In this episode of Careers in Finance on FinPod, we sit down with Carolina Lago, who has extensive experience in financial planning and analysis (FP&A) and corporate finance. Carolina shares her career journey from studying business to becoming a leader in FP&A, emphasizing how the role has evolved from mere financial planning to a strategic focus on guiding companies’ futures. She discusses her participation in an IPO, highlighting the invaluable learning opportunity it provided.

Carolina is committed to lifelong learning, pursuing certifications like the FMVA and building Tactic, where she develops corporate training programs for finance teams. She advises young professionals to actively seek opportunities, bring innovative solutions, and align their work with their interests to advance their careers.

Tune in for insights on career growth and the evolving landscape of corporate finance roles!

Transcript

Anna Talerico (00:15)
Welcome to Careers in Finance and I am so excited to be here today with Carolina Lago. Carolina, thank you for joining us.

Carolina Lago (00:23)
Thanks, Anna. Thanks for having me.

Anna Talerico (00:26)
I’ve been really excited to chat with you ever since we first connected on LinkedIn, because you share such incredible valuable information around financial modeling. And I think that’s first how I came to see you on LinkedIn. And then as I started to just look in a little bit more into your background, and your career throughout the different roles that you’ve had in finance, and then now what you’re doing at a tactic, I thought, well, we should really talk about just your career journey and

Carolina Lago (00:34)
Thanks.

Anna Talerico (00:53)
leading up to what you’re doing now. So let’s go ahead and get started if that sounds good. Okay, so maybe let’s start with how you first came into finance. I always like to ask people, did you study it? Was it intentional? Was it a choice? Or was it an accidental path? Because so many people end up kind of accidentally finding into finance roles. But what about for you?

Carolina Lago (00:58)
Yeah, that’s great.

It was not actually an accident because my bachelor degree was in business, but my favorite subjects in college were all towards finance, cost, accounting, accounting itself, and all the corporate finance subjects. That’s what I like to study the most. So I knew I was going to end up in finance at some point. I studied a little bit for two years, I guess, my two first years were in

commercial, like a commercial side of new business analysis and then I just shift towards finance already and I have been in FP &A ever since. But when I first started it was not called FP&A it was just planning, financial planning. We didn’t used to say a lot of the analysis it was just financial planning but that was I think back then 20 years ago nobody talked too much about FP &A itself. So it was more like a

evolution I think of financial planning as it used to be just corporate financial planning the people that did the budget and forecast to now the professionals that guide the company towards the future that can look to the back and see what’s what’s been going on and compare to how the company is shifting to this future towards the strategy of the company so it’s more like an evolution of these professionals and I’ve seen all

Anna Talerico (02:47)
I think.

Carolina Lago (02:47)
all of that throughout the career because when I started it was not even FPNA it was totally different.

Anna Talerico (02:54)
I think that’s right because you see more and more attention being spent on the FP &A role. I don’t remember anybody talking about it really 10 years ago and now even small startups will, you know, one of their first hires in that finance function and department will be an FP &A role. So it is interesting to see how important it’s become. But, and I want to talk about that for sure, but going back to some of your first roles, like what was the first role that you had out of college? What was that role like?

Carolina Lago (03:03)
Yeah.

Yes, yes.

Yeah.

The first one was in commercial. I was assisting the commercial, the salespeople on a company called LG Electronics. You probably know that for your monitors and TVs and all of that. Back then they did a lot of cell phones and monitors and it was the beginning of the LCD monitors. It was the change for the big monitors to the real thin ones and the thin TVs and everything. So all of that

was a new business and they were always searching for new technologies, bringing new technologies from Korea to implement in Brazil. So I was in the commercial doing that analysis for the commercial team working together with the salespeople actually but as an analyst. So I was in the office I was not going out as a salesperson but I was like going through all of this new business and it was great to see that and I was

I was always pushing that a little bit to finance, but finance was not my goal actually. It was new business analyst. So that’s when I started to, I already had in college all those finance subjects that I liked so much to study, but I didn’t work directly with a finance manager, with a finance team. Then I moved it. That was just a year and a half of my career. And then I moved as a finance analyst in what I call FP&A.

but it was actually finance planning. So there you go.

