Mentorship Memoirs - Anders Liu-Lindberg

Building a brand was always an afterthought. Sure, these days I'm mostly unavailable every quarter's end until October, but I've always wondered what projects would I be working in if I had started sooner.

I reconsidered only when I was introduced to non-finance professionals such as sales and marketing professionals, who'd spend time and energy crafting and perfecting their personal brands.

It's also never too late to build an online presence. According to Matt Craven, Founder of The CV & Interview Advisors (AICPA/CIMA website), 70% of employers use social media to screen candidates and 57% are less likely to contact applicants with no online presence.

I've learnt the following on branding:

1- Your personal brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room (Jeff Bezos)

2- Build your digital presence by sharing information online but be purposeful about what you put out there. Before you post, ask yourself, is this really what I want to be known for? (Merge Gupta-Sunderji CPA CGA)

3- Have meaningful conversations that you have with people to build trust. (Ethan Rotberg, CPA)

Let's pass this over to Anders Liu-Lindberg who will talk more business partnering and personal branding.

1. Anders, tell me more about BPI.

Business Partnering Institute has been founded to help individuals and organizations in the global finance community unlock value creation through business partnering. We’re all experienced with business partnering and classical finance transformations and we’ve seen that it has traditionally involved cutting costs in Finance and not about the value of finance. When we talk about the value in finance, we have failed or at least not succeeded to any particular degree, in becoming those business partners who help the business make better decisions.

So in that sense we wanted to change the narrative of finance from being a cost center to being a profit center. We do that in different ways through research and networking, learning and development, coaching of individuals and we have a consulting business which can also be extended beyond Denmark, depending on the nature of the task, in getting the foundation in place for business partnering.

2- No professional is an island, so who do you credit for your initial success? Did you have a support system throughout your career or a mentor like most do?

I wouldn’t really put it like that, I’ve had some leaders during my early years who I’ve learnt quite a lot from but let’s say since 2012, I’ve been mostly on my own.

But that has led to me doing what I do today and if I had leaders pushing me forward, I would have probably been in a different place and so I’ve learnt to push myself forward and because of that, that is where I am today; not only in terms of BPI but everything else I try to do for the profession of finance and accounting professionals.

3-That’s really commendable Anders. Tell me about Insights X Influence = Impact. How can finance professionals get closer to bringing this equation to life?

This equation is successful business partnering. That is what we have defined to really succeed at it.

Insights involves 3 steps and it’s about sharing new perspectives that business stakeholders do not know but can help them make better decisions through driving performance management, taking strategy to action and feedback from action back to strategy and even asking questions such as, “Do we have the right strategy? Are what we doing bringing the right results? If yes, then can we do more? If no, what can we do instead?

Step 1 is about being a catalyst for action and not just sharing performance.

For Step 2, we need to optimize the existing business which is through some concepts like lean management and other kinds of frameworks where we look at business and financial processes and ask ourselves, How can we do things smarter, better? It involves continuous improvement programs and there is a lot of value embedded there for finance professionals, we just need to take part of this.

For Step 3, we need to grow tomorrow’s business by answering the complex questions of what we will be doing 5-10 years from now. Where is the market heading? What are the consumer trends? And because these are complex issues, you need more problem-solving skills.

Insights therefore means growing tomorrow, optimizing today and driving performance management.

Influence is about making the insights count. You can have the greatest insights in the world or be the greatest finance professional ever but if you have no influence then you might as well go home.

Influence is when you combine acceptance from your message by focusing on what is important for your customers or business stakeholders and you can do this in many ways such as by building solid relationships with your stakeholders, gaining their trust, developing business acumen, speaking the language of the business and not of finance and even in communicating in an assertive manner.

Let me however clarify what communicating in an assertive manner means. It involves communicating with confidence but showing empathy for the receiver. We are not here for ourselves; we are not here to look good; we are here to help our stakeholders meet or beat their targets.

That is all we want and then we can create a great partnership, and this is how we influence decisions.

If we do insights and influence well then value creation comes as a result.

4-What in your opinion is lacking from today’s finance professional?

In drawing reference to the 2018 Future of Jobs Report from the World Economic Forum for professions straight up to 2022, there are some skills within this report that comes natural to finance professionals and those are analytics, critical thinking and analysis and system analysis and evaluation.

The accounting qualification does not fully prepare you for the real world anymore. There are other things however that do not come naturally and those are problem solving, idea creation, creativity and emotional intelligence.

Additionally, active learning and learning strategies throughout our lives. We used to think that learning was something we did in schools and we were done with it. But now we need to learn all the time to keep up and this is fun because its an enabler to get more done. A growth mindset is therefore more preferred than a fixed mindset.

5-I’ve heard it all the time from persons who are founders, what exactly does working ‘on’ your business really mean?

Working on your business is business development. It involves talking to lots of people, figuring out your business model, building the backbone of the business such as a website, to the products and services we offer and the way we market them. The key word as a founder is relationship building.

Situations/Other

1 - From a professional perspective and knowing that you have over 100k followers– I’m sure I’m not alone in asking this but how do you unplug or deep-think and focus on daily life as you post everyday? How can someone post content and still maintain a hectic work schedule?

How? Well, I don’t separate these things. I believe these things should be connected. I deep think together with my network, of course there are times when I have to think about things by myself, but I think when my network does especially when I throw out a question and they respond.

I think it should be seen together as I just need a small idea and I go to my network and they help me.

9/10 times it comes intuitively on how to respond from experience so regardless of the amount of comments, it’s very easy for me to get an answer based on the exact comment and share my opinion from there.

2- What are your recommended professional branding tips for the platform or what advice would you give to new persons joining the platform?

My advice on branding for the platform is to Get Outside of Your Comfort Zone:

Step 1 – If you are a finance professional, then know that you may feel uncomfortable simply liking someone else’s post because you feel as if you are giving something of yourself and exposing yourself.

Step 2 – Commenting on someone else’s post is now even scary. Now you must think.

Step 3 – If you start to post then initially it will feel very stressful as you are now under scrutiny.

What happens is that a lot of people really let these fears impact them and become passive consumers on the platform. I am not saying there is anything wrong with being a passive consumer but you’re just missing out on opportunities. LinkedIn is THE place for business people and finance professionals to network, consume opinions, interact and share their own story/brand. There are a couple of things I learnt on the platform:

·Understand from a technical perspective what do I do that optimizes the reach of what I do. If you’re posting content, then understand that you should write 3 or 4 more lines.

·If you’re posting you have to do it correctly, don’t post links in the body of your text,

·Use a few hashtags to further your reach.

LinkedIn is a massive opportunity for all and you’re a professional and you have knowledge so its better to share your knowledge because you learn more about what you do.

When I joined LinkedIn in 2012 it was a different platform then, I only shared articles that I thought were interesting, and I had this big excel sheet where I’d track how many connections I’d get per day and how many people viewed my profile to see if I had an impact. Back then, it was about like 5 people in a 7-day span. Times have changed and its only because I post high-quality content consistently. I also have a weekly content plan and that makes it easy.

3- If someone wanted to encourage innovative ideas, how should they go about it? Where do your best ideas come from and how can finance professionals spawn greater creativity?

Innovative ideas come from problem solving. It comes from understanding the situation that you’re facing, getting the right people together to brainstorm for ideas and having the ability to converge on these ideas. It also involves testing assumptions to see if those ideas fit and this then leads to the best solution to solve the problem. That’s innovation in its purest form.

Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to do this interview Anders.

Massive thank you's to all the mentors and to you, most importantly, for reading and following this series. Did you find this interesting? What resonated the most?