Building a Successful Corporate Culture: Tips from Glassdoor’s 2014 CEO of the Year

Posted on October 5, 2015 by lauriemccabe

This video interview was recorded on September 16, 2015, and originally posted on SMB Group Spotlight.

Laurie: Hi, this is Laurie McCabe from SMB Group and I’m talking with Rob Reid, CEO at Intacct, who was honored with the Glassdoor CEO of the Year award last year in the small and midsized company category. This is the second part of a two-part video series and in this part, I’m talking to Rob about some of his tips and perspectives on business as someone who’s founded and run a lot of successful businesses, what are some of the key areas that you could focus on to advance your business and get ahead.

Rob:  You know, I a lot of people ask me so, how were you able to create this organization and have a culture that seems to really be working? The first thing I’d pass on is you need to have a really compelling mission. The mission must be customer-centric, and driven by why you’re doing it, not how you’re doing it. When people come to Intacct, most think, oh they do accounting and finance management and ERP and I’m like, no. We’re helping change the world. For instance, we work with the Nike Foundation, and they go on in and help improve women’s’ ability to start businesses in Africa. How does Intacct help empower that? As Nike instituted programs across Africa, they found a lot of inconsistency in the success rate of women starting their own businesses. Intacct has gone in and we broke down village-by-village what was happening. So Nike could see what was working and change their program for higher success rates. That’s the kind of mission we have.

Laurie: Helping companies understand what levers they need to pull to create success

Rob: The other tip, and this seems obvious to most people, but organizations need to hire the right people. It’s like “Ah, yeah, yeah. Hire the right people.” But what you have to do is you have to hone in on the individual’s traits. What we do at Intacct is we look at first, is, are you a customer-centric type of individual? Do you care about others? Do you care about the customer? Do you care about your fellow employees? Do you care about our partners? If people inject in the interview process say, “Well, tell me about my budget responsibility” or “Tell me about how many people are going to be reporting to me” or “Tell me about how fast I’m going to be able to move up in the organization?” they may not fit in.

Laurie: Like “me, me, me”?

Rob: Yeah, this means “No, no, no!.” What we want to hear is, “Tell me how I can contribute. Tell me about how other people here and how they work together to have a bigger meaning.” We also look for people who are just naturally curious. Because if you’re naturally curious, you’re going to attack the status quo. If you attack the status quo, we go back to that other point of trying to improve whatever we’re working on. There are a lot of times where you work hard, and it’s like “Look at what we did!” And we’re like, “That’s great. Now how are we gonna do better?” And they go, “Oh yeah. Oh yeah! Yeah, let’s go do better!” We really try to look at how can we hire the talent that aligns for our mission. Now, what we’ve done at Intacct may not be right for others. But you need to think about what are the traits that you need in an individual in your organization? We’ve found that team players, that are customer-centric and very curious, are the best fit. Intacct has the highest customer satisfaction rating in the whole ERP industry, not just cloud, not just midmarket, according to both G2 Crowd and Entrust Radius. We’re off the charts in comparison to everybody else. I interview every person, making sure that they’ve got the right traits and the right kind of behaviors and the right attitudes. You know, in our industry we’re lucky enough that we have really intelligent people so most people walking through the door are smart, they’re motivated, now are they gonna fit in to be able to take it to the next level?

Laurie:  Culturally. Yes, culture’s really important.

Rob: You know, my son was in crew in college. It isn’t all about just the strength of pulling the oar, it’s pulling it together in unison. If one person hits that water a little bit differently, guess what? The boat starts to go in a different direction. So that’s one of the things that we are trying to achieve at Intacct, is making sure everyone’s pulling together. It’s amazing what you can do when you’ve got a true team all pulling.

Laurie: I’m sure it makes a difference for the customers too, and that’s why Intacct’s customer retention’s so high.

Rob: So there’s another thing that is really important. That’s to have clear, defined goals and objectives. And getting them written down, and mutually agreed upon. It allows you to hold people accountable. When I talk with others and they’re saying, “Yeah you know, it just doesn’t feel like we’re achieving the kind of success we’d like to have.” It’s one of the first things I ask them is, does everybody in the organization have written objectives? Whether it be weekly, monthly, quarterly, whatever it might be, whatever’s right for that organization, get it in writing and mutually agreed upon.

