Careers in Finance: Logan Burchett
In this episode, Logan Burchett, co-founder and COO of Forecastr, shares his unexpected career path—from aspiring lawyer to finance professional to entrepreneur. Initially set on law, he discovered a passion for economics and finance in college, which led him to work as a financial analyst and later at a pension fund. His time at Venture First sparked an interest in venture capital, ultimately inspiring him to co-found Forecastr, a company revolutionizing financial modeling.
Logan discusses the future of financial modeling, predicting a shift away from Excel and encouraging finance professionals to embrace emerging tools and trends. Throughout the conversation, he highlights the power of curiosity, adaptability, and continuous learning in an ever-evolving industry.
Transcript
Anna Talerico (00:13)
Welcome back to another episode of Careers in Finance. And I am thrilled today. We’ve got a really interesting career story and journey to share with Logan Burchett. Logan, thank you for joining us.
Logan Burchett (00:26)
Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.
Anna Talerico (00:28)
Yeah. So Logan is the co-founder and COO of Forecastr. And we’re going to pause there. We’re going to come back to Forecastr because I can’t wait to talk a little bit about that in your jump from finance professional to co-founder and entrepreneur. But, know, I always start the podcast, with your origin story. Tell us a little bit of, did you always know you were wanting to get into a finance role and what did you study in school?
Logan Burchett (00:56)
Yeah, no, I really appreciate that. And the quick answer is no, I did not always know that I wanted to be a finance professional. Funny enough, whenever I was getting my undergrad, and actually the entire time that I was growing up, I thought that I wanted to be a lawyer. My entire family is full of lawyers. I have like three cousins that are lawyers, uncles that are lawyers, and I always enjoyed
that just kind of like, I’m not like an argumentative person, but I like thinking through arguments and things like that. And so the entire time through middle school, high school, I thought this is going to be my profession. This is what I want to do. Go to college. I went to Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. And I started, you know, I was trying to figure out what that path would look like for me to become a lawyer. And one of the classes that I took
was economics and it was just microeconomics and I had to take microeconomics and macroeconomics. That was kind of a part of the pre-law path that they had for us. And I just got sucked into those classes. That was my favorite subject by far. And I decided that I wanted to major in economics at that point. And I, at that point still didn’t think that I was going to be a finance professional. I just thought that I was interested in economics generally and, and finance by extension. And,
it really, I think, came to a head for me whenever I started actually studying for the LSAT. And I bought one of those giant books that you had to like really dig into. And I realized probably about a month into studying that I just hated everything that I was reading and that there was this, I think I had romanticized in my mind what it would actually be like to be a lawyer. But whenever I got in the nuts and bolts of it, I was like, I don’t think that this is for me. I think that I would…
find a lot more excitement just staying closer to the subject that I really love, the subject of economics and by extension, finance. And so it was kind of, you could almost say it was laziness, you know, to an extent where I didn’t really want to study for the LSAT, but I really just wasn’t passionate about that material. And I decided at that point that I wanted to lean more into where I did have some passion, which was finance and economics. And that’s kind of like where it all turned for me. That’s when I decided that finance was something that I wanted to pursue as a profession.
Anna Talerico (03:25)
I love it because you’re so, I’ve been, when you maybe call lazy, I say self -aware. know, a lot of people will just take that book and grind through the study and not be happy and thinking, you know, I don’t like this, but not stopping to say, wait, like, let me reevaluate this. just, because they, they just, you know, kind of get the blinders on on the path and they don’t stop to say, what do really love to do? So I love that. Yeah.
So you’ve graduated, you have a degree in economics, you said, wait a second, I don’t love this LSAT stuff. Then what was your first role out of college?
Logan Burchett (03:58)
So funny enough, I graduated in 2013 and I was having a really hard time finding a job. So I decided instead I was going to go and get my MBA at Xavier University. So I moved up to the quote-unquote big city of Cincinnati. That’s actually where I live now. And I went to Xavier to get a finance degree, an MBA with a concentration in finance. It’s really what it was. And so while I was getting my degree, I decided that I was going to try to look for any work that I could as a financial analyst.
