The data is in – and it’s not pretty.
Most professional services firms are generating revenue. But somewhere between producing a quote and issuing the final invoice, profit gets eroded. And more often than not, the root cause runs deeper than you’d expect – it’s that nobody in the business ever properly understood the numbers in the first place.
In this special episode, Harv is joined by FinOps expert Rich Brett to introduce The Missing Finance Course – a completely free resource built for everyone in your firm, from the leadership team, to delivery teams, right down to individual contributors.
This conversation, taken straight from inside the course, sets the scene for why financial understanding isn’t just a finance team problem. It’s everyone’s problem.
Here’s what they get into:
- Why most firms don’t bother with financial education – and why that’s a mistake
- How finance and operations working in silos creates blind spots that erode profit
- Why storytelling, not spreadsheets, is the real skill your finance team needs
- How commercial awareness at every level – yes, including junior staff – changes the way a business performs
- Why understanding the numbers is one of the fastest ways to accelerate your career in professional services
The Missing Finance Course is free, self-paced, and built for three audiences: leadership, delivery teams, and individual contributors. Head to https://learn.scoro.com to get started.
Additional Resources:
👉🏽 Follow Rich Brett on LinkedIn
👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn
Transcript
[00:00:00] Harv Nagra: Guys, I completely forgot to say this when I was recording the intro to this very special episode. This is the two year anniversary of The Handbook: The Operations Podcast.
So a massive thank you to those of you that have been here since the beginning, and to any of you that are new listeners as well, really appreciate it.
Please share this podcast with anyone in the agency, consultancy or professional services space that you think would get value out of the show.
And if you haven’t done so or haven’t done so recently, please rate the podcast on Apple or Spotify. It’ll help us reach even more listeners and viewers.
Now let’s get into the episode.
Hi all, welcome back to The Handbook: The Operations Podcast. I’m Harv Nagra. This is a very special episode, but I want to start with a true story. In fact, it’s my story. I came up through my career on the delivery side, digital producer, digital director, and then getting gradually more involved in the behind the scenes until I moved into operations.
My strengths were in project management, people, processes, systems, the traditional operational disciplines. But beyond pulling together a decent quote, tracking project burn, or pulling together a utilisation report, my confidence around the numbers was pretty low. When our finance director would screen share the P&L in a leadership meeting, I’d feel a knot in my stomach, and the thing is, I’d glance around the table and notice I wasn’t the only one struggling to keep up.
There were other senior leaders in that room doing exactly the same thing, keeping quiet, looking slightly confused, not quite sure where to focus or what it all meant. When it came to reporting, I was almost entirely looking backwards. When it came to forecasting, I leaned far too heavily on our finance director. And if someone even said the word rev rec, I felt panic.
It sounded technical and complicated, and nobody had ever properly explained it to me. I don’t think I was incompetent. I just had a gap in my knowledge. The maturity gap report we published in April 2026 proved that this wasn’t just a me problem, nor a problem just with people in my last workplace, but an industry-wide problem in agencies and consultancies.
So other than despair, what do we actually do? We asked ourselves that question, what if we could level up together? Why does this financial knowledge need to be so rare? That question led me to start talking to finops expert Rich Brett. He’s been on the podcast before, and some of you might follow him on LinkedIn.
He’s brilliant, and he talks all about finance and operations coming together.
Well together, we created what we’re calling The Missing Finance Course, a completely free resource for everyone in your agency, consultancy, or professional services firm hosted at learn.scoro.com. Because as Rich puts it, the numbers aren’t the hard part, the hard part is that nobody ever explained them properly. There are three paths in this course, finops for Leadership for founders, MDs, Ops and finance leaders. A shorter finops for delivery path for project managers, delivery leads, and account directors. And finally, even finops essentials for individual contributors and specialists. It’s a short, 30 minute track for the people doing the work who’ve never had the financial context properly explained to them. All of it designed to be integrated into your team training and staff onboarding. Today you’re gonna hear one of the conversations Rich and I have inside the course. These discussions kick off every module, setting the scene for what we’re about to cover and why it matters.
If you’re ready, let’s get into it.
