began kind of over 40 years ago in Silicon Valley doing kind of early stage, early stage technology investing backed companies like Facebook at a very early stage, gave it a great reputation.

And this year marks 25 years for us being in London from where we focus on Europe and Israel.

We also have a third office in, in India.

And the heartbeat across all of those offices is early stage.

That for us means kind of series A and sometimes seed investing in technology companies.

So backing founders right at the beginning of their journey.

And each geo has its own early stage fund, so the partners locally are driving those funds in those regions.

And over time we've developed into a full stack firm which means we can invest in any stage of a company's life, but still in that same sector of technology.

So the same type of businesses but just further along the journey.

And we've got specific growth and late stage funds which are larger and global in focus that can invest right the way from right through to a kind of pre IPO round of a company.

Really exciting.

And as somebody who has followed technology for a number of years and certainly lived through the period in which Excel has been investing, a lot of the, well, not alumnus, I'm sure, alumni, I'm sure there's a proper phrase that you use, but a lot of those companies that you have played a part in their growth over the years have become household names since then.

Once upon a time, technology was a niche.

Now technology, digital is everything.

So do you kind of divide up the range of companies, the range of enterprises that you invest in in any way?

Yes, we do.

We have been fairly disciplined over the years with the type of technology we invest in.

And the key themes have included enterprise software, consumer and fintech.

So generally not hardware, not renewables and bring my stock stuff to our knitting.

But over time as the world changes, that creates kind of big themes to invest into.

So many years ago we had kind of the shift to mobile which had created huge headwinds in certain areas.

Then we had the cloud phase of software becoming kind of off prem and had a huge run of for us in enterprise software.

Right now we of course got this huge tectonic shift in generate agenda AI which is creating a load of interesting startup opportunities for us to invest in, but also a great opportunity for a lot of our existing companies to embrace these new capabilities and turbocharge their growth.

A lot of disruption as well.

It's fair to say.

And a lot of existing enterprises are finding their operations disrupted.

So yes, one would hope that they're also iterating how they go to business, how they develop their products and services to stay relevant in this age.

So you mentioned there that Accel's had a base in Europe for 25 years now.

And during that time technology, as I say, it has gone from being that kind of niche thing.

And I remember the millennium ticking over very, very clearly when I was working in tech, just waiting for things to break and thankfully they didn't.

But that seems like a lifetime ago.

It's a quarter of a century.

The other thing that's changed perhaps is Europe's place in the global technology market.

That's changed too.

So how do you reflect on Europe right now as a scene for founders, for early stages, the kind of places that as you say, is in Accel's investment DNA?

Sure.

And kind of, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, you could argue, actually I'm became a little bit early because in those early years there wasn't a huge amount of exciting activity.

But we're kind of reaping the rewards now of being here for this length of time, being consistently here for this length of time and having such a foothold that we do in the, in the market.

There were very few VC players like us making early stage investment.

It was absolutely vital to be in the kind of one or two good companies a year that were going to make a difference, whereas now there's a lot more, a lot more opportunity.

And I think in terms of what's driven that, probably a couple of things.

Probably maturity of talent and also maybe ambition as well.

25 years on we're now benefiting from the flywheel effect and we're now seeing repeat founders surrounded by repeat C level talent to support them, which I think really increased the probability of success of making a business.

Not necessarily always a, an ally business is going to be the kind of huge outcome that we look for in venture, but particularly the probability of success is developing a company into some kind of size is going to have some kind of outcome versus a lot more volatility in the early days of venture with a lot of companies that wouldn't make it at all.

And we also have a lot of former employees of successful tech startups spinning out to become founders themselves.

And this is something we track at Excel in partnership with Deorham we published something called the Founder Factories Report.

And that sort of shows us at the moment that from about 350 kind of venture backed unicorns across Europe and Israel, around 280have fueled more than 2,000 new startups.

So that's people that have learned what good looks like in one place and have taken that ambition to now start something new on the back of it.

That business has spawned 30 next gen founders that starting new firms while they leverage that kind of blah blah car experience which is a key part like the ecosystem in Paris and I think a really exciting phase for us to invest in.

So we backed a number of those kind of new founders spinning out of companies that we know well or companies elsewhere that we've seen that have been hugely successful and where we and see these people have had a big impact on the success of those companies as they go on their own first founder journey.

That's a really interesting story there about tracking where founders have come from and that kind of, I think you called it a flywheel effect there in terms of Europe and its position on the global stage there.

