October 30, 2025 • 24 mins
Join host Adam Larson as he sits down with Brian Hogeland, CFO of Packer Fasteners, in this SuiteWorld edition of Count Me In. Brian shares his journey from high school accounting classes to leading a fast-growing finance team, offering insights on how to manage rapid growth, adopt new technology, and foster a culture of curiosity and empowerment. He talks candidly about taking a company through an IPO, implementing ERP systems, and exploring AI with his team. Brian also gives practical advice on automation, upskilling employees, and embracing change while keeping trust and human judgment at the heart of finance. If you’re looking for real-world lessons from a forward-thinking leader, you’ll enjoy this engaging episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Adam Larson (00:00):
Hey, guys. Look where we're at here at Sweet
(00:02):
World, 2025 in Las Vegas. We areexcited to share some new
episodes with you that werecorded here live in Sweet
World in Las Vegas talking aboutAI and innovation and what CFOs
can do to be better leaders inthis organization. So we're so
excited to have you here, sostay tuned for some great
episodes. Well, Brian, thank youso much for coming on the Count
(00:27):
Me In podcast.
Really excited to have you.Really excited to talk with you
here at Sweet World. But Iwanted to start our conversation
just talking about your careerjourney. You know, what brought
you to accounting and how didyou find your way to your
current role?
Brian Hogeland (00:38):
Yeah, so gosh, high school, took accounting
classes. I was good at it, itmade sense, the double sided
entry of things just waslogical, orderly. I went to
school to be an accountingdegree and graduated and got my
actually, CMA before my CPA.Okay. And just really enjoyed
(01:01):
solving problems and making thenumbers balance.
Spent about three years doingfinancial statement audits with
Arthur Andersen in early daysand moved into a technology
consulting role which reallymorphed into IT security. That
was in the latenineties.com era,very exciting stuff and I really
(01:22):
enjoyed doing that. Moved fromArthur Andersen to a couple
different companies in theMilwaukee, Wisconsin area. And
then really kind of stayed inthe IT security core for about
ten years. About 2010, reallywanted to kind of get back into
the finance side of the world, Iworked with the company that I
was employed with at the time.
(01:43):
They had just completed an ERPconversion over to Oracle and
they brought me in because of myfinance and my technology
background and kind of helpednavigate that through, you know,
the post ERP implementationchallenges. And did that for a
number of different roles withinthe finance organization there.
And about four years ago, fourand a half years ago, I left and
(02:06):
came to work for PackerFastener, which is an industrial
distribution company in GreenBay, Wisconsin. I'm the CFO and
oversee a team of about ninepeople, you know, navigating
finances for two main entitiesbut eight different
subsidiaries.
Adam Larson (02:25):
Wow. So what's that like going from what you were
into like this type oforganization? There's so many
different avenues that you haveto have to deal with especially
with like the the products thatyou're delivering. Yeah. You
know, I was in transportation, alarge transportation company,
publicly traded, took himthrough an IPO.
That
Brian Hogeland (02:45):
was a big shift to back down to a smaller size
organization. The company was atabout $20,000,000 of revenue
when I joined him coming fromabout a $4,000,000,000 company.
So you can order of magnitudemuch less complex. And really
the organization when I joinedit was very focused on manual
processes, lot of paper boxes ofpaper. And, know, I was able to
(03:07):
kind of bring some of that focusto more digitization,
technology, automation.
And it's really fit very wellwith the company that we've
grown. We're growing about a 57%annual growth rate for the last
four or five years and trying tokind of do that with the same
set of team that I've got. Wecan try to absorb more work by
(03:31):
just being smarter about how wework.
Adam Larson (03:32):
Yeah. So what's your philosophy as a leader?
Because when I talk to differentaccount leaders, everybody has a
different kind of philosophy,but you know, you're growing,
you're growing fast. So what'syour philosophy as you're
leading this team through thisgrowth?
Brian Hogeland (03:47):
Yeah. Certainly accountability. You know, want
people to take things and ownthem. But ultimately, think
curiosity is really important.And from a finance perspective,
that's important because that'sthe same we've always done it.
That's, you know, obviously nota great way to approach
business. Yeah. In accounting,you're gonna be challenged with
(04:07):
trying to find a good answer ifyou're not curious. Right? When
I think about the efficiency andautomation, being curious about,
hey, is there a better way toapproach this?
How are we thinking about this?All the things you've heard in
the last couple of days here atSweet World, there's so many
things that you can take if youhave that curious mindset and
(04:28):
let's think about how we dothis, let's do it smarter. So my
approach from a leadershipperspective is to
Adam Larson (04:34):
try to like empower people, make have them be
accountable for for what they'reassigned to, really bring that
curiosity. So how do you developthat curiosity, that culture of
curiosity? Because it's not easybecause if somebody's not
naturally curious, it's hard tokind of coax that out of them.
Brian Hogeland (04:51):
Oh yeah, for sure. And there's some people
that I think they're comfortablein their roles and they don't
necessarily, don't wanna bechallenged or or kinda have to
go outside the box. Right?
Adam Larson (05:00):
Yeah.
Brian Hogeland (05:01):
I try to empower my team and give them we have a
standing topic in our in our inmy finance team. We've l 10
meetings traction if you'refamiliar with EOS.
Adam Larson (05:13):
Right? Yeah.
Brian Hogeland (05:15):
We have a standing topic there and I want
them to come and say, what haveyou learned about AI in the last
week, last two
Adam Larson (05:20):
weeks? Mhmm.
Brian Hogeland (05:21):
And it could be something personal, something
professional. And at first whenI started introducing this, this
is probably about a year and ahalf ago, didn't get a
Adam Larson (05:28):
whole lot of feedback.
