Breaking the Finance vs Ops Wall: KPIs, Cash Flow & Change Management in Construction

Rishi Srivastava (00:41)
Today, our guest is Lymor Wasserman. Lymor, welcome.

Lymor Wasserman (00:45)
Thank you, thank you, glad to be here.

Rishi Srivastava (00:46)
First section Lymor here is on your career journey and construction focus. You spent about two decades in and around construction finance, from HVAC and security to your current role in telecom construction. How did you first catch the bug for construction and what’s keeping you in this industry versus more traditional corporate finance paths

Lymor Wasserman (01:12)
Well, I worked for a retail startup that was responsible for putting together their opening balance sheet and they were building out their stores. I asked some good questions about how we account for things on the balance sheet. And I almost instantly became involved with the construction operations team, ensuring that we were recording everything properly. Nobody on the accounting team really had a clue about construction accounting because they were all retail folks.

So I learned from the construction manager and I dove into AIA billings and WIP schedules and unbilled and retainage and not things you would have expected from a retail company. But I stay in the industry because I have the knowledge and I have a lot to give. And what’s more with every single job, every single situation, I learn more every day. Two jobs can be very similar but play out very differently.

Rishi Srivastava (02:00)
Yeah, I was talking to a project manager recently and I told him as an accountant, we usually treat the bad jobs the same way as the good jobs.

Lymor Wasserman (02:09)
Exactly.

Rishi Srivastava (02:10)
Lighthouse technologies, you are overseeing all financial operations for a telecom construction company while partnering closely with project managers. How is telecom and underground broadband construction similar to and different from other construction uses you have worked in? For example, HVAC security, GC slash CM, et cetera, from a finance point of view.

Lymor Wasserman (02:35)
So the first major difference is AIA billing in every other construction world versus unit-based billing. With broadband construction, the contracts with clients and subcontractors have specific footage amounts, and they’re not always followed as laid out in the contract. Clients often change the routes they’re using. They force rebuilds. They switch aerial and underground work and reject the footage during quality control.

Also, state by state, municipality by municipality, permitting delays are probably the biggest differentiators with telecom and unit-based building versus other industries. And that can really massively impact your cash flow. And the similarities are exactly what you would think. The financial factors, keeping with to a minimum, making sure to bill out unbilled work, collecting, paying subcontractors on time and cash flow, et cetera.

Rishi Srivastava (03:30)
That’s a terse response, I love it.

You’ve also had stints outside of construction, recruiting, schools, retail, hospitality. When you came back into construction, what did you bring with you from those non-construction roles that made you a stronger construction finance leader?

Lymor Wasserman (03:49)
Yeah, you know this retail industry that brought me into the construction. That experience really taught me how to move fast and close hundreds of stores simultaneously. So that made me far better at managing high volume projects and the turnover that you get when you’re starting jobs, stopping jobs, completing jobs, etc. I mean, I think that growth in any finance position leads to life lessons that you can take to your new role, right? It’s like a like being a.

frog skipping on lily ponds, right? And depending on which lily pond you take is the experience you get to go to the next place. So my strengths of team building and reducing data entry and double work really could have been obtained in any environment.

Rishi Srivastava (04:31)
Yeah, the double entry is such a big deal in this industry. I’m glad that you’ve gotten control of it. A lot of people we talk, you know, they got people who are double entering half their job.

Lymor Wasserman (04:43)
Yeah, I mean, I think that when you talk about double entry and things like that, I think that we forget that accounting is seen by upper management as really this back office. And it really doesn’t matter what they do and how they do it, as long as we get our financial statements. They don’t know how long it takes us to close the books and do all of those things. And when there’s growth in the company, accounting has nothing to do with it.

Rishi Srivastava (05:01)
Mm-hmm.

Lymor Wasserman (05:08)
And so we’re the first to be laid off, right? Our staff, you know, maybe senior management’s there for a while, but if you can tighten up your day-to-day operations and save the company the bottom line money when they grow, that is where you can show your value in dollars.

Rishi Srivastava (05:11)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, definitely. The next section here is on finance operations alignment and KPIs.

On a previous call, you said operations folks really want KPIs that actually help them run jobs better, not just a wall of metrics. If you had to design a starter KPI toolkit for a small to mid-sized contractor, what five to seven KPIs would you prioritize for project managers and superintendents and why?

Lymor Wasserman (05:58)
So I think that, and I hope that every construction or project-based company is doing this, but gross margin, both dollars and percentage, it’s really basic, but sometimes senior management is focused on that gross profit and EBITDA and gross margin gets lost in that sauce. I think the second one would be cost versus budget. When you talk about direct labor materials, subcontractors and any other costs you’ve got.

