What people need is the starting point for dealing with change, regardless of how massive or external it is.

We cover:

• how Robert went from persecutor to promoter over remote work, thanks to the pandemic. 
• the impact of the pandemic on his teams, in particular, how it’s affected the engineering consultants, that his company, and also how accounting and related functions have adapted.
• how LCE are streamlining processes to improve communication between departments. 
• why the  the pandemic was a crash course or a reminder in the importance of the people side of change 
• why the pandemic also gives us a lot of opportunity to take control of our health and wellbeing

About Robert Bendetti

Robert is the Senior Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of Life Cycle Engineering (LCE). As CFO he is responsible for all financial operations of the company as well as contracting, purchasing, marketing, sales operations, and IT. Prior to LCE, Robert served as V.P. of Finance at Galey & Lord and CFO of The Coastal Logistics Group as well as financial management positions within Lockheed Martin, Hormel Foods, and Hilton Hotels. 

Robert has an undergraduate degree in Finance, an MBA, and a Masters of Accounting and Financial Management (MAFM). Robert is also a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), Certified Prosci Change Management Professional, and a Certified Six Sigma Green Belt. Robert’s volunteer activities include serving as a member of the Board of Trustee for the Educational Foundation for Women in Accounting (EFWA) and serving as an advisor to the Board of Directors for the South Carolina Federal Credit Union. Robert is also the President and founder of the Global CFO Council with members in the US, Canada, UK, and India. 

1. LinkedIn profile
2. LCE 
3. Global CFO council

Recommended resources 

• Prosci: source of the ADKAR framework for change which Robert finds really useful

Transcript

[00:00:00.085] 
It’s time to do it while you’re remote and maybe you have a little more flexibility, you could wake up earlier, you could start your work later, or you could finish your work earlier, you could take a break in the middle of the day. Take this as well. I have never been more equipped to take care of my health, my nutrition, my exercise and my mental wellness more now than ever. You are listening to the online remotely podcast, the show dedicated to helping lead distributed teams under difficult circumstances.

[00:00:40.005] 
I’m the host, Luke Schabir, and I’ve participated in a run distributed teams for almost a decade. As a practitioner, I’m speaking with experts on leadership, strategic alignment and a lot more to help you navigate the issues start facing after you get. Welcome, welcome. Today, we are speaking with Robert Vendetti, Robert is the CFO of Life-cycle Engineering full cycle engineering consulting firm, and he’s made a career of accounting related appointments at different established companies. And originally, I invited him because I wanted to get a Nonet view of what’s going on, get out of my own comfort zone.

[00:01:26.835] 
But we went a lot deeper than I originally expected. So in this episode, we cover how Robert went from persecutor to promoter of remote work, thanks to the pandemic, the impact of the pandemic on his teams, in particular, how it’s affected the engineering consultants that his company and also how accounting and related functions have adapted. We cover how LCR streamlining processes to improve communication between departments. Then finally we get to, I think, the most important part of this discussion, the the people side of change, in particular how the pandemic was a crash course or a reminder in the importance of that.

[00:02:15.535] 
And finally, also why the pandemic also gives us a lot of opportunity to take control of our health and well-being. Just before we jump into the interview, I wanted to announce that there is a free. Copy of a line remotely available for you on Amazon on January 5th and 6th, twenty twenty one, go on there, grab the Kindle version and read away. There’s also a paperback that’s being launched there. So definitely do dig into the book there.

[00:02:53.725] 
And let’s go on with the show.

[00:02:59.935] 
Welcome to the podcast, Robert. So, yeah, so can you say a few words about what you do and what your company does?

[00:03:08.335] 
Yeah, my name is Robert Vendetti and I’m the chief financial officer of Life-cycle Engineering has engineering in the name, but we’re really more of a consulting firm than we are what would be considered a traditional engineering firm. So we don’t have a lot of civil engineers or mechanical engineers putting our stamp on drawings. What we do is we consult manufacturing companies around the world and help them run better, faster, cheaper, safer.

[00:03:37.315] 
OK, so we like to say we bring engineering logic to consulting work.

[00:03:43.735] 
And so the consulting is primarily around the technical stuff. The more operational things they can operate operational.

[00:03:52.105] 
So it’s reliability consulting. That’s a specific type of engineering is reliability engineering, and that’s our specialty. And so it’s asset management or applied technology and the technology, hardware and software that supports operations. That’s our area of expertise. And we do it both commercially and also for government.

