Tristan Gaynor 0:00:08.9: 

My name is Tristan Gaynor. I'm a managing partner at Anavate Partners, which is an Anaplan partner firm. It's a mouthful, too much after lunch, but that was a mouthful. Long story short, our firm is lucky enough to work with Symetra in deploying Anaplan in their organization, and they're the real stars of the show today. So, without further ado, Joe and Fiona, can you give the crowd a little bit of an introduction to yourselves?  

 

Joe Eason 0:00:33.2: 

Yes. My name is Joe Eason. I'm the lead financial data analyst at Symetra, and I run our COE. I've been at Symetra for about eight years now. The first six were actually with our InfoSec team as a security engineer, and I ran our ISO program, ISO and SOX, and then Fiona poached me to come build, or when we started the OpEx model. I didn't know what Anaplan was two years ago, but she hired me anyways, and now we're here. 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:01:15.5:  

That's great. Hi, everyone. Fiona Zhao. I'm a finance director with Symetra. I've been with the company for about 11 years, and for most of my career, I have always been in the FP&A space. We brought in Anaplan about five years ago, started with the incentive compensation model, and then two years ago, I hired Joe, who knows nothing about Anaplan - now look at him. He's our COE lead. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:01:40.1:  

Yes. Well, thank you so much. Can you tell the group a little bit about Symetra, what industry you're in? I think if someone looks at the building, they'll find out pretty quickly, but just a little bit of background on what Symetra is and why you're here today.  

 

Fiona Zhao 0:01:55.9: 

Yes. Symetra is a mid-sized insurance company. We offer life insurance, annuities, and employee benefits. Our building is in Downtown Bellevue. You can see that very beautiful blue building, that's our building that has Symetra on it. Insurance, I would say, it's a highly regulated and also traditionally conservative industry, but I would say the recent rapid changes in the technology space really have driven the company to think about modernization across the organization. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:02:29.2: 

Yes, that's exactly right. Actually, how long was the walk over here? 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:02:36.7:  

Five minutes.  

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:02:37.7: 

Five-minute walk? [Laughs] That's what I thought, yes. It's a beautiful, beautiful building. Let's talk about first, the most recent addition to your Anaplan stack, and that's that OpEx planning use case. Where did the need arise? What were you using before, and ultimately, what led to the final decision to move forward with Anaplan?  

 

Fiona Zhao 0:02:58.2: 

Yes. The prior solution was brought to Symetra many, many years ago before I even started. At the time at Symetra, we probably only had a couple of people in the finance team who really went into the system and provided the budget-related information directly in the system. Then, over the years, our process has really evolved, and eventually, to the point that we feel like the old solution is no longer going to meet our growing needs. For starters, we have about 150 budget owners who provide budget-related information in some form to us, but of these many business partners, we only had one person, probably, who was brave enough to go into the system and provide input herself, which actually caused a lot of pain for us at the end, so we had to take her access away. [Laughter] Our solution before Anaplan, we were like, okay, we're going to give you guys a set of Excel spreadsheets, which everybody loves. You're going to go into the spreadsheet and provide your inputs to the FP&A team, so that we can upload your data to the system.  

 

Fiona Zhao 0:04:08.7: 

That got us to the second major problem, which is, our business partners really didn't feel like they were empowered to manage their own inputs, let alone their expenses or budgets, because every time they needed to change something, they had to contact the FP&A team, told us what they wanted to change, wait for us to go to the old system and upload the changes, and then wait for a couple of hours for the system to run the calculation and the refresh, and then we will send them a report saying, 'Hey, take a look and let us know what you think.' If, for whatever reason, they didn't really like the output, they had to go through that whole cycle again. If you were part of that process, it would be very difficult for you to feel like, I'm empowered to manage whatever I needed to manage. Then also, on the FP&A side, I mean, that whole process was really, really manual. It was really time-consuming, and the FP&A team pretty much spent a lot of time doing those non-value-added activities. I think for some of our analysts, depending on which area you support, some of them actually had to spend 70, or even 80 hours a week during those planning cycles, which was really not going to be sustainable for the long term. These are the three main reasons that we decided to move to a new solution. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:05:27.5: 

Great. In moving to a new solution, and I'm going a little off script here, you understood the need to have someone internally that could come alongside and be the owner of that solution. That leads us to Joe. You've mentioned it already. Can you speak to finding someone internally to help be an owner of the day-to-day in the system, and Joe, can you share why you raised your hand?  