They’re the basic expenses on every job. And sometimes you think, well, why are we 50 % completed with the project, but only 30 % on labor? Do we have fantastic people on a job? Are we missing something on the job? And if we can hone in on that earlier in the job, then the job gets done to satisfaction. And if you end up with 50 % completed and 30 % on labor, then maybe you’re pricing it wrong, right? So those are the good.

the good questions to ask. think a third one would be DSO, days sales outstanding. I think it’s important to understand the entire work to cash structure. Are we buying materials too early, not billing in a timely manner, having trouble collecting from the customers, keeping that DSO number below 60 days is really difficult in construction. But if you can do it, then you’re going to run like a well oiled machine. DSO is one of those that

can be daunting for construction supervisors and really belongs more at the project manager and above level. So I don’t know that I’d introduce that to a construction supervisor who’s out in the field turning screws or digging. If you’re talking about production and execution of a job, something called forecast to completion accuracy is very important. Do you have a kickoff call and a wrap up call for every job?

You know, the wrap-up can tell you a lot about something. Did you have fees that you didn’t expect? Is there higher labor? Who did we have on that job? Do you have some discipline or performance issues, right? Weather days on the project. Are we recording when it snows or when there’s a hurricane or when it’s really hot and we can’t be on a roof or up in the air or down on the hot ground? Another one for production and execution is crew output rate.

especially at Lighthouse, crews are different in different parts of the country. So depending on skill, pay, management style, if you have a metric that you can follow, that you can compare across the country or across different segments, you can really determine what needs to be done for slower output rates. Production versus plan. Field teams care deeply about the time, not just the dollar. So when you’re talking about a construction manager versus

Rishi Srivastava (08:06)
BLEUGH

So good.

Lymor Wasserman (08:32)
A project manager, have to look at all these KPIs and decide who’s what. Yeah. My last one is ⁓ percent of billing supported by required documentation, right? How much are we crediting because the client won’t pay us for work done or how much time passes because we have to chase a subcontractor on work they’ve already been paid for, right?

The construction ⁓ broadband construction industry is not an industry where we get pay when paid Right, which a lot of constructions are like that They don’t pay their subcontractors till they get paid from by the client We have 30 days to pay our subcontractors after we do the work. We might not even bill our client in 30 days So sometimes we’re paying out our subs months Before we get paid for that work that we’ve done by the client. So

⁓ well, KPI’s are important and who you share them with is more important. You know, make sure you’re not overburdening your construction managers with things that they don’t understand or every day can’t fix.

Rishi Srivastava (09:33)
I mean not having pay when paid is must be very challenging for someone like you. You know how you’re manage your cash?

Lymor Wasserman (09:41)
Right. Right. So, you know, you have to make sure you’re instituting final waivers that are strong, that have strong language that say, look, if we need something from our client, you’re going to agree in this waiver to pay us. So, ⁓ you know, we try as much as we can to hold off those retention payments to the the subcontractors until the client has signed off on all the work. So we do have that that retention that we keep.

Rishi Srivastava (09:55)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

By the way, I learned a couple of new KPIs from you.

Lymor Wasserman (10:10)
Good, we’re going to talk about them later.

Rishi Srivastava (10:12)
Yeah, you shared a great example of a company allocating uniform costs down to every job and every hour, then asking, what are we really getting out of this level of granularity? How do you help a leadership team decide where to stay super granular versus where to simplify into something like a burden rate?

Lymor Wasserman (10:36)
Sure. Most managers cling to that granularity because it gives them a false sense of control, that they can control the costs on their jobs, they can control everything. I think showing them a side-by-side model of, let’s say, a granular allocation versus a burden rate. And if the granular version doesn’t material a change, what decision you’d make from those numbers?

then we can introduce a burden rate, right? And say, listen, this will save us money in data entry, right? We won’t have to take that uniform bill for 50 workers and decide, well, Johnny spent 20 hours here, 10 hours here, and 10 hours here, so let’s allocate all of that. Again, showing where accounting can save dollars in the bottom line.