Anna Talerico (04:58)
You know, this is an interesting, I’m glad that you mentioned this first role wasn’t really sitting in the finance team because I think sometimes people don’t realize how many paths into finance there can be. And it can start with an analyst role. Yeah, not sitting in finance can be actually a great way to understand business that helps you as a then when you start to roll into like the finance function inside of an organization, right? Yeah.

Carolina Lago (05:03)
Yeah.

Exactly. And it’s very important. Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly, yeah. Yeah, I believe so. I believe this was a great first step for me. It shaped me a lot into knowing what a company like a manufacturing company actually was doing. And because my first goal in finance was a service company and I’ve been doing more on the service side of the businesses. Most of my career is in service instead of manufacturing. But this first step in

into business actually, being on a manufacturing company and being on sales, you can actually see how business develops. So it was great to have that experience before even stepping into finance.

Anna Talerico (06:07)
Love that, I love that, because I do think people need to kind of keep their paths open and realize that there are many paths into that finance role. So, you did that first analyst role with the sales team for about a year and a half, and then what was your first role after that that you said you went into and now at the finance function?

Carolina Lago (06:11)
Yeah.

Exactly.

Yes, that was on a financial service company, a company that process credit cards. It was actually on that time, it processed all MasterCard transactions in Brazil. It was just two companies doing all the acquiring and processing of credit card transactions, one for Visa and the other one for MasterCard and Diners. So it was a huge amount of transactions on a small, I would say not a small,

but a medium size in terms of number of employees. So it was very good to have that team. It was like 30 people, probably 40 people in finance together with accounting and planning. Altogether was about 40, maybe mostly 50 people. But it was great to have that interaction. Everybody was working together and it was really easy to talk to everybody. It was not like those huge silos where you have FP and they want to talk to you

on one side and accounting on the other side and all the business on the others. No, it’s everybody was working together towards one single goal. And I had amazing job opportunities there. I got to participate on the side because I was planning, but I got to participate on the IPO of the company, which was for me on the beginning of the career was amazing because I could see this view of a new public company

being born and creating an investor relations department, being able to help them craft the reports and the financial analysis that was needed to show to the market what the company was. It was amazing and it was a very successful IPO. It raised, I think it was around $2 billion, so it was huge, historical huge. So it was great to participate on that. And I had other opportunities along with this first…

company that

it’s unbeatable. It’s just for somebody that is on the beginning of the career, it was unbeatable the opportunities that I had. I could implement a planning software, which was, I think, the best part of my stay there, of my job there. I learned so much with that. I got to do a zero-based budget, which was amazing to learn about the company from the ground.

Zero everything, let’s see what you do. Is this really necessary? So, I went to a bunch of meetings with my boss like to learn about all of those processes in the company. What are really necessary? Let’s just bring to zero and let’s just build that again. So this was amazing opportunities I had on this first job. And I think it shaped a lot of what my professional career went on to be after that.

It was great.

Anna Talerico (09:28)
What an incredible opportunity because it sounds like to me you hit so many things there, and I’m sure it was just a fraction of all the things you got exposed to that really make you so well-rounded, right? Like going through an IPO, incredible experience. Something I always say to people, both in finance and out of finance, something I say is if in your career, early in your career, you can go through either something like an IPO experience or even something like a merger and acquisition, it’s…

Carolina Lago (09:39)
Yeah.

Exactly.

Yes

Anna Talerico (09:56)
is you don’t realize it at the time, but it’s like getting a whole other business degree, the things you get exposed to. I think you don’t even sometimes realize all the things you’re learning and processing until you’re out on the other side of it, but what an incredible experience. And then you got to stand up some new systems, which is a really important part of now FP &A roles in particular, these new systems that you might have to implement. And then the zero -based budget, which can be such a clarifying experience, right?

Carolina Lago (10:01)
Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yes, yes. It’s like learning the process actually.

Anna Talerico (10:26)
Yeah, nice. So yeah, yeah, exactly. From the ground up. Well, maybe some of our listeners don’t know what a zero-based budget is. So how would you describe it to somebody that didn’t know what a zero-based budget was?

Carolina Lago (10:41)
Okay, so usually I don’t know how much everybody is used to budgets itself, but with the budget process usually you just grab whatever you had last year and you grow a little bit and you keep your budget line or maybe you have top-down metrics to follow. That’s how usually people build budgets. I know you should be calculating the budget all over every year, but that’s not everybody. That’s not exactly what everybody.