And as soon as I actually got enrolled in the MBA program, I got accepted, you know, for one of the jobs that I applied for as a financial analyst. So I had this really unique situation. It was not the best situation in the world to be in, frankly, where I was a full-time student. I was taking night classes, but I was also now a full-time employee. Right? So I, my original intention was I’m just going to go to school instead of getting a job.
But whenever I actually got accepted into the MBA program, I got accepted for a job. And so now I was doing both things. So for a year, I would work as a financial analyst at this company called Access Financial. And I would work from, you know, eight to five, and then six o ‘clock we come around and I go to class and I would go to class from like six to 10. And I would do that Monday through Friday. And then I do homework on the weekends. And that was a year of my life. I think I was around 24 at that, 20, 23, 24 at that time. So.
that was my first career in finance. And I will note that Access Financial was a payday lending company. It wasn’t, it wasn’t like issuing payday loans. It was the parent company of like checking goes and things like that, if you’ve ever heard of them. So from a moral standpoint, I was not super comfortable with the type of work that I was doing, but I just was trying to break into finance. And was really hard to get a job if you’re new into finance. So I stuck with that job for about a year.
And then I decided I want to jump ship. I want to do something different. And that’s whenever I got involved actually with the Kentucky Pension Fund. So I realized that I wanted to do kind of like large scale asset management, but you know, being in even in Cincinnati, but really like Cincinnati, Louisville, Lexington kind of around where I’m from. It’s not, it’s not like Wall Street, right? There’s not a ton of opportunities there, but
The pension fund managed about $18 billion, so it was a good chance to actually get involved there. And that’s where I like to say that my finance profession really kind of took off, and I started following down a path that I really enjoyed and I really…
Anna Talerico (06:33)
Love it. That’s incredible. So let’s go back to when you were in school, grinding it out in full time. I’m just curious, anything that you were learning in your MBA program, how much overlap or applicability was there to what you were doing to the day? Because I’ve heard, you know, there’s so much theory of what you’re doing. It’s not really like what you’re doing when you’re at the desk, but how much did you find that that study, what you were studying was helping you?
Logan Burchett (06:59)
Interestingly enough, this is why, so I will give general advice and then context. I recommend that if you’re going to get your MBA in probably anything, but specifically here in finance, do it whenever you have a bit more in the world experience. So frankly, I went through my MBA because it wasn’t because I had this desire to learn or like really master my craft at that point. Like now that would be my main motivation if I were to do it again.
But at that point, my motivation was just to get a job. I just wanted the credentials to get a job. So there was a lot of going through the motions for me and just kind of doing what I needed to do to get a good GPA and to get a grade. so interestingly enough, now that I have in the world experience and I’ve done quite a lot in finance, I almost wish I could go back and retake my MBA to just look at things from a different perspective, a different point of view.
I think that a lot of that would translate a little bit more. So it’s a long way of saying at that point in my life, not really at that point in my life, it was very theoretical and it was very, I didn’t, I didn’t have at that point the ability to connect it to anything tangible and real and grounded in reality because I had never actually been in a real-life finance environment.
And so that would be, and I tell that to a lot of people that are coming right out of college and they’re like, should I get my MBA? My general advice is maybe, depends on your situation, but if you are gonna do it, my recommendation is give it like three to five years, get in the field, understand, get your bearings for like what this world of finance looks like, then go get your MBA and then you have, I think a firmer grasp and you can actually connect the theory to the reality.
Anna Talerico (08:48)
Yeah, that’s such good advice. I think you’re just more aware even to absorb what you’re learning and apply it. Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Such good advice. So one last question on the analyst role, that first role. Were you doing a lot of financial modeling in that role, or what was the day-to-day like?
