In this episode of the CFI Member Spotlight podcast, we feature Mateus Hamdan, an accomplished project controller at Field Aviation. Mateus shares his journey from Brazil to Canada, discussing his experience across a range of industries such as mining, education, shipbuilding, and aviation.

He furthered his career by earning the FMVA certification from CFI, which equipped him with advanced financial modeling and valuation skills. This certification played a crucial role in progressing his career, allowing him to secure roles in the shipbuilding and aviation industries.

Mateus also shares valuable advice for aspiring finance professionals, emphasizing continuous learning, building strong relationships, and simplifying complex tasks. Tune in to hear Mateus Hamdan’s inspiring story and gain practical tips for excelling in the finance industry.

Transcript

Asim (00:12)
Hello and welcome to the CFI member spotlight podcast. My name is Asim Khan and I’m joined today by one of our members, Mateus Hamdan. Welcome to the podcast, Mateus.

Mateus Hamdan (00:23)
Hi, Asim. Thanks for having me.

Asim (00:24)
It’s great. it’s an absolute pleasure. So as we’re a global company, where are you sitting at the moment?

Mateus Hamdan (00:35)
I am back in Brazil, my home country, but I work in London, Ontario for a company in Mississauga.

Asim (00:46)
Okay, in Mississauga, so we’re both kind of in Canada. I’m in Montreal and so let’s I mean, it’s quite a distance Brazil to Canada. So what are you doing right now professionally?

Mateus Hamdan (01:02)
Professionally I am a controller. I’m a project controller at Field Aviation. It’s a company that does aircraft modifications. So according to the customer, we modify aircrafts, helicopters to fulfill what they need. Radars, whatever it is they need. And I’m in charge of controlling all the…

the cost, revenue for all the programs that I’m in charge.

Asim (01:37)
Okay, so like, you know, if I bring my Gulfstream to you and say, hey, I need you guys to make this thing go a little bit faster, you can make that kind of modification.

Mateus Hamdan (01:48)
Faster is a little bit harder, but for example, let’s say you want a new interior with fancy couch, with different ways, different tables, dinner table, whatever it is. Or if you need a new radar, different cameras on it to do surveillance, those are the type of things we do.

Asim (01:51)
Okay.

Right, right.

That’s pretty interesting. So, yeah, I’m, you know, you’re kind of, I guess, taking what came out of the factory and changing it to the specs desired by whoever the new owner might be, right? Yeah, that’s pretty cool. So, how did you, let’s talk a bit about your journey. It’s what I’m interested in, because you’re in this controller position now.

Mateus Hamdan (02:16)
it is.

Correct, correct, yeah.

It is.

Asim (02:43)
Could you tell us how you started and where you started?

Mateus Hamdan (02:47)
Yeah, no problem. So as I mentioned before, I’m originally from Brazil. You can also know by my accent. I’m not from an English -spoken country, so… Back in 2008, I graduated International Relations. It’s nothing related to finance or accounting or FP&A or something similar.

was more like a political course, but when I started my career, I started working with contracts and with a mining company back here in Brazil. And after that, I started my journey in finance. I did…

contracts I was contract I can say manager and then I started more working with cost control, forecast, budgeting and those were roles or activities I had to do my entire career back in the mining company. But then in 2018 my wife and I we decided to move to Canada.

and I started working for a university back in British Columbia, Vancouver. And at that time…

Asim (04:14)
So if I may interrupt, there’s something interesting here. Why did you make the decision to move to Canada?

Mateus Hamdan (04:18)
Of course.

That was a desire from us. It was like my wife and I had very nice jobs here in Brazil, but we wanted something different. We wanted to a better, can I say balance, like life and work. So we decided to give it a try in a different place. And country wise, Canada was the one we chose. And…

Asim (04:31)
Yeah.

Excellent!

Mateus Hamdan (04:52)
After choosing that, we had also to check which province we had to go. At that time, we decided to go to British Columbia. My wife wanted to do an MBA. So there she had an opportunity to do that. So we moved it. We left everything here. Like in two weeks, we got, not rid, but we left everything and moved to Canada.

Asim (05:12)
Excellent!

That’s a pretty gutsy move to pick up and leave on such short notice. So before I interrupted you, sorry, you said you then were working at a university in British Columbia.

Mateus Hamdan (05:22)
It is. Yeah.

Yes, my first job in finance in Canada was for a university, Capilano University. At that time, my position was a budget officer. I was in charge to support the director of finance and the FP&A manager to control their monthly costs.

I was also in charge of develop, I developed with them a better way of reporting all the numbers for almost 51 different departments we have there, all the university, all the faculty, sorry, all the other supporting departments. They were taking like almost a week to do it and I helped them to reduce that time. And also I started working with them to build their multi-year,

their pluriannual budget. A university has a specific way of doing it because they need to do it by term. So, most of the time, their fiscal year doesn’t match the terms. So it was a little bit challenging. And just to push forward, this was the moment I decided and I realized that I needed to…

to fulfill, not fulfill, but to fill a gap in my academic study and it’s where I started to study with CFI.

Asim (07:06)
Did you kind of like dive into the FMVA certification? Was that your first move?

Mateus Hamdan (07:10)
Yeah, the first challenge I faced there was exactly that. How to model a better, how to build a model for them that they could use to better forecast or to better build their budget. Just like there are a lot of different revenues for them and…

bunch of different costs that works in several different ways. So I have to understand how many students they have, how many of those students were international or domestic, which term will have more students than others. What are the costs for each of the universities, each of the faculties, and then all the supporting areas that work like

totally different from a faculty more similar to an operation, a normal operation. So they have different ways of costing. And these were my challenge, how to put that together and present it to the VPs and to director of finance

not a proper way, a better way of doing it that could be something they could trust. And that’s what the main click I had to start working with CFI and to do the FMVA.