Brian Hogeland (05:29):
It was kind of the blank stares like what are
you talking about? We'reaccountants, you know. Yeah. But
over time, people started tobring in solutions and I think
that germinates the curiositywithin people because they're
like, oh, she's talking aboutthat and she did that in her
personal life. She built a, youknow, a diet plan or a way to
approach how am I gonna managethe drop offs with the kids, you
(05:51):
know, and they're using AI fortools like that.
It starts to get the wheelsrolling and what if I did that
and and maybe people that wereless inclined to try on
something new like an AI, thechatbots. They feel just a
little bit more comfortable indoing that. So trying to ferment
that curiosity among the team bygiving them a little bit of
(06:11):
space to play.
Adam Larson (06:13):
Yeah. Are there any skills or mindsets that you look
for in your teammates evenespecially if you're gonna hire
new people? Like what are thoseskills and mindsets that you're
looking for especially todaylike with the changing
environment?
Brian Hogeland (06:23):
Yeah. I mean we we had a leadership off-site two
weeks ago and really agreed thatwe want to lean in to the AI and
we want to really, I guess,skill up our teams to the
extent. So it's really if I wereto have to hire someone it would
be the curiosity as I mentioned,you know, who's intellectually
(06:45):
curious, but then who's notafraid to kind of tinker and
play with things. You know, tryand fail within the bounds of,
you know, accounting. We stillhave, you know, certain
guardrails we have to adhere to,but who's willing to try that
and can you exhibit that?
Can you can you speak in termsof digital, right? A good good
friend of mine from years back,we worked together and his
(07:07):
mantra was always, it's justdata. We can do with it whatever
we want to, right? Yeah. Andtrying to get the accounting
teams, finance teams to think inthose terms if I was gonna hire
somebody would be, did theythink like that?
Do they think of it's not like apiece of paper that's a vendor
bill, it is there's just a bunchof data elements on that PDF,
right?
Adam Larson (07:28):
How do you build trust within your team? Because
when you're building, whenyou're trying new technologies
and you want people to becurious, there has to be some
trust there to kind of make thatsuccessful. How do you build
that trust within your team?
Brian Hogeland (07:41):
Yeah, and it's a challenge because we're asking
them to really get outside thecomfort zone and some people,
they're less inclined toapproach that. So trying to give
them, again, a little bit of aseed to say, try this. And you
know like I said earlier youmaybe try and fail a little bit
within the guardrails ofaccounting but you know go ahead
(08:02):
and I'll give an example. Sowhen we moved on to NetSuite we
had the ability to generate ACHpayments in a much larger scale.
So we would have maybe like 400ACH payments we would queue up
to go out on a particular day.
It used to be somebody would gointo the bank type in the bank
routing number and the accountnumbers and okay there's an ACH.
I'm gonna go now and I'm gonnado the same thing and I'm do it
(08:24):
400 times, right? Yeah. WhereasNetSuite gave us the ability to
just click click click click andgo. That didn't come without
some trepidation and oh my godwhat if we do it wrong and we're
gonna pay maybe miss pay andsend money to a bunch of
different companies, you know.
There's a lot of trepidation. Soyou start small. Let's try it
with one or two companies andmaybe not large dollars, but you
(08:47):
know, let's try it with a coupleof, you know, a thousand here,
you know, 2,000 there. So youyou give them sort of that
ability to play and by givingthem the chance to try something
new. And if they make a mistake,you know, what do we need to do
to fix it and be accountable,but also like your job's safe,
right?
So it's building that trustthere and, you know, trying new
(09:08):
things, giving them the abilityto fail and still like we're
gonna be okay.
Adam Larson (09:12):
And I think about the accounting team, like you
had your career AP or career AR,like you had those career people
who were doing those same jobsfor like thirty years. And when
with all this new technologythat's coming, those people
don't necessarily their job ischanging and a lot times those
career people, they don't likechange very much. How have you
navigated that with those kindof roles?
Brian Hogeland (09:32):
You know, it's a challenge. Accounts payable is
an example. We've utilized athird party to try to take do
the automation of AP. So, youknow, you do get a PDF bill from
your vendor, you kinda drag itin and it should do the the
three way match. And there wasnot a ton of excitement from the
(09:52):
AP team when we went live withit.
Mhmm. And so it's really tryingto create some metrics and say,
look, I I know that this is theway you've done it. Right? And
you can easily just fall backand just type it all in. But
what I'm looking to do ischallenge you to say, I wanna
increase.
I'm gonna create a metric. It'sthe number of lines that we've
entered, like, from vendor billsper hour that you've worked. Now
(10:16):
you might have done it one wayfor years and you kind of have
sort of a static metric becauseyou just you're on autopilot,
you know how to do it. I'm gonnachallenge you to increase that
5%, 10%. How many more lines areyou able to do?
And it's not because I wannamanage people by just your
number and did you meet yourmetric or not? But it's a way to
try to draw them into let'slet's accept that this is, you
(10:39):
know, a better way for us to dothis. You've probably heard
Jensen Huang from NVIDIA He saysAI is not gonna replace people.
AI is gonna replace people thatdon't embrace AI. Right?
And so we're trying to have someof our teams embrace AI Yeah.
And this is one of the mechanismmechanisms that I've tried to
Adam Larson (10:55):
use to kinda like bring them to the table. Have
you had to like change teammembers because of the all this
all the new technology that iscoming?
Brian Hogeland (11:05):
No. I think our company, we have a very strong
culture around people and so weare really focused on upscaling
people instead of saying you'renot you're not a fit for this.
If we had to, I mean, you know,it's a consideration because
there's a certain point wherewe're growing really really fast
and, you know, we want tocapitalize on the growth without
(11:29):
having to hire people linearlyso that means maybe having the
right people in the right seats.
Adam Larson (11:34):
Yeah so AI is obviously changing the way the
finance and accounting teamlooks. How, like, is how have
you helped your team navigatethese waters? Like, what's your
perspective on how it's changingthe team?
