About the Founder and Instructor

Firstly, welcome to the FDTC! You are most welcome here, and I sincerely hope you find something that helps you in your day to day working life.

My training and education…

Born and raised in London, UK, I graduated from the University of Sheffield in 2009 with a bachelors degree in Modern Languages, picking up a tennis coaching qualification on the way. With teaching running in the family, I then completed a Post Graduate Certificate in Education in 2010, also from the University of Sheffield, before moving into accountancy, completing three years training in audit at PwC, while completing my professional ICAEW exams. At this point, I noticed something of a hole in my professional knowledge.

Frankly, going from a degree (and PGCE!) that is all about speaking and words, to a profession and qualification that is completely numbers based exposed a lack of knowledge in Excel! I was struggling and it became worryingly clear that if I wanted to be good at my chosen career I would need to know my way round a spreadsheet.

Bluntly, at the time; I didn’t. This needed swift rectifying.

I moved onto a further three years in audit at EY and by the end of the my time there, I had become an advanced Excel user reading several books on Excel and putting what I learned into practice. I’d also become part of a Global pilot audit programme that used data analytics to perform audit testing, which opened my eyes to how data could be used to really benefit companies.

I then moved on to a well known UK retailer using Excel to automate as much of my department’s processes as I could, from invoice validation to expense accrual, from cost analysis to monthly reporting. It was towards the end of my time here that I had a lightbulb moment. Well actually I had three!

Why I believe that training matters…

Firstly, by this point I was regularly coming up against a number of drawbacks in Excel that I felt really should be easily solved, like slow opening or responding files, worksheets running out of space, time consuming data cleaning and joining and so on.

This lead me to researching Power Query (now Get Data and Transform in Excel) and Power Pivot which is a free Excel add in and supercharges Pivot tables and solved pretty much all the day to day Excel barriers I was experiencing. These were simply incredible tools and FREE…but no one around me had any idea that they were there, and the amount of time that they could save in their work life by using these capabilities. And these were people that use Excel for 90% of their working life!

Secondly, Power BI was shown to me in a CPD session for the first time. I can remember the gasps and mutters round the room of about 50 colleagues as this brilliant piece of new software was shown and people realised how many problems, that each of them battled through every day, this great bit of kit could solve. With joy, I realised that I recognised almost all of it as it is based on Power Query and PowerPivot, and began to ferociously read anything that I could get my hands on that related to this fabulous new tech.

Thirdly, I had to recruit someone for the first time in my life. The position was a graduate or school leaver position and my sole criteria for the shortlist was that the applicant needed to know how to use Excel because then they could help the department from the word go. To me, it didn’t sound like a big ask, but out of circa 65 applicants, only 3 could say that they had the slightest inkling about Excel. The applicant who could describe a VLOOKUP, not even prove they could use it, got the job.

Who wins and who loses with software…

These three lightbulb moments showed me that people who dedicate time to understanding how they can use technology to do their job more efficiently are at such an incredible advantage over those who don’t. They are the ones that will get hired first, the ones who will be up for promotions, pay rises and bonuses and the ones who will be trusted with the interesting work, simply because they can get more work done quickly and accurately. They’ll also be the ones who can have a more relaxed working life while others furiously paddle to keep up with them, and, to add insult to injury, they’re the ones who can finish work on time.

It also became clear that, even though it is in a company’s best interests to train their staff to use these technologies, they often won’t, relying on staff training each other. In 16 years of working in finance teams, I’ve been through one mandatory Excel course!!! Those companies that train their staff well, will save on headcount costs as their teams will perform (much) more efficiently, can save on third party technology costs and can generate better business intelligence. Those companies can turn around work on tighter deadlines, and support each other better.

I finally moved on to my current role (yes, I continue to work in house!) where, among other things, I write Power BI reports that save my company many months of time every year, as well as generating business insight. Over the last 8 years I have written Excel, Power Query, Power Pivot and Power BI courses and have taught many around me how to get the best out of these brilliant tools, in a fun and entertaining style. I really hope that I can help you as well, so please check out my articles page and courses page to see if there’s something that tickles your fancy.