Howard Barash of Property Resources Corp. Talks New Tech

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MICHAEL PRAEGER 

Welcome to “The Power of Change” – the podcast that delves into the intersection of leadership and technology in the finance world. I’m your host – Michael Praeger, the CEO and co-founder of AvidXchange. In each episode, I dive into the leadership topics and industry trends with business leaders, partners and customers who embrace the power of change.

Our guest in this episode is Howard Barash, Chief Financial Officer at Property Resources Corporation. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Howard for many years, both as a customer and within the industry. You’ve been at the forefront of technology change his entire career – ever since I’ve known him actually. He’s been an advocate for how do I incorporate innovation into what’s mainly been a very labor intensive, paper intensive real estate financial processes. I thought you’d be a great guest, really a perfect guest for this week’s podcast. 

0:58 
HOWARD BARASH

Thanks. I’m thrilled to be here. 

01:00
MICHAEL PRAEGER

First of all, let’s start out by maybe giving our audience your number one piece of advice when you kind of interact with your team and coaching other leaders on how did they become strategic within their organizations to drive change and the mindsets that are characteristic of those types of leaders?

01:17
HOWARD BARASH

Yeah, and as you and I both know, Mike, change is hard, right? And it doesn’t come easy and people don’t let go of the past willingly. Um, that’s the number one thing we fight is people talk about wanting to change, but what I see is most people are invested in the status quo, right? It’s, it’s easy. It’s, it doesn’t require a lot of heavy lift.

So the number one piece of advice is you have to be willing to question everything, right? And you have to be able to say, “I know we’ve been here. But the way it’s going now will only take us so far.” And a lot of times change, you know, there are many drivers, right? Change is driven by growth. Change is driven by inefficiency. Change is driven by the fact that leadership changes. You know, you bring in a new team of leaders who are willing to question the status quo. But the number one barrier to change is when people don’t want to let go of the old ways and they don’t realize that they’re getting in their own way by not letting go of the old ways. 

02:26
MICHAEL PRAEGER

Yeah, early in my career I had a leader that I worked for back when I was doing venture capital and he had a saying about the older that he got he had a mindset around being uncomfortable. And he’s like, the more uncomfortable I am and trying new things, that’s what leads to staying current, staying relevant, and really then embracing being a change agent for the organization. And I think when we first met, we were a lot younger in our careers and now we’re a little bit more probably wiser and a little bit, you know, have some experience behind us.

But I think especially as leaders age it’s easier to become comfortable and kind of keep doing things the same way as you progress in your career, but I think there’s a lot to be said about that mindset of being curious and embracing being uncomfortable and just have you noticed anything similar related to your career?

03:30 
HOWARD BARASH

Absolutely. Both for myself, right, in taking new roles. Going from consulting in house and kind of practicing what you’ve preached your whole career. You have to go into that discomfort zone. I mean one of the most uncomfortable situations I’ve ever placed myself in is when I was hired to take over as CFO of a company trying to go public, getting in front of the SEC. I had no framework to talk to the Chief Accountant of the SEC.

Go figure. Right. Right. And I had to make a case for a change in a policy they had. And, boy, it got terse. We ended up going at each other over the phone. Needless to say the initial conversation didn’t end well, but I stood my ground and I kept after it, kept after it, kept after it. And six months later. Guess what? The SEC adopted my policy. The Chief Accountant retired, so maybe that was part of it. They went through their own change. But, you know, put yourself in an uncomfortable situation, and that’s how you grow. That’s how you continue to grow. And yeah, when did you and I become the old guys in the industry, right? We’ve talked about that before.

04:40 
MICHAEL PRAEGER

I keep telling myself it’s mindset, right? 

04:42

HOWARD BARASH

It’s mindset, but you know, factually, we are. We’re the elder generation. You and I in particular always work sort of above our pay grade, right? We were talking to senior leaders in companies back in our twenties and thirties, and boy, if that wasn’t an uncomfortable situation and making people believe you really knew what you’re talking about. But, yeah, the day you stop wanting to get out of your comfort zone is the day it’s probably time to retire.

And again, that goes back to the notion of change, right? Some leaders will want to stay in that comfort zone and that’s, that’s where you have to move them off of. 

05:23
MICHAEL PRAEGER

Well, let’s talk about some of that change you’ve gone through. So, you know, long-time industry consultant, you were on kind of the forefront in the early days of promoting automation around the accounts payable process. And that’s how we met. Long career as a consultant, then to move into an operating role with a company – previously one that was in the forefront of going public and how did you navigate some of that change for yourself going from the consultant role to being an operator within a company?