Brian Hogeland (11:49):
Yeah. Again, some people just jump in and
they're they're excited aboutit. Know, You one person on my
team, she used the free chat GPTaccounts and if you've used that
before, kind of go through andyou just run out of tokens.
Right? There's just only somuch.
And so she went through the nextday and kind of she had a a use
case she was trying to solve.She went through and, okay, I
(12:10):
ran out of tokens. Come backtomorrow and do the same thing.
And it would chain together liketen different days to try to
solve an interesting problem.You know, that was kind of a fun
example for trying to encouragethat and and celebrate it.
But also you're learning alittle bit too as a leader,
Adam Larson (12:26):
like Yeah.
Brian Hogeland (12:27):
You know, should I should I enable you and, you
know, pay for a fullsubscription to just allow you
to do that kind of thing? Mhmm.
Adam Larson (12:34):
Are how are so with with all the exciting
announcements that have beenhappening just in the last day
here at Sweet World, what areyou excited about, you know,
going forward?
Brian Hogeland (12:48):
Yeah. So the big splash yesterday, it was super
exciting to just kinda get theintroduction from Evan, CEO from
from Oracle. But really today asGary who's in charge of app
development and and Brian Chesswho's kind of their
infrastructure to listen to themtalk about the framework that
they're deploying now where youcan go out as, you know, kind of
(13:12):
an accounting, you know, teammember, maybe build your own
agents and or maybe I can go outand help you build some agents
because maybe you're not a supertechnology person. That's in the
accounting world, of course,that can extend far beyond the
accounting team. So sales teamscan do that, our procurement
teams can do that.
You know, our HR team can dosome of those capabilities. So
(13:34):
it's what they've done, I think,is I'm understanding it here is
really develop that framework sothat it's integrated with the
NetSuite platform. Yeah. We'realready fully in with NetSuite
and this is a way for us to justcontinue to scale and embrace AI
without having to replatform onsomething completely different.
Right?
Adam Larson (13:53):
Yeah. So what you think the biggest opportunity is
and possible challenges as youtake these next steps forward?
Brian Hogeland (14:01):
Yeah, I think I'm interested in and I just
heard Gary reiterate this too isyou want to automate the things
that are repetitive and justtime consuming and just sort of
that there's a lot of thingsthat happen in an accounting
team that's just repetitive andtime consuming. Those feel like
the first places we'd want tojump in and try to scale those.
(14:22):
And some of the solutions, likeI mentioned, already in the AP
side, it's already there andmaybe there's ways to enhance
that. But there's on theaccounts receivable side is how
do we get cash in and apply thatto customer invoices? Do we get
it through checks?
Do we get it ACH? Is there amore efficient way to do that?
There's some new flux analysiscapabilities they built into the
(14:42):
suite now. There are financialexceptions. So things like, hey,
you typically book an accrualfor energy in this department
every month, you haven't bookedthat.
It was an oversight. So asyou're kind of closing the
books, can tidy up and make surethat you got accurate numbers as
you close the book. So those areareas that feel like really low
hanging fruit we can get afterpretty easily.
Adam Larson (15:04):
And that's got to be exciting for the team too
because it frees them up topossibly think outside of what
they've been doing every day.Yeah. What can I do differently?
Brian Hogeland (15:14):
Know and a little bit of liberty too
because if I can if I can freeup you know an hour of your of
your week you can kind of go inthe sandbox and play with these
agents and see that just scalesinto it sort of snowballs into
what else can I do? What elsecan I do? And build on that.
Adam Larson (15:30):
So how do you, as you're moving into this, how are
you gonna balance the balancebetween like automation but also
the human judgment and makingsure that like everything's kind
of going the right direction?
Brian Hogeland (15:42):
Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about that
just in the last two days. Yeah.Because there's the the concept
of hallucinations. Obviously, onaccounting you need certain
controls and validations. That'sthat's why you're there.
So to the extent that there'shuman in the loop elements in
any of these processes we buildout, especially on the early end
of it because, you know, youmight be comfortable with it
after you've been using it for ayear, that first week, kind of
(16:04):
like the ACH example I usedearlier, you you just sort of
want to do that gut check. Isthis correct? Am I introducing
the ability for somebody tomaybe see data they're not
supposed to or to approvesomething they're not supposed
to? Those are all things we'llwant to proceed with intention,
but we're not going to let thatstop us either. We're going find
ways to balance the two.
Adam Larson (16:25):
Yeah, you have to find ways to balance the two
because obviously hallucinationsis a big deal. And being able to
have your AI look at your dataonly and not looking elsewhere
is a big thing. But how do youget from, okay, we're ready to
do this to like I'm afraid ofhallucinations to I'm ready to
like press go.
Brian Hogeland (16:46):
Yeah it's gonna be again the way I've approached
it in my career start smallstart with something that's if
it's something that's a highvolume, a lot of intense work,
pick off a small little sample.What happens if I do this? And
then you increase the sample alittle bit. Before you know it,
you've gotten out, you know, mymy day just is filled with not
(17:10):
doing the work but overseeingthe agents that are doing the
work is kind of how I thinkabout it. Do
Adam Larson (17:15):
you think that it's going to allow your team to
think more strategically and howare you going to help them get
to that place to think morestrategically outside of the I'm
just doing my mundane accountingtasks.
Brian Hogeland (17:26):
Yeah. I mean that's my that's my hope right?
That's sort of sprinkled in alot of the work that we do is
you know again if you've wherewe came from as a very manual
paper focused company, thinkwhat we've sowed so far is that
creativity and by continuing toenhance add more automation and
(17:49):
the AI is gonna be key for that.If you can add more of that, you
know, are excited about what canI accomplish here? What's new?
