Adam Larson: 00:00

Hey, guys. Look where we're at here at Sweet World, 2025 in Las Vegas. We are excited to share some new episodes with you that we recorded here live in Sweet World in Las Vegas talking about AI and innovation and what CFOs can do to be better leaders in this organization. So we're so excited to have you here, so stay tuned for some great episodes. Well, Brian, thank you so much for coming on the Count Me In podcast.

Adam Larson: 00:27

Really excited to have you. Really excited to talk with you here at Sweet World. But I wanted to start our conversation just talking about your career journey. You know, what brought you to accounting and how did you find your way to your current role?

Brian Hogeland: 00:38

Yeah, so gosh, high school, took accounting classes. I was good at it, it made sense, the double sided entry of things just was logical, orderly. I went to school to be an accounting degree and graduated and got my actually, CMA before my CPA. Okay. And just really enjoyed solving problems and making the numbers balance.

Brian Hogeland: 01:06

Spent about three years doing financial statement audits with Arthur Andersen in early days and moved into a technology consulting role which really morphed into IT security. That was in the latenineties.com era, very exciting stuff and I really enjoyed doing that. Moved from Arthur Andersen to a couple different companies in the Milwaukee, Wisconsin area. And then really kind of stayed in the IT security core for about ten years. About 2010, really wanted to kind of get back into the finance side of the world, I worked with the company that I was employed with at the time.

Brian Hogeland: 01:43

They had just completed an ERP conversion over to Oracle and they brought me in because of my finance and my technology background and kind of helped navigate that through, you know, the post ERP implementation challenges. And did that for a number of different roles within the finance organization there. And about four years ago, four and a half years ago, I left and came to work for Packer Fastener, which is an industrial distribution company in Green Bay, Wisconsin. I'm the CFO and oversee a team of about nine people, you know, navigating finances for two main entities but eight different subsidiaries.

Adam Larson: 02:25

Wow. So what's that like going from what you were into like this type of organization? There's so many different avenues that you have to have to deal with especially with like the the products that you're delivering. Yeah. You know, I was in transportation, a large transportation company, publicly traded, took him through an IPO.

Adam Larson: 02:44

That

Brian Hogeland: 02:45

was a big shift to back down to a smaller size organization. The company was at about $20,000,000 of revenue when I joined him coming from about a $4,000,000,000 company. So you can order of magnitude much less complex. And really the organization when I joined it was very focused on manual processes, lot of paper boxes of paper. And, know, I was able to kind of bring some of that focus to more digitization, technology, automation.

Brian Hogeland: 03:14

And it's really fit very well with the company that we've grown. We're growing about a 57% annual growth rate for the last four or five years and trying to kind of do that with the same set of team that I've got. We can try to absorb more work by just being smarter about how we work.

Adam Larson: 03:32

Yeah. So what's your philosophy as a leader? Because when I talk to different account leaders, everybody has a different kind of philosophy, but you know, you're growing, you're growing fast. So what's your philosophy as you're leading this team through this growth?

Brian Hogeland: 03:47

Yeah. Certainly accountability. You know, want people to take things and own them. But ultimately, think curiosity is really important. And from a finance perspective, that's important because that's the same we've always done it.

Brian Hogeland: 04:01

That's, you know, obviously not a great way to approach business. Yeah. In accounting, you're gonna be challenged with trying to find a good answer if you're not curious. Right? When I think about the efficiency and automation, being curious about, hey, is there a better way to approach this?

Brian Hogeland: 04:19

How are we thinking about this? All the things you've heard in the last couple of days here at Sweet World, there's so many things that you can take if you have that curious mindset and let's think about how we do this, let's do it smarter. So my approach from a leadership perspective is to

Adam Larson: 04:34

try to like empower people, make have them be accountable for for what they're assigned to, really bring that curiosity. So how do you develop that curiosity, that culture of curiosity? Because it's not easy because if somebody's not naturally curious, it's hard to kind of coax that out of them.

Brian Hogeland: 04:51

Oh yeah, for sure. And there's some people that I think they're comfortable in their roles and they don't necessarily, don't wanna be challenged or or kinda have to go outside the box. Right?

Adam Larson: 05:00

Yeah.

Brian Hogeland: 05:01

I try to empower my team and give them we have a standing topic in our in our in my finance team. We've l 10 meetings traction if you're familiar with EOS.

Adam Larson: 05:13

Right? Yeah.