[00:04:12.825] 
OK, and asset management, we’re talking about like real estate or what type of assets?

[00:04:19.315] 
A large manufacturing companies with significant assets producing widgets. So as in the machines, the kind of the capital. So right now, some really some industries that are having problems producing enough product to sell would be pharmaceutical industry and food manufacturing. And so those industries are very hot for us right now. We have consultants in pharmaceutical companies helping them produce more product. They’re running twenty four hours a day and they need to be running those assets need to be running more reliably.

[00:05:00.145] 
OK, yeah, I remember my wife, her first job out of college was at a factory and it was like one one hour of downtime was like 20 million dollars worth of revenue or something, something like the actual delay there and never come back.

[00:05:14.945] 
It’s like a hotel stay. If you you don’t sell that hotel room, it you never sell that hotel room that night. You never get it back. And if not, everybody’s in a situation where they could sell everything they could possibly produce. But there’s always some industries that are and they desperately need people to help them. And so that’s what we do. Part of it’s actually identifying the areas where you can improve both in operating the machine, maintaining the machine, engineering the machine, the location of the machine.

[00:05:45.845] 
And then a lot of it’s just communication and change management, getting people and processes and management all to work together to do the same thing at the same time.

[00:05:55.595] 
So I remember you saying that you initially were a bit skeptical about the whole remote working thing, let’s say a couple of years ago. What were your views on people working from home?

[00:06:08.495] 
Yeah, that is absolutely true. I was just always one guy in the office, some manager who thinks that telework is. Is bad, and he’s giving everybody a hard time. I was that person everywhere I ever worked for 20 years. I’ve just thought that teleworkers and remote workers are lazy. They don’t care about their career. They just want to sit at home and Netflix and chill.

[00:06:30.045] 
And when we when this pandemic really hit in the States was around like February, March, and we went one hundred percent max remote immediately and I was still going in the office, it was like, yeah, it was like me and one other person.

[00:06:49.455] 
Because of the kind of work we do, we’re considered essential. We’re helping pharmaceutical companies produce what needs to be produced. I have paperwork that says I’m a essential if anybody were to stop me or something like that. So I printed out copies in every car I have. And I was like so proudly driving in the work thinking I’m like the coolest cat. And then the only other person who came in the office thought that she got covid. And so she stayed out sick.

[00:07:18.495] 
And then I got like a panic attack.

[00:07:21.525] 
Oh, my God, I, I think I could have gotten because she’s been walking around the building, wiping down every door handle, and there’s only the two of us in this massive building. So I stayed home and I have never been back. I never want to go back. I love this remote telework thing.

[00:07:42.615] 
I think I’m more productive. My team is more productive. It’s awesome. Like it’s shifted from a persecutor to a promoter. It could not have been a bigger shift for me.

[00:07:57.105] 
When you stopped, was that something which you decided as a company or was that something which say was announced that everybody needs to work from home or something? We started early.

[00:08:07.695] 
We have people all over the world and so different places initiated different rules at different times. So we just found wherever like people are at the leading edge, we just initiated that everywhere, anywhere. Anybody could work remote. We just called it Mac’s remote. We shipped out whatever assets people needed, walked people through. There were a lot of people who have never done this before. When you we have about seven hundred team members around the world. And so some people always work remote.

[00:08:37.125] 
Anyway, this was no change at all. And we have some people who don’t have Internet access at their house. So there was some pretty wild swings and we planned for a week and then executed. And it was honestly amazing that we were able to pull it off as quickly as we were pulled off at the people that we have. I think we should initiate hug it person day.

[00:09:00.915] 
It was amazing.

[00:09:03.165] 
We got cameras out to people when nobody could get cameras. We got them. And it was really impressive. And and people seem to be they enjoy the flexibility. I think that’s what it gives people. More than anything I see is that we’ve got some early risers, we got some late risers. We have people who like to take a break in the middle of the day. And it just seems to allow people to be their best and get their work done according to whatever schedule works for them.

[00:09:31.545] 
Interesting, and then how did that affect within finance? How did that affect how you do what you do?

[00:09:41.715] 
Pretty significantly. And so as the CFO, the role of CFO has changed over the past maybe 15 years or so I reports to me, and so does contracts, purchasing, accounting, finance, what we call business information systems. But it’s also like process automation, a robotic process automation. RPA reports to me, depending on the company, sometimes it or excuse me, human resources might report to the CFO at this company.