And that’s one of those things. Most companies benefit from a burden rate, right? Because the details are a lot of noise that can be smoothed out. And depending on the size of the company, you could decide that something over a thousand dollars or over $5,000 is immaterial and doesn’t need to be broken down. But I caution that if you institute a burden rate, you have to review it often. For smaller companies, that might be every quarter. And for bigger companies, it might be once a month.

to decide is this the burden rate and what are you basing it on? Are you basing it on hours, labor hours? In my industry, we base it on number of feet completed. Maybe aerial feet would have different than underground feet because the subcontractor dollars are going to vary state to state. In rural Michigan, it’s going to be very different than in…

Rishi Srivastava (12:05)
Mmm

Lymor Wasserman (12:17)
⁓ metropolitan city in Texas.

Rishi Srivastava (12:20)
Yeah. ⁓

You often talk about it doesn’t matter who’s right. It matters that we get it right. Can you walk us through a real situation where finance and operations were in an us versus them dynamic and how you helped turn that into a shared problem solving effort?

Lymor Wasserman (12:40)
Yeah, I mean, it just happened a couple of weeks ago. We had a client that’s overpaid us. And the billing has been a difficult thing to manage between us and the client. And the client instituted a new system where they tell us what they’re going to pay us, right? So we then mimic that bill. Our system doesn’t allow you to bill for something if you haven’t done the work, right?

So we have this foolproof system that we can’t make up bills for anything that we haven’t done. So we have all of these invoices that have overpayments on them, but we also have invoices for work that we’ve done, but haven’t billed out. None of the numbers match. And so I said to the COO, well, you know, we’re coming on year end, audit’s going to ask about this. So by the 19th of December,

I’d like you to take everything before Q1, Q2, and Q3 and reconcile all of that. That has to be reconciled so we can apply the payments. I want you to take everything from Q4 and by December 31st have that done. And then I got on a conference call and they said, okay, instead of this guy in billing, spending 40 hours a week, which is he was spending all of his time on one client when he really had four clients on his portfolio. And instead of that,

We’re going to go in and see what work we’ve done. We’re going to compare the map with the client’s map. Make sure we agree on the work done and then say, OK, overall, we’ve completed this work. They’ve paid us for this work. So Mr. Client, we’ve done this work. You haven’t paid us for it. Please advise. They may say we paid you for it on these invoices they

submitted to us or whatnot. And so I said, wow, it sounds like a great solution. And the COO said, well, you have these deadlines. I said, forget the deadlines. I don’t care about the deadlines. It’s my responsibility to talk to audit and explain to them what happened and how it happened. And it’s your job to make sure that we bill and get paid for, that we have the work done that we can get, we can bill and get paid for it. So your system’s working better.

I’d rather do it right and get paid in a timely manner than be right and say, well, you have to do this by the 19th and this by the 31st, right? And so everybody was happy that everybody’s happy and we’re going to get paid hopefully by the end of the year for everything, right?

Rishi Srivastava (15:01)
Yeah, you know, this story brings a breath of fresh air. You know, as accountant sometimes we are known to be sticklers.

Lymor Wasserman (15:08)
Right, and that’s, think, again, you know, we have to remember that these guys out in the field are turning screws or digging ditches. And if we’re asking them to do paperwork, that clearly many of them, especially, you know, and I’ll be very generalistic here and people will come down to my throat, but let’s just say 45 and over, right? They’re not as technologically savvy as the younger ones. So the younger ones are happy to go onto an app and

Put a receipt in there and do all whatever. The older ones are used to bringing their receipts into the office and having somebody in the office do it. And that’s okay. And I’m okay to be a support mechanism for that if they can’t do it. But for the most part, if we just give them a teeny bit of training, they can do it. But when does it become our job and when does it become their job, right? So it’s very interesting.

Rishi Srivastava (15:59)
Yeah, a precursor to our next question. You mentioned that accounting’s job is to support the field without becoming their back office. How do you draw that line in practice? What’s a good example of support that empowers operations? And what’s an example where accounting has to push back and say, this is your job, not ours?

Lymor Wasserman (16:23)
Well, the phrase, is your job, not ours, would never come from my mouth to the person or the department head, maybe to my boss or HR, right? You know, if a project manager came to me and said that his laborers are spending time finding good rates for hotels and car rentals, and they spend time on the backend with my staff’s help to find out, let’s say, why the credit card charges don’t match the receipts they submit, clearly it’s not the field’s job, right? We want them, like I said, turning screws or digging trenches.

But I can’t have my staff calling the hotel and then the employee back and forth to resolve every issue. We’re too small for a travel agent sort of situation. So we found a product app website that books and pays the hotel and car rental company. We set it so they can’t complete a booking unless they provide a job code. They bill us once a week. We pay the bill. We download all the transactions and upload it to our accounting system. So we have no more issues now.

