Is your business set up to scale?

When I joined as CFO we were a $5M ARR business. Two years later we were at $22M ARR, and I learned quickly which parts of an organization are designed to scale and which parts break. The departments that are set up to scale well with the business all had a common theme: they had strong leaders paired with departmental discipline around process and keeping business transactions up-to-date in their chosen system of record.

In that two-year run, we added an international footprint and increased the employee headcount by 2x. Headcount went up in almost all departments, with the exception of one: finance and accounting. We had a finite number of resources and we needed to grow our business by bringing on talented engineers, sales reps, and customer success resources. Attracting more accountants to our business wasn’t going to help us achieve our goals. The problem when most companies try this is that their back office breaks and people get burnt out. Why? Because they don’t have the right finance tech stack in place to support their growth without adding more FTEs and more consultants.

From day one, I instilled a disciplined financial process and best-in-class finance tech stack to ensure we could surpass our growth targets without adding costly consultants that didn’t know our business or new employees that masked the poor process. Is your business set up to scale? I’d love to hear how you’re solving these difficult problems in your business and I’d love to share my perspective.