So what we usually do is we keep going with the budget. We’re not gonna lose our budget. We just keep growing it or maybe maintaining it or just keeping what the management is telling us. With the zero-based budget, we just zero everything. And it’s like we’re building the company from zero. We want to know every process. Why do you do it? We want to understand if we go up from zero, it doesn’t matter how much budget you had last year, how much do you need now to…

keep processing and if the processes are really necessary what can be cut and it’s not about just cutting from the budget but it’s cutting processes that are not needed and going back to the core of the business and see if we are actually doing what we’re supposed to do. So it’s like we’re building the company from zero again even though we already have it and of course we do comparisons with the budgets that we would have if we were just

going like business as usual, but we do try to recalculate and understand what everybody does. So we have meetings, the process back then was meetings with everybody. So we scheduled meetings back to back. It was like probably one or two months with meetings back to back with the consultants and me, my boss and the team that was involved in this zero base budget.

and the teams of the operations like we had a meeting with the marketing team So it was not just how much of the sales are we going to spend this year? No, why we are doing this in this campaign? Why do we need that? How much does it cost? What if we don’t do it? What is the losses that we have? So for sales, for example It was a little sad that we end up losing half of the teams in sales because it was not necessary for the new

strategy that we were heading to. But then we had to recalculate why do we need all those people who are in the office? Do they need office? Do they need office space if they’re staying in the street all the time? So that was something else that we did. We cut the office space and we gave it back one full floor of the company because we didn’t need actually all the office space to the sales team and we changed a little bit the way the sales team were located. They had

a right to have a hotel chair and that was very new back then because everybody was we were not talking about covid time we talk 2010 so it’s not useful to nobody was used to have this hotel desks back then it was very new concept but the sales team were like you’re going to be on the street you don’t need a desk full time so we’re going to give one full floor and then we just have half of the space for the

Anna Talerico (13:46)
Yeah.

Carolina Lago (14:10)
sales team and they’re gonna stay there for a while and then they’re gonna stay on the street the rest of the day. So that was the type of decisions that we had to make with the budget. So we cut it where we had to cut, but we needed to understand first how the process are done and why do we need those expenses and if they are really necessary to achieve the company’s strategy. So that’s basically what the zero budget is.

Anna Talerico (14:39)
That was a great explanation. And there’s oftentimes they are used for looking for cost savings and things like that. But it’s interesting. I work a lot with small and mid-sized startups, tech startups, and there usually is a time when a company has gone through a growth period that the founder or the CEO starts to feel like they don’t understand the business anymore or things feel less efficient or less, there’s less velocity than there used to be.

Carolina Lago (14:44)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Anna Talerico (15:05)
And one of the things I recommend is to go through a process similar to a zero -based budget. You know, go through a zero -based budgeting process and through that, the executive team and the leader learns about what are people actually doing now, right? They understand the business better and it can be so clarifying and you can find these things that we’re doing that we don’t need to be doing or we shouldn’t be doing and, you know, how does the work of everybody align to the strategy? So there are so many ways that going through that process can be helpful.

Carolina Lago (15:09)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anna Talerico (15:34)
Let alone the budget savings on top of that that usually comes out of it. Yeah. Fantastic.

Carolina Lago (15:39)
Yeah, it goes a little back to the transformation projects too. Even big companies when they go through a transformation, it’s sort of like the zero base budget, but they just do a step back and see if they are spending actually the resources where they need to be spending because especially on large corporations, I went through a transformation too after on another job, a bigger company, that we found out that most of the people were doing

things just to be busy. So there were a lot of busy work that was not connected and it’s not their fault. It’s just lack of, like probably…

management probably. They were just doing what they were told to do. So there are a lot of projects that had no sense with the strategy. There’s no meaning for it to exist. And we see that it’s a lot of busy work and it’s not connected to what the company really needs to be doing to achieve the best results. So that’s a little bit of the transformation projects are too.

Anna Talerico (16:47)
Yeah, and you’ve hit on something. I think actually there’s this kernel here of, so often people don’t realize how strategic the finance function is. And thinking about your role coming up in finance and having exposure to so much and having such an incredible career, finance is not just about the numbers, it’s about understanding the business strategy and helping people connect their initiatives and what they’re doing to that business strategy.