[00:10:10.605] 
It doesn’t. So it’s a it’s a broad group of roles that report up to the CFO now at most companies and certainly a lifecycle engineering. But to speak to accounting as an example, the in pockets, we were already digital and we had digitized processes and we’re either using a tool or partly using a tool. So it is really just accelerated that we’re now in dispersed locations. And so we’re having to share information digitally instead of folders. If you’ve been around any accounting departments, physical folders, maybe passing from person to person.

[00:10:47.325] 
And so you just did it. And you can if you want to, you can just use file folders in a shared folder when instead of a big Lieke Trever, which is a massive physical file cabinet, it’s just digital and you can further automate it using software tools your or you can digitize it just a little bit. In terms of the other functions, were there any major changes into how they needed to do things?

[00:11:15.875] 
Yeah, I’d say both. There’s been internal and external changes. So internally, the hardest part is communicating in entire department because a lot of times the managers, there’s not it’s intended, but there’s just these silos that are created and it can be with good intentions. They’re trying to create efficiencies within their team and their sphere of control, their control. So they do the best they can to make things efficient. But maybe they didn’t work with every single stakeholder.

[00:11:43.115] 
That is either the input they need to start their process or the receiver of the output. And so that’s probably been the biggest internal change we’ve had to look around the first couple of months. It was just about how do you do your job without going into office? And now the past six months been really about how can we all do our job smarter, that we’re not going into the office, maybe not for a while and for many people never.

[00:12:08.405] 
And so we’ve got to make long term decisions that make the whole process more efficient and easier for everybody. So that’s what I think the past six months have been around. And the next six months, when we talk internally, when we’re planning for twenty, twenty one, it’s about, all right, how can we automate this patchwork process that we’ve created over the past couple of months? And let’s make this permanently better, not just temporarily. OK, OK, interesting.

[00:12:35.825] 
And it’s more formalized, I’d say, for the customer facing stuff because we have to make money even if you can’t go visit the customer. And so I’ve been really impressed with the operations and sales folks finding out what and how the customer needs lifecycle engineering. And so as a couple of examples, in addition to consulting as part of an consulting package, it ends up usually being some training involved. There’s a lot of people who know what we’re talking about when we get to the facility, but there’ll be people who don’t.

[00:13:08.465] 
There’s just different things they need to be trained on. Maybe it’s change management or the principles of operational excellence, the how important safety is and quality is to to the entire process. And so we do a lot of training and usually that is physical training, either on site or off site. You can’t do that. You can’t have 30, 20, 40 people in a building together anywhere. And so we’re doing virtual instructor led training, something that we never did.

[00:13:34.055] 
And we went from zero of that to a portfolio of classes in thirty days. And we would have never we might have never done it and certainly never done it in thirty days or so. Some stuff they don’t need to it doesn’t need to be live. It could be on demand training. So we have a suite of E learning classes.

[00:13:49.505] 
We’ve never done that before. We always prided ourselves that we’re the high touch consulting firm, since our kind of specialty is to support the in a manufacturing facility, the people really working for a living with some dirt on their hands. Julie and John and Jessica, they got their sleeves rolled up and they’re really working in the operations department are the maintenance department or the engineering department. And we come alongside them. We can’t do that with covid. We’re doing remote consulting, something we would have never considered before.

[00:14:22.715] 
And then this is futuristic for us that’s been out in the marketplace for ten years. But we really think there’s a business application for virtual reality and mixed reality.

[00:14:32.795] 
I just want to loop back a little bit to this patchwork process that you put together about the departments working together. I’m really curious how that came about. Let’s start there.

[00:14:41.225] 
Yeah, I think a good example of that is maybe the contracts team and an accounting team. And so to use maybe more common language is we’ve got the client or customer service team who is dealing and partnering with the sales and operations folks as they bid work when work, execute work. And at some point we do enough to be able to build somebody for it.

[00:15:05.975] 
Hopefully. God bless. That would be awesome. And then someday, even something more glorious, the customer actually pays you. And so there’s some there’s a lot of baton passing through that process.

[00:15:19.595] 
You’ve got to get sales and operations people to do something which can be difficult. And then the contracts team or maybe what you might call a customer service team, they’re like herding cats, trying to get all this stuff together. And before that stuff oftentimes is emails and then you print it out. You literally at a lot of companies, you stick it in a manila folder and then you pass it along physically down the hall or to somebody in accounting who then writes up a bill, sends the bill to the customer, harasses them for months until they pay and then receives that payment.

