And How Knowing It Could Triple Your Pay

By Hiran de Silva

There is something your CFO probably doesn’t know about Excel.

And that creates an extraordinary opportunity for you.

Not an opportunity to learn another function.

Not another formula.

Not Power Query.

Not dynamic arrays.

Not LAMBDA.

Not Python.

Not Office Scripts.

Not even VBA.

This is about something much more fundamental.

It is about knowing something that could completely change the way your CFO thinks about Excel.

And, in doing so, completely change the way your CFO thinks about you.

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The CFO’s dilemma

CFOs have a problem.

They rely heavily on spreadsheets.

They like spreadsheets.

Their people understand spreadsheets.

Spreadsheets are flexible, immediate and extraordinarily adaptable.

But apparently that comes at a price.

We are constantly told that spreadsheets create problems with:

Scalability.

Collaboration.

Consolidation.

Disconnected processes.

Governance.

Audit trails.

Version control.

Security.

Manageability.

And, of course…

One version of the truth.

These aren’t trivial concerns for a CFO.

Their job, their reputation and sometimes their career depend upon controlling precisely these things.

So the CFO appears to be caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

On one side is Excel.

Familiar. Flexible. Ubiquitous.

But supposedly inherently dangerous at scale.

On the other side are the systems being offered as the escape route.

Planning systems.

Reporting systems.

Consolidation systems.

ERP systems.

Specialist FP&A platforms.

These may involve substantial expenditure, lengthy implementations, disruption to the business and handing considerably more control over to IT and external vendors.

Meanwhile, the idea that the organisation can simply “get rid of spreadsheets” is fantasy.

So what is the CFO supposed to do?

There is a third possibility.

And astonishingly, hardly anybody tells them about it.

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The Gordon Ramsay Experiment

I discovered an interesting way of demonstrating this.

I call it the Gordon Ramsay Experiment.

It is deliberately simple.

Almost an interview question.

You give Excel users a straightforward business problem and ask them how they would solve it.

The precise challenge isn’t important here.

What matters is what happened.

Broadly speaking, the people tackling the challenge divided into two groups.

About 99% approached it one way.

About 1% approached it completely differently.

Then we showed the two approaches to the people who actually employ these people.

The CEO class.

The CFO class.

The bosses.

The decision-makers.

And their preference was overwhelming.

They wanted the 1%.

Then we asked the candidates themselves:

Which group do you think the employers will choose?

They knew too.

The 1%.

Which creates a rather interesting question.

What does the 1% know that the 99% don’t?

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It isn’t advanced Excel

This is where things become interesting.

Was the 1% better at advanced Excel?

No.

Did they know more functions?

No.

Were they using Power Query?

No.

Dynamic arrays?

No.

LAMBDA?

No.

Python?

No.

Office Scripts?

No.

Was it VBA?

Not necessarily.

In fact, the difference can be represented by something extraordinarily small.

A tiny change in thinking.

One small step for a spreadsheet.

Almost like discovering a switch that nobody told you existed.

And once you flick that switch…

…the spreadsheet becomes something completely different.

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The Digital Librarian

Imagine a normal organisation.

There are hundreds of spreadsheets.

Perhaps thousands.

And scattered amongst those spreadsheets is data.

Someone has one version.

Someone else has another.

Files are emailed around.

Copies are created.

Consolidations have to be performed.

People ask:

“Have I got the latest version?”

“Has France submitted yet?”

“Which number is correct?”

“Who changed this?”

“Where did this figure come from?”

“Can somebody send me the spreadsheet?”

This is the world the CFO has been taught to associate with Excel.

Now make one small conceptual change.

Take the data out of the spreadsheets.

Put it somewhere central.

A database.

And let every spreadsheet communicate with it.

I call that database the Digital Librarian.

The spreadsheets ask the Librarian for information.

GET.

The spreadsheets give information to the Librarian.

PUT.

The Librarian remembers everything.

Who supplied it.

When they supplied it.

What version it is.

Who is allowed to see it.

Who is allowed to change it.

Every spreadsheet now works from the same centrally held data.

Suddenly everybody really can be singing from the same hymn sheet.

And something rather remarkable happens.

Many of the supposed inherent problems of spreadsheets begin to disappear.

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Enter the Excel House of Horrors

Take that familiar catalogue of spreadsheet horrors.

Poor scalability.

Poor collaboration.

Consolidation nightmares.

Disconnected processes.

Multiple versions of the truth.

Weak governance.

Weak security.

Poor auditability.

Version chaos.

Manual distribution.

Fragility.

Now take them one by one.

And demonstrate what happens when Excel works with a Digital Librarian.

Not with a PowerPoint presentation.

Not with a theoretical architecture diagram.

With Excel.

Live.

In demonstrations lasting less than a minute.

You can demonstrate hundreds of users collaborating.

You can demonstrate consolidation.

You can demonstrate drilldown.

You can demonstrate audit trails.

You can demonstrate access control.

You can demonstrate centralised data.

You can demonstrate one version of the truth.

You can demonstrate Excel operating across an enterprise.

And this is where the conversation with the CFO changes completely.

Because you are no longer arguing that spreadsheets don’t have problems.

Of course badly designed spreadsheet processes have problems.