Carolina Lago (16:56)
Yeah.

Anna Talerico (17:13)
And it’s such a strategic function inside the business. And I think sometimes people don’t realize that. Yeah.

Carolina Lago (17:13)
Yeah.

Yes. Yeah, I think that’s the evolution of FP &A. What I see is it’s more less than just creating budgets and more looking into the strategy and trying to guide the company towards that strategy. It’s the new, it’s a new function of FP &A, the evolution.

Anna Talerico (17:22)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly. So you were at this company, you had exposure to incredible, you know, just diverse, wide swath of types of projects, went through an incredible IPO. What did you do after that company? What were your next roles after that?

Carolina Lago (17:49)
I spent a small amount of time, maybe a year, a year and a half on a company that is an American company and I was responsible to consolidate the Latin America FP&A. Now my role was already FP &A, was already officially called FP &A. That was 10 years ago, 10 or 15 years ago. And I spent I think one year and a half there. And my role was to do the FP &A for the whole P &L.

Anna Talerico (18:05)
Okay, got it.

Carolina Lago (18:19)
I would say but for different countries in Latin America and report that to United States so I spent a year and a half there and then I moved to US it was not a long time because I had to move to US with my husband and that’s what I spent the most of my time at the last company that I was more than 10 years so that’s where I stay now not not anymore but last

Anna Talerico (18:46)
You have been, so yeah, and you’ve lived so many places, which has got to help make you just really inform your view too of your role in finance and just being, you know, culturally and different countries have, you know, different norms and processes. So it just really makes you so much more, you know, broad in terms of your vantage point and how you sit and look at things, I’m sure.

Carolina Lago (19:12)
Yeah, I can say that the culture, the differences of culture really helped shaping my career, I think. And I think studying in Brazil was a great point because people in Brazil, they really value the experience over the higher education first. So they go out of college straight to the market, to jobs, and they do so much with this job.

Anna Talerico (19:33)
Mmm.

Carolina Lago (19:41)
Like I did on the beginning of my career, they’re exposed to so much and also the challenges of the country itself, which is always like high inflation and a lot of macroeconomical problems. So you have to really be tough to try to understand all of this and position the company in a worldwide market because usually, at least the companies that I work for were like towards the world, were like global companies

in Brazil. So it was really nice for me to, I was really lucky I would say, to start my career in Brazil because it really, how can I say, it really, the position of the experience is more important. It’s not that it’s more important, but probably the education is not so…

pursued on the beginning of the career as it is in the US and probably in other countries. So I saw in the US I was a little bit different. People go out of college straight to a grad school and I believe I like better the way I did. I don’t advise people to follow just what I do, but I like better the way I did because I got experience and then I did my master’s degree. So I already had

that experience to apply and to understand better. So a lot of things that I went through during my master’s degree, I had already done in college, but I didn’t have the experience. So it’s a little different when you do that after so much experience. You have another type of learning, another type of absorption of that knowledge. It’s different. You can apply right away. It’s different from the beginning of the career when people didn’t have any experience and jump right off.

Anna Talerico (21:31)
Yeah.

Carolina Lago (21:36)
read on a master’s degree, even a doctorate degree. So yeah.

Anna Talerico (21:41)
Right, it’s true. So I want to come back in a minute and talk about tactic and what you’re doing there. But you’ve talked about learning. So let’s actually use this as a moment to just chat a bit about your ongoing approach to learning because you are somebody that I know to be a lifelong learner and you have so much experience and you are sharing that experience and teaching too, but also.

Carolina Lago (21:58)
I am.

Yeah.

Anna Talerico (22:05)
remain a lifelong learner. So let’s actually spend a few minutes about that because when I first met you on LinkedIn, I didn’t know that you were a CFI member, and we’re pursuing your FMVA, which was fun to find out when we connected. So that was great. And you know, somebody so experienced, but you still care about your skills and developing them. And then recently you got an FMI designation, which is incredible, not easy to do, I know. So share a little bit about your philosophy and your approach

Carolina Lago (22:14)
Yeah

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anna Talerico (22:33)
to continuing to develop yourself even while you share your knowledge to help others develop themselves.