Logan Burchett (09:06)
Funny enough, no. And that’s one of the reasons that I ended up leaving that job. And this is frankly, one of the reasons that I work primarily with venture -bunded startups now. Whenever that, that was a large company, a multi -billion dollar company. And I was at the very, very bottom of the finance totem pole. Technically I was, it was a co -op, which is code for, I don’t even know how like widely used that term is, but,
it was a full-time employee that was paid hourly treated as a full -time analyst, but it was like an hourly role. And so a lot of what I did in that role was generating just standard reports and doing a lot of manual data entry. And so that was, think one of my biggest issues was I was quite good at working within Excel and creating reports because I was fairly efficient at using those softwares, but I wasn’t getting what I needed
from connecting basically what I was doing from the day to day into the overarching, you know, strategy of the business or anything like that. So I didn’t get even visibility into their P and L. I didn’t get visibility into any of their financial statements. I was just essentially serving up data to the senior analysts that were then serving that up to the director of finance and onward and upward into the CFO. So it was, it was a, I, I, it’s funny, a lot of what I did
Anna Talerico (10:12)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Logan Burchett (10:32)
looking back, because I was so young and inexperienced, I didn’t even myself understand what role it was playing in the company. Right? So…
Anna Talerico (10:41)
Yeah, right. Yeah, now you probably can look back and go, that’s the little piece of the puzzle. I was Yeah. So, so the pension work, tell me about that role. So yeah, that sounds, I’m sure fulfilling in many ways, right? Yeah.
Logan Burchett (10:47)
Exactly.
It was, yeah, was a fairly pivotal moment, but it was a very unpredictable in the way that it would further play out. But it was a transition to, I was going from FP&A, which is generally what I was doing at Access Financial, to large-scale asset management. So was a very different area of finance. And it was even specialized within asset management in that the pension fund is
more or less an LP, but you know, from the private side, it’s an LP for a lot of these larger funds. What I was doing was mostly public equity. So about 53 % of the pension fund was publicly traded. It was a public equity, but we would farm that out to wall street managers, people that would manage it for us. So we were even within the public space, we actually kind of behaved like an LP. And interestingly enough, I really enjoyed that work. I thought it was really interesting. Got to meet a lot of really smart people.
But what I learned about myself was that I was much more interested in the work that our director of venture capital was doing than I was in the work that I was doing. So I was doing public equity, but I sat next to this guy named Anthony Chu and he was actually the director of private investments, which included a $2 billion venture capital portfolio. So he was going in meeting with all of these, you know,
Anna Talerico (12:17)
You…
Logan Burchett (12:20)
VCs and hearing about their strategies learning about the portfolio companies and I found myself joining his meetings just because I was so interested in the type of work that he was doing and so Where that ultimately led me was to you know, I decided I want to become a venture capitalist I want to get more involved in VC. I didn’t even know frankly It was one of those things where this excites me, but I don’t even know what that means But I want to do it type of deal like that’s kind of where I was in that moment.
And here I was, the Kentucky Pension Fund is based in Frankfort, Kentucky, which is right between Lexington and Louisville, AKA. it’s in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky. And, Kentucky generally is not known for its massive VC funds, it’s flyover country. And so breaking into VC, if you wanted to stay in Kentucky was really, really difficult. So what I ended up doing,
was I got connected? can’t even remember how I originally got connected with him, but it was a guy named John Shoemate who was just starting a company called Venture First. It had actually been around for a little while, but they were focused primarily on doing 409A valuations and were just getting started offering what they were calling CFO services, primarily selling to startups. And I got connected with him. you know, we, learned about what he was doing. He learned about what I had been doing.
And he decided that he wanted to hire me on as really his first analyst at that point in helping building these financial models, working with these early stage companies. And that’s really where I think my career hit overdrive, not necessarily from like a making money standpoint, but more so from a I found my niche in the world standpoint. Like I knew at that point that this is what I wanted to do. And this is what I was very good at.
And so that’s really where I think like the key fit in the lock, so to speak.
Anna Talerico (14:14)
Yeah.
I love it. I want to come back for just a minute on the role with the pension fund and talk about what that day-to-day was like. But before I do, I have to call something out that you said, because it’s such a through line in the podcast, the careers and finance podcast, you said, you know, I didn’t really even know what that was that I wanted or what it looks like. I just knew that it was interesting. So I think there’s so many
young aspiring professionals that go through traditional tracks into finance and they know exactly what that looks like. They know I’m going to go to hear for my internship and get this analyst job for two and they’re very aware. But there are a lot of people who have really successful paths in finance who say to me like, I didn’t even know what private equity was when I took it. You know, just like I think that there’s this idea of like, you have to know these things before you leap into them. And it’s just not true.