But we work together in creating this us and them situation. And the system now enforces accountability, not accounting policing the field office. And I think that’s important that, you know, a lot of times we want to say, well, the buck stops with us. You have to do this. And, you know, we need an audit trail and all of that. Instead of just saying, listen, you know, want these, you want these costs properly costed.

And we can’t chase you. You don’t want us chasing you, right? You I love talking to you, but I don’t want to talk to you every day, right? And getting them to understand how important it is. Let’s say a project manager asks accounting to update their forecast for them. That’s really a boundary you can’t cross. Accounting can validate the numbers, but the project manager has to make their own assumptions on the job. Now, if they’re not familiar with Excel, we’ll help them with Excel, right? Because that’s a

short-term solution to a long-term problem as opposed to the project manager coming in with his budget on a napkin that he’s crossed out and asking somebody in the office to put it in an Excel spreadsheet for him, right? So that’s where you have to draw the line.

Rishi Srivastava (18:22)
like it. The next section here, Lymor is on systems, processes, and technology, including AI. You’ve worked in a range of ERPs, NetSuite, Dynamics, PeopleSoft, Timberscan, Slash Sage, QuickBooks, and more. For a contractor thinking about leveling up from an entry-level system, what are two to three non-negotiable capabilities they should

insist on and what are some overrated bells and whistles.

Lymor Wasserman (18:52)
Sure. I think that automated billing workflows are super, super important when you’re looking at a system. Cost of complete forecasting. We need to know what’s left and being able to sit down on a monthly or hopefully a weekly basis to say, hey, you’ve got 80,000 to complete. What do you think? And they go, well,

I still have some material out there that I need to purchase. Ooh, let me go purchase that, right? That’s 75,000. I got so many guys I need on the job for eight hours a day for four more days. At this rate, do I have enough, right? And it forces them to think at this point in time, what do I have left to do? And if you don’t have real time cost visibility, right?

then you can’t go to the project manager and say, if I went to a project manager today and said, on November 30th, as of November 30th, you have 80,000 to complete. You’d have to see what the next few weeks had in there because they didn’t know where they were November 30th. They know where they’re at today, right? So that real time visibility is another must have. True job costing.

must have the ability to be able to report your P &L by job or by region or by project manager or region manager is important, right? If you report the P &L by job, that’s great. But now let’s say you’ve got a project manager who’s got four projects. What if all four of his projects are in the toilet, right? If they’re in the toilet, then maybe the project manager needs some training.

It’s not the projects, it’s the project manager. So that’s what we need to do with that. I think you need document control and audit trails, right? From a finance perspective.

From an audit perspective, we have to have that for audit. I think bells and whistles that you don’t necessarily need are overbuilt CRMs, right? In construction, you’re not generally making cold calls and hoping somebody will use the service, right? You’ve got relationships, you make new ones via your current ones, you respond to RFPs. That could be done in a simple spreadsheet, even though I hate

Rishi Srivastava (20:59)
Mm-hmm.

Lymor Wasserman (21:07)
having multiple spreadsheets, I’d rather have everything in one system, but you don’t need that CRM. The other thing is AI functionality. And I know we’re just at the very tip. If AI is your entire hand, we’re on like the pinky nail of it, right? We don’t know what the rest of it does. But AI functionality built into software is nice to have, but there’s other AI tools out there that really work better and you can hook them up to your system.

AI models often disappoint you, you know, and one thing you need to make sure in your new system is garbage in, garbage out, right? It depends what we’re putting in. I concentrate on getting the data in properly and then focus on the results and the fancy graphs and, you know, and everything AI can tell you about where you’re going with your business.

Rishi Srivastava (21:54)
Yeah. One of my previous guests, a CTO from a construction company, his philosophy is information architecture before artificial intelligence.

Lymor Wasserman (22:04)
I like that. I’m writing that down.

Rishi Srivastava (22:06)
You described an expense management setup where a card swipe triggers texts for receipts, descriptions, and coding, and then drops cleanly into accounting. For a contractor still living in chase the receipts chaos, what would a realistic 90-day roadmap look like to get from that chaos to a streamlined

tech enabled process.

Lymor Wasserman (22:32)
You know, it all depends on your change management, right? If you’ve got a lot of us’s and them in the company and resistance, then that’s going to be difficult. You need the buy-in from your COO down to the construction supervisor to make it happen. If 90 days is a realistic expectation after you’ve looked at that, let’s break it down. Weeks one and two, you probably want to define new rules, pick the tool you’re going to use. Weeks three, four, five, and six.