Carolina Lago (22:41)
Yeah, so I have a problem with learning. I am addicted to it. So it’s actually, it’s really a problem. I buy more courses than I should and I’m always doing like three or four at the same time. And just for the fun of doing, I really like to do them. So when I, along with my career, I kept doing this but not searching for any designation for it. So I didn’t do so much of formal education like

with titles and things like that during my career. I always did if I needed to apply something I would go and learn it and apply it and just learn informally and never even care about the designations or anything like that. I never even heard about the FMI and the FMVA until I stopped being on that bubble that I was in the corporate world. I was not participating so much out there. So when I first heard about

those two I taught myself I taught myself I really need to try this I need to put my skills to test it was more for the fun for the challenging myself then for the designation itself but I really really recommend not only the process for both of the designations but

also to prove your skills to the market it’s great to have that and to be able to prove that you actually can do because those two both the FMI and the FMVA those two are are very credible designations that if you manage to get them they’re very different from each other. That’s why I always tell everybody do both if you can. They’re very different from each other the FMI will test you for time and for

or one skill only, CFI and the FMVA will test you, will teach you actually so many skills and that’s why I didn’t finish my FMVA. I’m not in a hurry. I keep getting distracted with a few courses that I find interesting and stopping one in the middle and going back and sometimes I do the whole course and I leave the test for later and then I don’t get the certificate yet. So I have a few that is…

They are set on the side for me to do the test, but I’ll get there. By the end of the year I’ll get there. I’ll probably have to renew because I don’t think one year is enough. One year is not enough to see everything that I want to see in there. Maybe if you go and rush and do everything real quick, you can do all the certifications in one year if you want to. But I don’t advise to. Take your time, get a few years on it because it’s a lot of great content. Right now I’m lost into the power.

Anna Talerico (25:07)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Carolina Lago (25:28)
So it has nothing to do with FMVA. So I’m like, one thing that I always challenged me in the Power BI was doing the P&L in the Power BI and CFI has a great course. I just finished that one last week and it’s amazing what I can do now. And now I can put my models on Power BI too. Before, I used to put on Excel, create a dataset, and import it to Power BI. Now I can build the models in Power BI, which is awesome.

Anna Talerico (25:30)
Yeah.

Mmm.

Carolina Lago (25:58)
Awesome. So it’s a vast world of learning in CFI that it’s not enough. One year is not enough. So that’s why I’m taking my time on it. But yeah, I really recommend, I really recommend to everybody to do it.

Anna Talerico (26:09)
I’m glad it’s been, yeah. I’m glad that’s been your experience. You sound like you learn like I do. I do, I often, I start the course. So I kind of have a bunch of courses halfway started because I get so excited and then I get into another one and then I come back and finish it. So yeah, I love you. I think the first time we chatted, you said, I use it kind of like Netflix and a lot of our users do. So it was here. It’s fun to hear you say that. Yeah, yeah. But I,

Carolina Lago (26:22)
Yeah. Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s my Netflix. Yeah, that’s exactly the way.

Anna Talerico (26:41)
Yeah, but I love more than anything that you are a lifelong learner. You’re addicted to it, like you said. But yeah, you are using all of your knowledge and your incredible career to teach others and help others. So let’s talk a little bit about what you’re doing with Tactic and some of the courses that you’re doing and teaching and everything.

Carolina Lago (27:00)
Yeah, with Tadjic I became, I actually had to become digital nomad for circumstances because my husband kept moving to other countries and as soon as I get established he needs to move again. So now I’m in France and we’re getting ready to move again to another country. So when I finally learned French and now I’m able to work in France.

Now he’s moving again. So I said, no, you know what, let me open a company and let me just work towards this so I can actually build something on my own instead of just working on the corporate world. So I create Tatec with the intent of helping small and medium business to have this excellence of FP&A that big corporations have access to without the

barrier of the price probably because it’s much less it’s a fraction of the cost of having a full team of FP &A and having access to world-class analysis and strategy and actually how to understand your numbers, how to guide your company towards success. So that was the basic intuitive of Tetic was to do this help to companies but

But then again, I had to educate the finance teams to become FP &A when they were just finance or accounting or whatever they were. So I started to create this process for them and then started doing corporate training for them. And then I thought, this is the best part. This is what I like most is the corporate training too. So I’m still doing the FP &A for companies and creating processes for them. But at the same time,

I’m concentrating a lot on creating the content for the corporate training and making the teams get better with that.

