Planning During Times of Uncertainty with Louis Bucciarelli

Intro: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I am here today with my friend Louis Bucciarelli. Louis and I worked together for about 10 years at Return Path. He was our country manager in Brazil, he ran international sales, he was our chief revenue officer, he's a good friend. He's now the chief executive of a company called Playvox, which he's been doing since 2021, and he was the president COO before that. Louis, welcome to The Daily Bolster. Good to see you.

Louis Bucciarelli: Thanks Matt. Great to be here.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, so what do you want to talk about today?

Louis Bucciarelli: I would love to get your advice on planning in times of uncertainty. So for many of us SVB clients, last Friday was a scary day where the bank failed and was taken over and we didn't have access to the cash in those accounts. Kind of roll that forward, thinking about how do we continue to plan looking forward with uncertainty? There's still a bit of uncertainty in the market today, although I think the SVB has largely been resolved, but we still are operating at a time with higher inflation, and just kind of curious not to overreact in one direction nor another, and also not to react too late to trends in the market. So, I'd love to hear some advice from you on that.

Matt Blumberg: Yeah, absolutely. So, what I would say is the first thing you have to do is recognize that whatever plan you make, it's going to be wrong, you just don't know how it's going to be wrong. I think it was Eisenhower who had one of my favorite quotes, which is something to the effect of plans are nothing, but planning is everything. So if you're running a good planning process, what that means is that yes, there's an output, which is a plan, but you've put the thought into modeling the drivers, the success factors, the what could go wrongs. So, that stuff is actually kind of baked into the plan and those things you can come back to. Building off of that, we've developed a process over the last couple of years that we call NERF. So, NERF stands for new estimated rolling forecast. Basically what we do, although we do a budget at the beginning of the year for four quarters, what we do every quarter is we do a new 12- month forward- looking forecast. So, essentially every quarter we're re- forecasting the business based on facts on the ground, events and circumstances, and going back to our table of drivers, okay, what do we think is going to happen and then how does that ripple forward four quarters, and how does that impact everything, not just the income statement, but certainly cash balance and staffing and things like that as well. Then I would say my third thing is look, when there's a big explosion, for example, say your bank collapses with no notice, I don't know, something like that, I think the most important thing you can do as a leader is collect yourself, right? Take a beat, gather information, don't freak out, don't let people around you see you freaking out, or if you freak out, freak out privately. Ask for help. Ask the people around you who know more about the situation than you for their view of things, and then start laying out the options, think two steps ahead. Do all of that work before you jump back into what's the plan, so that instead of going straight to your drivers or your income statement or your cash flow statement, you're sort of being thoughtful about, okay, how has the situation changed that might be influencing our success factors, our drivers, et cetera? That's the best I can say. You are right though, we are living in what seems like very fluid and dynamic time, so hopefully the mantra of plans are nothing, planning is everything is helpful.

Louis Bucciarelli: Mm- hmm. That's great. I love the NERF and it's something actually we kicked off at Playvox late last year, is to move our planning cadence to a quarterly cadence. To your point, understanding that a plan is numbers on a paper and reality can be very different, and so shortening that planning cycle's something we're doing this year. So, that's helpful. Yeah, I love that advice.

Matt Blumberg: All right, thanks Louis. Good to see you.

Louis Bucciarelli: inaudible Yeah, great.