Leaders of Modern Finance Ep. 10 – Investing Energy to Streamline Solutions, Hosted by Ben Murray ft. Shachar Rabbe
On this episode of the Leaders of Modern Finance podcast, Ben Murray of The SaaS CFO is joined by Shachar Rabbe, CFO at Acronis, a global cybersecurity and data protection company. Acronis offers antivirus, backup, disaster recovery, and endpoint protection management solutions, as well as AI-based antimalware and blockchain-based data authentication technologies through service provider and IT professional deployment.
Communication Is Key
Acronis is a global organization with more than 17,000 team members spread out across the world. The company is headquartered in Switzerland and Singapore, and there are offices in Boston, Phoenix, and Bulgaria.
Shachar’s finance and accounting team numbers around 50 members, and they handle FP&A, accounting, treasury, sales ops, tax compliance, and procurement. The company embraced remote working before the pandemic, so there were no major changes that needed to be made when Covid hit.
Communication is key when it comes to remote teams. Shachar believes that the onus is on the team leader to communicate in ways that are the most effective and efficient. It is crucial that a leader understands each team member’s preferred method of communication, and they use that form of communication for each individual.
He says, “If one of your employees works best in text messages, then you work with him on text messages. If the other one needs long emails and long explanations, you do that. And if the third one has a hard time with both of these and he needs a phone call, you pick up the phone and you call him and you complete what you’re looking towards in that manner.”
Implementing Change
Like many traditional software companies, Acronis has been in the process of converting customers from a perpetual model to a subscription model that results in monthly recurring revenue.
This kind of major change obviously results in changes in the processes and procedures in the finance and accounting departments. When Shachar joined Acronis, he identified several processes that could be improved through streamlined automation using a variety of tools. This included ERP, budgeting, billing, and provisioning processes.
He is particularly proud of the changes he made in Business Intelligence reporting and analysis. He compares the change to the Apollo 11 mission to the moon. While the big payoff was the “one giant leap for mankind” moment, most of the energy expended on that mission was during launch and leaving the earth’s atmosphere.
Shachar saw that company executives were using far too many ad hoc reports that were time-consuming to create and not repeatable. He chose a BI tool that would streamline processes and automate a great amount of the data analysis needed for executives to make the best decisions for the company.
He defines success in this endeavor by the amount of usage of each report. Anyone can implement a data reporting tool, but if nobody uses the reports, it is a useless tool. So he and his team invested a great amount of energy and time into the beginning of the process. That research, analysis, and planning led to a remarkable adoption rate of the BI tool.
The BI team was initially put under FP&A. As the team became convinced that the new way of doing things was the right way, that’s when the expenditure of all the energy upfront paid off. Shachar saw a dramatic increase in the number of reports that the teams were using. He eventually was able to move the BI team from FP&A to what they call the Systems Team, making it more of an engineering task.
Build the Foundations
Shachar believes that the responsibility of the CFO is to build the foundations that will lead to success for the company. Choosing the right tools and implementing efficient and productive processes is critical. But just as important is the foundation of a strong team.
He has built a team around him with “leaders that constantly look at ways to improve and employees that have a growth mindset, that embrace change, and are not afraid of challenges.” He believes that it is vital to have leaders who look to inspire their team as well as their customers and partners.
His team handles analysis and reporting, budgeting, control, and sales operations. These functions are critical to the success of the company and he makes sure his team functions as a trusted business partner with the rest of the company. This helps company leadership make decisions in real-time based on the freshest possible data.
Solid Accounting
Acronis recently completed a round of funding in excess of $250 million, guided by Shachar and the rest of the leadership team. He points out that when you’re dealing with that amount of money, your accounting needs to be rock solid and your knowledge of the granular details of your data needs to be bulletproof.
During the due diligence process, investors will be digging deep into all the financial aspects of the company. They will want to dig deep into all the foundational metrics of a SaaS company, and it is critical that the finance team has a complete grasp of metrics like MRR, ARR, retention rate, upsell rate, and churn rate.
By implementing the tools to streamline the BI process, he and his team were able to navigate the funding process with confidence. Investors don’t like it if they don’t get a full and transparent picture of the financial health of the company. He was able to provide that picture.
Strategic Partnership
Shachar takes pride in the fact that his team acts as a strategic partner with the company, not just a department that churns out reports. There are plenty of times where they have to crunch numbers and generate reports, but his team goes beyond that.
A significant part of his team’s time is invested in planning, anticipating, thinking, and strategizing as a true business and strategic partner, to your CEO and leadership team. It is the key to having success.
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