And I decided to open for the public too. So last month I opened a course for a small group of people. It was a live course and it was great because we had people, different levels of the company, even people that were not finance yet, to learn about financial modeling. And that’s the subject that I’m most passionate about because I believe that this is the skill that all finance professionals

need to learn as soon as possible and I know there’s a lot of people that say we don’t need to build a three statement model because my company has the software and that’s not a skill that I’m ever gonna use in the company.

But I always advise this is a skill for people to learn for themselves, to start to build business acumen. So when you start to build financial models from scratch, you start to build them in your head. So it’s something that becomes natural to you. It’s a language that becomes natural to you. Actually speaking of language, I usually say finance is the language of business and accounts for business

is the grammar. So, if we see it that way, I don’t know if anybody said that before, but I didn’t read it anyway, and I tried to find that quote, and I can’t believe I’m being created like that. But yeah, I came up with that and I think it makes totally sense for me. And the financial model helps you learn accounting on a spreadsheet instead of being on the books trying to learn accounting rules. So that’s what moves me to teach…

Anna Talerico (30:24)
I love that. I love that.

Love it.

Carolina Lago (30:51)
financial modeling as a skill for professionals and that was great for having on the course as my first course for the public because I had people from all over the companies and different types of companies, different levels of the companies and even people there is no finance so it was great for that.

Anna Talerico (31:11)
That’s awesome. I love to hear it. And so this was great. Thank you for doing this and joining us to share a bit about your career. I’m going to ask you one question before we go, but I have to tell everybody I highly recommend to follow Carolina on LinkedIn. She shares such great information and she’s so generous with her knowledge. And so I highly recommend it. I really, I always follow and love the content that you share. So thank you for.

Carolina Lago (31:20)
Thank you.

Thanks!

Anna Talerico (31:40)
for being so generous with your knowledge and your insights. So my last question is, what advice would you give to somebody who wants to have a career like you did and somebody who’s just starting out? What kind of advice would you give them?

Carolina Lago (31:44)
Thanks, Anna.

Well, I think the biggest advice that I can get is don’t wait for opportunities. You can create your own opportunity. You can go after if you want to learn something. Go after, try to learn and then try to implement and be the person in the company that comes with new ideas and new insights. Even if nobody’s talking about, you can bring things. Even if it’s not fully supported right away, spend some time learning and bring a full solution

and try to bring that to management, that’s how you create opportunities for yourself. I see a lot of bright people that keeps waiting for their manager to tell them what to do and to put them on a job. Why they can be doing that already? So I see people in accounting, for example, that really wants to be FP &A. So if you really want to be FP &A, just get together with somebody, partner with somebody from FP&A team.

If you don’t have an FP&A team, try to do some analysis, try to bring some insights instead of just reporting numbers. Bring that idea, speak up. I think it’s the best way for you to start doing what you want to do and start being known to be able to do that stuff that you want to do. So that’s how you learn. Bring opportunities to yourself. Don’t wait for them.

Anna Talerico (33:21)
Incredible advice that I think every young and starting professional should listen to because a couple of things there that really apply to any role. One is bring solutions and bring ideas and even if those ideas or solutions don’t get adopted or they don’t take off, you start to become known as a person who’s thinking about solutions and thinking about improving the business and that’s great. And I think the other thing you said that I share with so many people that ask me,

Carolina Lago (33:34)
Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Anna Talerico (33:51)
for career advice or insights, do the things that excite you. A lot of people wait for promotions, like you mentioned, or wait to be moved into a new role, but if you start to, while still doing your own responsibilities, start to do the things that, a lot of times people get promotions because they’re already doing that job. That’s what we have to do, right? We have to take the initiative. So I love that advice, that was fantastic. Carolina, thank you for sharing your

Carolina Lago (33:57)
Mm -hmm.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes, yes, yeah, yeah.

Anna Talerico (34:20)
background in your your story your career story we appreciate you very much. Thanks for coming on today!

Carolina Lago (34:26)
Thank you so much and it was a real pleasure to talk to you.