[00:03:47] Harv Nagra (2): Rich in this course we cover a lot of territory pretty efficiently. Mm-hmm. Why is it so important that everyone in the business understands this stuff?
[00:03:57] Rich Brett: It’s important because everyone actually has a small part to play in it. You know, just because you might be a junior account executive. The decisions you make will have an impact, but more importantly, the way you communicate will have a bigger impact. Mm-hmm. Is if you spot something, then tell someone that.
Mm-hmm. And it’s the same with spending money, I think. If you think about a business, um, and spending money, you don’t just willingly do it if it’s your own money, so how come when you’re in a business, you just willingly spend money without seeing the value? So I think what I like to say to people that I work with is make sure that every pound you spend adds value.
Um, and most of the time it’s more junior members who might be doing that spending because they’re the ones who have to order something from a supplier, or they’re the ones who have to book in a bit of resource. Consider what’s the budget. What is my involvement in making this business money? And the reason why they think,
What difference does it make to me? Well, it does because if the business you work for makes money, in all likelihood, that will then filter through to you and your team and the way that you work in the business. Whether that is a pay rise or a bonus, or it’s just extra nice beers in the fridge or eggs for breakfast.
Mm-hmm. Who knows what it might be. It could even just be training. But I think if you show a willingness to understand a commercial awareness that does also set you apart from everybody else. Mm-hmm. So I think it’s important to be embedded because if everyone’s trying towards going towards the same goal, it’s more likely that you’ll succeed.
[00:05:21] Harv Nagra (2): Hmm. Maybe it’s just my experience, but I’ve rarely come across a business that has done that very well. Um, part of the reason, I suppose, why we’re creating this course, I, I mean you speak to a lot of, uh, professional services firms, agencies, consultancies. Um, do you see many that take that approach of kind of educating the full team?
[00:05:40] Rich Brett: No. Um, most of the time it’s just the owner. Yeah. And a couple of senior leaders who, who, who are touching the numbers.
[00:05:47] Harv Nagra (2): Mm.
[00:05:47] Rich Brett: And even then, there’s not always that much understanding of them. Most people who are running professional service business, agencies, consultants didn’t do it to run numbers. Yeah.
They did it to deliver a service because they’ve got a certain skill set, whether that’s creatives, strategy, design, whatever it might be. But yeah, most of them aren’t doing it. I mean, we were lucky, my old agency at We Are Social, we kind of had an approach that was um, especially I, I know that I did them within the finance team, which is, I kind of wanted it that if people left the business, no matter what role they played in that business, if they went to the next job, that the company who hired them went, wow, these guys really understand the commercials. And that was like, it wasn’t always possible. There were some people who really just didn’t give a shit and that’s fine.
[00:06:29] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm.
[00:06:29] Rich Brett: But actually a lot of those people suddenly were like, well, I’m asking quite interesting questions about, well, why does it matter if I spend more time like, you’re not paying me anymore money.
It’s like, yeah, but. We could be getting paid more money by the client.
[00:06:40] Harv Nagra (2): Right.
[00:06:40] Rich Brett: And also, why are you working longer hours? I think it’s quite a good approach to just think, I want people to leave this business thinking, wow, that that company really trained their team well. Mm-hmm. And that just builds credentials for you that if there are people in that business who then want to move to different company, they might go, I wanna go and work for those guys.
And I think that is, you should always just be trying to get people to build their understanding over and above what their role is within the business. Mm-hmm. Because ultimately, most of those people will at some point be a senior leader in a business if they stick to it. Yeah. So they’re gonna have to learn it at some point.
[00:07:10] Harv Nagra (2): Yeah. To your point, I, I think there’s a lot of people that become accidental founders of a mm-hmm professional services business so they never had the training. Nope. But a lot of us do get promoted, and I talk a lot to operations people and everyone has a very different journey into operations.
You know, there’s no kind of formal training at the moment. No. So everyone’s kind of just kind of graduated through their business until they become an ops person. Yep. And so, um, so often that financial gap is very, um, what’s the word I’m looking for? Just there’s a huge financial gap. Huge,
[00:07:41] Rich Brett: yeah.
[00:07:41] Harv Nagra (2): Gap in understanding.