Laurie: I love that because I think too many times we all have our own assumptions and we don’t make sure that they’re synced up.

Rob: Right. Then one other thing is that we’re dealing mainly with knowledge workers and they like to be stimulated by more than just work and we really like to have a work life balance. It’s not just work.

Laurie: Hallelujah!

Rob: It’s work and life so we encourage that our employees take time with their families. We encourage that they give back to their community. The organization invests in a lot of different community types of programs and you know, I think that then our employees feel like we’re really, we really do care, which we do. And having an empathetic, caring, curious organization is just a wonderful thing.

Laurie: Rob, these are great perspectives, great insights into Intacct and its culture that other companies can learn from. I really appreciate your time and thank you for talking to me today

Rob: It was super seeing you again, and thank you Laurie.

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Automation and Insight: Intacct’s Focus for Dreamforce 2015

Posted on October 5, 2015 by lauriemccabe

This video interview was recorded on September 16, 2015, and originally posted on SMB Group Spotlight.

Laurie: Today I have the opportunity to talk to Rob Reid who is CEO of Intacct, which is a cloud-based financial management solutions company. We’re here at Dreamforce 2015 for this SMB Spotlight. Rob, I’m delighted to be speaking with you.

Rob: It’s a real pleasure. It’s always good to see you.

Laurie: Thanks and likewise! Before we kind of get into some of the specifics of what Intacct is focusing on at Dreamforce, can you provide a quick review about Intacct–who you are and what you do?

Rob:  Sure. At Intacct we deliver ERP solutions for midmarket firms. We focus on being best in class and complementing other best in class applications like Salesforce. So connecting the front office and back office seamlessly is one of the things that we really focus on at Intacct . We’re doing that for midmarket firms that are typically going through a lot of growth that want to automate their processes so they can invest in their mission. You know, so maybe they can hire more engineers, or if they’re a not for profit going on out and really helping the world. We help them eliminate some of the costs of running the business so that they can go and attempt the big things.

Laurie: Yes, helping midmarket companies to automate a lot of backend processes. So how did you arrive at this focus?

Rob: So you know the industry has pretty much segmented for while when we got into the market several years ago. There were solutions initially for enterprise corporations, such as Oracle and SAP. And because there are millions of very small businesses in the United States and across the world, businesses like Intuit went after that arena. And requirements are significantly different between what a large enterprise needs and what an owner/operator needs. But in the middle market, in the past, it was pretty much Microsoft and Sage with offerings there to help those organizations grow and to try to become larger companies. And unfortunately, Microsoft and Sage didn’t migrate to the cloud too quickly. The cloud changes the economic model, it’s a more cost-effective, easy to use type of environment, and enables much better reporting than ever before. So organizations like Intacct went on in to that sector to take advantage of cloud, and it’s been working great for us. We’ve been achieving 40% growth for the last four to five years. We now have 9,000 customers in locations all over the world in every continent other than the Arctic, and it’s just working for these organizations.

Laurie: Here at Dreamforce, you have some announcements or focal points that you’re highlighting here at Dreamforce. Could you talk about that?

Rob: I’d be glad to. At Dreamforce we’re showing Intacct Subscription Billing capability, which allows you to automate the subscription billing practices that you have. So many different industries are moving to subscription billing, they need an adaptive way to do the monthly billing and then connect that from a revenue recognition perspective. So we offer Intacct Subscription Billing, on top of the Salesforce1 platform. It’s totally integrated in with Salesforce, so there’s a seamless flow from the front office into the back office, so you’re accurately billing your customers. In turn, customers are happier, and will pay the bill faster. We’ve tied the revenue recognition requirements in and automated the whole overall process.

Laurie:  You’re absolutely right, even products now are on subscriptions, like on Amazon I have certain things set up for subscription, like vitamins, because I know that I’m going to need them every so often. I think that subscription capability is going to be key for a lot of companies.

Rob:  I’m glad you brought that up about getting your vitamins and other consumer things, but I want to clarify that our subscription billing solution is really focused on B2B type organizations. There are solutions from our partners that do a great job for the B2C area.

Laurie: So you integrate with partner solutions to handle the subscription billing in a B2C environment. Ok, what else is Intacct focusing on here?