 

Fiona Zhao 0:05:52.9:  

Well, I think the reason that I decided to hire Joe was because it's an internal referral to me by someone that I really, really trusted. He used to work in IT, and that really boosted my confidence in him understanding the technology space, all of those things. That's really critical. Also, we wanted to build a good relationship with IT. Technically speaking, Anaplan is a business-owned tool, but we also have an IT department, a finance part, where they're supposed to help us with all of those system-related issues. So, we really wanted to find someone who understands how they're thinking and how we can really bring these two departments together so that we can have a very good relationship going forward. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:06:34.6: 

That's great.  

 

Joe Eason 0:06:35.6: 

It appealed to me to get out of the IT basement, and I really liked the idea of a business-owned application. I saw my career going more in a direction towards the business, and I thought this was a great time to shift over. I like that we as a business are empowered to work in Anaplan and make the changes we need, build out the functionality we want without having to fight back and forth, getting IT prioritization, and having someone come in and do that work for us. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:07:13.7: 

Yes, these are really great insights. This is a question from my seat in the partner org. Our customers are always asking, where can I find the best talent, or can you make introductions to the best talent? We say yes, we can help, but first, look internally. Your Anaplanners [sic] might already be on your finance team or an IT analyst or someone like that, who's a doer, who's a go-getter, who is someone that can just try to figure it out, right? They're not afraid of a new task or a new system. Of all of our customers, Symetra is by far one of the most impressive in this area. They had an analyst step up, raise their hand to say, 'I'll learn it, I'll figure it out,' and then we were able to bring them alongside the actual implementation. What this has really allowed us to do is get Joe trained up and then push the bird out of the nest, and the bird's been flying really impressively over the past couple of years, and that's what I want to lean into next. Joe and Fiona, let's talk about your culture of self-sufficiency that you have found. Your COE is lean and mean. Today, we're hearing about some of the most impressive organizations with big, strong COEs, with massive roadmaps. It's a very different story here, but the effectiveness and the excitement is really the same. Can you speak about that culture of self-sufficiency, how you manage the change? What are the roles that you play? Probably, in your case, many hats. Can you just begin to speak to that? 

 

Joe Eason 0:08:46.5:  

Yes. We don't have a honeycomb diagram. We have two use cases. That would be pretty lame.  

 

Fiona Zhao 0:08:55.6: 

No, we're not! [Laughter]  

 

Joe Eason 0:08:57.1: 

Each use case, we have one primary model builder. I'm it for our OpEx model. Anaplan really makes it easy to learn. I'm sure everyone here knows about all the free trainings, the certification course you can progress through, super helpful, and the community is great. We know that from a technical perspective, Anaplan can do just about anything we want it to do. Whether we know how to make it do that or not, but we are willing to learn, leverage the community. Something we say a lot is we can't be the first people to try to do this or to think of doing it this way. So, we go out and use our resources and try and figure out how to make it work. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:09:52.3:  

That's great. One model we always talk about is the support enhance project model and really enabling customers to take on the day-to-day support and ownership, as well as the enhancements and then leveraging potentially a partner on the project side, because support and enhance can be so time-consuming. In that same breath, though, the customer obviously has to drive a lot of those conversations. What are the enhancements that take top priority or what are the next projects this year, next year, and even farther out? You have developed a really interesting methodology that I think is worth sharing with this group on managing the prioritization of these different enhancements or new projects. Can you speak to that a little bit? 

 

Joe Eason 0:10:39.2:  

Yes, I'll give it a minute so everyone can read through this. [Laughter] Sorry, it's really small. I guess, it's in front of me, too. We had a working session. Anavate offered to come in and meet us in the office and talk through our roadmap and how we're prioritizing projects and enhancements. We came up with this model. We imported our roadmap ideas, projects that we think we're going to work on in the next couple of years, enhancements people have been asking for and whatnot, and in here, we're able to add notes, dependencies, and score each project on a couple axes. We have business value and ease of implementation, and then you can see there in the middle is a list of considerations for each of those scores, and that's how we come up with our number. We sat around a conference room and scored our projects. We had our executive sponsor for each model, our business owner for each model, our model owner for each, and went through these, challenged each other on, I think this is more urgent because X, Y, Z. Then what we came up with, you can see on the bottom right, we have this grid and that's plotting those scores on a chart. That just gives us a visualization. I'm sure everyone's seen the top-right grid is easy to implement and gives a lot of business value. We went from there, and that's how we built our roadmap and prioritized what we're going to work on. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:12:43.1:  