Silicon Valley where Accel started, it's how does Europe sit alongside that?

Is it looked at as competition or complementary?

You know, Europe's position on the global stage when it comes to innovation is sometimes questioned.

It's a much more fragmented market than you know, to the east or to the West.

But is it standing on its own two feet, would you say globally?

I'd say I think complementary was the word that stuck out to me there.

And by that I kind of mean the nature of the some of the sectors we invest in, companies that are found in in Europe and the technology space will naturally gravitate towards the US and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

It's a natural thing because if you're starting a software company and half the dollar spent on software global, you're in the US to become a big global business you've got to make it in the us so we do see a lot of our businesses relatively early, so starting here and they're having a base in the US potentially over time, a co HQ in the US but would often still have a significant footprint here in Europe.

Likewise, some of the companies that our US funds invest in and have become successful, they might be US driven but they often would have a big kind of operation either in London or another big European city.

So it's certainly a significant part of the map.

And the other bit I wanted to catch there was you mentioned Europe being fragmented and that's definitely a key difference in how our early stage business works here versus Silicon Valley where deals tend to kind of gravitate towards the west coast.

For us at Accel we've invested in, I think it's a bit more than 70 different cities now across Europe and Israel.

So we really have to cover the region fully.

And some of our biggest companies have come from outside the hub.

So companies like UiPath from Romania or Vinted from Lithuania for example.

All right, let's change tech slightly there and just come on to your role a bit.

You've been with Accel for a little while.

You mentioned your history up until that point, but I wonder to what extent you're able to reflect with your CFO hat on on the differences between being a CFO at a VC like Accel and being a CFO in other industries perhaps, or in other types of VCs.

Maybe with a different setup or a different structure.

Sure.

As other industries it's definitely very different.

So for the VC firm itself, our business model is much simpler than what our other CFOs will have to face.

Even for example, our portfolio companies are.

We have very predictable revenue streams from the funds that we manage.

We have very predictable cost base which is largely people driven.

So the challenging areas tend to be driven by operating our funds and the underlying transactions with our portfolio companies.

So the, the skill set is very different and the background and expertise of closed ended funds, be that venture that I'm working in now or private equity that I've worked in before, is really key to being able to perform the job.

And if you drop me cold now into an industrials business, I'd probably equally find it challenging.

You mentioned earlier, you're quite a small lean operation despite being very well established for a number of years.

Number of different geographies there.

How does that shape your day to day as a cfo?

Again compared to larger organizations, Yes, I.

Think we've got a large footprint, but as you mentioned, as a firm ourselves, we're not that large in terms of number of people and we have that kind of venture mindset in terms of how we, in terms of how we operate.

And some of our, just within the asset management space, for example, some of the larger pea houses probably would have broken finance that I look after probably into three or four different departments.

So one of the things I enjoy about my role is the, the breadth, the breadth of it.

And in terms of the day today, I think this is probably true of all CFOs in every industry.

It tends to be driven by reacting to whatever is the biggest challenge or opportunity of that particular week.

In a small operation, do you have the opportunity to wear some different hats that you might do within a larger organization?

I've worked in some of the biggest companies in the world and I've worked in some small startups and the smaller companies.

I enjoyed the opportunity to roll my sleeves and get stuck into stuff that I wouldn't do were I in a larger organization because there's a team that does that thing.

But in a smaller operation it's like, well, I can do it.

So yeah, let me have a go at it.

Is there an element of that with an organization your size still, would you say?

Definitely our size and definitely true of our portfolio companies too.

I think if I just think internally here, I think that's one of the things I enjoy.

Kind of just in my time at Excel, my job title has always been the same, but the breadth of what I've covered over that time has grown and evolved.

Likewise for people in my team and across the firm.

If people can show what they're capable of, there's always room to stretch people and step up and change what we're doing.

So yeah, that is something I've sort of, I think again, maybe not intentionally, but sort of fell into kind of gravitating to drawing the slightly smaller spaces where you really feel like you're having an impact versus working in a big, a big organization.

Sometimes companies mirror their customers or the other companies that they work with.

And given that you are engaging a lot with startups with early stage companies, actually that ability to be agile, to be lean, to be responsive to what's happening in the industry, if you can't do that yet those you are invest, investing in can, that puts you on the back foot.

So to be at the same pace, able to work at the same pace as those key stakeholders, those key Customers, clients, whatever you want to call those who you invest in.