So the purpose of this course in some ways is to talk about those two worlds coming together. Mm-hmm. Finance and operations. Mm-hmm. And finops. Yeah. So, um, we see this term occasionally, but maybe not often enough. Hopefully after this course that will be, um, more, more prevalent and better understood. But that’s really what we’re trying to do, right.
Is ensure that everyone has this kind of finops understanding. Yeah. The merging of these two worlds. But I think even perhaps finance people sometimes, maybe, maybe I’m, um,
[00:08:11] Rich Brett: careful,
[00:08:11] Harv Nagra (2): maybe, yeah, maybe I’m not being fair but they don’t always take as much interest in the operational side of things.
[00:08:17] Rich Brett: No, no.
[00:08:18] Harv Nagra (2): So it’s not just the ops people or the founders or the senior leaders, but it’s also the finance team needs to care more about what’s happening in operations so they understand the full picture.
[00:08:27] Rich Brett: I worked in finance teams for a long time. There’s a way to approach it and I think most, a lot of finance people have got this image of just sitting by their desks tapping on spreadsheets and saying no.
[00:08:39] Harv Nagra (2): Yeah.
What we were trying to do was to try and get our finance people and our finance team from quite a junior level sitting with the teams. Mm-hmm. Understanding how the business actually worked, not how it worked in a spreadsheet.
Right.
[00:08:49] Rich Brett: And I think, I’ll be honest, if a finance team isn’t good at communicating to the business, especially in professional services, when you’ve often got a lot younger people in the business, especially in more creative roles.
If that team can’t find a way to communicate the importance of commercials, they’re not doing a great job. And I do actually think generally the standard can be quite low. A lot of finance people come from an accountancy background. They sit, they do their spreadsheets, they do month end. They make sure the numbers make sense, but actually the numbers make more sense if you actually know where they come from.
So we, you know, finops and business partnering as it was called mm-hmm. Is about getting finance to be closer to the business. But it’s not a two way, it’s not a, sorry, it’s not a one-way street. It’s not, it’s up to finance to do that. It’s about, finops is about both of those sides working together and ops system or a finance system aligning a process that.
Sort of an operations process that then checks, but how would this work with finance? Mm-hmm. Those are just those small adjustments that make such a big difference when you suddenly look at a number and go, yes, that makes sense, or Why doesn’t that make sense? You can then just go and look over there.
And I think finops has been around for years as a, as a thing.
[00:09:55] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm.
[00:09:55] Rich Brett: But it was called other things, business partnering, financial planning, analysis, whatever you wanna call it. But really it’s just about trying to get close to the numbers. Mm-hmm. Closer to numbers actually mean something. But also the other side is getting ops to be more aware of what they’re doing and how that affects the numbers.
Yeah. So it’s kind of circular.
[00:10:13] Harv Nagra (2): Yeah. And we were talking about like the whole organisation needing to be kind of brought into the fold and educated and all that kind of stuff. Um, that, that goes hand in hand with communicating results to the team as well, right? Mm-hmm. Um, people need to be aware of how the business is doing and not surprised by it.
Yep. Um, I, I’ve seen kind of annual summaries and it’s so rare that like the numbers are presented that people end up just kind of staring really closely at the screen and a bit confused. Yep. And then everyone’s expecting bonuses and it’s like, well, what does that mean? It looks like you made so much money. yeah. But like, it’s like you just haven’t communicated that throughout the year, first of all. Yeah. And second of all, even when it is communicated, it’s kind of just glazed over. It leaves more questions than the answers.
[00:10:55] Rich Brett: Bear in mind, that’s most of the time because most businesses don’t know the numbers until the end of the year because they’re not doing what we’ve talked about in this course on a monthly basis until you get to a certain size.
But also, you’ve gotta remember that transparency works both ways. It can’t just be, we only talk about the good stuff, we’ve gotta talk about the bad stuff as well. I think doing that makes a big difference. I think if you only present good numbers, but don’t give bonuses. Then how does that work? Mm-hmm.
If you present bad numbers, but give bonuses as well, that doesn’t make sense. Mm-hmm. You’ve gotta try and be clear, but also you’ve gotta try and keep it simple. And often the problem is, is that those people who are presenting that maybe dunno the numbers that well themselves either, but they know that they have to do an annual review and present the numbers to the team.
