Radoslav Grudkov

Hi Radoslav, thank you for taking the time for the interview. With your bachelors degree in economics and your passion to work with numbers, you became part of our new Finance & Risk Team.

Can you please introduce yourself briefly?

Hi there! Thank you very much for this opportunity. My name is Radoslav. I'm from Bulgaria and I'm living for the past 15 years in Germany. I have a bachelor's degree in economics and my passion is to work with numbers and to build reportings, to show, how the company works and how the money moves. In my free time I like to meet with friends and family, to take long walks and cycling my bike.

You are in a relatively new team with Thorsten, Pia and Aris. How did you manage to work together as a team?

As a "newby" at Checkmk the teamwork is very important for me. After a short time, each one of us know what the individual responsibilities are. We have weekly meetings as a team, to exchange information on the tasks that we are working on. We also have separate meetings (one-on-one) for tasks, that need to be cleared more in details. The communication in the team and in the company is great. We have short decision paths, and everyone has time for an open discussion.

What does a typical work week look like for you?

I can tell you what a typical month looks like for me. As we are working in the finance department, we are responsible for the delivery of financial reportings at the right time. That means, that at the beginning of the month we are working on the important reportings, that will be delivered and presented, to show, where our company is standing now, what did we reach the past months and if we are reaching the expectations, at the beginning of the year.

After that we are working on the development of new reportings and KPIs, which are also important for our business. Because we are a small and fast-growing company, there are plenty of new statements, which will help us to improve our decisions. The implementation and the visualization are also a part of our job.

I work mostly remotely, but I try to be in the office once a week, to meet other colleagues and take some meetings in person.

What tools/technologies do you work with in your team?

Currently, we are working mainly with Excel. That help us to make the communication between different sources of information to work together. For example, we are using Power Query to combine information from different sources in one excel sheet and to take only the relevant information. For our internal tasks we are using Jira. That helps us to take control of our work and to have a better visualization of the tasks, that are open and to track the stand of where are we now and what we need to do, to reach our goal. Our biggest goal is to transform our reportings in different dashboards, which are communicating automatically with our database. For our daily communication and organization, we are using Slack, Zoom and Google Drive.

How do you collaborate with other teams such as controlling, accounting or management to ensure financial transparency and compliance?

We have separate meetings with the other teams, which are specifically for different tasks. We discuss our ways to the goal and make clear targets. The collaboration is easy, and everyone has time to help. We also have a monthly meeting, where the whole company gets information about our business, what is our financial statement and what fixtures did we made. Our teams are very international, and we must often switch between German and English language. There are no closed doors, and everyone takes time to share information with you.

How do you keep up to date with current developments in the finance and risk management industry?

I read a lot about what is happening in other companies, what are their goals and how did they succeed and if things go wrong, how did they fail. I’m also interested in competition companies with the same business model as ours. The pioneers in the business are very inspiring to show, how did they start and how are they now. Especially in what are they investing and how they move their business forward.