Rob: In addition to automation to help organizations take out costs, they need to know exactly what’s going on with regard to revenue and their overall performance. They need to get information to the management team and all the employees about what’s going on in real time. They need empirical data to make both strategic and tactical decisions. If they can see what’s happening, they can spot opportunities and go after them. Or if all of a sudden there’s a new issue starting to bubble, you’ll see it and you can hone in on it. So we have delivered the Intacct Visual Board Book to give organizations the ability to see not just gap performance measures, but the operational measures that go on all the time. In today’s world, many times the operational measures are more important than the gap measures.

Laurie: If you can see where you’ve got either an opportunity or an issue and fix that or address it right away it’s gonna make a big difference.

Rob: Yes, and since we’re here at Dreamforce, there are a lot software companies here, and the change in monthly recurring revenue is actually the most comprehensive way to look at a software company’s health. Looking at revenue from the past, you’re always looking at things in the rearview mirror. When you’re seeing changes in real-time, you know exactly what’s happening. For instance, one of the challenges for most subscription-based software companies is the cost of customer acquisition. Well at Intacct, we’re providing you that information in real-time. Our Visual Board Book it’s keeping track of cash, it’s keeping track of what your customer lifetime value is, all that’s automated and provided visually. Everything is data-driven so that you make the right decisions. So as important as it is to have a financial management system to automate your processes, I think it’s even more important to be able to have the empirical data to make the right decisions.

Laurie: Right, have the insights and get everybody on the same page instead of everybody having a different opinion about what to do.

Rob: You know, you and I have known each other for a long period of time. I’ve been in Fortune 500 companies and I’ve never had more information to make the right decisions than I have right now at Intacct. We use Salesforce, we use Intacct, we use Marketo, we have about 30 different cloud solutions that we’ve integrated in together. We’ve got dashboards on everything and know what’s going on in the real-time.

Laurie: So these capabilities help you grow a business and sustain a business.

Rob: Yes, and that draws us back to that midmarket. According to The Economist, 89% of all the jobs created in our economy since the Great Recession are in the midmarket. The midmarket is driving our economy today. In fact, enterprise level new jobs have gone down 10% since the Great Recession. So we’re helping growth-oriented midmarket organizations take it to the next level. It’s just really an exciting time.

Laurie: We have known each other a long time Rob, and I know you have a lot of experience in business, and you were also honored with the Glassdoor CEO of the Year award last year. I’m looking forward to Part 2 of this interview, where we’ll talk about your management tips for midmarket businesses over and above automation and analytics.

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Intacct Collaborate: Bringing Sales and Finance Together

Posted on November 3, 2014 by lauriemccabe

This video interview was originally posted on SMB Group Spotlight. 

Laurie: Hi, this is Laurie McCabe from SMB Group and today I’m here on the SMB Spotlight at Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2014 Conference.  I’m talking to Aaron Harris, who is the Chief Technology Officer for Intacct.  Aaron, thank you for sharing time with me today.  Can you tell me a little bit about Intacct, who you are, what you do?

Aaron: Sure.  Thanks Laurie.  Intacct is a cloud accounting and finance solution that we have designed for small and medium-sized businesses.  We’ve taken a best in class approach, so all of our resources are targeted at building just what the accounting and finance team needs, the general ledger, payables, receivables.  We’ve got a strong relationship with Salesforce, so if you’re using Salesforce we’ve got a very nice native integration where Intacct and Salesforce synchronize data and processes and it’s a beautiful way to get your front office and your back office working together.

Laurie: So what are you highlighting here?  I know you have an announcement about some new collaboration capabilities with Salesforce.  What’s going on with that?

Aaron:      That’s right.  So at Dreamforce this year we are announcing Intacct Collaborate.  What Intacct Collaborate does it takes Salesforce Chatter and extends it into Intacct so that your sales and your marketing and support people who are using Salesforce today and who are collaborating on Chatter are using now the same network that the accounting team, the finance team, project managers are using on the backend.  So there’s one social network, there’s one collaborative network across the enterprise for the whole organization to work on.

Laurie: Good.  It sounds like that makes it easier for everybody to feed information into the whole financial process.