[00:11:35] Harv Nagra (2): Yep.
[00:11:35] Rich Brett: Make sure that if you’re doing that, you know, you know what you’re talking about and what your plan is, what’s the, what’s the thing that you want those people listening to get out of it. Yeah. We’ve had a good year, but it’s not been as good as we hoped it would be. We are not gonna pay any bonuses or it’s been a good year, we’re gonna pay bonuses, but they might be held back a couple of whatever it might be.
You just wanna make sure that you’re clear with people because no one wants to leave thinking, oh, we’re screwed. I’m gonna go and look for another job. That’s, unless that’s what you want to try and get people to do, but you shouldn’t really doing that either.
[00:12:03] Harv Nagra (2): And I, I, I think this points to, uh, a non-finance skill, which is just communications.
Mm-hmm. We need to get so good, good at that in our roles, not just with clients, but internally. I, I just always think that you need to be such a good storyteller. Yeah. And that’s not about making shit up, but it’s about being able to communicate what’s actually happening with people in a way that they can understand.
Right. So,
[00:12:25] Rich Brett: yeah, I think. Finance people are guilty of looking for variances in numbers and saying, oh, the reason why we’re down is because we spent an extra 65 pounds on apples this year. Mm-hmm. Like, who cares? Like, in some ways, that’s quite an interesting piece of information to know that you have it to that level of detail.
But most people don’t care about that stuff. It’s like, well, where are we actually gonna go? You’ve gotta make the numbers relevant and understandable. I remember when I was first presenting this back in one of my old jobs, we equated the value of missing timesheets to a car each month. And we were talking about the value of timesheets is 200,000 pounds that we’re missing.
Suddenly people were like, whoa, we’re missing 200,000 pounds worth of timesheets. We could buy a house, we could buy a car with that. Suddenly it actually made more sense that that time is revenue that we can’t see.
[00:13:09] Harv Nagra (2): Yeah,
[00:13:09] Rich Brett: and I think that’s sometimes timesheets are seen as a bad thing, but actually it’s a really good way for people to understand what you are actually selling, ’cause you are selling time most of the time. Mm-hmm. Um, but yeah, I think it’s the narrative and it’s really crucial part of finances, communication. I, I, I’ll admit it, a lot of finance people aren’t great at it. They don’t wanna have to stand up on a stage and talk about numbers.
Mm-hmm. They don’t want to talk to anybody. They just wanna sit at home and do their spreadsheets. I think you’ve gotta try and encourage that out of your finance person. And if you haven’t got that look for someone who is willing to do that. I think the best businesses are probably supported by a finance team who are embedded in the business.
Yeah. That doesn’t mean going for drinks on a Friday night every time. It just mean, and being the person who holds the credit card is actually someone who knows the people in the business, knows what their problems are, and tries to solve them and works with them rather than just pushing against ’em the whole
[00:13:57] Harv Nagra (2): time.
That’s another thing I hope people take away from this course, that no one watching this is expected to become, you know, a, a finance or finops expert. Right. But what the point is, everyone needs to be part of the conversation working towards the same mission. Mm-hmm. But also working together. So, yeah. You know, don’t be watching this as a finance person and thinking, okay, well these are my skills and now I have this knowledge.
And nor as an ops person just sitting there. The point is that you need to start working together. Yeah. And you know, as finance, uh, as a finance person, you can tell a better story if you’re sitting next to the ops person and working together to understand this and, and getting that picture together.
Right.
[00:14:37] Rich Brett: As a finance person, you can’t do this by yourself.
[00:14:39] Harv Nagra (2): Yeah.
[00:14:39] Rich Brett: Like if you know all this stuff, you have to go and find, you can’t go and find out exactly why something happened. You’re gonna have to get, especially as you get bigger, you’re gonna have to look around and have people who you can talk to and say.
What happened here?
[00:14:51] Harv Nagra (2): Yeah.
[00:14:52] Rich Brett: And if that person isn’t able to answer that or know how to get that information, then you’ve gotta then think, we’ve got a problem here. This person doesn’t know how to answer the question of why did this happen?
