Ep 5  |  The Business Acumen Podcast

How to Listen to an Earnings Call (And Why It Can Accelerate Your Career) with Brent Barclay

Show Notes

Drawing from his monthly webinars, Brent Barclay, Chief Operating Officer of Acumen Learning, reveals how to transform public earnings calls from a seemingly dry financial obligation into an organization's ultimate strategic compass.

The conversation explores how listening to earnings calls serves as a hidden gem for professional development. Brent breaks down why these corporate rituals are often ignored, how employees can use a simple 5-driver framework to decode complex market realities, and how a basic understanding of financial scorekeeping can completely reframe an individual’s career trajectory.

Key Takeaways for Leaders

1. Unearth the Hidden Gem of Corporate Alignment

Most professionals assume earnings calls are strictly for Wall Street analysts and investors. Brent explains that these public broadcasts are actually the single best tool for building organizational business acumen. By listening to executives speak directly about market shifts, regulatory hurdles, and tactical pivots, employees can transition from executing isolated tasks to working on the right strategic initiatives.

2. Decode the 5 Business Drivers

Instead of trying to synthesize a mountain of overwhelming, jargon-filled data, Brent teaches listeners to filter earnings calls through five fundamental pillars: Cash, Profit, Assets, Growth, and People. Identifying which of these drivers the executive team is actively prioritizing—and why—gives employees an instant, high-level map of the company’s immediate operational focus.

3. Move Past Historical Financial Scorekeeping

A common mistake is treating financial statements as a passive record of the past quarter or year. Brent challenges leaders to teach their teams that numbers are an after-effect of human decisions. True business acumen means looking at historical financial results to deduce future strategy, allowing individuals to actively adjust their daily operational levers to drive stronger cash flow and profit margins.

4. Sellers with Enterprise Credibility

For sales organizations, listening to a prospect's earnings call is a massive competitive advantage. Enterprise executives routinely complain that vendors do not understand their business and simply pitch generic solutions. Reviewing a client's call allows a salesperson to explicitly tie their product's features to the specific growth targets or cost-management goals mentioned by the client's CEO.

5. Develop an Ownership Mentality

True career acceleration happens when professionals look past their siloed job descriptions and see themselves as "mini-CEOs or COOs." Brent emphasizes that consistently listening to earnings calls—whether for your own company, a competitor, or a client—builds immense internal credibility. When leaders look to assign high-visibility projects or promotions, they choose the people who understand the big-picture business of the business.

Additional podcast platforms

Listen to The Business Acumen Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Castbox, YouTube, Audible, or on your favorite podcast platform.

How to Listen to an Earnings Call (And Why It Can Accelerate Your Career)

Host: Stephen H. Covey; Guests: Brent Barclay (COO of Acumen Learning)

Stephen (Host): 

Welcome back to the Business Acumen Podcast. Today, I'm joined by Brent Barclay, our chief operating officer here at Acumen Learning. Every month, Brent leads a webinar called How to Listen to an Earnings Call, where we break down a public company's latest earnings report and use it as a way to understand strategy, financial performance, and executive decision-making.

What's interesting is that most people assume earnings calls are only for investors or Wall Street analysts, but at Acumen Learning, we've found that they're actually one of the best ways to build business acumen and understand how businesses truly operate. Brent, you've spent years teaching people how to use earnings calls as a learning tool. Why do you think so few people outside of the analyst and investor community pay attention to them?

Brent:

I think there are probably a few reasons. The first that comes to mind is simply accessibility and knowing how to find them. Beyond that, if a company is publicly traded, they use a lot of metrics, measures, and acronyms that we just aren't familiar with in our day-to-day work.

Many of us look at finance and accounting during our undergraduate or graduate programs, but we don't use it very often afterward. It’s like anything else: if you don’t apply it on a regular basis, you lose those connections, and it starts to feel like a foreign language.

There's also a feeling of, "I don't know how I can actually impact this." We are talking about billions of dollars for many publicly traded companies—even a small public company might bring in a billion dollars in revenue. It feels so big-picture that people struggle to see how their individual role connects to it.

Finally, many people just haven't had any real direction or encouragement around it. But once people hear about earnings calls and gain a little comfort, it piques their curiosity. They start asking: What is really going on? How are we performing? How can I impact this? So, a mix of unfamiliar terminology, a lack of clear direction, and feeling too small to make a difference are usually the main reasons people don't engage.