Pilot and test it, right? And not just amongst your staff. Find your most computer savvy or your most computer illiterate construction supervisor or project manager and have them tested too. Weeks seven through 12, I would train, enforce, stabilize. Make sure you know what you’re looking for,

and continue to know that it’s not going to just be those four weeks of training. You may need to train beyond. There may be some people that need consistent training and there might be someone on your staff who is patient, doesn’t mind showing people over and over and over again and understands it. That’s the person you want as your main contact person. You don’t want them calling you. I don’t want to sit on the phone with John and show him for the umpteenth time.

how to press submit. Before you go in, you have to make sure you know what defines success. Is it 80 % adoption? Is it 90 % adoption? Are you able to audit the results? Are you able to quantify it? At one point, I had started with a simple Google form that employees would fill out, two to three fields, name, job, comment, and take a copy of the receipt and send the form in.

Our AP specialist would take it, see if the employee name was a production, sales or management employee, code it properly. If the receipt matched the credit card transaction, we’re all good. With the VP of operations help, we got everyone using it in like two weeks. He even supported shutting off their corporate card if we asked them twice to fill out the form without a response. So that change management was easy, even though was this primitive

Google Form where you take a copy of the receipt, fill out two to three fields, and that’s it. It was amazing. If you’re implementing a new system with credit cards, it’s a little easier because you create procedures with those cards. But you need to buy in from the COO down to whoever’s using the credit card.

Rishi Srivastava (24:56)
Yeah, I mean having support from you know operations is so important.

Many finance leaders are being asked to drive automation and analytics on top of their day job. When you think about process improvements, whether dashboards, BI or AI, how do you prioritize which initiatives to do first and how do you measure whether it was actually worth that effort?

Lymor Wasserman (25:24)
Yeah, I mean, I always talk about lowest hanging fruits, right? They’re the processes that save us time and money. So if we can implement a software platform that handles three or more of the spreadsheets that we’re maintaining or hire some sort of company service instead of hiring another person, we’re good, right? What can you do quickly so that you could see the benefit immediately? I think that’s the key. And I talked about this before saying that the accounting and the finance departments

Senior management does not wanna hire a new person. They don’t. And they’re reluctant to spend money on it because what we do doesn’t bring in more business, right? It makes the business that we have easier to handle. But if you can show them the bottom line savings, you have affected the bottom line. And I feel like a broken record, that’s, I mean, that is the bottom line is that we need to show them that we can save them money too.

Rishi Srivastava (26:15)
Yeah, you know, need for a field labor so easy to see, but just the need for more accountant sometimes.

Lymor Wasserman (26:24)
Right. But how do you get your CEO to say, yeah, let’s spend $100,000, $200,000, $50,000 on a new accounting system, right? For $100,000, we can hire somebody. We could hire one more person. Do we want to hire one more person? And how do you prove that? It’s not easy.

Rishi Srivastava (26:43)
Yeah,

it’s very tough actually. The ROI, you you’re also baking in some sort of future assumptions on the accounting system versus the person you would have hired.

Lymor Wasserman (26:52)
And what if the person you hired wasn’t fit for the role and you had to start the hiring process over and then you had to train them again and all of that. And who’s doing the work in the weeks that you’re interviewing and hiring somebody. It could be a huge cost detriment.

Rishi Srivastava (27:08)
Definitely. The last section here Lymor is on leadership, soft skills, and change management. You’ve said that for controllers and CFOs, soft skills matter more than whether someone has used a specific system like Yardi or NetSuite. When you are hiring or mentoring senior finance talent, what soft skills are non-negotiable, and how do you actually test for them?

Lymor Wasserman (27:35)
So I think that communication, curiosity, problem solving and follow through are the most important things for management and accounting and finance, right? I mean, during an interview, I’ll simply ask for examples of how they did this at their current or their previous company. But my real test is the references, right? you know, HR doesn’t, first of all, I like to do my…

own reference calls for anybody hired under me. We just hired an AP specialist and I did the reference calls. Even though they’re not reporting directly to me, but I want to know that the person I’m hiring is the person that’s right for the job. And I want to be thorough with those references. And I don’t know if I mentioned it, but at one point I was a recruiter, I recruited for Robert Half. And so I have some of these skills.

Rishi Srivastava (28:04)
Mm-hmm.

