Unlocking Sustainable Growth with Vittorio Cosma

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10X ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and And today I'm very excited to welcome our guest, Vittorio Cosma. Now I'm gonna read his bio because it's really rich and interesting. Vittorio is the founder and CEO of Matters.to. And now Matters.to does a lot of really interesting things with empowering scale-ups to get more information as they grow, especially about their finances. Vittorio is passionate about fostering positive change in the investment industry by empowering small and medium enterprises as well as startups with the data-driven insights they need to thrive as they scale up. He wants to level the playing field by making advanced business intelligence accessible to all companies, regardless of size. And this translates into helping founders to attract investment and scale their ventures through a data-driven, people-centric, and value-based approach. By optimizing or integrating customizable and scalable tools, he aims to unlock sustainable growth for early-stage and growing companies, building a more equitable and data-powered business landscape. What an awesome vision that you have, Vittorio. Thanks so much for joining us on the show today.

Thank you, Mark. It's great to be here.

Awesome. So that really interesting business, and I know you have a pretty diverse background. Why don't you tell us a little bit about sort of how you got to where you are with Matters Too?

Yeah, well, my career path is a little bit, you know, different from the norm. I zigzagged a lot. I started in Procter Gamble, then did real estate, lived in China for a while, you know, building shopping centers and outlet centers, fashion outlet centers. And then at a certain point, I discovered that every 4 to 5 years, basically, I grow bored with what I'm doing and change completely the market I'm working in. And I was 35 when I realized that, you know, my mind works well when I have to deal with many different things. So I need— this is oxygen for me. I need to be exposed to many different things. And so I really had to think and, you know, to find exactly what I was good at. And so, yeah, almost 10 years ago, I started researching What would I? What would be my my next phase in life and potentially last in in this job for more than four or five years? So I basically used my financial background in real estate and repurposed it to be able to assist businesses in actually building their own financial frameworks. So I'm lucky I'm exposed to many different things with you know. Startups and early-stage companies, from drones to barbershop chains to restaurants to, you know, other digital startups. So yeah, I have a very different and vibrant agenda during the day, but I always do the same thing. So I'm able to actually become more and more proficient in what I do, become more and more into, you know, my specific niche while at the same time having this richness coming toward me.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And actually, that's one of the things that I've always loved about working with clients is the opportunity to learn about new businesses and really get in and understand their challenges. But as you say, like deepen your expertise at solving the same types of problems, but just for different businesses. So it keeps that variety, while at the same time giving you the chance to deepen that expertise. And you talked about that expertise being around, you know, providing, you know, business intelligence insights. And I know you focus a lot on, you know, sort of financial insights for companies. Tell us about some of the systems that you help create there at Matters2 for the companies that you work with.

Yeah, so basically we structure from the ground up the financial department and that means different things from different companies, right?

Mm-hmm.

Normally we address different growth pains. So sometimes we have the startups that is looking to raise funds. And in that case, we help them just with dealing with the backend of things. So from creating pitch decks to the data room, doing a bit of sell-side due diligence, if it's a startup is it's normally pretty easy. If it's a company that has been out there for a while, they might have complicated things. So they might jump on a situation, maybe you have a founder that has a company in the UK, a company in the US and no holding.

Uh-huh.

So that's definitely not investible. So we have to, you know, assess and actually rectify the situation there. In other cases, the needs are more around, you know, creating a team and a business. So ideally, when a company is doing great and growing, they need to, at a certain point, put in place certain rules around how to manage their finances. So one of these could be, for example, creating budget budgeting procedures. And so we come and help the founders create this environment where they can actually manage their company more effectively.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And you were telling me a story earlier about how, you know, some of the sort of hairy things that you've come into and like you had one company that had, I think you said 1,500 different shareholders because of the way that they were structured. Yeah, so seems like a lot to wrangle there.

Yeah, yeah, and that's one of the examples, right? So founders need to manage their companies, so they need to find new clients and they need to actually take care of the company. Sometimes admin gets a bit too much. In this case, this was actually a company who did a very successful crowdfunding campaign Back in 2016. So at that time, crowdfunding platforms were not really equipped as they are today. So today they normally tend to have all the shareholders get into an SPV, a special purpose vehicle, and then this SPV invests into the company. So, okay, founder, you deal just with one—

One entity. Additional shareholder.

In that case, that wasn't the case.

Okay.

Yeah, we had 1,500 people that every time you have to disclose some information or you have, you know, your annual general meeting, you have to communicate to all of these people. And then on the other side, you have potentially 1,500 people asking questions.

