Conversations with the people shaping the future of finance

There is so much changing in the office of the CFO with the tools and platforms right now. Many of our clients, we charge time and materials, and the time is going down. And I think our role as advisors are going to become more around thinking about managed services. There's lots of tools that we've invested in that in a labor rate based business model would have made no sense for us to make those investments because they're just driving down the amount of time people spend in some ways, but they're making the product better. What I'm selling at the end of the day is an output that is a combination of what someone can do with really good technology behind them. That kind of trusted advisor approach that we wanna promote and the way that we work with clients really depends upon or really is predicated upon our staff has something to offer beyond just a straight service execution. How do we unlock capacity on our team to do more analysis and more sort of storytelling partnership and less sort of building assets. Right? Building reporting, building models. There was so much manpower involved in that, and it was short circuiting the amount of time that our team could spend with clients actually talking about their businesses. We had so much data and have so much data that we were uncomfortable not being able to use it to help support our overall clients. From a tech standpoint, I think accounting and finance was stale. Typically, what you got access to in terms of data was substantially just the ledger, and that was it. And you had to whatever you could do in terms of advisory was limited largely by that sort of boundary of what you could see. And now, principally, we're gonna come to it, but why things like Aleph make such a huge difference is because it makes it so much more easy. It facilitates that access to data to the next levels of the organization. To be able to go to a client and say, hey, we've looked at other companies that have raised thirty million dollars that are doing ten million in ARR, and these are some metrics across those forty companies that fit that profile. And this is where you stand against that. That is such a powerful tool that we now have that we can use in supporting our clients. Whether it's the customer pipeline, operational metrics, data, payroll, all that stuff becomes something that we can see, and therefore we can leverage in the value that we provide to clients, and projections, and modeling, and advisory, the business analytics stuff, are so much more enabled with that data. Every single CFO engagement we're in, first thing we do is connect Aleph, everything. And all our models are, all of our templates, every everything is now dependent upon Aleph. We were into the implementation, I think, I don't know, two or three months, and the team was really in the weeds. And I said, why don't we just put it in front of, like, a prospect? Like, let's see what the reaction is. Let's just show them this. Like, let's lean into the fact that we're partnering with, you know, with this company to do a thing that's better than anybody else in this space. Like, let's lean into that. And I would say by late summer, you know, the Aleph demo was a key part of every every customer prospect instance where we pitch to finance service, an FP&A service or dashboarding service or something like that. You know, and our win rate's higher. I think a lot of people buy tech platforms, but they don't know anybody inside the company. And you actually value our expertise as much as we value the quality of your product. And so you kind of just end up with an agreement that this makes sense to all, but you really are most committed because there's this fit between the people and the teams. We asked you, frankly, for a a pretty big commitment terms of dev resources and product strategy and help us think about how we can do a lot of the things that we wanna do better. And the Aleph team has been incredibly responsive to all of our feedback. As you've gone out and talked to your customers, you've said, you've told us our customers want this and to have third parties, especially, those products that we use really listen to us and have Attivo become part of the development process and really engage in that level is sets us apart. Mean, ultimately Aleph, we started with Aleph to begin to set Attivo apart, and we continue to become further and further advanced, I think, against our competitors as a result of the relationship.