That's great, and that probably brings a little bit of sanity to your day-to-day, where you're ingesting these requests and this feedback from a variety of different stakeholders. Fiona, from more of the business perspective, how has knowing that Joe and the COE of sorts has a mechanism like this driven confidence in Anaplan in your realm? 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:13:07.8:  

I think it's really important. I think a lot of the time, probably, it's universally similar. We don't really consider ourselves a really big enterprise or anything, but at the same time, we're not a small company. We're 2500 people. Even with that many people, sometimes it's incredibly hard to say we need to focus on this modernization effort. We understand the concept, we understand the importance, but whenever there is a competing priority related directly to the operations, that one always takes priority. So, having a roadmap in front of us, putting that importance right in front of your eyes, that really illustrates how we're going to get to the next level of the operation that really tells people a story of, we really need to shift the focus from an operational-driven organization to a modernization-focused organization. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:14:05.1: 

That's really great, thank you. I want to move on. Our relationship working together has evolved over the years in many ways, and before I say how I observe it, I'm keen to understand what you think about how do you leverage a partner? What does a good working relationship with a partner look like over many years during the project phases and potentially the support phases long after you need them? Can you speak on that and what your experience has been so far? If I need to plug my ears, just tell me. [Laughter] 

 

Joe Eason 0:14:38.2:  

Yes. Anavate was our partner, our implementation partner for this OpEx model. They were there from day one, and I think it went a lot longer than we initially anticipated. Super solid partner. Love the communication. I think a very important thing is expectation setting in communication. I think of it as, you guys are the Anaplan experts, we're the Symetra experts, and we just need to find a way to meet in the middle and articulate both ways, this is how we want to do things, this is how Anaplan does things, and figure out what's best for both of us. Since then, our implementation, it's up and running. Now we're in a pretty stable spot, so we've shifted our relationship, and we have an on-demand support type engagement, where I know I have a bucket of hours every month that I can just call up Tristan or our solution architect. If I have a question, it will take me 20 minutes to talk through, and I know it's available there. I don't have to feel guilty that we're pinging these people and aren't paying them for it. What's really nice is it's the same resources available that were there on our initial build, that they know our model, they built it. They're the same people providing the support. I'm sure they like on our side, it's the same people they've worked with the whole time also. Just continuing to have that consistency on both sides is super important. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:16:38.8:  

Fiona. 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:16:39.3: 

Yes. I want to add that, personally, I really love the idea of having an expert like Joe on the team because he really knows the model inside and out now, but at the same time, he's just one person. He probably only has this much capacity, or maybe he still needs to expand his knowledge, and if he doesn't really have another team to work with, it's going to be really difficult to do. So, having a partner who are really deep in that space is really, really helpful. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:17:06.7:  

That's great. From our perspective and from a service provider perspective in general, it's obviously intimidating to think, the project's over, the gravy train is done, it's at a full stop. It's very clear that the financial relationship between our firm and Symetra has evolved, but what we've been able to accomplish outside of the project, I'd say, is even more impactful than what we've been able to accomplish during the project to enable the self-sufficiency, the advocacy, to have them up on stage like this. It's something that we're incredibly proud of. Also, by maintaining that point of contact, what we've been able to do is also scale up and down as needed, really, with Symetra. Symetra, again, Joe is a rock star in the model. Oftentimes, COEs will get busy, maybe during planning season, but there's a really important enhancement we know we need to get in. Our team has been able to scale up for four weeks of work to just crank out a very specific enhancement because you're too busy to do so. So, the relationship has enabled Symetra and Anavate to be very nimble, to keep some consistency between the two, but again, we find a lot of fulfillment in watching what you've done. This is really incredible stuff. You'd think that your COE is 50 people deep. I mean, it's a lean and mean team. It's incredibly impressive. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:18:34.9: 

As far as what is next, as far as a roadmap. You mentioned it's not going to be this huge honeycomb slide. Speak to what the next couple of years might look like one way or another. Maybe it's from a use case standpoint or further stability, really any lens. 