Wow.

So yeah, that was fun. But yeah, this is one of the many things that might happen.

When you, I know that you work a lot with scale-ups and one of the things that we see working with companies that are in that sort of growth mode is, you know, as they start to move from just the founder or just the founding team doing everything, they need to create systems that allow them to sort of scale themselves out so they can move out. But you called out something that I thought was really interesting because they might start to realize that they need to bring in other folks because they don't want to be the bottleneck anymore. But there's a sort of a financial bottleneck that if they haven't enabled budgeting outside of themselves, they're still the bottleneck. How do you sort of solve those challenges for companies as they're growing?

Indeed, indeed. And that's something that at a certain point founders realize. It's like, okay, that's amazing. We're growing fast. I have 24 hours a day. I need to sleep sometimes.

Sure.

So I need someone to help me, right? I need someone to help me comes with a lot of problems. Uh, and obviously from choosing the right people and, you know, all that HR kind of headache, but then on the other side, uh, and this is oftentimes overlooked, uh, you have to assign a budget to these new managers that come in. Otherwise you are still the bottleneck.

That's right.

Because at the end of the day, they take decisions and you have to sign for it. So if you hire a marketing manager, they need to have a budget. That budget needs to be approved by a board, ideally, you know, before the fiscal year starts. And then that person is free to spend, you know, $1,000, $2,000, $5,000, $10,000, $20,000, whatever it is a month. on what they need. Otherwise, you're still— you always will be in the loop, but you don't want to receive an email every hour. So that's something that sometimes it's a little bit overlooked and only comes with the realization that, yeah, now you have managers, but they're not as free as they should be, and you're still the bottleneck, and they potentially might be unhappy because they're not able to do what they're supposed to be doing.

Yeah, that— it's so interesting that you describe that too, because one of the things we see working with companies and scaling, and, you know, as we're implementing systems for marketing and sales, is when it goes from being like an interpersonal conflict of like, you won't approve, you won't sign off on my things, uh, that, that creates a lot of tension, uh, and friction within organizations. Whereas instead If you build a system, then the system is this sort of like external objective thing, and that the, the 2 folks can come together and say, well, the system isn't allowing us to accomplish what we need to accomplish. So let's adjust the system together. And it be— it becomes less of like finger-pointing of, you know, you won't let me do this. And so we see that, that, that can be really liberating. And it's also funny too, because A lot of times, you know, companies are afraid of over-systematizing things because they think, well, if there's too many systems, well, this, you know, this marketing genius that I just hired won't be free to do what they need to do. But in fact, we see that the system set them free because it creates the guardrails that then they have a lot more freedom and flexibility to be creative within those boundaries and know that they can get done what they need to get done.

Yeah, you hit on 2 things that I think are very, very important. First, yes, first is this, oh, I didn't receive approval for these, or, you know, and then you make it personal. While oftentimes in this situation, the CEO normally has no time. And so there are many emails that don't get answered, not because they don't want to answer them, right? Because they have too many. And then maybe they just, you know, leave it unread and they start having, you know, 50, 60 emails that are unread there in their backlog. And you don't get an answer simply because that's the situation. It's not personal. Absolutely. And so having system helps to take this away. But on the other side, it's very important. And I truly believe that you don't have to actually over-engineer. You don't have to create bureaucracy. So there is a fine line in this because the manager wants to see nice numbers, little graphs, nice pie chart, and keep track of things. KPIs, amazing. You need to do that.

Absolutely.

Of course. But on the other side, you have the people on the ground that are actually working. And you don't want to create, you know, add additional hours to the working day so that they do their job and then for 2 hours they log in numbers or, you know, notes on a system because that's bureaucracy, right? So that's where it becomes unproductive. So the smart approach is that these people, the people on the ground that are actually, you know, either selling, producing, managing, are already using services and systems and other things that they need for their job. So this is not possible yet everywhere. Sure. Like, I'm Italian. I tell you, in Italy, that's quite difficult to do, for example, for the bookkeeping. But if you're in the UK, if you're in the US, chances are you use either Xero QuickBooks, Sage, you name it. There are not many others, but all of these give you access to APIs. I can download the APIs, I can put them in a database, crunch them, and have a real-time dashboard of the situation. So for example, one of the questions that sometimes founders have is like, okay, how much VAT do I have to this quarter? You know, how much taxes do I owe?

Yeah.