Brian Hogeland: 05:15

We have a standing topic there and I want them to come and say, what have you learned about AI in the last week, last two

Adam Larson: 05:20

weeks? Mhmm.

Brian Hogeland: 05:21

And it could be something personal, something professional. And at first when I started introducing this, this is probably about a year and a half ago, didn't get a

Adam Larson: 05:28

whole lot of feedback.

Brian Hogeland: 05:29

It was kind of the blank stares like what are you talking about? We're accountants, you know. Yeah. But over time, people started to bring in solutions and I think that germinates the curiosity within people because they're like, oh, she's talking about that and she did that in her personal life. She built a, you know, a diet plan or a way to approach how am I gonna manage the drop offs with the kids, you know, and they're using AI for tools like that.

Brian Hogeland: 05:54

It starts to get the wheels rolling and what if I did that and and maybe people that were less inclined to try on something new like an AI, the chatbots. They feel just a little bit more comfortable in doing that. So trying to ferment that curiosity among the team by giving them a little bit of space to play.

Adam Larson: 06:13

Yeah. Are there any skills or mindsets that you look for in your teammates even especially if you're gonna hire new people? Like what are those skills and mindsets that you're looking for especially today like with the changing environment?

Brian Hogeland: 06:23

Yeah. I mean we we had a leadership off-site two weeks ago and really agreed that we want to lean in to the AI and we want to really, I guess, skill up our teams to the extent. So it's really if I were to have to hire someone it would be the curiosity as I mentioned, you know, who's intellectually curious, but then who's not afraid to kind of tinker and play with things. You know, try and fail within the bounds of, you know, accounting. We still have, you know, certain guardrails we have to adhere to, but who's willing to try that and can you exhibit that?

Brian Hogeland: 06:57

Can you can you speak in terms of digital, right? A good good friend of mine from years back, we worked together and his mantra was always, it's just data. We can do with it whatever we want to, right? Yeah. And trying to get the accounting teams, finance teams to think in those terms if I was gonna hire somebody would be, did they think like that?

Brian Hogeland: 07:20

Do they think of it's not like a piece of paper that's a vendor bill, it is there's just a bunch of data elements on that PDF, right?

Adam Larson: 07:28

How do you build trust within your team? Because when you're building, when you're trying new technologies and you want people to be curious, there has to be some trust there to kind of make that successful. How do you build that trust within your team?

Brian Hogeland: 07:41

Yeah, and it's a challenge because we're asking them to really get outside the comfort zone and some people, they're less inclined to approach that. So trying to give them, again, a little bit of a seed to say, try this. And you know like I said earlier you maybe try and fail a little bit within the guardrails of accounting but you know go ahead and I'll give an example. So when we moved on to NetSuite we had the ability to generate ACH payments in a much larger scale. So we would have maybe like 400 ACH payments we would queue up to go out on a particular day.

Brian Hogeland: 08:16

It used to be somebody would go into the bank type in the bank routing number and the account numbers and okay there's an ACH. I'm gonna go now and I'm gonna do the same thing and I'm do it 400 times, right? Yeah. Whereas NetSuite gave us the ability to just click click click click and go. That didn't come without some trepidation and oh my god what if we do it wrong and we're gonna pay maybe miss pay and send money to a bunch of different companies, you know.

Brian Hogeland: 08:40

There's a lot of trepidation. So you start small. Let's try it with one or two companies and maybe not large dollars, but you know, let's try it with a couple of, you know, a thousand here, you know, 2,000 there. So you you give them sort of that ability to play and by giving them the chance to try something new. And if they make a mistake, you know, what do we need to do to fix it and be accountable, but also like your job's safe, right?

Brian Hogeland: 09:04

So it's building that trust there and, you know, trying new things, giving them the ability to fail and still like we're gonna be okay.

Adam Larson: 09:12

And I think about the accounting team, like you had your career AP or career AR, like you had those career people who were doing those same jobs for like thirty years. And when with all this new technology that's coming, those people don't necessarily their job is changing and a lot times those career people, they don't like change very much. How have you navigated that with those kind of roles?

Brian Hogeland: 09:32

You know, it's a challenge. Accounts payable is an example. We've utilized a third party to try to take do the automation of AP. So, you know, you do get a PDF bill from your vendor, you kinda drag it in and it should do the the three way match. And there was not a ton of excitement from the AP team when we went live with it.

