chief financial officer

And I think that's a really good point.

And obviously we're speaking to CFOs here, right? So investment planning, planning the budget, planning the money that sits behind strategy is right up their street.

So talk to us about how we do that effectively.

What does a good process look like to ensure that we've assessed and we've invested properly in these strategic initiatives?

so more than a third of the book is about portfolio management, enterprise portfolio management, decision-making.

And, uh, there are a whole, I mean, I've got more than a decade working with some very bright, um, compatriots developing, uh, a fairly unique set of approaches to adaptive portfolio management.

Um, but the, the, I think the symptom that I saw again and again, and I'm betting for a lot of CFOs and folks in FP&A, you might recognize some of this.

A product manager or a portfolio manager who is trying to make trade-off decisions among very powerful stakeholders, sponsors, who are advocating for their own initiatives and investments, is in a very precarious political position to pick winners and losers.

So what is your approach and how do you think about that balance, really?

I think that balance is probably the most difficult task that you have as a leader in a medium-sized rheumatology practice, right? We don't have CEOs and CFOs, so we have just me, the practice administrator.

So it's really just Leading your staff.

Fortunately, I have the most amazing staff.

To learn more about how we help leaders and organizations grow, visit us online at vertisync.com. That's V-I-R-T-U-S-I-N-C dot com.

We definitely have to talk about the software, particularly in the context of the fact that there are a lot of CEOs and CFOs that are listening to this podcast.

So anything that will help to add objectivity to their decision making, particularly with capital allocation and major resource decisions within organizations, which is what the software is for, would be really helpful to have.

But let's talk more about decision making.

I think it's a structural thing.

And It comes down to, and I actually published a piece on this a few days ago, is as marketers, I find that one of our default settings when it comes to strategy and execution and where something should show up, whether that's traditional digital or in real life, and why they are so segmented is because we often build around what we think need to justify an execution against so you're almost going in with this preconceived idea of how am i going to be safe in the next board meeting how am i going to be safe in the next round of review and in order to be safe i need metrics to support and validate what i'm doing so digital's easier win in that sense because everything's trackable in its reach and its impressions and views and engagement so when I sit there in my CFOs staring at me in the eyeballs, I can say, but we got 38% engagement on this particular campaign, which is 17% higher than the industry average.

And everyone thinks that it's cool.

I think that's a very big part of it.

And then we see the shifts that build upon that.

The north star for us is, does spend accelerate more quickly than it currently is? Because CFOs are sitting down in boardrooms and going, wow, now I'm able to buy on outcomes-driven basis through my agent.

We've got all of this transparency and this optimization.

We're seeing a hugely increased effectiveness in advertising.

Day two is this is a massively improved system, right? And the vision for PubX within this is to build the best advertising system that's ever existed in the world because we can use agents to do that.

And that's best in terms of effectiveness, advertising effectiveness.

And then CFOs will hopefully flood more spend into the system because they can see it working.

And then advertising grows and it becomes a kind of positive, like it wasn't kind of, you know, the late 90s.

Oh, gosh.

Doug, CFO, he's Summer Breeze, you know.

We got a few, you know.

So it goes on and on.

Many a CFO will say this, we have spent a lot of money on technology over the past two decades, a lot, billions as a country, actually probably bordering on trillions if you keep counting every single outside investment and the internal investments.

Some CFOs will say, I don't know if we've reaped the benefits of those.

And so my sort of perspective on this is, well, you got to remember that meaningful use started happening before there were smartphones in a broad way, right? So think about the organizations that went live on their EHRs before smartphones were even a thing.

And they're using those same EHRs today.

Well, one of the main reasons that I've run into, and I think it's something that I learned, again, mainly through trial and error throughout my career, and now I have a much better understanding of it, is marketing, people who are in marketing, marketing teams, they tend to speak in marketing terms.

Whereas CEOs, board members, CFOs speak a different language.

And if you walk into your CEO and you're giving a report or an update on marketing results and you're talking about things like, well, we're getting better engagement on social media.

We have more traffic to our website this month and we're getting more likes.