Logan Burchett (15:08)
Yeah, I would actually argue the opposite. If I were to give advice to somebody that’s just getting started, I would say, just try everything on the menu. You know, like just dabble a little bit and figure out what you like. Because if you’d have asked me what I wanted to do and I had to commit to a career back in high school or even early days of college, I would have said, I’m a lawyer and I’m on that track and that’s a well-defined track and I can stay on that track. But it’s just being open to just where the world takes you. I think that…
Anna Talerico (15:16)
Yeah.
Logan Burchett (15:36)
That’s generally how I like to coach younger people that are trying to figure things out because I think that that’s how you can really find where your zone of genius is just trying a lot of things and just seeing where you lie.
Anna Talerico (15:49)
Totally, totally. So I want to talk about venture first because I know it is the thing that sprung board you into Forecastr. But before I do, just for anybody that wants to know, what’s a financial analyst at a pension fund do day to day? What was a day in the life like?
Logan Burchett (16:04)
It was really interesting, honestly. So you get some of the more monotonous work like combing through return data, putting together reports. I found myself writing a lot of industry reports that we would put out because it’s the pension fund, it’s public. Everything that you do is available for folks to scrutinize. So we would need to write up why we made this investment decision or we would just…
talk about how we view the market and just really be open and transparent. So there was some of that work, which I thought was really interesting, but the best part of that job was meeting with all of these really smart, really interesting money managers. So, you know, the, the pension fund itself, we didn’t do any active management. All we would do is our own replication of the S&P 500. So it was just…
we would do one trade a quarter to rebalance. So that part wasn’t super interesting, like trading stocks. It was that you got a little bit of a rush for, like, executing a $500 million trade or whatever, but like it was very standardized and nothing too crazy there. But it was really great to be able to fly up to New York, to Boston, to California, to talk to these people who were managing billions of dollars and they were managing the money of some of the wealthiest people in the world.
And you got to sit right across. I mean, as a 26-year-old or 25-year-old, I got to sit right across from, in some cases, the founder and CEO of these multi-billion dollar funds because they were gunning for our check. They, we, had the ability to write them an eighty- to a hundred-million dollar check. So the amount of respect might not be the right word but like the ability to get into pretty much any room that you need to get into as a 26-year-old.
That was what was the most exciting to me.
Anna Talerico (17:56)
I love that, too, because I think that’s a piece that people don’t realize about the role. know, cause you’re grinding it out and in many firms you’re working many, many hours sleeping under the desk, but you get exposed to so much, right? When you’re, yeah, sitting across the table. So it’s a whole other crash course, you know, I’m sure.
So that leads you to venture and that was where you said, “This is it, I really love this.” So tell us about your years at Venture First and what you were focused on.
Logan Burchett (18:26)
Yeah, it was really so the first, whenever I first joined venture first, that was actually the first time that I ever built a financial model. And it, is really funny to say, because at that point I had actually been in finance, but if we’re talking about the three statement monthly financial model, I had never done that outside of a classroom. And even whenever I did it inside of a classroom, it wasn’t a proper financial, it was a very high level annual,
Anna Talerico (18:36)
I…
Logan Burchett (18:55)
you know, financial models. So I remember the first financial model that I ever built was for a company called Century Health. And I had to, it was like drinking from a fire hose. I had to just learn everything about that business. And I have to, what a financial model is, as you know, is basically a simulation of a business. It is a mathematical simulation of a business. So to build a financial model, you have to understand very intimately how that business functions. Like from very, from a molecular level.
And so I just learned everything that I could. My boss, John Shoemade at the time, he told me, I want you to build this financial model completely from scratch. said, I know I have templates I can give you, but no, you have to do this from scratch because you need to learn and you need to like go through the pain. So it took me like two weeks to build this model. And it, you know, looking back on it probably wasn’t the greatest model ever built, but you know, that’s how we all start. And
I remember it really clicked for me whenever I was able to sit down with the CEO of the company and she was just so blown away at like the clarity, the understanding, everything. And John, the CEO later said something that I still remember. He’s like, at this point, I’m 27 years old or something. And he said, you know, you’re, basically the C CFO of this company at this point. He said, you, you are the one that’s in charge of understanding their cash flow,
forecasting it forward, like you are doing what a CFO does. And that was really exciting to me because now all of sudden, mean, looking at back in my career, I went from being at Access Financial where I was updating these nameless reports, not even knowing really what I was doing to sitting next to the CEO of this company that had raised millions of dollars in funding and she’s asking for my advice and I’m telling her.