I think that feels like it's the right thing to be doing.

Yeah, no, I'd agree.

And it certainly means when I speak to the CFOs of portfolio companies, we can certainly relate a lot with each other, with what we're dealing with day to day.

Back to your role.

Who would you say are your primary stakeholders there?

Who do you spend most of your time collaborating with in communicating?

The most sign would certainly be the partners of our firm.

Investors in private funds have the benefit of diversification, but in one sense I'm like an investor with one ticket of who I'm backing as a firm.

And very quickly after joining Excel, I feel great about the team that I'd backed here.

So I really enjoy working with and the challenges of kind of keeping up with that.

The partners both running the firm day to day, supporting them where I can on the funds and on their portfolio companies elsewhere.

I'd say our investors who ultimately know who we work for as a firm and part of my role is spending time with them to keep them updated on our funds and also to kind of work towards our next fundraising.

We typically raise a new sort of early stage fund for venture capital every few years.

And then lastly, our portfolio companies and their founders are also key, key stakeholders for us.

For one thing, the way we act with our current companies has a direct impact on our ability to invest in the best companies of tomorrow.

So it's not just about maximizing the outcome on the current investment, but it's about having them have a good experience working with us, such that they become one of the many kind of ambassadors for Excel across the European market.

I like the fact that you do engage with those who you invest in as well, that you are even, even as an internal cfo, that you are still working with those as partners.

Just coming back to the investors for a moment, just talk to me about the nature of the communication collaboration that you have with them as stakeholders and having worked elsewhere in funds as well before you came to Accel in this space, how have you found the nature of the collaborations with the, with the investors?

Are they demanding?

Are they wanting regular updates?

Are you finding that you are having to answer questions regularly from them or is it a case of you building up enough trust so that they know that they will know when there's something that they need to know about?

I think probably the latter and a couple of things come to mind versus where I was before in private equities, that the nature of Rental capital is.

It's a lot more volume.

So where I was before in a private equity fund, there might only be kind of 8 to 12 companies in a fund.

So there's a lot of detail to dive into on those companies.

Whereas right now at Excel, we have kind of over a hundred unrealized investments.

Also, our investors are very intelligent and they're very aware of the fact that in most of the funds, the bulk of the value is going to be driven by a handful of outlier companies.

That takes time for that to happen.

So often when we catch up, we do update them on the funds, but what they tend to be most interested in is just how things are happening in the market at the moment in terms of interesting sectors and themes, new deal activity, the valuation environment, that kind of thing.

Rather than being too worried about where our funds are marked.

There are some big personalities in the VC space, from, well, the investors to the partners that you mentioned and the founders themselves.

So what experiences have you had or strategies have you picked up to best manage the relationships with those as big characters?

Sure.

Well, I'm sure there are big and sort of different personalities in every industry.

This is probably a universal, universal challenge for me.

I think ability tends to show and kind of win respect quickly.

I'd also highlight communication skills, both verbal and written.

As CFOs, we're often reporting information or fielding questions for our stakeholders.

And the ability to present that information clearly and concisely can be something of a superpower for a cfo, particularly if you're giving thought to how the readers were likely going to digest it, trying to preempt the questions they're going to ask before they ask them, and also beyond just dealing with the question, sort of considering if there's any value add you can bring beyond.

But beyond that, I think goes a long way to kind of cutting through process time, getting answers quickly, decisions quickly, things happening, the right things happening.

I think that can really build your kind of status and affirm.

It's funny, I've had a number of conversations with people who are engaged in conversations with the board.

On the IT side, for example, maybe it's chief Information Security officer who needs to go to the board and say, hey, we need some investment for this.

And the same question is around, how do they communicate with the board?

How do they simplify?

How do they storytell?

How do they talk the right language so that those who maybe don't have a financial background or a technical background can still communicate?

Three key messages.

You know, making sure you're talking about risk and the things that resonate work there.

So to hear you as a CFO on that board, actually taking the same advice and using that for your outward communication, whether that's to partners, investors, so on, is heartening that it does all come back down to really understanding what your story is, really communicating it as clearly as possible.

Thank you for that.

I definitely learned that back in my days at Doughty Hanson that it was a key theme if you wanted to sort of get your messages through with keeping things simple.

And it certainly served me well as I've moved on to Excel.

And of course we talk about the elevator pitch.

You've got 15 seconds in there with somebody to try and get your idea across as clearly as possible.