You are demonstrating something much more important:

those problems are not necessarily limitations of Excel.

They may simply be limitations of the way Excel has been designed and deployed.

And that distinction could be worth an enormous amount of money.

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Now imagine demonstrating this to your CFO

This is where the Gordon Ramsay Experiment becomes important.

Imagine everybody else in the room knows Excel in the conventional way.

They know formulas.

PivotTables.

Power Query.

Maybe VBA.

Maybe Python.

Maybe Office Scripts.

They are all perfectly competent Excel users.

Then you demonstrate something none of them knew Excel could do.

You show the CFO a business process that currently involves hundreds of spreadsheets.

You show the chaos.

Then you show the Digital Librarian.

You press a button.

The data moves.

You press another.

The consolidated result appears.

You drill from Group…

…to Region…

…to Country…

…to City…

…to individual business unit.

Someone changes something at the other end of the process.

You refresh.

There it is.

Then you show who changed it and when.

That is the moment when you stop being merely “the Excel person”.

You become the person in the room who knows how to solve a business problem that everybody else assumed required something much bigger.

That changes your value.

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That is what happened to me

This isn’t a career theory I invented afterwards.

It happened to me.

Repeatedly.

I can point to four major client engagements where essentially the same thing occurred.

I arrived as the ordinary Excel temp or contractor.

I demonstrated what I could do.

And the relationship changed.

In one case I was hired for approximately six weeks.

The original engagement, expressed in today’s money, would have paid me roughly £6,000.

Then they saw what was possible.

I was invited to stay.

I was effectively allowed to choose my own projects.

My rate was immediately increased to approximately three times my original rate.

I remained there for around six years.

Eventually my rate reached approximately 7.5 times my original rate.

Over the engagement, expressed in today’s money, the client paid me approximately £1.4 million.

Another client changed the budget for my engagement dramatically after about a fifteen-minute conversation.

Another brought me in for a short assignment and, after seeing what was possible, paid me approximately three times the original rate and retained me long term.

My total billing there, in today’s money, was approximately £540,000.

That engagement was subsequently mentioned by WIRED in an article referring to my “six-figure spreadsheets.”

And the extraordinary thing?

At that client, the core solution consisted of only three spreadsheets.

Then there was another organisation that had abandoned a major SAP implementation after spending a very substantial amount of money and more than a year on it.

I wasn’t commissioned to replace SAP.

I created a prototype as a teaching exercise for a colleague.

He showed it to his boss.

His boss showed it upwards.

And suddenly they could see Excel doing what they had been trying to achieve through a major systems project.

Again, my value was no longer being measured as that of an ordinary Excel contractor.

I was brought in as a consultant and mentor.

Again, at roughly three times the normal Excel rate.

There is a pattern here.

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You don’t triple your pay by knowing three times as many formulas

That, for me, is the central lesson.

The market doesn’t necessarily pay you according to how difficult your Excel technique is.

It pays according to the value of the problem you can solve.

You could spend years becoming extraordinarily knowledgeable about Excel functions and still compete in a market containing millions of other Excel-skilled people.

Or you can acquire one piece of knowledge that allows you to walk into a finance department and solve a problem that management believed Excel couldn’t solve.

Now your competitive position is completely different.

You are no longer competing with the other Excel people.

You are potentially solving problems associated with highly paid consultants, enterprise systems and major transformation projects.

That is why I talk about Triple Your Pay with Excel.

It isn’t:

“Learn these ten clever formulas and demand a pay rise.”

It is:

Learn how to create dramatically more value with the tool you already have.

Then demonstrate that value.

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What the CFO doesn’t know — yet

The CFO knows about Excel.

The CFO probably knows about spreadsheet risk.

The CFO has almost certainly heard about spreadsheet hell.

The CFO knows about version control.

The CFO knows about consolidation problems.

The CFO knows about governance.

The CFO knows about disconnected processes.

The CFO has probably sat through presentations explaining why all of this proves the organisation needs another system.

But there is one question the CFO may never have been invited to ask:

What if Excel itself was never the problem?

What if the problem was the architecture?

What if all those spreadsheets didn’t have to behave like isolated documents?

What if they could operate as clients of centrally managed data?

What if the familiar spreadsheet could become the front end to an enterprise process?

What if the CFO could keep the flexibility, familiarity and immediacy of Excel…

…without accepting the chaos traditionally associated with hundreds of disconnected spreadsheet files?

That is the missing piece.

And the extraordinary opportunity is that you can be the person who shows them.

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Become the 1%

This is my pep talk to Excel people.

You don’t have to believe me.

You don’t even have to decide immediately whether this approach is relevant to you.

But learn what it is.

Look at the demonstrations.

Understand the Digital Librarian.

Understand GET and PUT.

Understand why separating the data from the spreadsheet changes the architecture completely.

Then decide.

Because I believe this represents one of the biggest opportunities available to an Excel professional.

Not because it makes Excel cleverer.

But because it makes you more valuable.

The 99% can continue learning how to make better spreadsheets.

There is nothing wrong with that.

But the 1% can learn how to use Excel to solve problems that the CFO has been told spreadsheets cannot solve.

And when you are the only person in the room who can demonstrate that…

…you are no longer just the Excel person.

You are the person who knows something the CFO doesn’t know.

Yet.