KATIE FINDLAY • consultant

A lot of friction can come up when a process is shared across departments. Here are some example situations that I’ve helped improve. If any of these feel familiar to you, I might be able to help.

Human Resources and Finance departments were both involved in the new hire process, but neither team understood the other’s workflow. This caused a lot of frustration on both sides. A weekly meeting, some email templates and mailing lists, and a simple spreadsheet improved not only the communication, but the new hire experience. Not to mention the tension between departments.

Company leadership was too involved with some decisions, and not involved enough with others. All of it stemming from a desire to be informed about the health of the business, but not knowing where to prioritize their attention. Regular reporting from departments like finance, HR, IT, facilities, and development gave the right level of information and served as a way to flag risks and concerns. 

“But this is how we’ve always done it” has been used to protect many inefficient processes. Working with individuals in a way that hears their concerns, acknowledges the risks or fears associated with change, and bringing them along for the journey is always a better approach than cramming a new process in place. This type of situation has happened more times than I can count, but I believe there’s always a way through it that results in peoples’ time being freed up for more important work.

My starting point in these situations is to learn about the processes that are already in place, and what the pain points are for everyone involved. I try to ask more questions than I answer in an effort to help the people involved come up with their own solutions that they’re excited about, rather than prescribing a “fix”.

I will preface this section by saying that I am not a financial professional. If you’re looking for accounting or tax services, there are a lot of great resources out there. But what I can help you with is creating/managing your operating budgets and modeling for the future of your business to align with your strategic goals.

Here are some examples of how my skill set has benefited companies and departments with which I’ve worked.

Coming into a small but growing company, the IT department had a large budget to manage. The budget was made up of a combination of leased equipment to be tracked across multiple years, software licenses that needed to be renewed regularly, and daily expenses to keep the business running and scaling. This budget was onerous and time-consuming to create and manage, and there was quite a bit of friction between IT and the finance team (who had to set up the equipment leases). I took on one budget cycle in order to streamline the budget, help the planning process to be more predictable, and improve communication between IT and finance. I was then able to hand it back to the IT team, who have been managing it smoothly ever since.

An established company was struggling to keep projects on budget, and budget owners weren’t being held accountable. After some digging it was clear that budget owners didn’t have all of the information they needed in order to properly manage their budgets. They struggled to answer questions like, “What was the contracted budget?” or “Will this new hire be in budget?” This was, understandably, very frustrating both for company leadership as well as budget owners. I was able to create some simple folder structures that contained all of the financial data related to a given project: contracts and amendments, staffing plans, invoices, budget-to-actuals reports, etc. Simply knowing where the information lived, and being provided with a spreadsheet that pulled all of the information into one place, was a huge step toward better transparency and accountability. 

A company going through difficulty in landing new contracts was struggling to come up with a per-person monthly rate when bidding on new projects. A number that seemed very reasonable and competitive, but still profitable for the company, was losing them money. I was able to come up with a more accurate monthly overhead cost that clearly showed the need to either reduce overhead, or increase the rates on contracts. While this didn’t solve the problem by itself, it provided a framework around the problem that identified what success would look like, as well as some of the steps needed to get there.

Incoming investors required a high degree of accurate financial reporting, as well as scenarios to use while assessing the value and strategy of the company. I was able to quickly model various versions of the company’s P&L based on different decisions that could be made, which removed a lot of uncertainty and provided clarity to decision makers. 

“Have you tried making a spreadsheet about it?” -Katie Findlay

If your business model is that of multiple projects on the go at any given time and you find it overwhelming to manage–I can help! I have extensive experience scaling companies from sub-one hundred employees to over five hundred (and vice versa), while tracking the needs of multiple projects alongside administrative functions that are impacted by an increased (or decreased) employee base. 

Resource management is more than names on a spreadsheet. It requires clear lines of communication between employees, managers, and project leadership. It often means keeping a database of skill sets and specialties in order to avoid hiring for positions that someone could fill internally. It means strong collaboration with HR and recruiting, project teams, and often finance and other business teams.

Outside of the day-to-day management of who’s working on what, resource management and strategies become key when either scaling up or downsizing a company. There’s a lot to think about when a project is ramping up, and often there’s a lot of nuance around how to build the best teams for the work. The same goes for reductions in force–it’s important to identify gaps in work early in order to support outgoing employees in the most generous way possible. Or perhaps short term contracts or project-based employee agreements are the best way to go for certain projects. 

On top of employee allocations, hiring ramps, and reductions in workforce, there’s also the matter of scaling your business processes and tools appropriately for the size of your company. Running a small start-up with Google Sheets and best intentions is often all that a new business can afford (and to be honest, can work really well for a long time), but multiple projects across hundreds of people likely need more robust tools that tie into HR, payroll and accounting systems.* These overwhelming and often time consuming projects are kind of my jam. In fact, the more complicated the better. 