Stephen:

If someone has never listened to an earnings call before, why should they care? How would you respond to that?

Brent:

You're going to see a lot of passion from me on this, Stephen, because this is the core of what we do. It’s about helping people truly understand how their company makes money, how decisions are made around that process, and, most importantly, what they can do about it.

It really comes down to employee engagement. Once an employee understands what the company is doing, why they are doing it, and how they can personally impact it, their entire level of involvement changes. I often refer to these earnings calls as a "hidden gem" when I teach our courses.

As you know, Stephen, we work with some of the best companies in the world. Because our programs are highly customized to their specific financials and strategies, people often mistake us for internal employees. They’ll ask, "How long have you worked here?" and they’re surprised when they find out we are outside contractors. They’ll say, "Wow, you seem to know a lot about our business." I always joke with them: "Look, I wish I could say it's because I'm a genius or because of my academic background. But fundamentally, it's just because I can read." That information is available to everyone.

Once you get comfortable checking in on a quarterly basis, it acts as a vital strategic compass. Day in and day out, you are working on your specific tasks and projects. At the beginning of the year, you set your goals. But three, six, or nine months later, has the landscape shifted?

Look at what has happened in our global economy over the first half of 2026—significant geopolitical shifts, inflationary pressures, and supply chain challenges. Those macro events shift where an organization needs to focus its time and attention. Checking in on the earnings call ensures you are actually working on the right things.

We all know the saying: Work hard, but also work smart. The "smart" side is doing that quick quarterly check-in to see what executives are talking about, and then going back to your individual role and asking, "What should I do about it?"

Once you get comfortable with them—whether it’s for your own company, a competitor, or a client—you realize these calls follow a very predictable pattern. After listening two or three times, you know exactly what metrics they’re going to address. You’re just waiting to hear: What happened to our key profit measures (like gross, operating, net, or EBITDA)? What’s happening around top-line revenue growth?

They are mission-critical. The employees who listen to them consistently build immense internal credibility, accelerate their careers, and ultimately drive their company's success.

Stephen:

I think one big reason why people avoid earnings calls is that they assume they are simply too technical, or they just don't know where to start. But Acumen Learning has developed a relatively simple framework for approaching them. If someone wants to start listening to these tomorrow, how would you teach them to approach it? What is your method?

Brent:

Well, first of all, reach out to us or join our monthly webinar where we break down a new company and industry every single quarter!

But simply put, it comes down to a reliable framework. I am biased, but it’s a mental model we’ve used since 2002 because it just works. For us, every company on the planet focuses on five fundamental drivers: Cash, Profit, Assets, Growth, and People.

Rather than trying to synthesize a mountain of overwhelming data on a call, you use this framework to filter what you hear. From there, you ask yourself two or three foundational questions. First: Which of the five drivers did the executives focus on most, and why?

The "why" is important because context changes the message. If a CEO is talking to Wall Street analysts on an earnings call, the focus will lean heavily toward revenue growth, profitability, and cash flow. If that same CEO is talking internally at an employee town hall, the focus shifts toward the People driver and internal culture. External pressures—like rising commodity prices or inflation—will dictate exactly which driver the executive team is forced to prioritize.

To help with this, we use a tool called the Executive Alignment Template. In about fifteen minutes—roughly the time it takes to read the transcript or listen to the call—you can fill it out and completely map the company's strategic perspective.

The second step is learning how to keep score, which is where the financial statements come in. A lot of times, when people think of business acumen, they think only of the numbers. But the financial statements are just an after-effect; they tell you what happened in the past quarter or year. Your job is to take that historical data and say, "Okay, based on these results, what can I do moving forward to drive more cash flow or optimize profitability?"

If you don't know what the key metrics are, or which levers to pull to impact them, you're playing blind. And remember, when you look at Growth, you're just looking to grow the other drivers: growing your cash, expanding your profitability, and improving your asset utilization.

Connecting the executive commentary to the hard numbers is the real game-changer. When you do this for two or three consecutive quarters, people notice. You gain massive credibility in the organization because you aren't just looking at your siloed role—you see the big picture.

When leadership looks to hand out promotions or assign special high-visibility projects, they choose the people who actually understand how the business operates. It builds your career, and the company wins as a result. Executives want employees to engage with these calls because it serves as a quarterly reminder to take your functional expertise back to your role and help drive the corporate metrics that matter.