Aaron: That’s right.  There’s a lot pieces to it.  Obviously there are some great stories, right?  I’m a sales rep, I’ve got a deal that I want to get done, I need to get a 10% discount approved on that deal.  In the old world I’d write an email to the CFO, the CFO doesn’t know anything about what I’m talking about so the CFO has got to go do some research.  She responds to the email, there’s lots of back and forth, none of the communication is captured, right?  So it slows down the sale, it adds frustration, there’s no log to what happened.  So in this world that all happens via chatting and collaborating, and it’s all in real-time, it’s all captured, it’s all part of the record.  We also see this being useful within the accounting and finance team, getting them to collaborate over some of the more tricky business processes.  I was talking to a CFO the other day who said 20% of finance transactions are exceptional, they’re complex.  And we spend 80% of our time on those 20% of the transactions, the exceptions.  We have to find out what’s going on, what do we do?  Having Collaborate allows them to not only more efficiently communicate about these transactions and these exceptions, but it generates a log that you keep the communication around the transaction.

Laurie: I know Intacct is really aimed at small and medium businesses, but that’s a very diverse audience, so what segments of the SNB market are really the sweet spot for Intacct?

Aaron: Sure, so there’s really two categories of customers who are choosing Intacct.  The first is companies who have outgrown their first accounting product, usually it’s QuickBooks.  They’ll outgrow it when they need to automate processes that are manual.  Perhaps they’re now a multi-location business and it’s just too difficult to aggregate or consolidate data across the locations.  It might be that the reporting tools available in QuickBooks don’t give them kind of insight that they need, which product lines are the most profitable, which of my professional services engagements are losing money and which are making money?  This kind of insight is just not possible in some of the low-end products.  Or it may just be that this is a growing company that expects to go public, they need to have proper controls in place, they need to have a certain way they’re going to get through their Sarbanes–Oxley audits, so they need a product that will help them…

Laurie: Even if you’re preparing to be acquired or something like that.  If you sell the business you would need that.

Aaron: Exactly.  You need a product that cannot just assure external auditors that you’re following these controls, but that allows you to provide the evidence that you’re doing it.

Laurie: And that’s about half of your customers are coming from that.

Aaron: About half.  So the other half are people who have embraced the cloud.  They love Salesforce, they love some of the other cloud products.  They can see that with Salesforce they’re getting constant innovation, it embraces mobile technology.  You know what I’m talking about.

Laurie: Yeah, they just want to be able to do things on the fly, they way they want, on the device of choice.

Aaron: And no more headaches about hosting the infrastructure, that’s security, right?

Laurie: No, they don’t want to mess with that.

Aaron: So they want to take their accounting and finance processes and modernize them to the same extent as they already have sales and marketing.  So they’re choosing Intacct not just because it’s cloud and it gives them the same advantages they’re getting through Salesforce, they’re also choosing it because it’s fully integrated with Salesforce.  They’ve got the full front office/back office integration, data synchronization, process integration.

Laurie: It takes the integration headache away too.

Aaron: That’s right.  No more disconnect in the process.

Laurie: So how can a potential customer or prospect learn a little bit more or better evaluate whether this might be a good fit for them?

Aaron: The easiest way is to go to our website, go to www.intacct.com.  There’s a number of things you can do there, but maybe the easiest is just to get a trial.

Laurie: So you do still offer a free trial?  I think a lot of them don’t anymore

Aaron: We do.  We’re very proud of our product, we think it’s very easy to use, so get a trial.  We actually walk you through how to learn more.  It’s actually a really nice way to learn about Intacct.

Laurie: That’s great.  Well Aaron, thank you again for sharing that information with me about Intacct.  I think it will be really valuable for a lot of small and medium businesses out there.  Have a great rest of Dreamforce.

Aaron: Thanks Laurie.

Laurie: Thank you.

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Acumatica’s Best of Both Worlds ERP Story

Posted on April 24, 2010 by lauriemccabe

Just want to let you know that we are publishing highlights from recent vendor briefings on the SMB Group web site. As time permits, we discuss our takeaways from the more interesting briefings. I’ll try to remember to post them here as well. There are several up there already, here is the most recent one.

4-23-10

Highlights:

Acumatica is a relatively new player on the SMB ERP scene. It delivers its web-based ERP solution both on premise, and via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Targeting companies with 5–1,000 employees (or roughly $5M – $500M in annual revenues), Acumatica provides accounting, CRM and distribution capabilities, and worldwide currency and language customization.