[00:15:56.615] 
And so that that works, OK, if you’re all in the same building or you’re all in the same time zone or you’re all in the same country, and this is nothing new. Outsourced functions, they had to go through the same process, so it’s not like we’re trailblazers. I don’t want to give that kind of impression. Luke, people have been doing this for 20 years, but for domestic a US based business with 90 percent. Ninety five plus percent of our work in the US is a little new to us.

[00:16:28.265] 
And so I just look to best practices of what others had done before me in the similar industry. And part of it is just digitizing all that documents. And then second was just having a common understanding of where we’re going to store and how those documents are going to flow. And then future like we’re right in the middle of this now is then leaning that process, OK, we digitize it. We made it something so we can get something done.

[00:16:56.565] 
That was an emergency, it was like triage, and then now we’re in. OK, we’ve got a digital process. We really need to clean that out. I want to clean that process, make it as efficient as possible. And then. This is starting in January, is then utilize a software tool to automate that Leane process, and it makes me more frustrated to buy software to to do a process that no one should be doing in the first place.

[00:17:27.825] 
I think that’s a Drucker quote, right. It’s nothing worse than making an unnecessary step more efficient. We just get rid of it. So we clean it out first, only do what’s critical. And then is there some software tool that could automate this? Is there some data warehousing tool that you could use the principles of process automation or robotic process automation to then make it much quicker? And so that that’s what we’ve been looking into between the contracts team and the accounting team as we got through triage, then we leaned.

[00:18:03.645] 
Now we’re looking to software to automate the process.

[00:18:07.245] 
OK, interesting. And Bulleen, we’re just talking about efficiency in terms of cutting out as many steps as possible or making them as short as possible.

[00:18:15.735] 
Absolutely. There’s sometimes you can do things because you’ve just always done them and then you do them digitally because you’ve always done them and they don’t need to be done. You don’t need to have a digital copy of something that you should have never done. You just stop doing it.

[00:18:31.035] 
I think back in the 90s, there was a lot of talk and in I.T. circles that having things like forums on Web pages that would make things so much more streamlined and all of that. And it turned out that actually most companies are just replicating their paper processes online, especially that first step. It was literally like the same form being created.

[00:18:53.835] 
And there’s two reasons for that. One is some people just they’re doing what they know. They’re just doing their job. They don’t know that they’re not supposed to do it or they’ve been there for 10 years. And it was really important eight years ago. And then a rule changed. A law change person changes and it’s no longer needed. Now, the other part of it is in some of the work we do, we are highly regulated. And I have an enormous amount of what I would think are inefficient non-value added steps that I’m required to do because of some regulatory or compliance reason.

[00:19:30.195] 
And I know probably twenty five percent of all the documentation that I require and forms that I require to be filled out by other team members or customers. They’re necessary because some regulatory body in the US or abroad requires it.

[00:19:50.075] 
You know, interesting. Or should we go? What’s something that you were surprised about now looking from the perspective of the end of the year and compared to going into it in March or February, as you were saying?

[00:20:08.025] 
Yeah, I’ll take two sides to that. I have a professional answer and then a personal answer. Sort of one thing I was surprised and I shouldn’t be, is that the people side of change is still the most important part. I’m an accountant. I love math and. I used to think early in my career that how change worked either in a dramatic and pandemic kind of situation or just slow change, I thought it worked because you just did the math you worked out and you showed people the solution to the problem and they just do it or that if you’re a project manager or a pimp, they might think, oh, if I just put it in a Gantt chart and I show the critical path with the red line and who needs to do what to do, the next thing, people just do it because it’s in Microsoft project.

[00:20:57.285] 
And none of that’s true is if people sign a change and you really have to dial people into WIIFM radio, which is what’s for them radio, that’s the only thing that matters. And it’s still the only thing that matters is they’re worried about their family and their job and their situation dealing with change. You have to lead with the people side of change management. And I think there’s a dozen really awesome change management practices. But I I’d suggest the listeners of the podcast check out Croci.

[00:21:33.455] 
I think that’s been a recent tool in my tool belt, and they have a great emphasis around the people side of change. So if you’re already Lean and Six Sigma, then you’ve got a great start. You got a great foundation, but you might have a little gap on the people side and the people skills and that it would be a great way. That’s at least for me. I thought it was like a really great way to round out my tool set.

