Bijan Moallemi of Mosaic on Taking Financial Storytelling to the Next Level
Bijan Moallemi, Mosaic CEO and co-founder, covers how you can get the most out of financial storytelling vs. financial reporting. He also discusses how to take your storytelling to the next level by embracing a customer service mindset across the organization, and understanding and presenting specific metrics that impact the company’s growth at the right time.
Episode Summary
Finance can be a strategic partner and growth catalyst for department and executive leaders. But many organizations still see finance teams as a back-office department, simply delivering financial reports.
If companies really want sustainable growth, that mindset needs to change.
This episode of The Role Forward revisits the presentation Mosaic CEO and co-founder, Bijan Moallemi, gave at SaaS Metrics Palooza in October 2022. Bijan and our host Joe Michalowski discuss how you can get the most out of financial storytelling vs. financial reporting. They also cover how to take your storytelling to the next level by embracing a customer service mindset across the organization, and understanding and presenting specific metrics that impact the company’s growth at the right time.
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Featured Guest
Bijan Moallemi has nearly a decade of experience building and leading finance functions at companies like Qualcomm and Palantir. He knew CFOs deserved access to better tools, so he co-founded Mosaic Finance to build the next generation of finance software for CFOs and their teams. Born out of their own experiences in finance, Bijan and his co-founders have built the Mosaic platform as a tool that combines big data and machine learning to provide powerful predictive reporting capabilities.
- Bringing finance closer to other departments in the organization seems straightforward, but the reality is different. Finance’s duties involve more than just creating numerical reports. Finance needs to embrace a customer service mindset and explain the numbers in a way anyone could understand.
- We need to understand that not everyone is a finance expert. Creating a perfect report from a finance perspective may not have value for other people in the organization. Get to know your business partners’ preferences for information, whether it’s a paragraph summary or visualizations, so you can truly collaborate and get the most out of the data.
- As a strategic partner, the finance department can help an organization think about growth from different angles, focusing on specific metrics. For instance, hiring impacts business development significantly. The way a company approaches costs around it can be a game changer.
Episode Highlights from Bijan Moallemi
06:15 — Financial Reporting vs. Financial Storytelling
“I love Excel and Google Sheets as much as anyone [in finance], but I don’t build models for myself. Instead, I build those analyses for folks across the org.
It’s my job to enable folks across the org and empower them to understand their area of the business better. Storytelling means more than putting together an analysis. That’s the start.
Where things get fun and interesting, and where I enjoy spending my time, is having the opportunity to take a step back. Put yourself in the shoes of who you’re delivering that model to across the org and help them paint the picture around why the data I’m showing you matters.”
12:19 — The Idea Behind Customer Service Mindset
“A customer inside of finance could be anyone across the organization. That could be an intern up to our CEO. So anyone that needs data or information from us.
And […] the biggest thing is putting yourself in your customers’ shoes. Trying to help them bridge the gap between what they know and don’t know — and giving them data that is going to make sense to them.”
16:05 — Strategic Finance Sits at the Intersection of Different Data Sets Across the Organization
“Let’s say, for example, we as a business are trying to double our revenue over the next 12 months. So, to me, being more strategic as a thought partner to your CEO and VP of sales is […] let’s break it down and talk about the levers we have and what it’s going to take to get there. So I’d like to put a bunch of information in front of that group of folks.
There’s more than one way to double. We could hire a bunch of reps and, based on that, grow our new business and, inherently, double revenue. […] The second option is, ‘Hey, let’s continue to invest in our product line.’ […] The third lever is, we have an existing customer base. How can we drill down into some of those retention numbers and try to maintain and grow that customer base?
How we are going to double the business is probably a blend of all three. I’d like to show my customers — in this case, the VP of sales and our CEO — all the data that goes behind some of these assumptions. I’d also want to paint a picture of what is realistic and what is not. […]
Finance, again, can start to preempt some of those questions and share not just one path but multiple paths to getting to where the business needs to go by presenting data and testing some of those assumptions that go into the data as well.”