 

Joe Eason 0:18:51.9:  

OpEx, obviously, us being the FP&A team is our main priority. Even though the implementation is over, there's always a backlog of enhancement requests, bug fixes, that kind of stuff. As we have more of our OpEx business partners using Anaplan, they've come to us, 'What else can you build for us? This is awesome.' Naturally, our backlog is growing. It's also super important with this small COE, I've recently been working on a project for our incentive compensation team. That's the first model we built. Just to familiarize each other with our models. 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:19:44.4: 

Yes. I think we have really enough on the roadmap now for us to build for the next probably 12 or even 18 months. I think really the critical thing is we need to continue to iterate on these, the potential models that we want to bring onto the roadmap. Currently, we don't really have that honeycomb slide, but eventually, that's what we're aiming for.  

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:20:08.9: 

Yes, and then you've taken it a step further. I'm going to go to the next slide, actually documenting the timeline associated with your enhancements in the roadmap as well. Can you speak to this as well? 

 

Joe Eason 0:20:19.0: 

Yes. As part of that prioritization scoring, we're able to put in an estimated start and end month for our various projects. This is just a quick visual that we can look and see, make sure we're on track, we know what's coming up. This gives me comfort that I know what's expected of me and if someone comes to me with a new request, something to add to the backlog, we can look at this and see where we might be able to fit that in. It's just another tool for us to use while we're having those conversations. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:21:02.5: 

Yes. I guess, we should probably start calling this a use case in and of itself, and the one you built all on your own, right? This is your third model, so to speak. Can you speak on some lessons you've learned over the years? I guess, over the years in projects - I'm sure a lot of folks can relate to, and then also, can you speak on now that you're really running on your own for the most part, what are other lessons you've learned? 

 

Joe Eason 0:21:28.3: 

Yes, I would say the biggest thing is at the beginning of a new implementation, that's a perfect time to re-evaluate your process. We didn't do a great job at that, I don't think. We just told Anavate, 'Hey, this is our process, how it works now. Our business users are comfortable with it. We just want to duplicate the exact same thing in Anaplan.' When you do that, you're not opening up yourself to take advantage of everything that Anaplan has to offer. Why did we spend all this money if we're not going to use it? I'd say, really, we built a lot of complexity into our model trying to make Anaplan function exactly as Excel does, because our users like Excel, we want it to look like Excel. Quickly learned that wasn't the right thing to do, so we had to rip some things out and rebuild them. Yes, just re-evaluate the process. How can we use Anaplan and everything it gives us now before we start this big project? 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:22:37.5: 

Yes, I probably want to add two things. One is very close to what you said. I think after you've initially built a model, maybe don't expect that model to stay the same exactly for the next how many years. One example I have is the way that we built our employee-related expenses is really, we look at one particular person and say, this person makes this much in terms of salary, and then we add on 401k, payroll tax, bonus, whatever, and then you get to the total compensation for that person. Our business partners really, really love that approach because it's such an easy-to-understand concept. It's absolutely accurate to the pennies, but as we tried to push for a more frequent forecasting model to our business partners, we realized that this approach actually makes it very challenging on the business partner side. Every time we ask them to do a new forecasting, they will have to go back to the tool, look to the prior version of the forecast and reconcile the headcount between that and what's actually happening in reality. We have someone, like Joe here, on the team who can continue to work with Tristan's company to make that change happen. It goes back to when you initially built it, you probably had a certain idea in your head, but eventually, that process will evolve, and you will need someone to make that change really happen.  

 

Fiona Zhao 0:24:03.5: 

The second thing I think is really the change management. Especially if you have a model that's going to interact with a lot of people. For example, we have 150 people. Probably statistically speaking, you're guaranteed to have a few people who are like, 'I feel like this is really pushed on me. I don't really want to change it. It looks really scary and not familiar. Why do you make me go through this whole thing? The old system worked just fine.' When we wrote our operating expenses model, we actually partnered internally with our change management team, and one thing I learned, which is very interesting to me, and I really didn't expect to hear, on average, a person has to hear about a change seven times for that change to stick and for that person to actually take action to do something about that change. I think that's very shocking to me. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:24:59.6:  

That's really great. I'm sure a lot of other folks in the room have had their change management war stories as well. We can get into that in the Q&A. Before that, I would say, how are you now measuring success? What does success look like to you at the end of the year? Joe, I guess you specifically, first, if you look back on everything you did in Anaplan this year, how are you going to measure yourself? 