And sometimes you have to phone the accountant. But if you use any of these systems, actually you can, you know, take out your phone and check and it's in real time. And at the same time, then you can start, you know, using other information. And that's where the, you know, the interesting magic begins because then Okay, I have my bookkeeping and maybe I have, you know, the number of invoices I have out that I know they're going to be paid, you know, either this month or next month. And then I take the CRM and here I'm getting data instead from the salespeople. And then I can mix the 2 and tell you, oh look, in the next 3 months roughly you have these invoices out plus This is your pipeline. So cash flow forecast, you might see this coming in, right? And then you can keep adding on top of that. And if you have, you know, you use any ERP or other softwares, you can tap into that and maybe download a calendar of activities that you have to do. So, and you start now having all this information in one place and then you can use it to actually extract that data without creating that additional layer of bureaucracy that you definitely want to avoid.

That's right. Well, and that sort of real-time visibility into the data and what's happening gives that CEO the ability to let go of some of those things and to open up some of those bottlenecks so that the company can really start to grow and start to scale. And that that idea of bringing in that really solid forecasting on sales as a function of using the leading indicators from marketing and what's in the pipeline and historical close percentages. Like, it's so amazing to see those light bulbs go off because so many, you know, CEOs, founders that we work with as they start to get to that scale-up stage, cash flow, you know, they talk about it in the US as it's like the alligator that'll eat you, like if you're not feeding it. And so When you've got really good solid predictions of what the cash flow is going to be, you can make much better decisions on, well, where should we invest it versus if you're like, well, I don't know what's going to happen. I'm hoping that we're going to hit this sales forecast, but I don't really know. But when you've got these types of systems that give you that forecasting with really accurate visibility, it just opens up a whole world of things that you can do.

Yeah, and then you can plug in different things.

That's right.

So we talked about, you know, your finances, your sales pipeline, but then you can have a storage and, you know, start tracking inventory and then you can have other things and then it can also be used with investors, either potential investors or, you know, actual investors because you're giving them visibility.

Yeah.

And when it's early stage, that's a very good thing.

Yeah.

Because, you know, well, if you're looking to raise, you can tell your investor, oh, look, this is what we use internally. Give them maybe limited access for, you know, a few weeks just for them to have a look at the business. But then they know this is what you're using. They know they will have access to it. They're very happy that They have this kind of monitoring tool. But then early stage, if they see something wrong, guess what? They're going to phone you up and say, hey, listen, there's something wrong here. What's happening?

And it gives them an opportunity to plug in their insight as you really value, you can get the full value out of that VC relationship and it makes the due diligence that much easier and inspires so much more confidence. Which, you know, make you a much more attractive investment for those best investors.

Indeed, indeed. It's absolutely the case. And then, I mean, the sky is the limit. I'm just, you know, I'm the numbers guy. So at the end of the day, you need then to, you know, access the insights of a wider range of professionals within your company, and then they start, you know, wanting to see this or that or that KPI. And you start talking about lifetime value, customer acquisition cost. These are all things that you can have real time.

Yeah.

So, and even in a more traditional business. So one of the things I love, I was saying, I love to work with startups, but also with SMEs, small and medium businesses that are a bit more traditional, right? And sometimes you might think that these KPIs that were actually born out of, you know, digital or, you know, startup ecosystem do not apply to traditional businesses, but they do. And every business might have specific things. I mean, most of the businesses want to know their revenues and their costs, and, but then each business might have a very, you know, More specific things.

Unique KPIs.

Yeah.

For that business.

Yeah. Specific problems. So for example, for one company, they had a problem. It's an e-commerce business. They had a problem in which they lost quite a bit of money during Christmas season because their Stripe account got somehow detached from the e-commerce and people were inputting their credit cards. And nothing was happening, right? And they discovered this after the Christmas period. So that was terrible. But then it's okay, how do we, how can we make sure this does not happen anymore? And then you start to put them in the same dashboard from different sources. You collect the data so that it becomes evident right away.

Yeah.

If anything happens. So this is another more, if you wish, creative way to use this kind of tools.

Yeah. So valuable. So valuable. So I'm gonna take a little bit of a left turn here. As we were sort of talking and learning about your business, I also noticed that you have like a whole series on your website of blog posts talking about sort of horror stories of like what's out there in the VC capital markets. of, you know, essentially scams that are out there. And I saw one in particular that's sort of the new Nigerian prince scam. Tell us a little bit about this and sort of how you came across it.

