Everyone talks about being "data-driven," but many professional services businesses are drowning in data, not actually using it.

Rich Brett is back for episode three of our mini-series from inside The Missing Finance Course, the free FinOps course presented by Rich and Harv Nagra built to close the gap between finance and delivery.

This episode leans into the delivery side of the business – the day-to-day decisions that end up written into your numbers, whether you meant them to or not.

Here's what we dive into:

• Why utilization and capacity are two sides of the same coin, and why utilization should never be a surprise at month end
• Where delivery leads go wrong on scoping, and how a duplicated quote can set a project up to fail before it starts
• Why over-servicing to keep clients happy is often a decision nobody actually made, and how to take back control
• What revenue recognition really means (it's simpler than it sounds), and why doing it once a year isn't good enough
• What "recovery" actually measures, and why comparing it to an invoice tells you nothing
• What being genuinely data-driven looks like, versus just having a lot of reports nobody reads

Plus, Rich and Harv get into why the best businesses are already looking at what’s going to happen next month instead of just explaining what happened last month.

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: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-brett-36903590/

👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you.

Everyone wants AI to fix their messy data. Andrew McBarnett will tell you straight: it won't. In fact, it'll just help you reach the wrong conclusion faster.

Andrew is Group Financial Director at Lucid Group, a PE-backed medical communications agency. He joined in 2020 for what was meant to be a four month contract. Six years later, he's still there, and the numbers tell the story: EBITDA up from £3.6m to £18.1m, revenue more than doubled, legal entities cut from 25 to 15, and a finance team that's shrunk in headcount while transaction volume has nearly doubled.

In this conversation, Andrew explains how he diagnosed a business that looked successful on the surface but was being held back by its operating model.

Here's what we get into:

• Why numbers don't explain your business, they just reveal where the pain is
• Andrew’s five pillars of an operating model that can actually scale
• Why "businesses don't fail to grow, they fail to absorb their growth"
• How Lucid built single sources of truth across accounting, project delivery, and expenses
• Why AI was never the goal, it was the reward for doing the foundational work properly
• What changing the culture of a team actually takes (it’s harder than the tech, according to Andrew)

Plus, Andrew shares the real reason finance teams get sidelined in the business, and how to fix it.

Additional Resources:

👉🏽 Follow Andrew on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewmcbarnett/

👉🏽 Lucid Group: https://wearelucidgroup.com/

👉🏽 AMB Associates: https://amb-associates.com/

👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/

💰 The Missing Finance Course (free): https://learn.scoro.com

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you.

Most leaders in professional services are making decisions every day that come back to the finance – but no one ever actually taught them the numbers.

In this episode, we're pulling back the curtain on the financial foundations that every leader needs to get a handle on, whether you're running a team, managing projects, or sitting in the hot seat at the top.

Rich Brett is a FinOps consultant with 15 years in finance, working with professional services businesses to close the gap between finance and operations – and answer that nagging question: why is everyone busy, but we're not making any money?

This episode is pulled directly from The Missing Finance Course – a free FinOps course Rich and Harv built to level up everyone from founders to individual contributors at agencies and consultancies.

Here's what they get into:

• Why cashflow forecasting isn't an advanced topic – it's a survival skill
• What the P&L is really for, and why most senior leaders struggle to explain it to their own teams
• How a knowledge gap becomes a credibility gap – and why that erodes trust across the whole business
• Why so many businesses are pricing based on what they think something costs – not what it actually costs
• Why comparing your rates to competitors is a trap, and what to do instead

If you've ever sat in a finance presentation and felt a bit lost, or if you've been winging parts of your pricing strategy, this one's for you.

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: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rich-brett-36903590/
👨🏽 Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/

➡️ This podcast is brought to you by Scoro, where you can manage your projects, resources and finances in a single system. Sign up for a free trial or a demo at https://scoro.com/demo – and for the VIP treatment, tell them Harv sent you.