What can I do? What's thestrategic side? And we're a
rapidly growing company too, sothe things that work as finance
team with a $20,000,000 companyare not what work as a
$500,000,000 company. And so weall need to collectively think
(18:10):
strategically a little bitdifferently. So you're thinking
more about cash flow models,you're thinking more about maybe
investor relations type things.
Those are areas that we'll haveto scale up to.
Adam Larson (18:20):
What do you think about like the next generation
of accountants coming up fromcolleges? What advice would you
give to them if they'relistening to this conversation
like, hey, I want to get in onthis. What skills should I be
getting into? What should I bedoing? Because the traditional,
like if you went to school foraccounting twenty years ago,
you're not looking at the samething.
The foundation is still thesame, but there's so many other
(18:41):
skills that you need.
Brian Hogeland (18:42):
Yeah, yeah, really. I mean, you know, I was
in high school in the the lateeighties and the early nineties
and it literally was on paper,right? So what we thought about
as accounting was was verysimple compared to what we do
now. The volume of what systemsdo on your behalf now. Thinking
systemically, thinkingdigitally, I think if you're
(19:04):
just if you read in anaccounting textbook and you say,
you have to book, you know,debit to cash and a credit to
sales, that's obviously you needto start somewhere with that,
but you have to think biggersystemically.
I need to there's there'sclearing accounts, there's, you
know, those are things you getkind of with experience working
with a large company with acomplex system, if you can
conceptualize that as a studentand and to the extent that they
(19:26):
can augment in education trackswith that, I think that's gonna
service our young prospects.
Adam Larson (19:33):
Yeah, definitely will because it's because they
still you still need thatfoundation like you because if
you're looking at what the AI isdoing you need to understand
because if you need to checktheir work if you need to see
hey is this working correctlyyou need to understand what's
happening behind the scenes.
Brian Hogeland (19:46):
Correct. I mean reconciliations is a great, used
to be the one question I wouldask somebody when I was
interviewing them. Said explainto me what a reconciliation is.
And you could really tell a lotfrom their answers to that. Do
they really kind of get that?
I think there's probably aseries of new questions that
would make sense to ask in thesame vein like, how does the
(20:08):
system you know, how do youbalance a sub ledger against the
general ledger Yeah. In a in ahigh volume situation. Right?
Adam Larson (20:16):
Those are types of things you'd try to tease out.
So when you think about yourleadership journey so far,
what's something you'd like youto say I'm most proud of in my
leadership journey?
Brian Hogeland (20:31):
You know, I've I've tried a lot of different
things. I haven't been afraid tokind of peel the onion, get
really into the the weeds on it.Mhmm. But then also come back up
and think strategically aboutit. And I I think I've had good
(20:51):
people I've worked with over theyears that have kind of enabled
me to do that.
You know, early in my career, Iwasn't necessarily comfortable
talking at a very high levelwithout understanding really
what was what was how was thesausage made, know? Yeah. And
and so it's kind of being ableto kind of explore on both of
those veins, the the top levelthinking, the low level
thinking. I feel like I kind ofbring both of those to to the
(21:15):
role that I'm in right now. AndI think I'm pretty proud of
that.
That's awesome.
Adam Larson (21:21):
You mentioned that you kind of started in IT and
kind of moved to the financeside, the CFO side. Do you think
that tomorrow CFOs should bereally looking in technology and
the accounting side as well?
Brian Hogeland (21:34):
Yeah, I didn't necessarily think that was I was
just excited because I came outof college in the .com boom and
I was super excited about theinternet and all that came with
that and so I started as anaccountant but was really
excited about the digitaltechnology side of it. I think,
you know, it's certainly notgonna hurt, you know, finance
(21:54):
professionals to really kind of,I don't know, I guess how you
avoid it in today's world withall the AI. If you're not
conversational and LLMs andchatbots and again building out
agents in the future here, youmight be in competition with
people that are.
Adam Larson (22:11):
Sure. So if somebody's listening to this
conversation and they're like,okay, I want to get where you're
at. I want to make sure my teamis ready for this AI thing. I
want to make sure that we'recreating a culture so they can
fail, fail well and learn fromthat. What's that first step
that they should take?
Brian Hogeland (22:28):
You know, so I'm part of a local FEI, finance
executives Yeah. Chapter. And weas a group kind of talk about
those types of questions likeMhmm. People say, hey, it seems
like you guys are reallyprogressive in AI. What are you
doing?
What how do I get started? Yeah.And the answer we've had lately
has been we had a rock earlierthis year where we had an AI one
(22:51):
zero one training. So for threeseparate months, we did a a a
one month an hour long trainingeach month. And it was for the
whole company.
Tune in and we're gonna explainwhat what AI is and LLMs. The
second one is we're gonna talk alittle bit more about how you
write a prompt. Right?
Adam Larson (23:07):
Yeah.
Brian Hogeland (23:08):
And then the third one was we had a contest.
We introduced it to the wholecompany and said, look, we want
you to go out. We want you totry AI. Come back to us. What
were some of the cool cases thatyou found?
Whether it's business, somethingpersonal, bring it back. And we
had a contest and awarded, youknow, some prizes out to the the
top people. I share that withother companies that are kind of
(23:28):
in that, how do I get startedhere? For us, that was a really
good Genesis to try to like getpeople excited about it. And we
think we accomplished a lot withthat.
In fact, we're gonna try to doan AI two zero one here as we
close out the year to kind ofdouble back and see where people
are at. Update with now,especially what we've learned
this week here and, you know,where we see next week going.
(23:48):
Those are areas again, I thinkthere's another great book too
that we we've just kind offinished as a leadership group
called the AI Driven Leader. Itreally embraces the idea of
using AI as your strategicthought partner. So I'd
encourage people to crack thatone.
It's a good audiobook, easylisten, but it really hammers
homes to some very strategicuses of AI.
Adam Larson (24:10):
Well, Brian, I really appreciate you coming on
the Count Me In podcast. Thankyou so much for sharing your
insights with our audience.