Brian Hogeland: 09:54

Mhmm. And so it's really trying to create some metrics and say, look, I I know that this is the way you've done it. Right? And you can easily just fall back and just type it all in. But what I'm looking to do is challenge you to say, I wanna increase.

Brian Hogeland: 10:08

I'm gonna create a metric. It's the number of lines that we've entered, like, from vendor bills per hour that you've worked. Now you might have done it one way for years and you kind of have sort of a static metric because you just you're on autopilot, you know how to do it. I'm gonna challenge you to increase that 5%, 10%. How many more lines are you able to do?

Brian Hogeland: 10:28

And it's not because I wanna manage people by just your number and did you meet your metric or not? But it's a way to try to draw them into let's let's accept that this is, you know, a better way for us to do this. You've probably heard Jensen Huang from NVIDIA He says AI is not gonna replace people. AI is gonna replace people that don't embrace AI. Right?

Brian Hogeland: 10:50

And so we're trying to have some of our teams embrace AI Yeah. And this is one of the mechanism mechanisms that I've tried to

Adam Larson: 10:55

use to kinda like bring them to the table. Have you had to like change team members because of the all this all the new technology that is coming?

Brian Hogeland: 11:05

No. I think our company, we have a very strong culture around people and so we are really focused on upscaling people instead of saying you're not you're not a fit for this. If we had to, I mean, you know, it's a consideration because there's a certain point where we're growing really really fast and, you know, we want to capitalize on the growth without having to hire people linearly so that means maybe having the right people in the right seats.

Adam Larson: 11:34

Yeah so AI is obviously changing the way the finance and accounting team looks. How, like, is how have you helped your team navigate these waters? Like, what's your perspective on how it's changing the team?

Brian Hogeland: 11:49

Yeah. Again, some people just jump in and they're they're excited about it. Know, You one person on my team, she used the free chat GPT accounts and if you've used that before, kind of go through and you just run out of tokens. Right? There's just only so much.

Brian Hogeland: 12:05

And so she went through the next day and kind of she had a a use case she was trying to solve. She went through and, okay, I ran out of tokens. Come back tomorrow and do the same thing. And it would chain together like ten different days to try to solve an interesting problem. You know, that was kind of a fun example for trying to encourage that and and celebrate it.

Brian Hogeland: 12:24

But also you're learning a little bit too as a leader,

Adam Larson: 12:26

like Yeah.

Brian Hogeland: 12:27

You know, should I should I enable you and, you know, pay for a full subscription to just allow you to do that kind of thing? Mhmm.

Adam Larson: 12:34

Are how are so with with all the exciting announcements that have been happening just in the last day here at Sweet World, what are you excited about, you know, going forward?

Brian Hogeland: 12:48

Yeah. So the big splash yesterday, it was super exciting to just kinda get the introduction from Evan, CEO from from Oracle. But really today as Gary who's in charge of app development and and Brian Chess who's kind of their infrastructure to listen to them talk about the framework that they're deploying now where you can go out as, you know, kind of an accounting, you know, team member, maybe build your own agents and or maybe I can go out and help you build some agents because maybe you're not a super technology person. That's in the accounting world, of course, that can extend far beyond the accounting team. So sales teams can do that, our procurement teams can do that.

Brian Hogeland: 13:30

You know, our HR team can do some of those capabilities. So it's what they've done, I think, is I'm understanding it here is really develop that framework so that it's integrated with the NetSuite platform. Yeah. We're already fully in with NetSuite and this is a way for us to just continue to scale and embrace AI without having to replatform on something completely different. Right?

Adam Larson: 13:53

Yeah. So what you think the biggest opportunity is and possible challenges as you take these next steps forward?

Brian Hogeland: 14:01

Yeah, I think I'm interested in and I just heard Gary reiterate this too is you want to automate the things that are repetitive and just time consuming and just sort of that there's a lot of things that happen in an accounting team that's just repetitive and time consuming. Those feel like the first places we'd want to jump in and try to scale those. And some of the solutions, like I mentioned, already in the AP side, it's already there and maybe there's ways to enhance that. But there's on the accounts receivable side is how do we get cash in and apply that to customer invoices? Do we get it through checks?

Brian Hogeland: 14:35

Do we get it ACH? Is there a more efficient way to do that? There's some new flux analysis capabilities they built into the suite now. There are financial exceptions. So things like, hey, you typically book an accrual for energy in this department every month, you haven't booked that.