[00:15:00] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm.
[00:15:01] Rich Brett: The root now is we need to teach this person how to find out.
Why did this happen? Yeah. Have we got the systems in place to do it? But yeah, it’s really about a lot of running a good business, it’s about communication. Mm-hmm. And as you get bigger, it becomes even more important. That is why businesses over and above £1m, ten people start to struggle is because the person who runs it isn’t able to hear everything going on and go, don’t do that.
And especially in a more hybrid post COVID world. Yeah. You are not even in the same room as these people that often. Mm-hmm. So you’re not gonna catch a conversation on Zoom unless you just keep your zoom open every day. Yeah. No one’s doing that.
[00:15:35] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm.
[00:15:36] Rich Brett: So I think it’s, it is trying to build those roots to communicate and explain things as much as you can.
[00:15:41] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm. And, uh, you know, we were, uh, alluding to this a few moments ago, uh, with, with regards to people coming up through a business to become ops leaders and stuff like that. And we’ve been picking a lot on kind of finance people, uh, in this conversation perhaps. But I, I think also for ops people, uh,
[00:15:59] Rich Brett: I’m allowed to pick on finance people, by the
[00:16:00] Harv Nagra (2): way.
Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. And, uh, I, I think all. Also for ops people, like, it’s important to realise that your role is not just about firefighting and technology and processes and stuff like that, it is about business performance. Yeah. So if you want to run a mature business, and if you want to be on that kind of, uh, high maturity end of your operational role and be growing in your career as an ops person, you have to think about business performance.
[00:16:30] Rich Brett: Yeah. I think you have to, and I think that goes for most roles within professional services business. Mm. Unfortunately, I’ve met a lot of people who’ve come in quite senior. Mm-hmm. And you quickly realise they have no idea of commercials.
[00:16:39] Harv Nagra (2): Mm.
[00:16:40] Rich Brett: And that’s a problem because you kind of expect them to.
Mm-hmm.
But that’s because you don’t necessarily have to. Finance might take all that away from you, or it might not be that it’s needed at all because the business just solves it in a different way.
[00:16:50] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm.
[00:16:51] Rich Brett: But I think if you want to progress in your career and help a business grow better. A full awareness of commercials and especially at that senior level. An understanding of your influence on the numbers is, is pretty much a crucial part of your business. Mm-hmm.
[00:17:06] Harv Nagra (2): Something that you’ve said that I quite like is that even kind of on an individual contributor level, people get promoted faster when they take an interest in the numbers and stuff.
Mm-hmm. That was kind of like, I, I’ve never really heard anybody say that. Can you, just very briefly…
[00:17:20] Rich Brett: I shouldn’t have said it.
[00:17:22] Harv Nagra (2): Can you briefly just tell us why, why you think that is, or what, what that point of view is about?
[00:17:27] Rich Brett: I think it just shows interest. It’s easy to just do your job. Um, I think a designer is a really good example.
You know, work with designers who are very much about the design. They spend hours and hours perfecting it. You know.
[00:17:38] Harv Nagra (2): “I’m an artist.”
[00:17:38] Rich Brett: We’ve all had, yeah, many, many challenges where designers say, well, I needed to spend an extra 30 hours on it ’cause it wasn’t perfect. Mm-hmm Okay. But commercially that doesn’t work for us.
Yeah. Because we had other work that we needed you to do, you’re not getting paid for it. So then actually, if you have that conversation and they start to realise that they might take that down to 10 hours or the next time they quote it, they might then do it for more hours to allow that, or they might figure out a different way of doing it.
[00:18:00] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm.
[00:18:00] Rich Brett: So I think the important thing is, is that you’re more likely, I think you’re more likely to get promoted with that stuff if you do both, right? Mm-hmm. You can’t be a shit designer, but know the commercials. But it still could be quite helpful because if you understand the commercial side of it, you might be better at managing a design team.
[00:18:16] Harv Nagra (2): Mm.
[00:18:16] Rich Brett: But if you’ve got that more commercial understanding of how you impact and your role impacts the business. You’re gonna be a much more important part of that business than someone who just does one thing. Yeah. Most businesses aren’t just looking for someone to do one or two things. If they can be doing one or two things, plus have a commercial awareness, it does make sense that you’re gonna be better at running teams and being able to make better decisions.