Brian Hogeland (24:15):
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It's
awesome.
Announcer (24:19):
This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast providing
you with the latest perspectivesof thought leaders from the
accounting and financeprofession. If you like what you
heard and you'd like to becounted in for more relevant
accounting and financeeducation, visit IMA's website
at www.imanet.org.
Hey, guys. Look where we're at here at Sweet
(00:02):
World, 2025 in Las Vegas. We areexcited to share some new
episodes with you that werecorded here live in Sweet
World in Las Vegas talking aboutAI and innovation and what CFOs
can do to be better leaders inthis organization. So we're so
excited to have you here, sostay tuned for some great
episodes. Well, Brian, thank youso much for coming on the Count
(00:27):
Me In podcast.
Really excited to have you.Really excited to talk with you
here at Sweet World. But Iwanted to start our conversation
just talking about your careerjourney. You know, what brought
you to accounting and how didyou find your way to your
current role?
Brian Hogeland (00:38):
Yeah, so gosh, high school, took accounting
classes. I was good at it, itmade sense, the double sided
entry of things just waslogical, orderly. I went to
school to be an accountingdegree and graduated and got my
actually, CMA before my CPA.Okay. And just really enjoyed
(01:01):
solving problems and making thenumbers balance.
Spent about three years doingfinancial statement audits with
Arthur Andersen in early daysand moved into a technology
consulting role which reallymorphed into IT security. That
was in the latenineties.com era,very exciting stuff and I really
(01:22):
enjoyed doing that. Moved fromArthur Andersen to a couple
different companies in theMilwaukee, Wisconsin area. And
then really kind of stayed inthe IT security core for about
ten years. About 2010, reallywanted to kind of get back into
the finance side of the world, Iworked with the company that I
was employed with at the time.
(01:43):
They had just completed an ERPconversion over to Oracle and
they brought me in because of myfinance and my technology
background and kind of helpednavigate that through, you know,
the post ERP implementationchallenges. And did that for a
number of different roles withinthe finance organization there.
And about four years ago, fourand a half years ago, I left and
(02:06):
came to work for PackerFastener, which is an industrial
distribution company in GreenBay, Wisconsin. I'm the CFO and
oversee a team of about ninepeople, you know, navigating
finances for two main entitiesbut eight different
subsidiaries.
Adam Larson (02:25):
Wow. So what's that like going from what you were
into like this type oforganization? There's so many
different avenues that you haveto have to deal with especially
with like the the products thatyou're delivering. Yeah. You
know, I was in transportation, alarge transportation company,
publicly traded, took himthrough an IPO.
That
Brian Hogeland (02:45):
was a big shift to back down to a smaller size
organization. The company was atabout $20,000,000 of revenue
when I joined him coming fromabout a $4,000,000,000 company.
So you can order of magnitudemuch less complex. And really
the organization when I joinedit was very focused on manual
processes, lot of paper boxes ofpaper. And, know, I was able to
(03:07):
kind of bring some of that focusto more digitization,
technology, automation.
And it's really fit very wellwith the company that we've
grown. We're growing about a 57%annual growth rate for the last
four or five years and trying tokind of do that with the same
set of team that I've got. Wecan try to absorb more work by
(03:31):
just being smarter about how wework.
Adam Larson (03:32):
Yeah. So what's your philosophy as a leader?
Because when I talk to differentaccount leaders, everybody has a
different kind of philosophy,but you know, you're growing,
you're growing fast. So what'syour philosophy as you're
leading this team through thisgrowth?
Brian Hogeland (03:47):
Yeah. Certainly accountability. You know, want
people to take things and ownthem. But ultimately, think
curiosity is really important.And from a finance perspective,
that's important because that'sthe same we've always done it.
That's, you know, obviously nota great way to approach
business. Yeah. In accounting,you're gonna be challenged with
(04:07):
trying to find a good answer ifyou're not curious. Right? When
I think about the efficiency andautomation, being curious about,
hey, is there a better way toapproach this?
How are we thinking about this?All the things you've heard in
the last couple of days here atSweet World, there's so many
things that you can take if youhave that curious mindset and
(04:28):
let's think about how we dothis, let's do it smarter. So my
approach from a leadershipperspective is to
Adam Larson (04:34):
try to like empower people, make have them be
accountable for for what they'reassigned to, really bring that
curiosity. So how do you developthat curiosity, that culture of
curiosity? Because it's not easybecause if somebody's not
naturally curious, it's hard tokind of coax that out of them.
Brian Hogeland (04:51):
Oh yeah, for sure. And there's some people
that I think they're comfortablein their roles and they don't
necessarily, don't wanna bechallenged or or kinda have to
go outside the box. Right?
Adam Larson (05:00):
Yeah.
Brian Hogeland (05:01):
I try to empower my team and give them we have a
standing topic in our in our inmy finance team. We've l 10
meetings traction if you'refamiliar with EOS.
Adam Larson (05:13):
Right? Yeah.
Brian Hogeland (05:15):
We have a standing topic there and I want
them to come and say, what haveyou learned about AI in the last
week, last two
Adam Larson (05:20):
weeks? Mhmm.
Brian Hogeland (05:21):
And it could be something personal, something
professional. And at first whenI started introducing this, this
is probably about a year and ahalf ago, didn't get a
Adam Larson (05:28):
whole lot of feedback.
Brian Hogeland (05:29):
It was kind of the blank stares like what are
you talking about? We'reaccountants, you know. Yeah. But
over time, people started tobring in solutions and I think
that germinates the curiositywithin people because they're
like, oh, she's talking aboutthat and she did that in her
personal life. She built a, youknow, a diet plan or a way to
approach how am I gonna managethe drop offs with the kids, you
(05:51):
know, and they're using AI fortools like that.