Stephen:

If you are watching or listening to us, you can clearly hear Brent's passion for this topic. We will link the tools Brent mentioned, as well as a link to our monthly webinars, in the show notes. For the past five years, Brent has taken a different publicly traded company every single month and done a live breakdown of their most recent call.

Shifting gears slightly, Brent—having reviewed hundreds of earnings calls across almost every industry over the last few years, what patterns do you see consistently showing up?

Brent:

Across all industries, a few universal priorities always stand out. First, everyone is trying to drive sustainable growth and figure out how to withstand macroeconomic headwinds. If you look back at the pandemic in 2020, industries saw massive disruptions. Success came down to adaptation and resilience.

Lately, a major pattern is a deep focus on product and business life cycles. Every product eventually hits a maturity ceiling or a maintenance phase where the curve starts to drop. The calls consistently highlight innovation—how companies are actively creating new growth vectors to avoid that decline.

Over the last few years, between global health crises and intense geopolitical issues, executives have also really emphasized the reality of the global economy. You can no longer manage a business by looking strictly at your local geography. For most public companies, the world is their market. There is a massive effort to better understand evolving customer buying habits, shifting ideal customer profiles, and how technology is reshaping commerce. Specifically, automation and the operational integration of AI are dominant themes right now.

But if I look at the overarching pattern, I always come back to the People driver. What I see on these calls, time and time again, are good people trying to do good things. You have a customer with a specific need, and an organization trying to build a partnership to solve that need. Seeing that symbiotic relationship play out across global business models is incredibly cool. It's fascinating to watch leaders navigate their operations to help their teams lead more effectively.

Stephen:

That's great. To make this as practical as possible for someone who is inspired but might still feel that familiar sense of financial intimidation: where should they start? Should they listen to their own company first? How often? Should they look at competitors or customers? What is your advice for a beginner?

Brent:

I can completely relate to that feeling of intimidation. My professional background is in leadership development and organizational behavior. Typically, leadership training covers three areas: leading self, leading others, and leading a company. I spent the early part of my career and my PhD focused entirely on leading self and leading others—understanding human motivation and career trajectory. But once you realize that the third piece—leading the company—is just as vital, you’ve cleared the first major hurdle. You just have to commit to giving it a chance and investing the time.

As for where to begin:

If you work for a publicly traded organization, start there. That is where you will get the absolute highest return on your time. It completely changes your day-to-day work because you can finally connect your performance management goals to the overarching corporate strategy. Instead of looking at your marketing or operational tasks in a vacuum, you see exactly how they move the needle for the entire business.

If you are in sales and sell into publicly traded accounts, this is non-negotiable. You already know your product's features, advantages, and benefits backward and forward. But the number one piece of feedback we hear from enterprise executives is: "Sellers don't understand my business. They just throw a generic product at me." Imagine walking into a meeting after reviewing their latest earnings call. You can say, "It looks like you are targeting top-line growth of X percent this year, and you have a major corporate initiative around cost management. Let me show you exactly how our solution aligns with those two priorities." You instantly transform from a vendor into a trusted strategic partner.

If you don't work for a public company or sell to them, look at your primary suppliers to understand your upstream risks. Personally, use them for your investment decisions. You can do all the technical investing you want with P/E ratios, volumes, and betas, but true investing requires understanding the underlying business model. Look at someone like Warren Buffett—he looks primarily at cash flow. Is the business generating positive cash flow, and do I understand how they make money? It completely changes your financial literacy.

Stephen:

Brent, this has been fantastic. This was a great, concise look at why these calls matter so much. Again, for our audience, we will include links to the breakdown tools and our monthly webinars in the show notes to help you kickstart this habit. Before we wrap up, Brent, is there any parting thought you want to leave with our listeners?

Brent:

One phrase comes to mind as we finish, and it's the concept of developing an ownership mentality.

This information is sitting out there, completely free and available to you. If you want to build your professional credibility, accelerate your career, and drive your company’s success, commit to listening to these calls for just two or three consecutive quarters. I'm so confident it will change your career that if you do our online training, apply it to your calls, and find it doesn't help you, you can knock on my door and I'll personally reimburse you!

It is a massive professional differentiator. It allows you to own your role and see yourself as a mini-CEO or COO. When you pair your functional expertise with a deep understanding of the business of the business, it's an absolute game-changer.

Stephen:

Love it. Well said, Brent. Thank you for joining us, thank you to everyone for listening, and we will see you all soon.

Brent:

Thanks so much.