And I went from having what I perceived to be basically no impact on this company to like severe impact on a company. And that was what was really exciting to me is I could tangibly in not, not, not just in the data in the face of the CEO, I could see the impact that I was making.
Anna Talerico (20:59)
Love it.
Yeah. Yeah. And you know, that was not about the battle, but I have to say, like, the model is so often the gateway to those moments, and people don’t realize that, right? It is. is the, you said, you’ve got to intimately know the business and really understand it and the drivers and all of us that’s love it. how the heck did you go from doing this to being an entrepreneur and co-founding a software company?
Logan Burchett (21:31)
It’s a great, great question. And it’s like, looking back on it, it’s funny because this was inevitable. know, like eventually I think that I was always going to start a company, although I didn’t, I don’t know that I knew that back then, but even whenever I was really little, I was interested in entrepreneurship, starting businesses, things like that. But whenever I was a venture first, it was the perfect storm because
I was surrounded by entrepreneurs all day. was just working with entrepreneurs. was seeing the things that they were building, hearing about their ideas, learning from them, understanding what venture capital was, how to raise capital, advising them in some instances, talking to investors, all of this. So I just, learned how that ecosystem worked very, very deeply during my time there. So I was inspired by that. But at the exact same time, I was every single day,
working in what I thought was a massive problem. And it was a problem that I knew that I could solve because we were building these financial models using Excel. That’s where 98% of financial models even to this day are built. Back then it was closer to a hundred percent. And the problem with Excel is that you have to know how to use Excel to build the models. You have to know how to use Excel to interact with the models. These CEOs, these founders, they didn’t know how to use Excel.
You had to understand finance. So you had to be able to navigate the financial model and be able to read the output of it. And so they took a long time to build. So because they took a lot of time to build, they were very, very expensive. And because the, ultimately the client couldn’t understand them, they had to keep paying a CFO or our firm to keep them up to date and to keep explaining the financial model to them. So it was this big cluster that I was like, this is not, this is not great. This is not a great experience. Meanwhile,
every other business function I’m noticing is done online. So you have accounting, it’s done on QuickBooks or it’s done on Xero. You’re looking at CRMs, that’s gonna be on Salesforce or HubSpot. You look at cap tables, that was all being done in Carta. And that was actually, I was in the midst of being pulled away from Excel into Carta at that point in time. So I’m noticing all this and I one day have a conversation with my now co-founder, Steven, who is an analyst at VentureFirst at that time too. And I was basically just like, look,
I think that financial modeling should be done in the software. think that this is something there’s no reason that this has to stay in Excel when every other business function is done outside of Excel. So I think that we should build that software. And funny enough, he had had the same idea and he had actually made a deck for a company that was basically that same idea called Crystal Ball. And we came together on it and we decided this is something that we wanted to do. That was a conversation that we had way back in 2018.
Anna Talerico (24:17)
Incredible that you know, all great companies start with founders having the acute need and seeing the need right and living it and understanding it. Yeah. So you guys decide to take a leap and found the company, and so tell us a little bit about Forecastr, and you know, just are you bootstrapped self-funded venture back? Give us a sense of where you’re at today.
Logan Burchett (24:42)
Yeah, absolutely. So we are not bootstrapped. We are venture backed. We’ve raised about $15 million of venture capital at this point. We’ve grown the team to, I think we’re at like 30, I’m trying to, I want to get to you guys. It’s like 38, 39 full -time employees. And so, you know, this is, you know, our whole situation, the way that we’ve attacked the market is that we’ve noticed that there are a…
handful of people out there that are building software around financial modeling. Companies like Pride, companies like Finmark, even companies upstream like Mosaic. But the core issue that we see with the companies that we sell to is not that they’re just looking for a better version of Excel. It’s that they’re looking for somebody to generally help them with finance. We don’t think that software alone is the solution. We think software plus a human
is going to give our clients the best outcomes. So that’s kind of our unique approach to the market is we are a software company first and foremost, but our software is meant to power our humans and they’re the ones that are delivering a lot of the value. So, in terms of revenue, we are just shy of $3 million of ARR, and we are right now
on the path to becoming profitable. And that is kind of the next major milestone for us is trying to hit profitability, which we would like to do. And we think that we can do it in 2025. We should have plenty of cash to fill this through to that.