It starts to get the wheelsrolling and what if I did that
and and maybe people that wereless inclined to try on
something new like an AI, thechatbots. They feel just a
little bit more comfortable indoing that. So trying to ferment
that curiosity among the team bygiving them a little bit of
(06:11):
space to play.
Adam Larson (06:13):
Yeah. Are there any skills or mindsets that you look
for in your teammates evenespecially if you're gonna hire
new people? Like what are thoseskills and mindsets that you're
looking for especially todaylike with the changing
environment?
Brian Hogeland (06:23):
Yeah. I mean we we had a leadership off-site two
weeks ago and really agreed thatwe want to lean in to the AI and
we want to really, I guess,skill up our teams to the
extent. So it's really if I wereto have to hire someone it would
be the curiosity as I mentioned,you know, who's intellectually
(06:45):
curious, but then who's notafraid to kind of tinker and
play with things. You know, tryand fail within the bounds of,
you know, accounting. We stillhave, you know, certain
guardrails we have to adhere to,but who's willing to try that
and can you exhibit that?
Can you can you speak in termsof digital, right? A good good
friend of mine from years back,we worked together and his
(07:07):
mantra was always, it's justdata. We can do with it whatever
we want to, right? Yeah. Andtrying to get the accounting
teams, finance teams to think inthose terms if I was gonna hire
somebody would be, did theythink like that?
Do they think of it's not like apiece of paper that's a vendor
bill, it is there's just a bunchof data elements on that PDF,
right?
Adam Larson (07:28):
How do you build trust within your team? Because
when you're building, whenyou're trying new technologies
and you want people to becurious, there has to be some
trust there to kind of make thatsuccessful. How do you build
that trust within your team?
Brian Hogeland (07:41):
Yeah, and it's a challenge because we're asking
them to really get outside thecomfort zone and some people,
they're less inclined toapproach that. So trying to give
them, again, a little bit of aseed to say, try this. And you
know like I said earlier youmaybe try and fail a little bit
within the guardrails ofaccounting but you know go ahead
(08:02):
and I'll give an example. Sowhen we moved on to NetSuite we
had the ability to generate ACHpayments in a much larger scale.
So we would have maybe like 400ACH payments we would queue up
to go out on a particular day.
It used to be somebody would gointo the bank type in the bank
routing number and the accountnumbers and okay there's an ACH.
I'm gonna go now and I'm gonnado the same thing and I'm do it
(08:24):
400 times, right? Yeah. WhereasNetSuite gave us the ability to
just click click click click andgo. That didn't come without
some trepidation and oh my godwhat if we do it wrong and we're
gonna pay maybe miss pay andsend money to a bunch of
different companies, you know.
There's a lot of trepidation. Soyou start small. Let's try it
with one or two companies andmaybe not large dollars, but you
(08:47):
know, let's try it with a coupleof, you know, a thousand here,
you know, 2,000 there. So youyou give them sort of that
ability to play and by givingthem the chance to try something
new. And if they make a mistake,you know, what do we need to do
to fix it and be accountable,but also like your job's safe,
right?
So it's building that trustthere and, you know, trying new
(09:08):
things, giving them the abilityto fail and still like we're
gonna be okay.
Adam Larson (09:12):
And I think about the accounting team, like you
had your career AP or career AR,like you had those career people
who were doing those same jobsfor like thirty years. And when
with all this new technologythat's coming, those people
don't necessarily their job ischanging and a lot times those
career people, they don't likechange very much. How have you
navigated that with those kindof roles?
Brian Hogeland (09:32):
You know, it's a challenge. Accounts payable is
an example. We've utilized athird party to try to take do
the automation of AP. So, youknow, you do get a PDF bill from
your vendor, you kinda drag itin and it should do the the
three way match. And there wasnot a ton of excitement from the
(09:52):
AP team when we went live withit.
Mhmm. And so it's really tryingto create some metrics and say,
look, I I know that this is theway you've done it. Right? And
you can easily just fall backand just type it all in. But
what I'm looking to do ischallenge you to say, I wanna
increase.
I'm gonna create a metric. It'sthe number of lines that we've
entered, like, from vendor billsper hour that you've worked. Now
(10:16):
you might have done it one wayfor years and you kind of have
sort of a static metric becauseyou just you're on autopilot,
you know how to do it. I'm gonnachallenge you to increase that
5%, 10%. How many more lines areyou able to do?
And it's not because I wannamanage people by just your
number and did you meet yourmetric or not? But it's a way to
try to draw them into let'slet's accept that this is, you
(10:39):
know, a better way for us to dothis. You've probably heard
Jensen Huang from NVIDIA He saysAI is not gonna replace people.
AI is gonna replace people thatdon't embrace AI. Right?
And so we're trying to have someof our teams embrace AI Yeah.
And this is one of the mechanismmechanisms that I've tried to
Adam Larson (10:55):
use to kinda like bring them to the table. Have
you had to like change teammembers because of the all this
all the new technology that iscoming?
Brian Hogeland (11:05):
No. I think our company, we have a very strong
culture around people and so weare really focused on upscaling
people instead of saying you'renot you're not a fit for this.
If we had to, I mean, you know,it's a consideration because
there's a certain point wherewe're growing really really fast
and, you know, we want tocapitalize on the growth without
(11:29):
having to hire people linearlyso that means maybe having the
right people in the right seats.
Adam Larson (11:34):
Yeah so AI is obviously changing the way the
finance and accounting teamlooks. How, like, is how have
you helped your team navigatethese waters? Like, what's your
perspective on how it's changingthe team?
Brian Hogeland (11:49):
Yeah. Again, some people just jump in and
they're they're excited aboutit. Know, You one person on my
team, she used the free chat GPTaccounts and if you've used that
before, kind of go through andyou just run out of tokens.
Right? There's just only somuch.