Lymor Wasserman (28:19)
which I can kind of look at resumes really quickly and say, you know, yeah, they may have the skills we need or not. But my favorite question, which HR hates this question, but I ask it anyway. If you owned a hundred million dollar company, would you hire John? And what position would you offer him in the company? Now, if I get, yeah, John would be great as my personal assistant because he knows we’re all the…

You know, he’s really good on the internet and he can find the best caterer and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He’s not the guy I want in my finance department. Who’s John? Right. So, but, but, if I ask the question and they say, he would definitely be my controller or my, my AP manager or whatever. And if I get that similar response from, you know, a second reference, now I know.

Rishi Srivastava (28:50)
Who’s John?

BLEH

Lymor Wasserman (29:06)
That’s my higher. And I often say, well, why? And they’ll tell me that they’re detail oriented and that they understand the gap of procedures, policies. They understand three-way match. they’re always looking at the bottom line cash flow. They’ll give me the reason, and that will tell me who they are, and I’ll know whether they’re the right hire or not.

Rishi Srivastava (29:28)
Yeah, actually, I also run a software company hiring people so hard. You go to these interviews and everyone gives you polished answers and nothing you can figure out from an interview. I feel like, you know.

Lymor Wasserman (29:43)
You got to come up with those questions that throw them off balance. Why should I hire ⁓ you? I got an interview. I had a question one time in an interview. What kind of brownies do I like? I’m like, what kind of brownies? Yeah, do you like an end piece? Do you like a middle piece? Do you like them sweeter? Do you like things in them? And I was like, OK.

Rishi Srivastava (29:47)
Okay. ⁓

Yeah.

Lymor Wasserman (30:06)
And I answered the question, it threw me off balance, but the mannerism in which I answered the question showed them whether I had prepared an answer or not. So you can tell when somebody has a canned answer that they’ve prepared for you versus an out of field question where they actually have to think about the answer.

Rishi Srivastava (30:16)
Mmm.

like it. In your view, there is always an us versus them somewhere. Field versus office, finance versus ops, senior management versus the front line. What are some concrete things a construction CFO or controller can do in the next 30 days to start breaking down one of those walls inside their company?

Lymor Wasserman (30:46)
Yeah, so let’s say it’s accounting versus operations, because that’s a big one usually, right? Sit in maybe on a project management meeting. Maybe shadow a foreman for a morning. Review the WIP schedule with the operations team. You can get a lot from that. You have to really find out what makes them tick, right? And then you can.

bring them things that help them with their own job. I think that if you looked at this report, it might help you with the issues you’re having. If they’re an analytical person or a people pleaser, there’s different approaches you would take. Long term, you can have lunch or drinks with the manager of the department. You can suggest one-on-ones to help bridge your departments together.

you know, phrases like, what’s your biggest pain point right now? You know, let them talk about their pain point. And they may just go on a tirade for, you know, 20 minutes to tell you what’s paining them right now. It might be you that’s painting them and you’ll have to listen to 20 minutes of what’s paining them. You know, what can accounting do to make your life easier? That’s another good one. You know, stop bothering me.

Okay, let’s dig into that. What does bothering me mean? Let me know. Am I emailing you three times a day about the same thing? I’ll stop that, right? What is it that we can help them with? And if you can figure out and implement something that helps them in the next 30 days, 45 days, whatever, like you were saying, then hopefully they’ll reciprocate and help you when you need backup for something or when you need something, right? And I have to say that

At Lighthouse Technologies, one of the strengths is we don’t have an us and a them. We are willing to help when there’s an issue and somebody may not have the time to do it themselves, but they’d be happy to give you whatever you need to solve a problem. There was another company I was in where I came in just when two companies merged and a lot of people were laid off and the leftover employees had animosity for one another and

I noticed that there were different posses of friends that were going out to lunch once a week and noticed that they included certain people and excluded certain people. And it was like a big deal if you got invited to this lunch or that lunch or whatever. And I thought, God, there’s more going on here than I don’t want to share my AR with you. Right. So I had everybody in the conference room for lunch one day and I ordered from one of their favorite restaurants.

And what did I know how their favorite restaurants were? I noticed what the leftover bags were in the fridge, mostly from one restaurant. So I figured that must be their kind of favorite. And it was a little bit more expensive of a restaurant. So I simply, you know, chit-chatted, whatever. And I said, what’s your biggest pain point right now? And we went around the room and we got the pain points. And I didn’t try to resolve the problem on the spot. I just wrote it all down and listened.

And some of them actually pointed fingers at people in the room indirectly without mentioning their names or job responsibilities. So now I knew why Marge isn’t invited to lunch when the other ladies are going to lunch, right? So a lot is, again, communication and how you communicate. sometimes you need to change, you you need to take a hard look at yourself too, right?