And ultimately, as you get more senior, the accountability and responsibility you have becomes bigger.
[00:18:44] Harv Nagra (2): Right?
[00:18:44] Rich Brett: If you aren’t able to make good commercial decisions, then you’re not gonna make good decisions. Mm-hmm. Like you have to be able to understand that stuff, and I think that is why unfortunately finance people sometimes get put into these positions.
It’s ’cause they do understand the whole business.
[00:18:59] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm.
[00:19:00] Rich Brett: Um, if you can be a client services or a delivery person, or a creative or a strategist or whatever you might be, but understand the commercials, that’s only gonna help you move up to more senior levels where you’re gonna have bigger responsibility for bigger decisions and bigger discussions.
[00:19:14] Harv Nagra (2): Well, there you go. We’ve called out everybody in this discuss.
[00:19:16] Rich Brett: We might as well, you know,
[00:19:18] Harv Nagra (2): individual contributors, finance, good luck ops,
[00:19:20] Rich Brett: senior leaders. I think
[00:19:21] Harv Nagra (2): everyone,
[00:19:22] Rich Brett: I think everyone, most people don’t want to just do their job. They, most people do want to get promoted. I think there will be some people who, who just love design and therefore they don’t really care about it.
[00:19:32] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm.
[00:19:33] Rich Brett: And that’s fine, but if you really care about that, but you just have a little bit of an understanding of how it all fits within the wider machine. That’s all you need. You don’t need to be an expert. It’s just an understanding of what your role is within that business. Yeah.
[00:19:44] Harv Nagra (2): I just think it’s really exciting to think about the idea that like, you know, people could be watching this course, you know, asking their colleagues, um, to, to, to watch.
And just like I I I can imagine kind of the, the change in attitude that might come into an organisation when everyone from, you know, top of the organisation to the, the ICs cares. Yeah. And remembers that we’re here to make money and we’re, we’re on a mission together. And it’s not just about my salary and my paycheck and, uh, my tasks.
[00:20:14] Rich Brett: I, unfortunately, I think a lot of times in business people forget that the idea of the business is to make money.
[00:20:19] Harv Nagra (2): Yeah.
[00:20:20] Rich Brett: And they lose that.
[00:20:21] Harv Nagra (2): Mm.
[00:20:21] Rich Brett: And they think, actually it’s, for me to get paid. That is, it is to get paid and it is to do your job, but ultimately a business doesn’t keep going if it’s not making money.
[00:20:28] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm.
[00:20:28] Rich Brett: And everyone does contribute to that, even if it’s even in a small part. You know, the more junior members might only be a small percentage compared to the more senior people. But if a business isn’t making money, then you are not gonna get paid at the end of the month because they won’t be able to pay your salary.
So I think everyone has an involvement in it. The level of which they are involved will differ, but you do have to remember that someone has to make money. That’s how the world spins around, unfortunately.
[00:20:52] Harv Nagra (2): Mm-hmm. Excellent.
[00:20:53] Harv Nagra (2) That’s just a taste of the course and I hope it gives you a sense of what Rich and I have put together. Over the coming weeks ,we’ll be releasing more of these conversations here on the podcast, so there’s plenty more to come. But don’t wait for those. Head to learn.scoro.com.
[00:21:09] Harv Nagra: Take a look at the course and the three learning paths and get your team watching, whether that’s integrating it into your new starter onboarding or rolling it out as team training. There’s something in here for everyone from the leadership team right down to the individual contributors doing the work day to day. Even finance people will find benefit. They might already know the concepts, but this course will help them better understand the operational side of the business and help them communicate better with the rest of the team. This course is free. It lets you track your progress. There are quizzes to reinforce your learning and you get a Rich Brett Certified certificate at the end.
I’m super proud of what we’ve created. Rich has done an exceptional job of making this material feel accessible and relevant, and I think the value here is huge. Both for the people watching and for the business they’re a part of. Once again, that’s learn.scoro.com. That’s it for me this week.
I’ll be back soon with another episode. Until then, take care.