And so she went through the nextday and kind of she had a a use
case she was trying to solve.She went through and, okay, I
(12:10):
ran out of tokens. Come backtomorrow and do the same thing.
And it would chain together liketen different days to try to
solve an interesting problem.You know, that was kind of a fun
example for trying to encouragethat and and celebrate it.
But also you're learning alittle bit too as a leader,
Adam Larson (12:26):
like Yeah.
Brian Hogeland (12:27):
You know, should I should I enable you and, you
know, pay for a fullsubscription to just allow you
to do that kind of thing? Mhmm.
Adam Larson (12:34):
Are how are so with with all the exciting
announcements that have beenhappening just in the last day
here at Sweet World, what areyou excited about, you know,
going forward?
Brian Hogeland (12:48):
Yeah. So the big splash yesterday, it was super
exciting to just kinda get theintroduction from Evan, CEO from
from Oracle. But really today asGary who's in charge of app
development and and Brian Chesswho's kind of their
infrastructure to listen to themtalk about the framework that
they're deploying now where youcan go out as, you know, kind of
(13:12):
an accounting, you know, teammember, maybe build your own
agents and or maybe I can go outand help you build some agents
because maybe you're not a supertechnology person. That's in the
accounting world, of course,that can extend far beyond the
accounting team. So sales teamscan do that, our procurement
teams can do that.
You know, our HR team can dosome of those capabilities. So
(13:34):
it's what they've done, I think,is I'm understanding it here is
really develop that framework sothat it's integrated with the
NetSuite platform. Yeah. We'realready fully in with NetSuite
and this is a way for us to justcontinue to scale and embrace AI
without having to replatform onsomething completely different.
Right?
Adam Larson (13:53):
Yeah. So what you think the biggest opportunity is
and possible challenges as youtake these next steps forward?
Brian Hogeland (14:01):
Yeah, I think I'm interested in and I just
heard Gary reiterate this too isyou want to automate the things
that are repetitive and justtime consuming and just sort of
that there's a lot of thingsthat happen in an accounting
team that's just repetitive andtime consuming. Those feel like
the first places we'd want tojump in and try to scale those.
(14:22):
And some of the solutions, likeI mentioned, already in the AP
side, it's already there andmaybe there's ways to enhance
that. But there's on theaccounts receivable side is how
do we get cash in and apply thatto customer invoices? Do we get
it through checks?
Do we get it ACH? Is there amore efficient way to do that?
There's some new flux analysiscapabilities they built into the
(14:42):
suite now. There are financialexceptions. So things like, hey,
you typically book an accrualfor energy in this department
every month, you haven't bookedthat.
It was an oversight. So asyou're kind of closing the
books, can tidy up and make surethat you got accurate numbers as
you close the book. So those areareas that feel like really low
hanging fruit we can get afterpretty easily.
Adam Larson (15:04):
And that's got to be exciting for the team too
because it frees them up topossibly think outside of what
they've been doing every day.Yeah. What can I do differently?
Brian Hogeland (15:14):
Know and a little bit of liberty too
because if I can if I can freeup you know an hour of your of
your week you can kind of go inthe sandbox and play with these
agents and see that just scalesinto it sort of snowballs into
what else can I do? What elsecan I do? And build on that.
Adam Larson (15:30):
So how do you, as you're moving into this, how are
you gonna balance the balancebetween like automation but also
the human judgment and makingsure that like everything's kind
of going the right direction?
Brian Hogeland (15:42):
Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about that
just in the last two days. Yeah.Because there's the the concept
of hallucinations. Obviously, onaccounting you need certain
controls and validations. That'sthat's why you're there.
So to the extent that there'shuman in the loop elements in
any of these processes we buildout, especially on the early end
of it because, you know, youmight be comfortable with it
after you've been using it for ayear, that first week, kind of
(16:04):
like the ACH example I usedearlier, you you just sort of
want to do that gut check. Isthis correct? Am I introducing
the ability for somebody tomaybe see data they're not
supposed to or to approvesomething they're not supposed
to? Those are all things we'llwant to proceed with intention,
but we're not going to let thatstop us either. We're going find
ways to balance the two.
Adam Larson (16:25):
Yeah, you have to find ways to balance the two
because obviously hallucinationsis a big deal. And being able to
have your AI look at your dataonly and not looking elsewhere
is a big thing. But how do youget from, okay, we're ready to
do this to like I'm afraid ofhallucinations to I'm ready to
like press go.
Brian Hogeland (16:46):
Yeah it's gonna be again the way I've approached
it in my career start smallstart with something that's if
it's something that's a highvolume, a lot of intense work,
pick off a small little sample.What happens if I do this? And
then you increase the sample alittle bit. Before you know it,
you've gotten out, you know, mymy day just is filled with not
(17:10):
doing the work but overseeingthe agents that are doing the
work is kind of how I thinkabout it. Do
Adam Larson (17:15):
you think that it's going to allow your team to
think more strategically and howare you going to help them get
to that place to think morestrategically outside of the I'm
just doing my mundane accountingtasks.
Brian Hogeland (17:26):
Yeah. I mean that's my that's my hope right?
That's sort of sprinkled in alot of the work that we do is
you know again if you've wherewe came from as a very manual
paper focused company, thinkwhat we've sowed so far is that
creativity and by continuing toenhance add more automation and
(17:49):
the AI is gonna be key for that.If you can add more of that, you
know, are excited about what canI accomplish here? What's new?
What can I do? What's thestrategic side? And we're a
rapidly growing company too, sothe things that work as finance
team with a $20,000,000 companyare not what work as a
$500,000,000 company. And so weall need to collectively think
(18:10):
strategically a little bitdifferently. So you're thinking
more about cash flow models,you're thinking more about maybe
investor relations type things.
Those are areas that we'll haveto scale up to.