[00:21:58.665] 
And one of the things I remember is they have this little acronym called ADCA and it’s for Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Action and Reinforcement, a D K, a R and it.

[00:22:11.175] 
And so you can map, you can map through when you’re mentally map when you’re having a conversation with a person or a team like where they are like what that person is dealing with.

[00:22:21.555] 
As you’re talking about this change, maybe they’re not even aware that it’s they’re like what do you mean. Like they’re like surprised or they are aware, but they have no desire, no desire to do what you’re talking about. Oh, yeah, I know it’s a problem, but I’m not doing it. Yeah, I’ve been here for thirty years and you can go blank yourself.

[00:22:43.425] 
Or maybe they’re aware and they have desire, but they don’t have the knowledge, they do not have the skills to do the new thing you’re talking about. They’ve only done the old thing. They’ve been doing the old thing since they started and they have no idea about the new thing or what you’re talking about. And they’re super scared that they’re going to lose their job because they know the old way. And now you’re talking about a new way. And there’s and then the AI is action and they are.

[00:23:06.495] 
And you can just figure out, OK, are they a D, A, K and A and R? And if they’re one of those things, OK, if this then I do that. And as an accountant I like processes and have a little memo talking to Luke and I’m listening to you. First of all, I’m engaging Luke the person. So Luke appreciates it and then I’m listening.

[00:23:31.965] 
Everybody likes that when the CFO is listening and then I’m hearing you out, I’m hearing your concerns. And when Luke says his concern, I can go, oh, OK, that’s knowledge. I now need to walk Luke through how I am planning on investing in teaching you and giving you the skills so that you have the knowledge to execute this new thing. I’m not leaving you out in the lurch. Look like you are so critical. You are so critical and important.

[00:24:00.945] 
I’m putting dollars behind and time so you have time and dollars to go learn this new thing. I need you to be a leader like you need to be lead in this effort. I’m coming to you first and then you’re not as paranoid and then you’re not as resistant to my change project and it’s a little bit more likely to succeed. None of this is perfect, but it just increases your chance of success from twenty five percent to 50 percent if you use the skill set.

[00:24:28.365] 
That’s something that I was still surprised by this or in the pandemic. And I was thinking, everybody understands that we’ve got to change and I don’t have to worry about the people side of change. And then a very quickly day two, I was like, oh, no. Yeah, nobody nobody wants to hear about the math or the chart. They want to hear about the people side of this.

[00:24:45.735] 
And I had to like, OK, grab that book. Well, OK.

[00:24:50.625] 
Was that what did I learn and put that back into play.

[00:24:54.315] 
And so what was the other thing is that the people side of things was when I’ve been really emphasizing a lot around change and change management, but I want to connect that with remote and personally. How it’s affected me is that I joked before that at some point we’re all going to have to put on real pants and go to like meetings or go to a conference and put on a suit. And I see, myself included, I’m doing a little bit of stress, eating and sometimes not working out and taking care of myself as much as I should.

[00:25:21.345] 
And we really should be personal care. Really important physical nutrition and mental illness is really important, not for US leaders, but of every team member, and our family is just critical now more than ever. And maybe there’s somebody listening who’s heard this a lot and they’re like, oh, Luke and Robert, they’re in good shape. They don’t understand what it’s like. Just a few years ago, like three, four years ago, I was sixty five pounds heavier than I am now.

[00:25:48.795] 
And in using this ADCA thing that I talked about, awareness, desire, knowledge, action and and reinforcement, I needed to change. Now, I was aware. I needed to change. The doctors told me, and I was actually really knowledgeable about nutrition and exercise, but I wouldn’t actually exercise. I had no desire.

[00:26:11.595] 
I loved reading magazines about people who exercised and well, I found it really entertaining to watch exercise videos, but I didn’t actually. Watch my nutrition and and I did an exercise and I had a desire change because I had a very close friend of mine who’s quite young, have a heart issue and had to have double bypass surgery because of the poor diet and exercise choices that he made. And it was like a wake up call. I’m like, I hit.

[00:26:45.865] 
I’m like, well, I’m 40. I’m older than this dude and I’m full figured I was a big boy. I’m five foot 10 if I’m lying, really. Five foot nine and sixty five pounds on my frame is a big deal. That makes me pretty curvy if I’m being generous and every part of my body, her carrying around a sixty five pound backpack, your knees are going to hurt your back is going to hurt because of the poor things.