Asim (08:40)
That’s great.

I’m glad we could be helpful. So you got your certification for FMVA. And so armed with this new knowledge, did you stay at the university or did you kind of move on from there?

Mateus Hamdan (08:57)
I did, I had different positions there. I had to move from BC, like I said, now I am in Ontario, just in Ontario, in the different coasts. And even when I moved from there, I kept working as a consultant for them to help them in several different process

at the time they were implementing like softwares to BI softwares to help them build those models that I had in Excel. So I helped them with that transition. But yeah, unfortunately I have to leave them and try to find another job.

Asim (09:39)
Which, okay, so I imagine you probably didn’t have much trouble finding the other job. So what was that? What was the next move?

Mateus Hamdan (09:48)
I actually jumped one of the parts right before I moved to Ontario. I also got another job in BC working for a shipyard. It was more similar to my position in Brazil, like more operation. So I was helping them to control all the overhead costs they have for operation.

Asim (10:06)
Right.

Mateus Hamdan (10:17)
It was pretty challenging as well because it was a shipyard and they were used to do maintenance and repairs, but they got a contract to build ships. So it was an ongoing learning process for them and also for me. I was learning about ships and they were learning how to control our operation.

Asim (10:39)
Mm.

Mateus Hamdan (10:42)
But unfortunately that was a short experience, just like I mentioned previously I had to move to Ontario. But even though… Of course!

Asim (10:49)
Can I ask out of curiosity? What kind of ships were you building at that shipyard?

Mateus Hamdan (10:58)
We had a contract with Canada, so we were building exploring ships for the Coast Guard. Even different ones, I have, if I can remember now, it was three different models. It was an ice breaking, was a bigger one for surveillance, and a smaller one, I can’t remember the name, but it was more like a supporting ship.

But also for the Navy, we were building another ship. I can’t remember the name now, right now, but it was a ship, not a weaponized one, but was also for surveillance.

Asim (11:24)
Hmm.

Okay, no, that’s interesting stuff. I did a little bit in ship finance. Yeah, some time ago, and just to get smart on the business, I hired this one consultant out of a firm in London, and he gave me a book called Maritime Economics. And he said, okay, so now once you read this, for the rest of your life,

Mateus Hamdan (11:46)
Not really.

Asim (12:04)
there’ll be some sort of nexus to shipping. It’ll always come back either in conversation or in business, something. He’s proved right again. Okay, so now you’re in Ontario working in aviation services, right? Okay.

Mateus Hamdan (12:07)
He was right.

Yeah.

Yeah, as you can see, industry change is my specialty, like mining and then education, shipyard, and now aircrafts.

Asim (12:31)
Yeah, I mean, but what it’s what the bit that seems constant is that, you know, you had a whatever job you were doing at the mine and skill set you built, you were able to take that with you, right, to different industries and then build on that, you know.

Mateus Hamdan (12:43)
Yeah. Yeah.

Asim (12:49)
you did the FMVA and now the skills are portable, right, though the industries may change, right? Have you, so good, you were gonna say something, Mateus?

Mateus Hamdan (12:54)
That’s true.

I was just going to say that finance is good because it doesn’t matter the industry. You will always be needed and it’s something that everybody always watch for.

Asim (13:09)
Right.

No, that’s on that note. And you mentioned FP&A a couple of times. So we came out with a brand new FP&A specialization. Have you taken a look at that? I’m judging not just from your reaction. Yeah. Yeah. Have a look. It’s very comprehensive. We had a course previously, but nothing like this one. I mean, this is just.

Mateus Hamdan (13:32)
Not yet, but I’ll definitely do.

Asim (13:48)
It’ll be a value add if you’re doing this kind of stuff.

Mateus Hamdan (13:50)
Definitely, I’ll do it or check it out.

Asim (13:53)
Yeah. Okay, great. So I’d like to ask you, so we’re in closing, you’ve had an interesting journey. I’m counting now one, two, three cities and two countries, right? So we have, you know, we have members who are just kind of starting out in their careers or just kind of in the early part of their careers. Could you kind of plumb for,

Mateus Hamdan (14:09)
That’s true.

Asim (14:23)
your imagination for maybe three pieces of advice you can give people.

Mateus Hamdan (14:30)
If you are like me, first one, if you are like me outside of finance that got got hooked, I would say like this with this sector Try to have a good not background but basis like supporting

Try to do math courses, accounting courses, Excel fundamentals. Those are things that you need for your life working on this. The second one is that working with finance, you’re gonna deal with a lot of people that doesn’t like numbers. And you have to make them like it…

especially when you are dealing with operational directors or any other high people, high person. And so try to have a good relationship with these persons, these people and supporting them because sometimes they just don’t give you what you need because they don’t know. And…

The third one, it’s a mantra I keep with me for life. It’s a Latin say that is avia pérvia. It means make difficult paths easy to walk. And this is something you have to remember. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing. Try to do it as easy as possible for you and for everybody that’s with you.

Those I think it’s three devices I can give them.

Asim (16:20)
That is a wonderful piece of closing advice. And I’m going to remember that myself. In fact, I’m going to write it down when we get off the podcast. Well, Matias, thank you so much for joining us. It was a real pleasure having you on and hearing about your journey. And it continues, right? So I wish you all the best…

Mateus Hamdan (16:42)
Yes. Thank you.

Asim (16:44)
for the future and please do keep in touch if you want to meet back here. We can certainly, we’d love to have you.

Mateus Hamdan (16:50)
Thanks for the invitation. It was a pleasure to be here.

Asim (16:57)
It’s a pleasure. Thank you.

Mateus Hamdan (17:00)
Thank you.