Rishi Srivastava (33:57)
Yeah, if everyone’s complaining about you then maybe you are the problem.

Lymor Wasserman (34:01)
Yeah, exactly.

Rishi Srivastava (34:03)
You talked about driving change by getting buy in and sometimes even letting others think it was their idea. Can you share a story where you needed to implement a major process or structural change in finance or operations? How you built that buy in and what you do differently next time.

Lymor Wasserman (34:26)
Yeah, mean, it’s kind of piggybacks on the last question. Get to know who they are. If they have a big ego, then saying something like, you know, I heard that giving the project managers recurring reports, showing them project health makes them more profitable. I don’t know much about it, but maybe you should look into that. That gives the person enough information to go Google, chat GPT it, and ask their peers about it.

Rishi Srivastava (34:45)
Hmm.

Lymor Wasserman (34:52)
Eventually come back and implement it or ask you to implement it. And it was their idea because they did all of the research. Fine. Remember what I said? I don’t want to be right. I just want to get it right. When it works and someone says to me, but that was your idea. That’s what I come back with. I don’t want to be right. I just want to get it right. You have to know who your audience is before you implement the change.

I had a job that I came into. created procedures. I cross-trained people. I wrote a procedure manual. And I ultimately worked myself out of a job because they had clear duties and clear cross-training. Everything was in a binder on everyone’s shelf. And so if somebody was out one day, they could pull out the binder and see what that person did and do it. So they had some layoffs. And I put myself out of a job.

But I first came in and I observed for six weeks to understand the personalities before I any structural changes. How did they work with other people in the department? What were their work patterns, their ethics? I wish I had AI back then. was, ⁓ my daughter was 10. So God, it was like 14 years ago. you know, I wish I had AI back then. So I could have fed it all into the computer, right? And it would have come up with who would have been the best AP person who would have been the best AR person.

But taking the time to figure out the best approach is just as important as the process itself.

Rishi Srivastava (36:12)
Yeah, actually, I really liked the way you talked about letting others think it was their idea. people rarely believe what you tell them. People sometimes believe what you show them. People always believe what they tell themselves, the stories in their head.

Lymor Wasserman (36:29)
Right. And that’s why the buy-in is so important. How is this going to help you? We talk about this all the time. What have you done for me lately? Janet Jackson, right, I think. So how do you get an operations department or your CEO or somebody to want to crack the hammer on their people to follow a new procedure if they don’t care about it themselves? It’ll never happen.

First you need the buy-in and the trust, and then the procedure and all the technical stuff that goes with it.

Rishi Srivastava (37:00)
Yep. This is the last question for you, Lymor You also mentioned being a bit edgy and constantly working on your interpersonal skills. So people still feel safe bringing you problems. For other finance leaders who are direct, analytical, maybe a little intense, what have you learned about delivering hard truths in a way?

that keeps relationships strong.

Lymor Wasserman (37:24)
Yeah, I mean, first of all, a lot of times I take a breath. A lot of times before I send an email, I’ll put it aside, right? But the bottom line is you have to know your audience. Who can you be direct with? Who do you have to give a diatribe before delivering some news? It’s kind of like when you click on a recipe, you see a recipe you want.

Rishi Srivastava (37:40)
Mm-hmm.

Lymor Wasserman (37:42)
Do you read all that flowery language about being in the forest and coming in cold and you want a cup of hot soup and blah, blah? Or do you just jump right to the recipe and go, what ingredients do I need? What ingredients do I have? So, you know, if, if you can observe all of those things about someone, you can really help deliver some hard truths, right? So what I do know about my intensity that it comes from passion.

Not ill will, right? Nothing I do or say ever comes from a bad intention in my body. I’m really a good person overall. I know that about myself. If I remember that, then I could take a deep breath and figure out how will the message be received, not how I should deliver it. And that’s really the key. Let’s say I want to tell a PM that their job’s going over budget, right?

Rishi Srivastava (38:28)
Mm-hmm.

Lymor Wasserman (38:28)
If

they’re easy going, which means they’re probably not reading the report they get every Monday in their inbox. I would see them in the hallway and ask them to pop in when they have the moment or ping them on Teams to talk to me when they have a free moment. I would start with something that maybe we share in common, like, I golfed in 42 degree rainy weather last week and boy, my bones are still cold, right? We talk about golf and we talk about the weather and whatever it is, if it’s, you know, cooking or baking or something that I have in common with them.