[00:27:08.635] 
I ate and drank my head hurt all the time. So I was, I was taken like a thousand milligrams of some sort of Tylenol or aspirin every single day and it just hit me like a brick. I was like, I am going to frickin die. And I’m 40 years old and I just had a desire change. And so if there’s somebody right now who’s they let themselves go a little bit or they’re not taking care of their mental health or their physical health or their nutrition, it’s time to do it while you’re remote and maybe you have a little more flexibility.

[00:27:38.545] 
You could wake up earlier, you could start your work later, or you could finish your work earlier. You could take a break in the middle of the day. Take this as well. I have never been more equipped to take care of my health, my nutrition, my exercise and my mental wellness more now than ever. And I don’t know where you are on the awareness or the desire or the knowledge or the action or the reinforcement. But you’ve got to ask yourself, you can have an interview with yourself and you’ve got to get out.

[00:28:04.975] 
It’s freaking important. You’re going to be a better you if you’re taking care of yourself. And for me, it was all around nutrition. I realized I can’t I was like, man, I don’t want to exercise my way to skinny because what if I stop exercising or I get old and I can’t exercise or I just don’t feel like it for a day? I don’t want to just get fat just because I was like, I am trying to exercise a bad diet.

[00:28:30.835] 
So I thought I’m going to really focus on the nutrition side of it and I’m going to get some good proteins, good carbs. I’m going to get good fats. Just go balanced diet. This is going to sound like lazy and lame, but I just made super small changes every day.

[00:28:45.865] 
I just made one little micro change and I just decided every day, OK, what could I stop doing forever? And so, like day one, it was really literally I used to go to a fast food restaurant every day for lunch.

[00:29:01.045] 
And I was like, look, I normally get my sandwich with cheese and I get a large fry and a large drink. I was like, you know what I’m doing?

[00:29:11.125] 
I’m going medium drink, medium drink. Next week I was like, I’m going medium fry boom. And then the next week was like, I’m a go one catch up instead of two ketchups. And it was little itty bitty changes every week for sixty five weeks and I lost sixty five pounds, one pound a week for sixty five weeks. And then it didn’t seem like a big deal. I didn’t try to lose sixty five pounds and one day I took twenty years to gain the weight so I made little changes that didn’t seem like a big deal.

[00:29:43.525] 
And they add up and I think that’s apropos and applicable to like work life and the rest of our life. There’s there’s something you’re not doing. You think you maybe you should and you need to change do a little ADCA assessment. The people side changes the you cited change and make a change, make a step, but just something small that you could do forever. And equally important is mental health and physical health with exercise and nutrition. I think those things are all all equal.

[00:30:15.325] 
And I just hey, call to action for the folks listening is to do something for yourself. That’s great. I had a somewhat similar story close to 15 years ago, and I think also around 40 kilos, around 60, 70 pounds, also gradual tracking nutrition. And so they came off.

[00:30:36.715] 
He had a great friend say something early on when I was when I shared my desire as my I think we went out to lunch and I got like a water. And the person was like, well, what do you do in?

[00:30:49.695] 
And I told them and I was like, I got to start exercising. I got to do something. And they told me they were like, Robert, you can’t outrun your fork. You can’t you can’t exercise out a bad diet, a Snickers and a Coca-Cola. You’d have to run five miles to burn that off. Just don’t eat the Snickers in the Coca-Cola. That’s way easier. And I was like, dang, I was like, OK, as I’ve always led with like you, Luke is just nutrition is I got to eat, I got to and I made it fun.

[00:31:20.415] 
I game a fight it for me. I’m an accountant so I got an app and I’m starting to load what I eat and I’m like, OK, how can I have a constraint, which is the amount of calories I can eat to maintain my weight. But I have to get the right amount of nutrition. I need potassium, I need minerals, I need calcium, I need protein. I need carbohydrates and fat. How can I get this whole mix of everything that I need while also staying within my current strain of calories?

[00:31:48.165] 
And it’s super entertaining to me.

[00:31:51.735] 
OK, everyone else in the world is struggling and I’m not recommending that for everyone. I made it fun for me somehow.

[00:32:00.585] 
Yeah, I use the same thing at the time I was using a Palm Pilot, but with Palm Pilot, but more or less the same approach.

