Operations Nation is 7 months old, and as the end of this crazy year quickly approaches, we'd love to reflect back and celebrate our first milestones: 

'Tis the season of giving thanks and we'd like to express gratitude to everyone who has supported us on our journey:

As we look ahead to the new year, we cannot wait to curate and create more content that will achieve our mission of providing ops leaders with the knowledge and tools to make even more of an impact in our respective companies.

Since our last newsletter, Operations Nation has been thrilled to produce 3 additional events in our 6-part Finance for Ops Series, in collaboration with Quantico, as well as a panel on Remote Working Operations.

On July 29th, we hosted a webinar on Compliance, featuring valuable insights from Roshni Patel, CFO at Karakuri, and Nichola Hailes, Product Legal Advisor at PayFit covering a wide swath of topics on everything from HMRC and Companies House filings, to payroll and HR compliance. We are also excited to announce a special offer from PayFit - normal customers receive a 1-month trial but ON members will receive 2 months free. If you missed it, check out the recording here.

On September 9th, we dove deeper into the ever-important topics of Procurement, Treasury, and Cash Flow Management with guest speakers Joe Gallard, Co-Founder of Reducer, the business cost management system, and Adam Gouveia, the CFO of AZA, a provider of global currency trading solutions. If you missed this highly practical session on supplier relationships, foreign exchange risk, and working capital, the recording is here.

On October 21st, we rounded up our series with best practices on when and how to hire a Finance team, featuring an all-star panel of previous speakers Julie Oey from WeGift, Roshni Patel from Karakuri and new speaker Murtaza Ibrahim, ex-VP of Finance at DICE. If you're tired of wearing the Finance hat in your company or need to build a Finance function for any other reason, don't miss their incredible advice here.

We can't express enough gratitude for our incredibly diverse lineup of speakers across the six events, who each brought their unique experiences, both past and present. 🙌

On November 19th, we organised our last event of 2020 on the incredibly timely topic of remote work operations. Attendees submitted a record number of questions ranging from HR and payroll to tax and compliance issues related to Brexit, COVID, and a workforce that wants to work from Barbados to Bali.

A huge thanks to our wonderful panelists Alex Bouaziz (CEO of Deel), Dee Coakley (CEO of Boundless) and Duncan Macintosh (Director of Shield GEO) for sharing their immensely global experiences and for their generosity in providing follow up resources and introductory offers for ON members.

👉 You can find the event recording, notes, articles and other info here. 👈

In his blog post "FinOps: A new profession", Dan Hully, Co-Founder and CEO of Quantico shares the dichotomy between the increasingly high-profile "strategic finance" and the increasingly downplayed "operational finance" and the need for a generation of startup leaders who complement the traditional CFO role.

In a traditional business a Financial Controller might be responsible for ensuring that financial reporting is accurate and timely. A CFO might then be responsible for interpreting those reports within the context of a business’ objectives.

In comparison, a FinOps leader would be responsible for ensuring that the correct systems are in place for both of those individuals to do their jobs. That means building and operating reporting systems, ensuring that data is collected rapidly and accurately, but also the systems needed to execute any growth strategies that arise."

In future issues of our newsletter, we will feature the birth of ops roles in other functions, such as People Ops, Sales Ops and Marketing Ops, so stay tuned!