Brian Hogeland: 14:53

It was an oversight. So as you're kind of closing the books, can tidy up and make sure that you got accurate numbers as you close the book. So those are areas that feel like really low hanging fruit we can get after pretty easily.

Adam Larson: 15:04

And that's got to be exciting for the team too because it frees them up to possibly think outside of what they've been doing every day. Yeah. What can I do differently?

Brian Hogeland: 15:14

Know and a little bit of liberty too because if I can if I can free up you know an hour of your of your week you can kind of go in the sandbox and play with these agents and see that just scales into it sort of snowballs into what else can I do? What else can I do? And build on that.

Adam Larson: 15:30

So how do you, as you're moving into this, how are you gonna balance the balance between like automation but also the human judgment and making sure that like everything's kind of going the right direction?

Brian Hogeland: 15:42

Yeah, there's been a lot of talk about that just in the last two days. Yeah. Because there's the the concept of hallucinations. Obviously, on accounting you need certain controls and validations. That's that's why you're there.

Brian Hogeland: 15:52

So to the extent that there's human in the loop elements in any of these processes we build out, especially on the early end of it because, you know, you might be comfortable with it after you've been using it for a year, that first week, kind of like the ACH example I used earlier, you you just sort of want to do that gut check. Is this correct? Am I introducing the ability for somebody to maybe see data they're not supposed to or to approve something they're not supposed to? Those are all things we'll want to proceed with intention, but we're not going to let that stop us either. We're going find ways to balance the two.

Adam Larson: 16:25

Yeah, you have to find ways to balance the two because obviously hallucinations is a big deal. And being able to have your AI look at your data only and not looking elsewhere is a big thing. But how do you get from, okay, we're ready to do this to like I'm afraid of hallucinations to I'm ready to like press go.

Brian Hogeland: 16:46

Yeah it's gonna be again the way I've approached it in my career start small start with something that's if it's something that's a high volume, a lot of intense work, pick off a small little sample. What happens if I do this? And then you increase the sample a little bit. Before you know it, you've gotten out, you know, my my day just is filled with not doing the work but overseeing the agents that are doing the work is kind of how I think about it. Do

Adam Larson: 17:15

you think that it's going to allow your team to think more strategically and how are you going to help them get to that place to think more strategically outside of the I'm just doing my mundane accounting tasks.

Brian Hogeland: 17:26

Yeah. I mean that's my that's my hope right? That's sort of sprinkled in a lot of the work that we do is you know again if you've where we came from as a very manual paper focused company, think what we've sowed so far is that creativity and by continuing to enhance add more automation and the AI is gonna be key for that. If you can add more of that, you know, are excited about what can I accomplish here? What's new?

Brian Hogeland: 17:57

What can I do? What's the strategic side? And we're a rapidly growing company too, so the things that work as finance team with a $20,000,000 company are not what work as a $500,000,000 company. And so we all need to collectively think strategically a little bit differently. So you're thinking more about cash flow models, you're thinking more about maybe investor relations type things.

Brian Hogeland: 18:18

Those are areas that we'll have to scale up to.

Adam Larson: 18:20

What do you think about like the next generation of accountants coming up from colleges? What advice would you give to them if they're listening to this conversation like, hey, I want to get in on this. What skills should I be getting into? What should I be doing? Because the traditional, like if you went to school for accounting twenty years ago, you're not looking at the same thing.

Adam Larson: 18:38

The foundation is still the same, but there's so many other skills that you need.

Brian Hogeland: 18:42

Yeah, yeah, really. I mean, you know, I was in high school in the the late eighties and the early nineties and it literally was on paper, right? So what we thought about as accounting was was very simple compared to what we do now. The volume of what systems do on your behalf now. Thinking systemically, thinking digitally, I think if you're just if you read in an accounting textbook and you say, you have to book, you know, debit to cash and a credit to sales, that's obviously you need to start somewhere with that, but you have to think bigger systemically.

Brian Hogeland: 19:14

I need to there's there's clearing accounts, there's, you know, those are things you get kind of with experience working with a large company with a complex system, if you can conceptualize that as a student and and to the extent that they can augment in education tracks with that, I think that's gonna service our young prospects.

Adam Larson: 19:33

Yeah, definitely will because it's because they still you still need that foundation like you because if you're looking at what the AI is doing you need to understand because if you need to check their work if you need to see hey is this working correctly you need to understand what's happening behind the scenes.

