Written by: Tedfuel
It was the summer of 2021. Glenn Hopper was preparing to go out on the road to promote his first full-length book, Deep Finance: Corporate Finance in the Information Age. The book was a manifesto for Hopper’s philosophy of helping CFOs embrace smart technology in smart ways, in order to increase efficiencies for businesses in their financial operations. The COVID-19 pandemic had been showing signs of relenting, and Hopper was excited to see things getting back to normal.
But “normal” decided to stay away a little longer.
“The original idea was to do in-person signings at several small independently-owned bookstores, and at some events for the CFO Leadership Council and the Controllers Council,” recalls Hopper. “I was going to sign books at the Harvard Coop last September, but everything kept getting pushed back because the cases weren’t going down.”
As the Delta and Omicron variants reared their ugly heads, the mood just didn’t feel right for getting back out into public and encouraging people to congregate and/or wait in line for book signing events, meet-and-greets, and other traditional forms of book promotion. So, after some delays and an eventual decision to postpone the tour, Hopper made a decision to embrace the same mentality that had served him well throughout his career.
“I figured that I could use technology to tell the world about my book and accomplish the same goals that a book tour would have done,” Hopper says. “I worked with Geffen Media Group to book a couple dozen podcasts. Then the publisher booked another couple dozen, and now—six months later—we’ve done like 50 podcasts, including:
· CFO Talk
“Now I feel like I’ve had six more months of practice before getting back to speaking to large groups in person. The world is opening up, so it seems like a natural transition to in-person events.”
Today, Hopper is rested, ready, and back on the road, promoting his book the old-fashioned way—a brick-and-mortar book tour—while continuing to also push it via podcasts and other virtual methods. As such, he has rejoined the “post-normal” post-pandemic world with the rest of us, and he’s jazzed about spreading the gospel of outside-the-box thinking and the smart use of leading-edge technology (especially AI) to his fellow business leaders and CFOs.
Hopper is a relentless optimist with sky-high energy levels, and he is confident in his belief that confidence—some might say an insane level of confidence—is the golden ticket to business success.
“Set your goals so high that everyone thinks you’re kidding,” Hopper says. “Then, when you achieve those goals, they’ll never see you coming.”
“Glenn’s vision of the CFO role goes beyond budgets and balance sheets,” says Aaron Vick, a technology evangelist and author and Multi-X founder. “He has risen above traditional labels by weaving together an entrepreneurial lens, automation strategies, and data-driven decisions. Glenn has set the example for CFOs by envisioning and implementing back-office finance automation that extends beyond the calculator.”
Hopper got his start as a journalist in the Navy, editing a monthly magazine for a technical training center (where he drove the publication’s transition from print to web-based, foreshadowing his career path as a high-tech champion). He later went on to serve as CFO for several companies in the litigation solution space, most recently with the Virginia-based Sandline Global. Hopper joined Sandline after serving in the same role at Cicayda, where he played a leadership role in preparing the company for M&A. This required a revamping of some legacy processes that, while not “wrong,” represented missed opportunities to improve the company’s bottom line.
“When I got to Cicayda, their overall recordkeeping wasn’t great,” Hopper recalls. “They had a fractional CFO who was putting together monthly financials for the board, but there wasn’t much analysis or guidance — it was just a report card. And it took about thirty days each month to close the books. I was able to streamline some bank office processes to reduce that close time to about 10 days.
“I also had to clean up historical financials a bit and streamline the metrics on which we reported. I knew that, if we were going to sell, we’d likely have to stand up to an external audit or quality of earnings report. We had to dig down and provide margins on each of our products and for each of our customers. We really had to get an understanding of what was working or not working for the business. We had to be able to explain the value of the business and be able to demonstrate that with our numbers.”
Hopper implemented steps to (1) define the back-office processes, then (2) to find pain points or blockers, and then (3) to start working on automating the processes to remove those pain points. When the company started putting systems in place to automate their processes, they began to find more ways to get more data. They were then able to use that data to model the future of the business and to drive the decisions about where to take the business.
“I felt like these improved efficiencies resulted in a virtually brand-new company that retained the best aspects of the firm’s value, while increasing that value simply by giving its leaders better financial data and perspective upon which to base their decisions,” Hopper says.
Given his extensive experience in working with startups, Hopper possesses an unusually deep understanding of the importance of making more out of less. This skill set is more relevant than ever, in times of rising inflation and general uncertainty about the future. Advanced financial analytics can help companies optimize pricing, improve promotions, and maximize relationships with retailers and other strategic partners. They also can work wonders for allocation of resources, as more reliable data helps companies to better understand customer behavior at the most granular level.
“The real magic in data science is finding correlations in the sea of data that’s available now,” Hopper says. “If we can find a data point that is a reliable leading indicator, then we can predict the future. After decades of loose money and stagnant prices, we are now looking at macroeconomic indicators on things like how interest rates might impact client spending on our product, or which supply chain issues could impact our ability to deliver goods or services to our customers.”
Hopper notes that the recent Covid-related disruption to international supply chains is a textbook opportunity for advanced data analytics to change the game for the better. He emphasizes that finance managers need to focus more on stress-testing their models to prepare for the potential impacts of additional shocks to our economic systems.
“The business world was somewhat lulled to sleep by decades of predictable and uninterrupted supply chains,” says Hopper. “This led to Just-In-Time (JIT) inventory management systems that enabled businesses to limit their carrying costs, as well as loose money and credit that was readily available at negligible interest rates. All of this made cash management less important.
“Now that those long-term truths no longer hold, businesses must get better at forecasting, which means that there can be no slack or ‘guessing.’ You need to get it right the first time.”