If you’re feeling like you might be losing money, time, or productivity with how you’re managing your people and tools, give me a call! And by “call” of course I mean send me an email.

*I can especially offer implementation support for Netsuite Planning & Budgeting if your  company is looking at rolling out the Netsuite software for finance and resourcing.

Growing and shrinking your business both bring unique challenges. Many of the other services I offer ultimately drive decisions about how big your company should (and can) be based on your forecasted revenue, project life cycles, and work force. So while this particular service isn’t always a stand-alone engagement, I thought it would be beneficial to outline some of my experience and approaches to scaling businesses both ways.

Let’s start with company growth. There’s a lot to consider when growing a company, and most have us have been in companies that have scaled up “too fast”. I don’t know that the problem is the speed at which scaling up happens, but rather the intentionality behind it. It’s important to think ahead to questions and problems that a larger company will bring, and often a company that’s scaling up for the first time doesn’t have the experience to know what the pitfalls and challenges might be.

This is where I can help you out. I take a look at what your end goal is in terms of company size (head count, project count, revenue, etc) and work with you to establish a plan for growth. This could include considerations around what software you use, what your employee contracts look like (is this short term or long term growth?), your compensation structure, in-house vs. outsourcing work, and more. By bringing me in to help you think through the unknowns, you can scale as fast as you want in an intentional and thoughtful way.

Downsizing is more than just reversing growth, and it’s more than layoffs. While employees are the biggest cost a company has, they are also typically the most valuable asset a company has. Layoffs due to financial constraints should be a last option, but it absolutely needs to be an option. It can never be too early to plan a layoff, but it can definitely be too late.

However, there are many other budgetary cuts that can be reviewed in tandem with or before planning layoffs. If a company has grown quite big with fairly siloed departments, you might find that your HR team is using one piece of software to do the exact same thing as your finance team who is using something else. Streamlining software and tools can save a lot of money. Or if you have a large percentage of your work force that’s only in the office part time, you probably don’t need all that office space and you need help strategizing around facilities.

If it does come down to layoffs, let me help you put structure in place. It’s your job to make those hard decisions, but I can remove the stress around making sure you have all of the information you need to make the decisions. I have extensive experience with looking at a budget and deciding layoffs are necessary, building a plan to assess who will be laid off, working with HR to establish severance packages, and working with people managers and leadership to create the communication plan.

Although my career has pretty solidly kept me in the TV animation and video game industries, I’ve spent a lot of those years managing multi-million dollar studio build-out projects. Alongside all of the smaller, every day projects that pop up consistently, I started realizing that I was being asked more and more to project manage this or that for various departments. Whether it’s construction on a building or implementing a new tool/software solution, the basics are typically the same:

• You want to accomplish a thing
• There’s a limited amount of time and money to do so
• Multiple stakeholders need to be involved
• Tracking and reporting are crucial
• No one has the capacity to manage it all on top of their day jobs

Having a dedicated project manager to collaborate with stakeholders, communicate clearly with external parties, and ensure that every detail is being looked after is often the difference between thousands if not millions of dollars (and hundreds of hours) being wasted when things threaten to fall through the cracks.

I can offer an hourly or fixed-rate fee structure depending on how you do project-based budgeting.

If your company is just getting off its feet and you know you need to start creating more structure, I can help with that! Young companies often can’t afford full time positions that cover operations, HR, recruiting, administration, etc. And often, full time hours from someone aren’t required for those roles for a while. There’s a lot that can be set up early on to make the life of company founders easier, and free up their time to focus on what’s going to bring revenue and profit in the door long term. 

Here are some examples of tasks that I can help with, and would likely only take a few hours over a few weeks, but would have lasting impact:

• Budget set up and tracking processes
• Job description templates
• Basic HRIS implementation
• Project reporting
• Infrastructure such as file systems and company documentation (i.e. Confluence)

If I don’t have specific experience with something you need, I’ll either recommend a specialist or, if we both agree, I’ll tackle it with reckless optimism and figure it out! But I will never pretend to be qualified to take something on that I’m not qualified to do. That doesn’t benefit anyone, and I would much rather you get the expertise you need when setting your company up for success. However, I know how to do a lot of things, so it doesn’t hurt to ask if I can help with something that’s not on the list!

You can refer to my fee breakdown to get a general idea of what I charge start ups. 

But, Katie, what qualifies as a start up?

I’m so glad you asked…

…you’ve been in business for less than 5 years and/or…
…you’re doing something for the first time (i.e. running two projects simultaneously) and/or…
…you’re scaling up quickly for the first time and/or…
…you don’t have the funds (yet) to support a full time person like me

If those definitions aren’t helpful, let’s just have a chat!