 

Joe Eason 0:25:27.3: 

Yes. We don't have a lot of hard data, hours saved or whatnot. That's something we're looking at for the next level of maturity for our COE. What I really like looking at are all the requests. People coming to us and wanting to use Anaplan more. I think that's the best indicator of success right there. Users, new users of Anaplan, they like it so much that they want to replace their other business processes with this. It's just about finding time on the roadmap.  

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:26:07.9: 

Fiona. 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:26:08.9:  

I might want to add the strategic alignment. I love the improvements themselves, but I think, ultimately, it's not really just about the process improvements. It's also about how these improvements truly drive better decision-making, drive a better employee experience, and eventually, your overall company performance. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:26:32.6: 

That's great. Are there any other points you'd like to add before I open it up to questions?  

 

Fiona Zhao 0:26:40.1: 

No.  

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:26:41.0: 

Okay. These folks are a wealth of knowledge. Lean and mean; that's what we say. If there are any questions, we'd love to answer them. 

 

Audience 0:26:56.2: 

Hey, Jake Cosenza from the San Francisco 49ers. Your company's Anaplan structure sounds a lot like what we do. I'm the one-man show for Anaplan on our finance team. Can you talk - a little change of pace in the question - can you talk a little bit about some of the data inputs into your FP&A model? What are you bringing into the system? What are you modeling in there? 

 

Joe Eason 0:27:29.2: 

Yes, so the data we get in from our business partners, compensation and non-compensation data are our two main focus areas. Like Fiona was saying, we plan at the individual level. A manager will go in and say, 'I know this person is retiring next year. I want to give this person a raise.' Things like that, or if they know they want to expand the team, they'll put in to be hired. From a technical perspective, I don't love that we're planning by person. We've had some challenges with lists and hierarchies, and we want to transfer this person in the plan version, but not the forecast version. That's a rabbit hole. Then our non-comp side is, they're putting in budget lines, 'I know I want to fly two people to the Anaplan conference in October.' That level of detail. 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:28:41.8:  

I think outside of the operating expenses model - I mean, that's the model that we started with, which is the incentive compensation. We do also bring the sales-related data in there. I don't know if you have any specific insights into that, but I think that used to be a manual process, but maybe not anymore. 

 

Joe Eason 0:28:59.6: 

Real talk here. Our incentive compensation model in Anaplan exports a CSV, sends that CSV to us to import into our OpEx planning model, and that is absolutely on the roadmap to get those talking to each other. 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:29:18.5: 

Yes, so there's definitely more work to do there. I hope that answers your question. 

 

Joe Eason 0:29:24.8: 

Go, Hawks! [Laughter]  

 

Audience 0:29:39.1: 

Well, as a San Francisco native and a Seattleite since '92, I think both your teams are awesome. I just have to say! [Laughter] Thank you so much, Fiona, Joe, Tristan. Fiona, you were talking about shifting the focus to modernization, strategic alignment, and then Joe, you were talking about the business value scoring, transparency, productivity, decreasing risk, business transformation. Any further suggestions that either of you have for leaders in this room who are working across lines of business or even thinking about their ecosystem as a whole with partners, with third parties? Any further thoughts around your recommendations for maybe starting in one finance discipline with Anaplan, but how to get value across sales, across perhaps supply chain, or any other lines of business? 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:30:43.8: 

Well, I would say the key is to start small and don't worry about having the whole picture laid out in front of you before you actually position yourself in that direction and start walking. I think really what you need is, do you have enough pain for you to say, we need to really do certain things differently? If the answer is yes, then figure out a solution. Figure out where you want to go and figure out how you are going to get there along the way. I think that, personally, I really like the agile approach because it really allows you to modify and adjust your path as you go. I think that's probably how I would start. We initially started with the incentive compensation. It's probably not a typical thing that you would start to do on Anaplan, but that's where we started. That actually gets back to why we selected Anaplan in the first place. There were some other solutions that we were looking at, at the time, but eventually, we decided to go with Anaplan because it's a really, really flexible platform that we feel like we can build everything on it. It really makes me feel like, eventually, it will enable us to achieve the vision for a more extended and connected planning concept. That's why we went with Anaplan in the first place. That's what I meant by, if you have enough pain, you realize that you need to do things differently, then focus on the big picture and take small steps, one step at a time.  

