I'm Randy Brown, I am the director of financial planning and analytics at Nature's Sunshine Products we're a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange. If you are into finance at all and you followed our stock, you'll know that it's the most boring stock on the planet, which is just fine but it's where we are, It's a public company. My story begins as I started out as a music major in college, I was a saxophone performance major for the first three years, two and a half years of college, I mean it two and a half years before I realized that, that's not what I wanted to do but interestingly enough that a couple of years in college shaped everything that I became, if I hadn't done that, I don't think I would have gotten my very first job out of grad school and that shaped my entire career so I'll give you a little bit of that story. When I dropped out of the music program, it was 2006-2007. It was the middle of the financial crisis. It was just coming undone and the markets were going down. I was thinking, "I'm going to need a job." Fortunately for me, my father called me up and said, "Hey, Randy, I'm getting ready to retire and I want you to come to take over the family business." The downside is you need to get a degree in accounting and past the CBA exam and be okay with being a public accountant for the rest of your life. Job security is job security so I went for it. I got my degree in accounting from Brigham Young University passed the CBA exam about a year later and started my foray into tax and audit accounting for three or four years, three or four years into that, I realized that there are two kinds of people people who do don't want to do public accounting and crazy people me not being a crazy person. I realized that wasn't what I wanted to do, so I thought back to my college days and I had done IT support to pay through college. Image development and deployment and a bunch of cool stuff so I went back to grad school, got a master's degree in information systems. I felt like that was kind of a better blend for me using some of my finance skills and focus more on business applications versus doing hard computer science degrees so I did that and as soon as I graduated, it was time to figure out what I wanted to do, where I wanted to work and I found a job at a little retail products company. I went to I put my Rezaian and I got a callback and they said, we really want to talk to you and I came in and I sat down and I met with Greg, the hiring manager and he said, do you really play the saxophone that well apparently on my resume trying to fill up a page was hard when you were just kind of out of school. You had one job and some education so, at the very bottom I had a link to a video like a YouTube video of me playing the saxophone back in college and that was apparently what landed the interview. I'm not sure in that interview we talked about anything about business or finance or information systems we just talked about. We were name dropping we talked about Wayne Bergeron, who is a professional trumpet player that I knew and played with and my experience growing up in the music and I got the job because apparently the guy was even a bigger musician which was wonderful and I wouldn't have found that job if it hadn't been for my music background and if it hadn't been for the fact that I wasn't afraid to be me that didn't hide from the fact that I'm no longer a saxophone player and I'm an accountant or an information system first. Part of me is my music background I'm a serious nerd and frankly, I would tell everybody that's looking for what they want to do with life to find out who you are and because you never know where that's going to take you.

I'll start with the work hours and then move into responsibilities and decisions because one's a short answer and one's a little bit of a longer answer. I'm a salaried person and I'm expected to work normal business hours I've earned the right to have a very flexible work schedule so I don't have any formal flexibility If I need to take the morning off I just take the morning off If I need to leave early to pick up my kids from school or take him to some kind of action I just go. My bosses are behind me 100% and he's fantastic. Every once in a while, I do work from home just as the situation needs but generally speaking, I work in my office normal work weeks like a salaried employee. You don't get paid overtime for those occasional crunches If you're going to work in finance you need to understand that the first week of every month is really busy and then the rest the month isn't so I'll spend the first week and I'll work 80, 90, or 100 hours sometimes and then those other weeks 40 hours and that's kind of my weekly layout. It really goes in monthly, quarterly and annual cycles and then as far as responsibilities and decisions are concerned I am responsible for all forward-looking financial statements at this company so anything that hasn't actually happened is my responsibility. My friends and I joke that our job is just to make things up and it's not too far off from the truth and a better financial person is really good at predicting the future so I spent a lot of time forecasting sales by product, by the customer by country, by channel everything about forecasting what sales are going to be tomorrow is my wheelhouse then everything else just kind of pigeons off of that. As far as decisions, I do have a team that works underneath me I have a couple of financial analysts that work for me and so one of my responsibilities is making sure I give them enough to do and give them enough challenges and opportunities to grow so that they can be successful too.

Every company is a little bit different as far as what tools we use but there are a few things that I have used in literally every job and college which are Microsoft Access and Excel, especially virtual basic for applications behind the scenes running macros and custom calculations and things every single day of every single week of my life. I'm in those tools on top of that obviously Powerpoint and word are important for presenting what it is that I figure out from excel and access. I've worked in multiple ERP applications of enterprise resource planning, If you're not familiar with those tools just google the ERP annual and you will find who the leaders are. I've worked in SAP, I've worked in Oracle, I've worked in Netsuite, I've worked in dynamics from my Microsoft, those are the main ones that I've spent my time with and really those are just company-specific. Every company does an ERP implementation at some point and it's left to the finance and accounting people to clean up the pieces so I don't like working in those but here we are. Outside of that, I've just started dabbling in a new field of software called corporate performance management or sometimes called Enterprise Performance Management for the acronym Soup. The one we're working with right now is called planful and the responsibilities in that tool are to create templates that distribute information across the company so we have templates that are inside the tool distributed to our various market controllers and finance people. They fill out these templates with their information, whether its variants analysis from the prior-year budget or whether it's their own forward-looking projections. Everything goes into this tool and it rolls forward and consolidates all of the information going forward and then it becomes my job to take that information and determine which of it is credible and what needs to be adjusted so it's a pretty cool tool. Other tools I've worked with in my career or that I work with right now, I've worked in tableau I guess Salesforce bought them a little while ago so I probably won't work for them anymore I don't like Salesforce just personal opinion, It's not for me It's not my style but I've also worked in Power BI, which is competitive to tableau by Microsoft It's a lot more affordable, maybe not as good but again affordability It's sometimes important. Then when I'm coding, I'm coding in one of two languages, I'm either in VBA building back ends for Excel or access or I'm working in Python.I'm starting to learn R a little bit, but my career has transitioned out of the more hard development space and more intomanagement and people skills