Brian Hogeland: 19:46

Correct. I mean reconciliations is a great, used to be the one question I would ask somebody when I was interviewing them. Said explain to me what a reconciliation is. And you could really tell a lot from their answers to that. Do they really kind of get that?

Brian Hogeland: 20:01

I think there's probably a series of new questions that would make sense to ask in the same vein like, how does the system you know, how do you balance a sub ledger against the general ledger Yeah. In a in a high volume situation. Right?

Adam Larson: 20:16

Those are types of things you'd try to tease out. So when you think about your leadership journey so far, what's something you'd like you to say I'm most proud of in my leadership journey?

Brian Hogeland: 20:31

You know, I've I've tried a lot of different things. I haven't been afraid to kind of peel the onion, get really into the the weeds on it. Mhmm. But then also come back up and think strategically about it. And I I think I've had good people I've worked with over the years that have kind of enabled me to do that.

Brian Hogeland: 20:56

You know, early in my career, I wasn't necessarily comfortable talking at a very high level without understanding really what was what was how was the sausage made, know? Yeah. And and so it's kind of being able to kind of explore on both of those veins, the the top level thinking, the low level thinking. I feel like I kind of bring both of those to to the role that I'm in right now. And I think I'm pretty proud of that.

Brian Hogeland: 21:20

That's awesome.

Adam Larson: 21:21

You mentioned that you kind of started in IT and kind of moved to the finance side, the CFO side. Do you think that tomorrow CFOs should be really looking in technology and the accounting side as well?

Brian Hogeland: 21:34

Yeah, I didn't necessarily think that was I was just excited because I came out of college in the .com boom and I was super excited about the internet and all that came with that and so I started as an accountant but was really excited about the digital technology side of it. I think, you know, it's certainly not gonna hurt, you know, finance professionals to really kind of, I don't know, I guess how you avoid it in today's world with all the AI. If you're not conversational and LLMs and chatbots and again building out agents in the future here, you might be in competition with people that are.

Adam Larson: 22:11

Sure. So if somebody's listening to this conversation and they're like, okay, I want to get where you're at. I want to make sure my team is ready for this AI thing. I want to make sure that we're creating a culture so they can fail, fail well and learn from that. What's that first step that they should take?

Brian Hogeland: 22:28

You know, so I'm part of a local FEI, finance executives Yeah. Chapter. And we as a group kind of talk about those types of questions like Mhmm. People say, hey, it seems like you guys are really progressive in AI. What are you doing?

Brian Hogeland: 22:41

What how do I get started? Yeah. And the answer we've had lately has been we had a rock earlier this year where we had an AI one zero one training. So for three separate months, we did a a a one month an hour long training each month. And it was for the whole company.

Brian Hogeland: 22:59

Tune in and we're gonna explain what what AI is and LLMs. The second one is we're gonna talk a little bit more about how you write a prompt. Right?

Adam Larson: 23:07

Yeah.

Brian Hogeland: 23:08

And then the third one was we had a contest. We introduced it to the whole company and said, look, we want you to go out. We want you to try AI. Come back to us. What were some of the cool cases that you found?

Brian Hogeland: 23:18

Whether it's business, something personal, bring it back. And we had a contest and awarded, you know, some prizes out to the the top people. I share that with other companies that are kind of in that, how do I get started here? For us, that was a really good Genesis to try to like get people excited about it. And we think we accomplished a lot with that.

Brian Hogeland: 23:35

In fact, we're gonna try to do an AI two zero one here as we close out the year to kind of double back and see where people are at. Update with now, especially what we've learned this week here and, you know, where we see next week going. Those are areas again, I think there's another great book too that we we've just kind of finished as a leadership group called the AI Driven Leader. It really embraces the idea of using AI as your strategic thought partner. So I'd encourage people to crack that one.

Brian Hogeland: 24:04

It's a good audiobook, easy listen, but it really hammers homes to some very strategic uses of AI.

Adam Larson: 24:10

Well, Brian, I really appreciate you coming on the Count Me In podcast. Thank you so much for sharing your insights with our audience.

Brian Hogeland: 24:15

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. It's awesome.

Announcer: 24:19

This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast providing you with the latest perspectives of thought leaders from the accounting and finance profession. If you like what you heard and you'd like to be counted in for more relevant accounting and finance education, visit IMA's website at www.imanet.org.