Acumatica offers customers a choice to run its solutions on-premise or via the SaaS model, providing the benefits of cloud technology and social media capabilities in both delivery models. Subscription pricing for the SaaS version of the accounting module starts at $12,000 annually, while on-premise licenses start at $15,000.  On-premise pricing is CPU-based, not per-user based, enabling customers to maximize the ERP user base without incurring added costs. The company has more than 50 customers using its solutions to-date. About 30% use Acumatica via the SaaS modes, and the other 70% have deployed it on-premise.

Acumatica has a 100% indirect sales model, which provides an attractive and neutral compensation model to motivate value-added resellers (VARs) to sell the solution that will work best for the end-user customer. The vendor has signed up more than 40 VARs to date—mostly from the ranks of Microsoft Dynamics and Sage.

Quick Take:

Acumatica intends to capitalize on key trends and requirements in the traditional VAR community and it the SMB market.  First, as I’ve written many times, SaaS vendors have yet to crack the code on creating a VAR-friendly model. Customer demand for SaaS is on the rise, and  many VARs want to add a SaaS offering to their line-up. But, they worry that SaaS vendors (who often sell both direct and through channels) will disintermediate them once the partner has brought in the business. VARs searching for a SaaS option are likely to find Acumatica’s 100% indirect model, combined with a choice of delivery options and a Microsoft-centric approach, quite attractive. The fact that VARs can sell the same solution via either delivery model is also a plus—most VARs don’t want to be evangelists, they want to sell the solution that best fits the customer’s needs.

Acumatica offers customers a distinct value proposition as well. Customers can either self-select what model (SaaS or on-premise) will work best for them, or Acumatica and its partners can help them decide what will work best. In contrast, other major vendors in the mid-market space—including Intacct, NetSuite, Microsoft, Sage, etc.—have a pre-determined agenda.  Acumatica also offers customers that want to switch from one delivery mode to the other discounts that take into account their prior investments.

As a relative newcomer, Acumatica will have to work harder than more established rivals to prove that it has both the product capabilities and corporate viability to be a “safe” choice. However, if Acumatica can keep pulling in VARs, and broadcast its best of both worlds story out to the market, it should be able to cross this chasm.

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Will CPAs Bring the Cloud to Earth for SMBs?

Posted on April 8, 2009 by lauriemccabe

Just last week, I blogged about how some IT pundits and vendors are falling into the trap of turning the cloud into yet another confusing and over-hyped industry buzzword, and the need to bring cloud conversations down to earth for small and medium business (SMB) customers.

A couple of days after I wrote this post, I had a briefing with Intacct, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and it’s subsidiary, CPA2Biz. The three organizations have just announced a significant partnership designed to do just that (http://us.intacct.com/corporate/news_events/2009/040709.php)  through some of the most down to earth people I know—accountants.The gist of the alliance is that AICPA and CPA2Biz have designated Intacct as their preferred provider of financials applications. Together, they will educate AICPA’s 350,000 members about the benefits of moving their financials solutions to the cloud. The deal will give all AICPA members—both CPA firms and their clients—discounts on Intacct solutions, and encourage accounting firms to use Intacct as a platform to provide services for their clients. In addition, AICPA will layer its best practices and vertical templates on top of Intacct’s solution to give accountants additional tools, guidance and content to create a unique CPA version of Intacct. The partnership is a big coup for Intacct, which currently has about 100 accountant partners. By joining ranks with AICPA and CPA2Biz, Intacct gains the potential to dramatically scale its accountant channel–and reach thousands of SMB customers through them. 

Not only does this alliance pose a strong threat to Intuit QuickBooks’ dominance in the small business accounting market, it has the potential to pull SMBs into cloud computing in vast numbers. Intacct, AICPA and CPA2Biz did a lot of homework beforehand, including research that showed online accounting solutions boost productivity by as much as 50%. By dramatically reducing the need for travel, and the necessity of exchanging paper and email files, CPAs have more time to spend providing guidance to clients to help them improve financial performance and decision-making.

Accountants are rarely bleeding edge technology adopters. But AICPA’s backing will give them more confidence in recommending cloud computing to their clients. The fact that Intacct uses IBM for its primary data center, a SunGard facility as a hot standby, and has exceeded all uptime guarantees for the past year should help mitigate concerns about security, reliability and performance. As important, the message that AICPA, and eventually its accountant members, are communicating to SMBs—that cloud computing can help them “improve financial performance, take better advantage of financial advice, and make better, faster business decisions”—is framed in business terms, not cloud speak!

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