EP 016 - The CannaTech CFO with David Yan, CFO at Treez

“My main interest area was really just understanding all the different challenges companies were going through.”

“If you ultimately want to influence the strategy of business and you want to influence the outcomes of the company then going to have to get into the operations, you going to have to understand the strategy, you have to go down into the model, you have to go down into how you actually affect change and decision making into the company.”

“Putting yourself outside of your comfort zone as many times as you can in the first five years of your career is tremendously valuable.”

“(Understand) how much trust you can put in people and what your role is in making sure that your team succeeds.”

“(Definition of Modern CFO) to really being the nexus point between the company strategy, it’s capital investments, as well as operations, and people.”

“Ultimately, the role of the CFO is making sure the company can see around the corner in all aspects.”

“Once the capital is gone, it doesn’t come back.”

“I think of it as a pyramid in that at the very bottom layer, you have to have the finance operations. If you don't have that, you're not going to have the accounting. If you don't have the accounting, you're not going to have data integrity. And if you don't have data integrity, you're not going to be able to do financial planning. And if you don't have the financial planning, and then above the financial planning is analytics and insights. So, you really have to create a team and navigate systems and data that can meet the maturity of your business.”

“It's not about raw data. It's about insights. So, you have to start with what insights you need to run the business one year forward or a little bit more, again depending on your scale, and work backward into what systems, what processes, and what team structure would best help you get to that state.”

“You want to understand as quickly as you can, what you can do to help the company see around the corner.”