05:55 
HOWARD BARASH

It’s a role that going in house is a role that’s much more visible because as a consultant, it’s a little bit easy in that you get to make a whole bunch of recommendations, maybe implement a whole bunch of recommendations, and then you go away. And yeah, maybe, the success and failure of what you do and recommend your client lives with.

Now the stakes are a lot higher. The success or failure of what I do, I have to live with every day. And I’m accountable to my senior leadership to say, “Hey, I recommended this change.” I drove this change. I put this policy in place. It better work because I’m going to live with the result of it.

06:39
MICHAEL PRAEGER

We’re going to bring context here to maybe how old we actually are. But I think you and I are kind of the vintage where we’ve probably now, we’ve seen really three massive waves of innovation, technology change, and we’re about to see a fourth wave.

And so I kind of think of those first three as it started with the evolution of the desktop laptop, you know, kind of the mobile device. Right. The second one is around the internet. We all remember probably when you got your first AOL account, right?

And the early days of the internet and just how that ended up changing everything and then the third one being kind of the evolution of the cloud for business applications. I still remember in the early days of AvidXchange, the number one sales barrier we had is CFOs telling me they didn’t feel comfortable having their financial data in the cloud. It had to run on premise behind their firewall, you know, data center. And now if I went back to that same group of CFOs and said, good news, we came out with an on prem version. They’d be like, Mike, it has to be in the cloud. Right but it probably took 15 years to make that full evolution.

And now we’re about to enter into, we’ll see, but it may be one of the biggest changes of all, and that’s the kind of the evolution of, uh, you know, AI and how that’s going to impact companies. 

And so kind of across those four, we’ve seen a lot, but I’d love to get your perspective on AI and kind of that maybe fourth generation now of kind of change that we’re going to go through. 

08:11
HOWARD BARASH

So I have very mixed feelings about AI and where it can take us. I think properly controlled, it’s going to unleash an evolution, probably a revolution, in the way we do business, because mundane tasks can readily be automated, right? You can give AI a set of tasks, or a set, or a query, and get back a whole finished analysis. But that said, it really, right now at least, it’s only as good as the human beings that control it.

AI for some analysis, it’s going to allow us to do a lot more with information. I’ve always said that we go from data to information, information to knowledge and knowledge to intelligence, right? Data for data’s sake – I think we’ve all gone through that, you know, that whole thing, the first wave of data warehouses, which is a big, you know, go back through your cycles, just a big lump of data. You couldn’t do very much with it, you know? 

So we started to generate some reports on top of that, right? And we got information, we got useful information. And the next wave took that information and started to generate knowledge for us, right? We could take it and learn things and get to some nuggets that were valuable to running our business.

You know, now we’re going to go from knowledge to intelligence and AI can facilitate that. If we, if we need to find certain patterns or trends or analytics in data, AI can help unleash that and do that a lot faster than a human being can in terms of taking a spreadsheet, going through it, finding, you know, looking for trends or writing macros or programs that will analyze AI. You can feed it a set of parameters and come back with an answer, but we’re still controlling. We’re still on top of it. 

You know, I’d like to think that we’re not going to get to, um, you know, the world that the Terminator lived in, right? Um, where AI and technology takes over our day to day lives and we’re not going to live in the Matrix, all those sci fi things that we’ve gone through. But AI properly applied I think can really add value and capability to our industry.

10:28
MICHAEL PRAEGER

Well, that’s well said. And Howard, there’s a lot of nuggets throughout this conversation that you’ve provided and maybe just to kind of wrap this week’s webcast, three quick takeaways that I have related to this discussion, that you prompted me with is the importance of those mindsets. Number one is question everything. Right. And as it relates to change and innovation. 

The second one is really be curious and continue to be learning. And the third one is I love the story about having the confidence to put yourself in a situation that you haven’t been in before and try new things like going up against the Chief Accounting Officer of the SEC when you had no experience in doing that. And so I think having the confidence to try new things is a great lesson as well. 

I think that’s a wrap for this week. And, thanks Howard. You’ve always been a great industry ambassador and looking forward to – I don’t know what you call the next stage of our careers here in the industry but I have confidence it’s probably going to be the best and probably the most fun. So looking forward to going through that process with you. Same here. Thanks, Mike. I appreciate you having me on.

11:42
MICHAEL PRAEGER

Thanks for listening to the Power of Change presented by AvidXchange. If you like what you heard, subscribe to our channel and leave a five-star review. While you’re waiting for the next episode, head on over to avidxchange.com for our latest research reports and business insights. And if you’re interested in learning more about accounts payable automation, click the link in our show notes to connect with our experts. Thanks again for listening to the Power of Change. We’ll see you next time.