How Users of Excel & AI Can Help CEOs Execute Bold Growth Plans

SUMMARY: Excel users who combine AI, external data, and automation are no longer just support—they’re growth accelerators. By integrating FRED and Sharadar data into live dashboards, validating assumptions with AI, and enabling agile, cross-functional planning, they help CEOs act faster and smarter. This all-Excel, AI-assisted strategy, empowers them to translate external signals into bold moves and measurable results—at scale. Here’s an introduction to the new strategy.

Growth starts with context. You can’t design a growth plan in a vacuum.

To place bold bets, you need to understand the landscape—where the economy is heading and how peers are performing. That context doesn’t live in your ERP. It lives in external data sources that too few companies use well.

That’s why ultra-productive Excel users are critical to fast-growing firms. They know how to work with data. They know what the data means. They know how to move quickly. And they can help CEOs plan and execute growth strategies without waiting for formal systems to catch up.

Let’s look at how Excel users can help drive growth—not just support it.

Start with External Visibility

Most growth strategies begin with a question: Where should we place our bets? To answer that, you need visibility. Not just internal reports. You need external data that shows you where the economy is headed and how your peers are performing.

Two databases stand out. FRED, the Federal Reserve Economic Database, offers more than 800,000 time-series economic indicators. You can track trends in retail sales, interest rates, employment, inflation, consumer sentiment, industry performance, and more.

Sharadar provides financial statement history for more than 5,000 currently listed companies that are publicly traded in the U.S. It lets you monitor the financial performance of your competitors, partners, and acquisition targets. Because their data is standardized, Excel users can easily analyze any company, or any group of companies, with the same flowbook (a workbook set up to flow data from its source through its output).

Together, these datasets provide the economic and competitive context that a growth plan needs.

Flow the Data into Excel

FRED and Sharadar are powerful, but the Excel users in most companies don’t use them. Why? Because pulling and prepping the data takes time.

Excel Data Plumbers know how to solve that issue. With Power Query, they can build automated pipelines from FRED, and from Sharadar via Nasdaq Data Link. Those pipelines can clean, filter, join, and reshape the data automatically.

With the right Excel strategy, they can keep those dataflows fresh. No VBA. No one-off formulas. Just structured automation. The result? Live economic dashboards. Dynamic benchmarks. Strategic models that reflect the real world.

And performance measures that track your strategy’s assumptions and progress.

Validate the Growth Plan

Suppose a CEO wants to open five new distribution centers in the Midwest. But what does FRED say about retail sales growth in relevant states or regions? What do national or regional credit trends suggest about demand?

AI fills the gap between financial outcomes and competitor actions by analyzing news reports, earnings call transcripts, press releases, and investor presentations—using tools like Copilot, ChatGPT, or industry-specific Natural Language Processing (NLP) models, like BloombergGPT.

AI can surface signals like announcements of new locations, pricing shifts, or strategic pivots. Excel users can then match those actions with Sharadar’s financials to assess the impact. Did the strategy drive margin expansion or revenue growth? Or did it stretch the balance sheet? With AI as the radar and Excel as the dashboard, companies gain visibility into both the moves and the outcomes.

Sharadar lets you analyze the financial results of similar companies that expanded operations—what happened to their margins and asset efficiency? Did expansion drive earnings or just dilute ROI? What happened to their debt ratio over time?

Excel users can integrate this data into a model that tests the assumptions behind the plan. They can run comparisons and simulations. And they can raise a red flag if something doesn’t align. This level of validation isn’t just smart—it’s essential.

Enable Scenario Thinking

Plans are never static. Inflation spikes. Interest rates change. A competitor gets acquired. Your plan has to respond—fast.

When your Excel models are linked to external data, your scenarios stay grounded. You don’t need to rebuild them from scratch. A Fed rate hike? See what happens to your cost of capital, customer demand, and FX exposure.

An industry downturn? Model how far you can drop volume before the plan breaks. Excel Data Plumbers can surface these scenarios with a click—assuming the model has been built to support it. The point isn’t that setup is effortless. The point is that once structured, those tools become fast, flexible, and refreshable—ready when the CEO is. That agility gives CEOs room to maneuver.

AI also can help identify which scenarios matter most. By scanning industry trends, economic forecasts, and news sentiment—filtered by geography, industry focus, or both—AI can highlight emerging risks and opportunities that aren’t yet in your planning assumptions. Excel users can translate those insights into fast, testable models.

Set Smarter, Sharper Targets

A good growth plan needs measurable goals. But too often, targets are arbitrary. Someone picks 15% because it sounds ambitious.

With FRED, you can align goals with the business cycle. If the economy is slowing, modest growth may be a win. If it’s accelerating, your targets may be too soft.

With Sharadar, you can benchmark KPIs—like gross margin, SG&A as a percentage of sales, ROA, and revenue growth—against actual public company performance. Excel users who know how to connect those dots can help leadership avoid both overreach and underreach.

AI tools also can analyze hundreds of peer companies and surface patterns that matter—like which mix of KPIs most often correlates with sustained revenue growth, improved valuation, or Total Shareholder Return. Excel users can incorporate those benchmarks into forecasting tools that prioritize what actually moves the needle.

Accelerate Execution

Even the best plan will die in a spreadsheet bottleneck. If you’re copying and pasting data for reports, you’re already too slow.

Excel users who automate data refreshes and streamline reporting can remove those lags. They turn recurring reports into refreshable dashboards. They reduce manual error. They give operators and execs real-time answers to their questions.

And they free up bandwidth for analysis instead of cleanup. That speed translates directly into execution.

Beyond automation, AI can summarize findings, flag outliers, and suggest follow-up questions based on the data. Instead of waiting for analysts to interpret results, executives can get narrative insights built into dashboards—delivered in natural language alongside the numbers.

Show What Growth Will Cost

Growth isn’t free. More sales usually mean more people, more inventory, more risk—and more cash.

Excel pros can use Sharadar and FRED data to estimate working capital needs. They can build integrated models that show the timing and size of expected cash crunches.

They can test forecast models against debt service assumptions, coverage ratios, or working capital limits based on historical financial data. They also can spot when headcount or wage inflation might outpace revenue. In short, they keep the growth plan financially grounded.

Growth Loves Speed

Great strategies don’t guarantee great outcomes. Strategic clarity and execution speed make the difference.

Ultra-productive Excel users who combine internal models with external data—and now AI—give companies both. They help CEOs test ideas, validate assumptions, move faster than the market, and generate significant value.

They don’t just support the growth plan. They accelerate it. And in competitive markets, that edge is what wins.

Translate AI signals into action—build reports and analyses that drive CEO-level execution. Join the EDP Institute today.