Yeah, that's a really scary story, really horror story. So by helping, you know, several companies, obviously we've encountered a number of interesting and and weird things. Actually, the same company that had those 1,500 shareholders, they got approached by someone on LinkedIn saying they were an oil tycoon and they had just the right amount of money that this company was looking for and they were willing to invest. So having us on board, they just said, okay, Vittorio, you take care of this. And so I just said, okay, fantastic. Let's start talking. And it was, it wasn't really high level. Let's say it was quite obvious that there was something wrong.

A little amiss.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was really very poorly executed. So we just asked, you know, proof of funds and other things. And this person sent along, sent along like solemn declarations that they had all the money in their bank accounts and things that made absolutely no sense. So, you know, first thing you do when something like this happens, you Google it, right? And we couldn't find anything. So we said, well, we need to put it out there so that people—

If someone else Googles it, they'll find your article.

And they can see if it's a similar thing or, you know, they can have a double, a second take and, you know, think a bit more about what's happening. And actually, that this meant that over the years we received more and more, you know, uh, call. I actually received also a call from a person in Dubai saying, oh, I'm in Dubai, I've read your article. I see that one of the, uh, the, the, the tricks they use is basically to make you come To Dubai so that you're already invested, so that you have to go through with this because you're already there.

Right, you got to get paid back for that plane ticket. Yeah.

Yeah, you have a number of, you know, marketing, right? So they ask you to work on a business plan for 2 weeks, spend and invest that time. So, you know, it's always more and more difficult to disengage because you're already, you know, you're going through the process. So it's quite difficult then to you know, disengage and you're more and more committed. So we had people calling from Dubai, we had CEOs of listed companies saying, oh, but yeah, well, yeah, you know, they're asking and they're asking more and more money. So at that time it was a bit more than $30K.

Okay.

And they were saying, basically they were saying, oh, for us, in order to invest in your company, you need to have this certification, please pay our lawyers. And then it became, oh no, you have to actually open a company here. So pay, these are our lawyers, do it through them.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah. And they're getting more and more sophisticated, asking more and more money. Last I heard of, like a few weeks ago was $80K. So that's— Wow.

So you invest $80K with us and then we're gonna give you millions.

Not investing, it's like we are going to invest $10 million or give you a credit facility of, so a loan of $10 million. But for some reason you have to go through these hoops.

Regulatory issues that we have to take care of with you, you have to invest, you have to give us $80K to take care of. Wow.

And the problem is that they're getting more and more sophisticated. So basically, for the Sharia law, it's actually, and this is true, you cannot earn profits on the interest if you loan.

Okay.

If you lend some money. Right. You can lend some money, but you cannot. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, there are ways to go around this and legitimate way to do that because, I mean, banks exist in, you know, in the UAE and All over the world. So there are ways to go around it. So basically what they're saying now, the story is that due to this Sharia law restriction, you have to create an SPV in the UAE. You have to do it through our lawyers and it's going to cost this and this. And yeah, and so far I haven't heard of, you know, a legit actually story or something, a story that ended well, unfortunately. Yeah. So yeah, this is happening. It's quite troubling and concerning. But it's, yeah, it's one thing more that founders have to be aware of.

Well, good for you though, for like creating an article so that if someone else goes to Google it, they'll find it and be able to And be able to catch up. So obviously—

Actually became also kind of a lead gen avenue for us. I mean, maybe you're not that big, but we had good conversation in the past years with founders that found us just because of that. Wow.

So obviously you've got a lot of expertise and background and are helping a lot of companies. Potentially someone's, you know, here on the, on the call or, you know, watching the, the podcast that's thinking like, well, we're in sort of this scale-up space and we could really use some help getting our finances together and getting better business intelligence. Give us the pitch. Why, why should they work with Matters too?

So ideally, when you have an amazing product and doing a lot of sales, inevitably you start creating a mess in the background. Right.

Sure.

So what we do, we jump on board and take care of that. Um, so you can see me as a fractional CFO, although I do not do the fractional CFO per se. I create systems that then will outlive me, and maybe when you will be able to hire a CFO, they will still be there. Yeah. So I systematize and basically create the structure. That will enable companies to grow. So that's my 2 cents, my elevator pitch. Sure.

And how can folks get in touch with you, Vittorio?

LinkedIn is a big one. So if you look for Vittorio Cosmo on LinkedIn or our website, that is Matters2, and that's the numeral 2. Exactly.

Awesome. Well, we could talk all day about some of these fun horror stories that you've uncovered and scams in the space, but I I gotta be mindful of your time. I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your insights with us today.

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me, Mark.

All right, talk to you soon. Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like, On your favorite platform and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.