Adam Larson (18:20):
What do you think about like the next generation
of accountants coming up fromcolleges? What advice would you
give to them if they'relistening to this conversation
like, hey, I want to get in onthis. What skills should I be
getting into? What should I bedoing? Because the traditional,
like if you went to school foraccounting twenty years ago,
you're not looking at the samething.
The foundation is still thesame, but there's so many other
(18:41):
skills that you need.
Brian Hogeland (18:42):
Yeah, yeah, really. I mean, you know, I was
in high school in the the lateeighties and the early nineties
and it literally was on paper,right? So what we thought about
as accounting was was verysimple compared to what we do
now. The volume of what systemsdo on your behalf now. Thinking
systemically, thinkingdigitally, I think if you're
(19:04):
just if you read in anaccounting textbook and you say,
you have to book, you know,debit to cash and a credit to
sales, that's obviously you needto start somewhere with that,
but you have to think biggersystemically.
I need to there's there'sclearing accounts, there's, you
know, those are things you getkind of with experience working
with a large company with acomplex system, if you can
conceptualize that as a studentand and to the extent that they
(19:26):
can augment in education trackswith that, I think that's gonna
service our young prospects.
Adam Larson (19:33):
Yeah, definitely will because it's because they
still you still need thatfoundation like you because if
you're looking at what the AI isdoing you need to understand
because if you need to checktheir work if you need to see
hey is this working correctlyyou need to understand what's
happening behind the scenes.
Brian Hogeland (19:46):
Correct. I mean reconciliations is a great, used
to be the one question I wouldask somebody when I was
interviewing them. Said explainto me what a reconciliation is.
And you could really tell a lotfrom their answers to that. Do
they really kind of get that?
I think there's probably aseries of new questions that
would make sense to ask in thesame vein like, how does the
(20:08):
system you know, how do youbalance a sub ledger against the
general ledger Yeah. In a in ahigh volume situation. Right?
Adam Larson (20:16):
Those are types of things you'd try to tease out.
So when you think about yourleadership journey so far,
what's something you'd like youto say I'm most proud of in my
leadership journey?
Brian Hogeland (20:31):
You know, I've I've tried a lot of different
things. I haven't been afraid tokind of peel the onion, get
really into the the weeds on it.Mhmm. But then also come back up
and think strategically aboutit. And I I think I've had good
(20:51):
people I've worked with over theyears that have kind of enabled
me to do that.
You know, early in my career, Iwasn't necessarily comfortable
talking at a very high levelwithout understanding really
what was what was how was thesausage made, know? Yeah. And
and so it's kind of being ableto kind of explore on both of
those veins, the the top levelthinking, the low level
thinking. I feel like I kind ofbring both of those to to the
(21:15):
role that I'm in right now. AndI think I'm pretty proud of
that.
That's awesome.
Adam Larson (21:21):
You mentioned that you kind of started in IT and
kind of moved to the financeside, the CFO side. Do you think
that tomorrow CFOs should bereally looking in technology and
the accounting side as well?
Brian Hogeland (21:34):
Yeah, I didn't necessarily think that was I was
just excited because I came outof college in the .com boom and
I was super excited about theinternet and all that came with
that and so I started as anaccountant but was really
excited about the digitaltechnology side of it. I think,
you know, it's certainly notgonna hurt, you know, finance
(21:54):
professionals to really kind of,I don't know, I guess how you
avoid it in today's world withall the AI. If you're not
conversational and LLMs andchatbots and again building out
agents in the future here, youmight be in competition with
people that are.
Adam Larson (22:11):
Sure. So if somebody's listening to this
conversation and they're like,okay, I want to get where you're
at. I want to make sure my teamis ready for this AI thing. I
want to make sure that we'recreating a culture so they can
fail, fail well and learn fromthat. What's that first step
that they should take?
Brian Hogeland (22:28):
You know, so I'm part of a local FEI, finance
executives Yeah. Chapter. And weas a group kind of talk about
those types of questions likeMhmm. People say, hey, it seems
like you guys are reallyprogressive in AI. What are you
doing?
What how do I get started? Yeah.And the answer we've had lately
has been we had a rock earlierthis year where we had an AI one
(22:51):
zero one training. So for threeseparate months, we did a a a
one month an hour long trainingeach month. And it was for the
whole company.
Tune in and we're gonna explainwhat what AI is and LLMs. The
second one is we're gonna talk alittle bit more about how you
write a prompt. Right?
Adam Larson (23:07):
Yeah.
Brian Hogeland (23:08):
And then the third one was we had a contest.
We introduced it to the wholecompany and said, look, we want
you to go out. We want you totry AI. Come back to us. What
were some of the cool cases thatyou found?
Whether it's business, somethingpersonal, bring it back. And we
had a contest and awarded, youknow, some prizes out to the the
top people. I share that withother companies that are kind of
(23:28):
in that, how do I get startedhere? For us, that was a really
good Genesis to try to like getpeople excited about it. And we
think we accomplished a lot withthat.
In fact, we're gonna try to doan AI two zero one here as we
close out the year to kind ofdouble back and see where people
are at. Update with now,especially what we've learned
this week here and, you know,where we see next week going.
(23:48):
Those are areas again, I thinkthere's another great book too
that we we've just kind offinished as a leadership group
called the AI Driven Leader. Itreally embraces the idea of
using AI as your strategicthought partner. So I'd
encourage people to crack thatone.
It's a good audiobook, easylisten, but it really hammers
homes to some very strategicuses of AI.
Adam Larson (24:10):
Well, Brian, I really appreciate you coming on
the Count Me In podcast. Thankyou so much for sharing your
insights with our audience.
Brian Hogeland (24:15):
Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It's
awesome.
Announcer (24:19):
This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast providing
you with the latest perspectivesof thought leaders from the
accounting and financeprofession. If you like what you
heard and you'd like to becounted in for more relevant
accounting and financeeducation, visit IMA's website
at www.imanet.org.
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