And even when you're not in an elevator, and even when in theory you've got a 20 minute presentation, having the clarity of that 15 second elevator pitch is still a really, really strong tactic skill to develop.

Taking a step back one more time, are there any particular trends that you're seeing, and again, not necessarily with your CFO hat on, but kind of like with your broader industry site, are there any particular trends that you're seeing maybe in the European market now, maybe a bit broader that you think might be interesting, important for the CFOs who are listening to this show?

Sure.

I think AI is a good place to start.

It's certainly a key focus for everyone in our industry at the moment.

So I think a big question for CFOs is kind of how quickly they kind of change and embrace some of the large language models directly and also some of the services coming off around that.

So at Excel we've invested in a number of companies and the, the application layer that I think have some really sort of clear and quick kind of returns on investment for companies.

I mean, for example, we invested in a company called Synthesia, where you can build your own kind of online avatar and kind of create video content super easily.

And that's had a huge use case in kind of learning and development.

Because I can imagine if you start working at like a car manufacturer and you have to kind of read very dry onboarding materials or the option in the old days was they could make a video version of it, but as soon as they make it, it's out of date.

Now they can have a avatar kind of pitch this script to new recruits, instantly change it.

And as that company's grown, and it's grown really quickly, the use cases have expanded.

So I'm now sort of meeting some of Our investors who are telling me they're using Synthesia as part of their marketing and using it to pitch themselves.

So rather than sending a presentation, they can send a presentation with an avatar built in to present the presentation.

So I think there are certain ones which can show their value very quickly.

And then in terms of more of the plumbing of finance, I think it's a scale game.

I think for some of the larger businesses there's probably more an immediate kind of use case for investing into kind of AI straight away.

Whereas for some of the smaller organizations that would be certain elements that you can sort of embed pretty quickly.

But it might not be top of mind right now to totally overhaul things just because generation is here.

Yes.

It's about finding those pockets of value.

And you know the stories of the CEO saying we need some AI in our organization, you know, whether they are apocryphal or not, there is a danger of throwing AI at a problem without really understanding what the business driver for that is, and you ending up with something that really doesn't answer any problems and probably ends up costing a lot of money and causing more problems further down the line.

Good to hear, good to hear.

And Synthesia, I've come across that, that gets some good advertising on my social media timeline, for sure.

I'm well aware of that.

I can see a lot of opportunities.

Yes.

Whatever you're investing there, it's certainly working for them by the sounds of it.

Good to hear.

And hopefully it won't replace you, David, because you could have kind of, or maybe if you could have your own avatar to kind of get a lot more interviews done on scale.

Oh, gosh, okay.

Yeah, maybe that's something for me to either weep in a corner about or to consider later on in the year.

And of course there are a lot of applications, technology of AI for good, you know, all of the good products and services, beneficial, lots of value there that we're talking about.

But of course there's also applications of technology by bad actors as well, you know, hacking for various cyber attacks.

But in terms of the defense against those attacks, is that something that you're seeing a lot of attention on, a lot of investment on at the moment?

Definitely.

It's been a huge theme for Excel over the years, as you say, in some ways, unfortunately so, because as much as you can create solutions to problems, bad actors able to continue to find new ways to cause problems for firms.

And Excel has backed some great slab companies over the years, going right back to Veronis in our first fund in Europe, CrowdStrike in the US and a number of companies more recently, which really makes us a good partner to young startup companies.

And with our region being not just Europe but Israel too, obviously cyber's been a big, a big area of expertise for Israel, where we've made a number of investments.

It's not just about actors.

It's also, I think, the way we work.

As that evolves, it creates new needs for cyber.

So for example, in recent years, we're creating and keeping collecting a lot more data than we ever used before.

And this has created a, a real need on cloud data security.

So that's enabled companies such as Sayera in Israel, which is one of the companies Excel has backed.

That company is going really rapidly since its inception a few years ago.

It's also with cybersecurity, probably the last item on a budget ever to be cut in tough times.

So from that point of view, it tends to be a very sticky business indeed.

Indeed.

Fascinating stuff.

Thank you for sharing those broader insights as well as the specific stuff about Accel and about your role there.

Now, Ben, on the CFO Playbook, we speak with a wealth.

Is that the collective noun for a lot of finance leaders?

A wealth of finance leaders?

That's what I'm going to call them today, from around the world, from across many different industries.

And of course we hear, as we have been today, so many unique insights and nuggets of knowledge in the course of our conversations.