Rishi Srivastava (38:49)
Hehehe

Lymor Wasserman (38:56)
I’d ask them if they saw the report first, right? They might answer, no I was too busy. Then I could say, by the way, and give them the details of the report. But if they answer, well, yeah, I know that project BT42 is over budget. I had an issue, and I’m not going to try and get a change order from the client. But I have to talk to my boss and blah, blah, blah, blah.

Those are very true to different very answer to very different answers. If I had said instead of did you see the report if I said to them, did you know that BD 42 is over budget? I could get two very different answers. I could get no, what happened? Let me see the numbers or I could get. Yeah, I know I’ve been, you know, I’m talking to my talking to my boss about it. You don’t have to ride me about it. You know, it’s a very, very different answer. So.

I may not have to deliver hard news. They may know it, right? For the most part, when we do self-evaluations, we’re harder on ourselves than our bosses would be on us. And so if they get a Monday report in their bin and they look at it, they know. And by the time I see them on Wednesday, they’re figuring out how to change it around, if they’re a good project manager, right? If they’re a laissez-faire project manager waiting for someone to come to them to tell them their project’s over budget,

Rishi Srivastava (39:51)
Mm-hmm.

Lymor Wasserman (40:08)
And I have that conversation with them. Then I can remind them they get these Monday reports. And I’ve highlighted for you in red when there’s a problem. Or now I know Monday morning, I need to go and tell the guy that I golfed this weekend, every Monday morning, even if I didn’t golf over the weekend, so I could let him know that he’s got three red projects and he should look at them. So that’s really long term how you can develop a rapport with people.

And then if you do have a rogue day where you’re not yourself, somebody would be like, well, that’s not like her. Let me go find out what’s wrong with her. Or, or, wow, she must have gotten some bad news. I’ll wait till tomorrow and we’ll, you know, we’ll, we’ll work it out, that sort of thing. So, you know, and again, it’s just about knowing who you are, developing relationships and, you know, making sure that there’s something in it for everyone.

Rishi Srivastava (40:43)
Mm-mm.

Yeah, yeah. You know, I run a company. Pleasing people has been one of the things from my childhood. You know, I’ve always been trying to do that. But now when you have this kind of burden on yourself, like someone like I cannot please everybody all the time now. How would you advise me?

Lymor Wasserman (41:17)
Would I be your supervisor or am I working alongside with you?

Rishi Srivastava (41:20)
Let’s say you are my consultant and how should I not be pleasing people?

Lymor Wasserman (41:25)
Well, I think you can please people, but not cater to them. That’s different, right? So you can, again, figure out what makes them tick. Is it bottom line? Is it making their employees happy so that they stay? And then figure out, how can I help them? How can I help them get the numbers and the KPIs that are important to them?

Rishi Srivastava (41:29)
Hmm.

Lymor Wasserman (41:45)
to make them do their job better. And if you help them get their bottom line, whatever their bottom line is, whether it’s production or numbers or whatever KPI that is, then they’re gonna know you’re on their team and you’ve pleased them. And so when you ask them for something and need to be, you know,

What you need to you need to deliver harsh news or ask them for something that you know, they don’t want to do You’ve already helped them so it’s their turn to help you right or you’ve reached out that olive branch there and they are more willing to help you and listen you have to remember that you don’t come to work to be anybody’s friend and so if

Rishi Srivastava (42:27)
Mm-hmm.

Lymor Wasserman (42:28)
You know, if there is not a friendship and there’s no love loss for whatever reason it is and you can’t repair it, then you just have to go about your day and say, okay, I’m the controller. I’m the VP of finance and I need this piece of information. And if I send an email and I don’t get it, I’m just going to send it to his boss and let him deal with it. And if you’re the, if you’re the CFO and you’re dealing with COO and you have to bring in the CEO to handle it.

That’s what you’re going to do. And it’s unfortunate. But you hopefully have crossed every avenue before you’ve done that, right? And sometimes we just, sometimes we can’t be nice. And it’s very hard for, it’s hard for me to swallow because I always really want, I want that door open. I want people to be able to come into my office virtually or physically.

and plop down with a problem they may have or something like that. And I hope that they equally plop down with, wow, you implemented this and it has saved my life. Thank you. You want the kudos just as much as you want the criticism. And sometimes there are just people that see the glass half empty all the time. You’re never going to get it from them. So don’t expect it. So know your audience. That’s like A number one, I think, in soft skills.

Rishi Srivastava (43:41)
That was great. Lymor I had a great conversation with you. Thank you for coming onto the show.

Lymor Wasserman (43:46)
Thank you so much for having me.