Leaders of Modern Finance Ep. 6 – Humanizing Your Data ft. Evgeny Fetisov

On this episode of the Leaders of Modern Finance podcast, host Tiffaney Fox Quintana welcomes Evgeny Fetisov, Chief Financial Officer at Semrush, an online visibility management and content marketing SaaS platform.

Journey to CFO

Evgeny originally wanted to be a computer coder but detoured quickly into finance. He spent his early career in banking and moved on to become a trader doing foreign exchange. That led to time as a consultant at McKinsey & Company, which he followed with what he calls his “entrepreneurial stint” for several years. 

He then joined a private equity firm doing stock exchange investments on the second-largest Russian stock exchange, becoming a big enough shareholder to sell the firm to the Moscow Stock Exchange. In 2013, a large company asked him to be CFO, and he joined just in time to take the company public.

He joined Semrush in July 2019, and his experience with IPOs shone through as he took the company public.

Exchanging Data and BI

Evgeny’s approach to the engagement between the finance department and other departments in the company is to treat those departments as clients. Interactions rely on the finance department providing key data to the departments that need them.

This data allows each department to make decisions on the fly, while having all the knowledge necessary from a financial perspective to ensure those decisions are best. They also collect data from other departments to help with accurate forecasting to keep the company on the right growth track. This is no small feat for a global company like Semrush, and they dig down into the data by specific countries. 

An example he gives is they will forecast what their business will look like in Germany in two years’ time. As he says, they get deep in the weeds to build out a model and understand the business and key drivers so they can get that information back to their peers.

Interestingly, Evgeny says they have two separate business intelligence teams at the company. One BI group digs deep into the analytics of operations, analyzing data at a very granular level, which is a lot deeper than he might need for his department. The second BI group merges what they do with financial data, reporting directly to Evgeny and interfacing between finance and operations.

Collaborating with Marketers

Evgeny uses Excel and BI tools and presentation tools, but his favorite collaboration tool is the whiteboard in his office. He likes to meet with the marketing team in person and brainstorm and collaborate using the whiteboard. His marketing team members are very well-rounded and have a grasp of broad finance concepts. He says there is no need to get into technical accounting concepts with them.

He lets them know in broad terms where the revenue comes from and how it is disaggregated to the key drivers, which they can relate to. Then they can have meaningful discussions about the marketing budget. 

The biggest challenge he faces with his marketing team is not controlling their budget—he is actually asking them if there is any way they can spend more. Marketing is the key driver to customer acquisition, and he wants them to find ways to bring in more customers without worrying about the cost. 

Their customer acquisition cycle is short, and they use sophisticated data collection to track return on investment, which is measured by the number of new customers they acquire. If they increase spending in a quarter, the cycle is short enough that they will see results during that same quarter. 

Engineers Are Key

Semrush is, at its core, a software company. Evgeny believes that the engineers and software developers are key to the success of the company, and he does everything he can to make sure they are working comfortably and efficiently. This is important to creating the right software products that will keep their customers happy.

When Covid hit, they were already prepared to work remotely. People weren’t working at home before the pandemic, but the way the company was set up from a technology standpoint was remote-ready. They were in five countries, so they were already set up for meeting and working through tools like video conferencing platforms.

They have returned to the office off and on, and they follow the local restrictions and procedures in place in each country to determine who can come back to the office.

Track Record for Hiring

When it comes to hiring for his department, Evgeny puts an emphasis on a candidate’s track record in his or her career. He is looking for people who have successfully done the processes and functions that he would like to build in his department. They are still a young company, and that experience is essential to help the company grow and thrive.

When he meets with candidates, he is looking for someone who will fit with the culture and fit with the team. He needs individuals who are self-starters, who are able to work on their own. He says that means being a risk-taker. He often finds it challenging to hire people from very large companies into his department because he finds that they are experts at one or two things, and at Semrush they need to be able to handle a little bit of everything. 

Moving to the Cloud

One of the biggest changes Evgeny has seen in his time in finance is the movement of many processes to the cloud. The old way was to own a piece of enterprise software and keep it up to date with updates and patches. With the popularity of SaaS offerings, it’s becoming easier and the quality of the software is higher. His company is in the SaaS business, so he appreciates the magnitude of the change. 

The online tools help drive the mindset they are trying to instill at the company—that they want all the data to be presented in as close to real-time as possible. That means moving away from PDFs and PowerPoint presentations and moving more to online collaboration tools. This allows them to build models and perform data analysis with up-to-date information. 

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