Anna Talerico (26:10)
Sure. Fantastic. And it’s great to be thinking about profitability so early in the journey, you know, and just, yeah, how exciting. So what an interesting career path. I’ve got a couple of questions for you in closing. One, I guess, is, let’s keep it on Forecastr for a second. You kind of hinted at this, there is this explosion of technology, feels like right now, particularly for FP&A. What are some of the just the
overall trends that you see or that you think that, you know, operators and finance teams need to have on their radar where this is all going, because there’s a lot going on right now?
Logan Burchett (26:50)
There is a lot going on right now. I have a very strong conviction that financial modeling, specifically, which is, you could argue, the bedrock of FP&A, will move away from Excel. I just don’t see any other way, whether it’s Forecastr that is the one that fully eats up that market and takes it away from Excel or it’s somebody else or it’s an amalgamation of players in the space. I firmly believe that eventually
financial modeling will move generally away from Excel. And I think that you see this with every major business function. Everything starts in Excel and it moves away from Excel. That’s just every, you can literally go down that list and you’re going to see it. I’ve yet to be convinced as to why finance should be the exception to that rule. So, if I’m looking at business trends, I believe that eventually, that’s going to happen. I think that that’s just the natural progression of FP&A. And so,
in terms of like, if I’m the CFO of a company or if I’m working in a company, what can I do to prepare for that? You know, it would just be evaluate the options that are out there. Just see what’s out there, learn about kind of the evolution and just kind of like educate yourself on, on all of these interesting and new tools. And a lot of them, they kind of have this transition in mind. Like Forecastr, for example, if you look at our latest version, which hasn’t even been released to the public yet.
It looks and feels a lot like Excel. You can build models kind of like you can in Excel. You can, there’s a formula bar and all of that stuff, but it integrates with everything. There’s out of the box reporting. So I think that the trend is going to be to facilitate the transition away from Excel. You’re going to see a lot of these software that look and feel a lot like Excel does just to capitalize on the learning curve. But that ultimately it’s going to move away from the spreadsheets.
Anna Talerico (28:44)
Yeah, yeah. And I think you’re so right about just you’ve got to stay curious and explore all these things. because what will happen is if you don’t, you’ll get past, right? So you’ve got to be evaluating all of these things and keeping your finger on the pulse and looking at them. Yeah, great advice. So what advice would you give to somebody that you’ve had such an interesting career because it’s not this linear path necessarily, right?
Working kind of what we call general market and then getting into the pension fund and then getting into venture first and getting exposed to so much. What advice would you give to somebody who’s just starting out in their career or a couple of years into their career and thinking like I want to make a switch to X, Y, or Z? What advice would you give them?
Logan Burchett (29:28)
Yeah, it’s a really, really great question. So I’ve already given one piece of advice, which is just try a bunch of different things. Try to figure out where your passion is because odds are you probably don’t know. And if you, if you’re searching, then clearly you haven’t found what that passion is. So just have an open mind, I would say. But then another thing that, you know, I do a lot of reading on famous entrepreneurs and I follow a lot of really successful entrepreneurs on social media. And one common theme that I’m seeing is that they,
they really study others, the behavior of others, and they all seem to have kind of idols or people that they really look up to. So if there is somebody that’s kind of like in and around your space that you’re like, hey, I really want to be like them or what they’re doing seems really interesting, find a way to become useful to that person. Like find a mentor and just learn from them and be a sponge and don’t…
worry so much about making money and trying to generate as much money as you can whenever you’re just in learning mode. Just try to learn and get into the right rooms with the right people and learn as much as you can. That would be my advice.
Anna Talerico (30:36)
Great advice, I love it. Well, what a great place to wrap up our conversation. I am so glad we did this finally. I know we’ve talked for a while and I’ve been so interested in what you’re doing at Forecastr, so I’m really glad we finally got a chance to sit down and thank you for sharing your career journey so far.
Logan Burchett (30:53)
Yeah, thanks so much. I’m glad that we were able to do this as well and it’s a blast and always love chatting about this type of stuff.
Anna Talerico (31:00)
Absolutely. Thank you so much, Logan.
Logan Burchett (31:02)
Yeah, thank you.