But we thought, what if we had a virtual CFO playbook into which each month we submit a new entry from our guests, a piece of advice that you were given or an experience that helped to shape your or just a tip that you hope will help fellow finance professionals.

So, Ben, with that I come to you with an open virtual book.

What would your contribution be to the CFO playbook were you to make one right now?

Well, I may have actually said clear communication, but as I mentioned that earlier, I'll go in a different direction and I'll try a tip which is to lean into opportunities to broaden your role.

So early in my career at dh, I had a fund accounting job title for quite a while, but in that time I was very proactive in looking for new challenges across the business.

And that meant in addition to my core role, I got involved with things like a development budget on a new office building we were knocking down and building again in Victoria with our real estate team.

And I got involved providing deal execution support to the private equity team on new investments and exits such as the set of view cinemas.

Those experiences were great for my development, but also then became self fulfilling and creating further opportunities to grow and kind of build my kind of status in the firm.

And I'd really encourage younger people in the finance world to kind of be thinking beyond the day to day of what they're doing, how can they help their firms and also not shying away when times are a bit, are a bit difficult, because I think you can often learn most in those toughest times rather than kind of jumping ship looking for something that's kind of an easier day to day.

So in a way, kind of lean into the side hustle.

It's very easy to stay in your lane and not to look either side of it, but particularly if there's another lane that you want to move into.

Just see if there are ways to lean into that to take on a couple of extra bits of responsibility or just kind of nudge over there.

And that could open up an entire new few lanes on the motorway for you if you wanted to speed ahead into them potentially.

But I guess using the driving analogy, the most important thing is you've got to keep your eyes on the road as well.

So this is all on top of keeping the core things running.

You can only do these sort of things from a position of strength.

Good stuff.

I like that entry very much.

And we will make sure that that gets put into our virtual CFO playbook.

And at the end of each of our conversations here on the show, we ask a parting question.

We call it our showstopper question.

And well, in this series, we're asking our guests all to give us their reflection on a phrase.

And that phrase is progressive finance.

So, Ben, what does progressive finance conjure up for you?

For me, the phrase probably makes me think of two things.

The first is continuous improvement, and the second is kind of doing more than just reading the weather.

And for continuous improvement, it's kind of the finance function itself.

I would think about always looking to make things better.

And that can come from hiring better talent or just having a culture that is more than just this is how it was done last year.

I'm going to do the same thing again.

And we also touched on the technology and clearly that for the right situations, that can also be a way to kind of turbocharge a finance function.

And then on kind of doing more than just reading the weather, by that I mean trying to be a CFO in a finance team that thinks strategically and tries to be value add to the business.

Most people wouldn't Describe accountants as creatives.

And we're definitely not.

I'm definitely not the creative one in my household.

My wife writes musicals, which I couldn't even try to do.

And I also have to be careful using the words creative and accounting.

New Stanton has kind of potential to sound underhand, but one of the parts of the job that I enjoy most is being faced with a problem and having to to kind of think creatively to find options on how to solve it and trying to think beyond.

For example, it's easy for a CFO to just outsource to these third party advisors, disposal experts, and leave it at that.

But try to solve things yourself.

Be creative beyond the normal course is.

Really fun to build on a couple of metaphors there.

It would be really easy just to be a middle lane driver.

So with that driving analogy, just be a middle lane driver, not check your mirrors, not look either side and just go middle of the road all the time.

But actually looking around you, looking to see if there's an opportunity to take that outside lane, or knowing when to put on the inside lane so someone else can overtake and you can move on your journey and make everything better.

That kind of active driving is what you're talking about there.

And then, well, to use your wife and musical theater analogy, you can read a script or you can bring it to life.

And I think that sounds like it's a key difference too, that kind of active element to it and not just sitting back and letting it wash over you.

Yeah, we've got to be careful with how this podcast gets tagged.

You might accidentally have a motorist or a car wannabe kind of listening into this one.

So somehow get into their feed and then be really disappointed when you realize finance podcast.

But hey, and if we have some musical theatre listeners as well, then it's all good, right?

Listen, Ben, thank you.

Thank you so much.

That is all that we have time for today, but I've really, really enjoyed our conversation.

Thank you for bringing it to life and thank you for joining us on CFO Playbook.

Thanks, David.

That was great.

And don't forget to join us every month here for more insights from finance leaders from around the world.

But for now, from me, David McClelland, until next time, bye.

Bye.