Life lessons from my first finance year-end close.

I know it’s been a while since my last blog post and long story short, I’ve been busy. I’ve thrown myself at my (fairly) new job working upwards of 55 to 60 hours per week and even on my weekends. Do I regret it? No. Working in finance, the end of the year is not a relaxation time but rather quite the opposite. Many companies want to close their books for the year and that means more work for people like myself. I don’t think the word “busy” thoroughly encapsulates my schedule for the past couple of months.

Now that I am out of the mountain that is year-end closing, I have had the chance to reflect on this experience. While it was an overall success in my eyes, this blog post is not for me to gloat. Rather, it is for me to take the lessons I’ve learned, apply it to real life, and now share it with all of you reading.

Some things are out of your control

For starters, I work in a financial consulting business where we serve clients in the form of companies. So, delivering our deliverables timely and effectively requires both us and the client to have a schedule and stick to the deadlines. On my end, I made the effort to create personal deadlines and a plan on how to hit them. I sent a schedule to my all my client teams, used an app to track my tasks, and worked my butt off to get things done. Spoiler: I did hit all of them without fail. Not only did I stick to my deadlines and even got a few things done early. I wish the same could be said about my clients. Out of the four clients that I am personally responsible for, only one had no delays in providing us the data that we needed (heck, one of them was nearly a whole week late). I will admit: this ticked me off, and being a newbie who wanted to prove himself, this did not ease the pressure I felt.

Taking a step back, I realized this was a situation where I could only control so much. This has been, for as long as I have been out of childhood, a struggle of mine: the ability to let go of things that I cannot control. I’ve always loved being at the helm and knowing that I had the authority to control how things would go. However, I am learning that this is a very idealistic perspective. Ideally in this situation, I would call my clients and push them to meet their deadlines. Realistically, that would get me fired. Instead, I had to deal with it and “bite the bullet” as my manager told me. While not a fun experience, it served as a reminder to me that some things are uncontrollable and there is nothing much you can do - you just have to work around that to the best of your ability.

The power of a disciplined mind

With clients making my work harder, working overtime with no overtime pay, and having minimal time to relax, this would send a good chunk of people off the rails. At times I pondered if doing this was worth it. Should I be working this hard? Why am I even doing this? Yet every time I thought these questions, I always had an answer and I pushed through. It wasn’t motivation nor divine intervention, but rather the mentality of “I have to do what I have to do”.

Now, you may ask “But Brandon, why do you have to do this?” Great question with simple answer: because that is who I am and what I believe in. Within my company, each client has its own team of about 3-4 people each and I am the one responsible for creating the deliverables for our clients. These people in my teams are relying on me to perform - I couldn’t bear the thought of letting them down just because I didn’t “feel” like doing work. What made me have this mindset? Why would I do things I didn’t feel like doing? One word: discipline. Without it, I would’ve been screwed. Hence why I think that culturing mental discipline is extremely important in succeeding in whatever path one chooses - it helps you have a good baseline to push through when things get tough.

Chaos presents an opportunity

In the book “Atomic Habits” by James Clear (a book I will certainly write a blog post or two about in the future), there is a chapter that talks about having a change in perspective about your habits. In this chapter, he writes that you should focus on a habit’s benefits as opposed to its drawbacks. Well, I believe that concept can be applied to a tough situation such as this one. Instead of focusing on the long hours, delayed responses, and high amounts of pressure and stress, I viewed this as a situation to prove myself to my peers and seniors: no matter how bad things seems to get, I can get through it. While this shift in perspective may seem simple, it truly can be the difference between hating the situation, to being fueled by the challenges in front of you. So, next time you are presented with something that challenges you, think of it as an opportunity - an opportunity to show others what you are made of.

“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity” ― Sun Tzu

The Aftermath

So, what is the aftermath? As 2024 dawned on us, I got through the year-end reporting with everything being done on time. Not to say it was smooth let alone perfect, but I would deem the situation as a success. Maybe it was luck, fate or a bit of both, but one of my co-workers was leaving which left some “open” clients to assign. I got a message from one of the managers to hop on a video call. Lo and behold, one of the open clients was assigned to me - my 5th client. More work? Absolutely. However, I viewed it as a sign that the company believes I can take on more - and I have quite the confidence that it is probably a result of my year-end performance. Again, it is about having a shift of perspective.