Aleph brought a ton of firepower to the tool that I was already intimately familiar with. 2X is a category-defining marketing as a service company since our founding in 2017 We've grown north of 80% CAGR over the life of the company. We've brought on two incredible financial partners in Recognize and Insight Partners, and we've increased our talent pool from a group of ten originally to about eleven hundred today. I'm CFO. I joined in 2021, so I've been here for four years now. I've been in this, you know, hyper-growth scaling mode for my entire time here, and I've really leaned on the tech side to try to get as much scale as I can, with limited, yeah, resources and capacity. And that's where, you know, Aleph has been a total game changer for me. At 2x and a lot of my past lives as well, I was stuck in Excel purgatory. I think every FP&A individual contributor has lived through that. Yeah. Throughout their lives, careers, you know, whatever. Like, manually downloading exports out of all the different siloed systems, stitching together a master workbook with VLOOKUPs and lookup tables and macros that get increasingly fragile farther, you know, I got away from the initial model build. And then I found myself ultimately spending more time validating the data and that none of my macros had broke or none of my formulas had broke, rather than actually, like, analyzing the outputs of the data. We're also in a phase of aggressive m&a driven scale. And so every new acquisition we make brings new platforms and unique data structures and challenges. And when thinking about that whole way of doing things that I had just mentioned, each acquisition created an exponential level of complexity as everything needed to be stitched together. We've got multiple Salesforce environments. We've got different ERPs and NetSuite, QuickBooks, and different revenue models. And so, it finding a tool that allowed me to, minimize my pain there was was something that I was certainly interested in. There were pieces of things that I was looking for that I found in a lot of other tools. Aleph checked the boxes on probably the most of them. I made a choice based on my belief that Aleph would plug into the tools we already use, absorb all of our complexities without a bunch of custom contortions, and ultimately would deliver pretty fast ROI for me all without having to sit through some long, painful implementation cycle. Trust is greatly improved, and so I've eliminated version control issues. I've significantly reduced the risk of manual errors yeah, there's no more like, oh, I didn't apply the departmental filter properly when I exported the report this time and, yeah, go back and rerun it. I've also gotten really high praise from my board for the weekly dashboards that I, you know, built in Excel and published out to them. It's also been incredibly helpful at m&a integration. And you can, you know, get into their QuickBooks environments, their Salesforce environments, and it gives me instant visibility. And allows me to create consolidated reports and dashboards and forecasts all within one system. Like, yeah, I kinda mentioned this before, but it's shifted a lot of my time from, like, data whack-a-mole to strategic finance outputs, which freed up a ton of my bandwidth for scenario planning and modeling and business guidance. And it's given me significant leverage from an FP&A perspective without having to bring an FP&A person on. Like, it's probably delayed my need for a dedicated FP&A person by about a year. The implementation process was unlike anything I've ever experienced in my career, and I'm not being hyperbolic in saying that. Like, our NetSuite implementation was done in three months, and from what I understand, like, that was running at hyper speed. Our implementer never had done one that fast. We've implemented some other tools that are usually in, like, six weeks to three month time frame. And so going from, like, kickoff to fully operational at two weeks was unbelievable. The free trial element, I think, was a total game changer because, like, I got to see my NetSuite data, my Salesforce data in the tool. I got to build a dashboard. Like, I built my private equity dashboard in the free trial version before I even kicked off. And so, like, I was able to see in real time and then have that confidence that the value that I was gonna get again before, you know, even signed on the dotted line.
