Excel at Finance in 2025

Thank you all for Subscribing and I wish you a Happy New Year with good health and prosperity for 2025. I hope you achieve your Professional ambitions. Leaving aside the passing nature of New Year Resolutions, do any of you have a Career ambition?

Its a serious question. Did you set out to be one of the following:

1. A Shared Services Leader
2. A Shared Services Consultant
3. A Solution Provider to the Shared Services industry
4. A Finance Leader

What actually is the aim of your Career? Have a think about that and Comment below as you see fit. No pressure. I would hazard a guess that nobody set out to be (1), (2) or (3). Yet here you all are, possibly 15 to 20 years into your Career, possibly with no single defined Career Ambition? It's interesting isn't it, when you think about it like that.

You waste time once a year on the passing fad of New Year Resolutions yet you don't have a Career Ambition for the industry you work in? How else will you know when you are happy, have achieved all you can and that it is time to do something else?

I only dreamed about playing for Man Utd and the Dubs. I became an Accountant because 2 of my Uncles are and I got lucky because I 'fell' into Shared Services in 1996, right at the start of my Career. My ambition is to create a Consultancy which redefines how Shared Services is delivered and to deliver it for as many Organisations as possible.

I have been at varying times in my Career an Accountant, a Project Manager, a Consultant and an operational Shared Services Leader. I am fascinated by why Finance does what it does, in the manner in which it does it, since for most of Career it has not collectively done it very well. Yes there are stand out examples, but none that are then universally applied elsewhere.

The 101 Consulting line 'that the Client always did it that way' masks the fact that so few people challenge why anything is done, not whether one particular Business does it that way, all the time. Its a lazy argument. There is actually very little theoretical debate about how Finance is delivered.

You can study to be an Accountant, pass the Exams, go into a Business to start your career. This point is pure pot luck. Go into a bad Business and your world view of 'Finance' is probably irredeemable.

There are very few stand out Leaders showing how Finance should be delivered. There are many vested interests telling you that you need this system or that system because it is cheaper, faster, smarter but very little challenging the actual action being performed. That gave rise for the 'need' for the system in the first place.

Which is why, AI or no AI, that Excel was there at the start of my Career and it will still be there at the end.

Want to know why?

Read the next Edition, which follows shortly.

Cheers,

Michael Ryan