Mikus Krams: Why We Scrapped Budgets At Chili Piper

Are you starting to think about your budget for the next year? Stop right now, argues Mikus Krams.

As a former senior director of strategy and finance at Chili Piper, he described budgets as a shackle — you’ll be held prisoner to the assumptions you make for the next year.

In this episode, Mikus Krums, the B2B Saas finance leader turned co-founder of Trace Space, says budgets are unlikely to be relevant for small agile companies. He tells Paul Barnhurst: “Let's say you're doing some activity and it's yielded you some results. If halfway through the activity you figured that it's not working, why would you still keep pushing it? But if you have a budget, that's exactly what you are doing…it just felt silly to be living that way.”

In this episode Mikus describes 

• Bottoms up planning as the most impactful strategy for agile  B2B SaaS companies
• The reason that budgets are bad for business
• ROI mindset as core to his finance thinking 
• Managing incentive structure through a Rev Ops approach
• How on target earnings are sometimes more mirage than reality 
• Managers as “powderkegs” and “snipers” 
• The path to moving to a continuous forecasting methodology
• His biggest failure in his FP&A career
• Banking as a powerful route to FP&A career success
• The importance of lunch with business leaders and individual contributors in a business 

Read the full transcript and blog

Follow Mikus Krams on LinkedIn

Follow Paul Barnhurst on LinkedIn

Follow Datarails on LinkedIn

FP&A Today is brought to you by Datarails.

Datarails is the financial planning and analysis platform that automates data consolidation, reporting and planning, while enabling finance teams to continue using their own Excel spreadsheets and financial models.

Get in touch at www.datarails.com

For AFP FP&A Continuing Education credit please complete the course via the Earmark Ap, must pass the quiz with 80% accuracy and send the completed certificate to pbarnhust@thefpandaguy.com for issuance of 1 hour of credit toward your AFP FP&A Certification.