[00:32:10.485] 
That can look great. You look great. Thanks.

[00:32:14.625] 
Were there any tips or things that you found that you know what first what spurred the change and then how were you able to stick to it? I’m sure you’ve done you’ve thought about it and then didn’t stick to it. So what caused this change and then caused you to stick?

[00:32:29.955] 
It was quite similar to what you were saying. I think the part that was really important was that I would only make a change that I know would be permanent, which automatically meant that all of the stuff that I tried before, the shortcuts, the pills, the all that kind of stuff, it didn’t make sense. In my case, it was tied to to running. I ended up doing four marathons later, so it built up over time. But I think the key thing was the thinking about it in terms of only choosing things that I’m going to be willing to stick with and then making a gradual and that’s how it works pretty much.

[00:33:02.325] 
I think that the tracking gave an extra level of awareness. When I put things in my mouth of what it actually what it actually is doing and it’s still not foolproof.

[00:33:13.665] 
And I could still probably now do a bit more, particularly given the stress eating and other things going on during the pandemic. But there was a definite change back in the day and it was awesome.

[00:33:27.825] 
And kudos and congratulations on the marathon. That’s a big deal. Thanks.

[00:33:32.365] 
It crept up on me actually, because I was just running so much and it was just like from running two hours a day anyway. How far away from just doing a marathon might as well do it.

[00:33:40.995] 
Yeah, that’s that’s the logic at the time.

[00:33:44.475] 
But yeah. Yeah.

[00:33:47.565] 
Why don’t we talk about the CFO Council.

[00:33:50.655] 
This is the Global CFO Council. I’m the founder of the Global CFO Council. It’s an educational and networking forum for senior financial executives. And we’ve got about a thousand members and the US, Canada, UK, India, Spain, Japan and Russia. And right now we’re one hundred percent virtual. If we had talked last year at a soldier, we really lead by having physical meetings. And what we try to do is provide some education, networking with our little shtick, being that we try to make the meetings fun.

[00:34:22.665] 
That’s early in the morning and accounts here’s a secret are actually super cool and funny and really fun. But all you people make us so crazy at work by seven thirty, we’re in a bad mood.

[00:34:35.625] 
And so what I do is I have a really early breakfast that starts before they have to start seeing your emails and your texts. And we have some fellowship and some fun. But you can’t do that during covid you can have breakfast. And so really by accident, I had to cancel the March breakfasts everywhere. And one of the speakers said, hey, could I can I just give my presentation virtually?

[00:35:02.025] 
And I was like, yeah, we can do that. That’s a good idea. I didn’t even think about that. And so we converted to virtual meetings and we’ve had we have our virtual business meeting of education each month via WebEx. And we have about a hundred people on each WebEx. It depends. We had a. And 40 on the last one, because it was a topic people really are interested in, tax accountants love to hear about what might happen with tax.

[00:35:29.525] 
So where’s the best place for people to get in touch to see if they have any questions?

[00:35:34.055] 
Yeah, two places. One, I am on LinkedIn. I’m not really on any other cool social media like my teenagers, but I am on LinkedIn and I’m the only Robert Vendetti that is a CFO and it’s not a common name to begin with. So I’d love to connect with anybody on LinkedIn and then any senior financial executives on listening to the podcast would love to have them check out the Global CFO Council. It’s that Global CFO Council dot com. Great.

[00:36:04.455] 
Thank you and thank you for having me on. I enjoy listening to the podcast and I appreciate getting to talk to. That was a wonderful discussion with Robert in particular, I love the insight that you can’t outrun your fork in terms of the nutrition side of it, but also that, in effect, being at home means you can really design everything to support your health and well-being goals. And that’s something that I originally thought was a nice side benefit of moving to remote work when I was originally thinking of it.

[00:36:39.565] 
But now, given that it’s the beginning of the year, I think it’s it’s a good reminder, certainly to me. And hopefully now with Robert sharing it in the context of the New Year and resolutions and things getting started, it really is worth paying attention to that and making the most of it. And just as a reminder, on January 5th and 6th, there’s a free giveaway of a line remotely the book on Amazon, the Kindle version. So definitely jump on and grab your copy.

[00:37:15.345] 
See you next week. Thanks for listening to this episode of the online Remotely podcast. If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review on iTunes, Google podcast or wherever you get your podcast.