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:32:18.8: 

That's great. 

 

Audience 0:32:28.3:  

You mentioned something about a change management system. Based on your experience, you talked about the seven times before it sticks, that change management is actually there. Could you talk about some of the tactical things you did when it comes to the change management?  

 

Fiona Zhao 0:32:45.2: 

When we rolled out that operating expenses model to over 150 business partners, we partnered with an internal team which helps people through the change, and then that's what they shared with us. I think where they stepped in to help us through is how we're going to communicate out, because you can't just grab a person and say, 'Hey, we're going to do this,' and then, 'Hey, we're going to do this,' and repeat that seven times. We actually have to figure out seven different venues to communicate that message. It also goes to the training, who we're going to actually bring into the initial training. Originally, we were probably thinking, let's get those people who are excited about Anaplan, but then through the change management team, they were like, you really need to target different types of customers. You want to bring someone who is an expert who is excited about your technology. You also want to bring those people who are probably the most scared of change, and then bring them along the way and help them to go through that change. Basically, give them more time and more voice in terms of what they want and what they're looking for and why they're so scared. 

 

Audience 0:34:00.5: 

Hi, I'm Chris from [unclear words 0:34:01.7]. I have a question about skilling up someone from inside of your organization. We have external consultants that we use. We don't have internal resources really, and I think I'm moving in the direction of we need some internal resources, and I'm trying to figure out is the best group to look at, do they need to be technical? Should they be business-focused? Is there a skill set that we should be focusing on? 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:34:29.7: 

I have an opinion on this, too, but I'll let Joe take it. 

 

Joe Eason 0:34:34.2:  

From my vast two years of experience, I don't think technical skill is a huge requirement. I think I've heard somewhere that Anaplan tried to build the formulas to mirror Excel a fair amount because that's what our finance users are used to using. We have a group of FP&A analysts, and they're the ones in Anaplan every day. Not from a model builder perspective, but they're our power users. That's where we're really looking for internal resources. They already are comfortable with Anaplan. They know all the processes, so it's just taking that next step to actually start building. I like to get that started without them even knowing. 'Hey, Joe, I love this report, but what if we added this to it?' Then I jump on a call to get some more requirements from them, but then we actually go through it together and make that change, and then slowly that evolves into bigger changes, convincing them to start taking level one. It's just super organic. We've never felt the need to go externally, for resources - for permanent resources! [Laughter] I think Anaplan just makes it super easy. I hate to just tell someone to go take the trainings, but I think they're very valuable. At least, level one, level two. If anyone shows interest, let them do it and bring them along while I'm doing work already, showing them what I'm doing and why and how it all works together. 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:36:39.2: 

Well, I think if you're trying to bring some of that talent internally, as a hiring manager, that decision needs to be quite intentional. I think this happened actually before Joe. Our incentive compensation, we had an opening. We wanted to get a person who understands incentive compensation so that they can come in and do that operational-related work. At the time, we already had Anaplan in place, and we were really struggling between which person do we want to go with, because we narrowed it down to two people. One, he came from a technical background. He doesn't really have too much knowledge in incentive, compensation. The other person, he has a lot of incentive compensation related expertise, but he doesn't seem to be too interested in technology. At the time, we were like, we really wish we had a person who can do both, but I think in reality, that's just not going to happen. What we did was to bring on the guy that has the technical background, and it worked out really great for us. I don't know if it works out great for all kinds of different scenarios, but that's when I realized that if you want to bring some talent internally, that hiring decision needs to be very intentional. 

 

Tristan Gaynor 0:37:57.8: 

Once you've made that decision, I would tell your consultants to bring these people alongside their work. Be it just shadowing or workshopping or giving actual model-building activities to them. It's going to be slower, so expect the consultants to gripe a little bit, but that ramp just accelerates so much more quickly. I mean, we did that with Joe because Joe's boss told us to, and what we found is that we are, as the consultants, getting an even more in-depth look at the business processes that we're transforming, and we're doing a knowledge transfer that's going to enable us to think about the next thing. I would say whoever your partner is, make sure to leverage them to help build up this expertise as well. Thank you all. 

 

Fiona Zhao 0:38:46.5: 

Thank you.